Ramble on brother.............

Disclaimer: my words are my own and don't represent anyone else's opinion. Heck, I'm probably wrong anyways.

Copied from a reply I wrote to a friend (edited for content):


"I am troubled and want you guys back, but am old enough to remember our withdraw from Vietnam with those poor individuals trying to grab the last chopper out of there. We are so deep now we should not leave the place in such a mess.

Your environmental diatribe disturbed me. I am having a really hard time supporting anyone (natives) over there. They are so far from my mindset. My wife wonders why there are no mothers speaking out. Surely they do not want to see there sons killed everyday. There have to be some reasonable people in that god forsaken place. It does not sound like it."

....... Admittedly though, the cultural differences are shocking in some regards.

Your wife wonders about why the mothers don't decry the deaths, well that too is cultural. They grieve and wail, but they also accept that it is Allah's will and that they will go to heaven for their sacrifice. We're not fighting a people so much as we are fighting thousands of years of Islamic thought. The Koran hasn't changed much since its inception and given the number of rules/laws/whatever laid out in it, there are bound to be discrepancies- which there are. Much as the Old Testament gives rules for general living along with ways to worship, the Koran sets forth general living guidelines too. Unfortunately, it doesn't really seem to leave room to adapt to modern society and so you have clashes occurring between the old ways of life and the new ways.

There are people with modern ways of thinking, but again, you are looking at a mostly agrarian society that had little use for or interaction with the government (as near as I can tell from what I've seen and read). They do interact with their religious organizations though and much of the education here is religion based so now you have indoctrination into a way of thought that hasn't changed much in a thousand years. Kind of scary isn't it?

If you look at the countries that have made a sincere effort to advance, notably Jordan, Kuwait, Dubai, and Saudi Arabia, only a percent of the people have made the changes and that has been against a lot of resistance. Religious laws still supersede, or more often are, the enforced judicial law. Beating your wife is still acceptable in Dubai (and other Islamic countries) as long as you don't kill her. Dubai is a country that now allows consumption of alcohol (again within certain guidelines) women don't have to dress traditionally, and prostitution is common in the bars, yet it's still OK to brutalize women.

Most of the people want the same things as anyone else- to be left alone to live their lives. I suppose the problem arises in that they seem to envision outside influence as a threat to this. Many seem to be lacking any real concept of the future- they live now and when they die they want to go to heaven, but what happens in between isn't really a reality to them if that makes any sense.

We, the American government, may have come in with good intentions, but, as the saying goes- The road to hell is paved with good intentions. If their own people aren't able to change the common man's thought processes, what are our chances? Unfortunately, I'd have to say none.

I suppose this whole experience has made me question my own religious beliefs (I was raised Presbyterian but I've considered myself agnostic for quite a few years now). As I read more and more news stories about the problems that Europe is having with the rapidly growing influx of Islamic culture, I believe that this is indeed a growing battle between religious thoughts. We in the west view this as a political endeavor; in the middle east, religion and politics are intertwined. You start to see the importance of separation of church and state.

If anything, Iraq should be a glaring example of what happens when you get people with varying beliefs together and try to make them all one people. It doesn't work. It never has, and it never will in my opinion. The only thing we all agree on is science and thats because science is defined by facts- repeatable experiments with a control, it's the theories that cause us so much problems; problems, because theories are just opinions and every one has their own and they justify them through emotion, not fact.

Wow, I just realized I'm rambling again. I'll stop now.