Quote:
Originally Posted by Cactus
Hard to tell how useful it will be for the US. The effort needed to carry out this difficult and drawn-out exercise would be justified, for any country, if:
1. Muslims formed a significant portion of the population and the country was trying to wean them off from Middle East and Central Asian dominated narrative of Islamic history and current affairs.
2. The (hijacked/misinterpreted) Islamic zeal was acting independently in generating and sustaining the terror and insurgent campaign at the country.
As we know neither of them are completely true for the United States: Neither the Muslims are a significant portion of US population, nor are all the terror and insurgent campaigns aimed at the US purely sustained by hijacked/misinterpreted Ismalic zeal. So questions should be: How much effort is the US willing to put into a campaign of perhaps limited, peripheral value to the overall war? What are the hidden costs of such a campaign?
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Cactus,
I have to disagree with you here. AQ does misinterpret the Koran to justify their actions. They are waging an ideological war, one to which our primary response has been military instead of counter-ideological. Our failure to understand the ideology has negatively impacted and hampered our military response. So, as I add up the scorecard here in the first inning, we're using the wrong lineup, and the lineup we're using is also hampered by not fully understanding the opposing team.
I'll give you an example. During my time in Iraq, because some of the Iraqi citizens would refer to the insurgents as mujihadeen, I started using the same terminology. Without realizing it at the time, I was implicity giving credence to the actions of the insurgents, and I might as well have been calling myself a kafir (infidel) at the same time. Pretty hard to win hearts and minds when you're calling yourself the enemy.
The reality is that at the cost of a few hours on just around a dozen terms and the concepts surrounding those terms, we can start to drive the wedge between AQ and Islam and call into question the very heart of their rallying cry. I call it a bargain.