Al Qaeda And The West

[Colmc54]

Jim down the pub suggested that the failure of the 'West' to finish off Saddam Husain in the first Gulf war was the reason AQ began to turn against us. True or false?

[Farriercm]

TRUE.

[Peter Pedant]

tell Jim it is a complete non-sequitur

the two events are independent - I think even the spirit of bin Laden would drink to that !

[Colmc54]

Jim, who spends most of his time on his pad when he's not serving, was quite certain. For myself there is a panda-like residue that followed on from the first Gulf war (eats shoots and leaves) that turned our show of military might into a demonstration of weakness.

The only reason Jim spoke up was because I suggested that because John Major was at the dentist and 'couldn't speak' in defence of the leader (Thatcher) that created his political career the course of human history was changed!

PS The Doom Bar was going down well on the day!

[ToraToraTora]

False, Islam is by default commited to world conversion or extermination. AQ etc are merely the tip of an iceberg. Finishing off SH, which they should have, would have no effect on the long term aim of Islam.

[Colmc54]

I like your picture btw. Surely you agree the message from the first Gulf war was that the West is tokenist and bureaucratically mired by the UN and is thus weak and vacillating when it comes to delivering the final blow. By the time B and B went back to finish the job it was too late. The damage to our credibility was already done and if anything grows daily.

[Gromit]

Jim is partly right.

Saddam hated al qaeda and his country was free of them.

Al qaeda were the remains of the freedom fighters the west supported in Afghanistan when the Russians were there. They turned against the US when they set up permanent air bases in Saudi Arabia to fight the first Gulf war. The US presence in Saudi Arabia was seen as an invasion of the Holy sites and why Osama Bin Laden, a Saudi himself, set about attacking US targets.

[ToraToraTora]

yes, colmc54, I agree with those points, that failure to finish the job has no doubt encouraged AQ et al but the fact remains that the removal of SH at that time would have changed very little in the overal game plan of Islam. Leaving aside the obvious despotic tendency of SH Iraq was not seem as a hot bed of islamic extremism at the time.

[jno]

the old regimes in Iraq, Libya and Syria were not Islamist the way Iran and Saudi are. All were tyrannical. Two have been overthrown and one is struggling. This has given extremists like Al Qaeda a great opportunity. Al Qaeda specifically seems to have arisen out of anger at the Saudi authorities cosying up to the west; I don't think Iraq was initially one of their grievances.

The west keeps hoping these tyrants will be replaced by mild-mannered secularists who will sell us cheap oil and not oppress their people; but it hasn't happened yet.

[Gromit]

If we had removed Saddam at the time of the first Gulf war, it would not have made any difference to al qaeda. It was the US presence in Sadi Arabia which made them the target for terrorist attacks.

If the US had packed up after Kuwait was liberated, it is likely that Al Qaeda would never have evolved. By remaining in Saudi long after the war, they became targets.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/world/02/september_11/investigating_al_qaeda/html/places/saudi_arabia.stm

[Colmc54]

It would have suggested to our potential enemies that we are capable of finishing what we started. Too late now though. The Taliban will take over Afghanistan again within months of NATO forces pulling out because the continued deployment of our troops there is unappealing to voters.

[Gromit]

Colmc54

But we did finish what we started. The mission was to liberate Kuwait and we did that we great haste and efficiency. The mission never was to kill Saddam. If it was, we would not have got any help from the many Arab countries that joined the coalition. We would just have made the terrible mistake we made in 2003, only 12 years earlier.

[ToraToraTora]

yes the original plan was to liberate Kuwait. That did involve incursion into Iraq for military purposes but there were no orders to remove the leadership.

[emmie]

look where it's got us.

[ToraToraTora]

what liberating Kuwait was bad was it???

[Colmc54]

I was in my car, I can remember it vividly, and Radio 5 Live was saying that Saddam's private jet was on the runway ready to take off. They were actually speculating where he was going to run to.

Minutes later came the cease fire and Saddam and his family of congenital psychopaths were suddenly left again free to slaughter their people, if anything with a renewed depravity.

We in the West understand the importance of mandates from the UN because we have been brainwashed into thinking that Western institutions have some kind of sanctity that all humans should instinctively recognise and admire.

Guess what, there's another world where our day is their night, our good is their evil, and our black is their white. To them there are no shades of grey.

We unleashed the demon again for reasons they can never understand except for believing that it was all about oil not persecuted human beings.

Isn't it strange to think that every war causes the next one. We can put men on the moon and robots on Mars and yet in terms of our understanding of ourselves we remain akin to snails (no offence to snails with their love darts intended)!