Appeasement and the war on terror

[nelson]

This ties into my rant about political correctness, but has more to do with the overall strategy some would like us to engage in. Some people think we just ought to be nice while the terrorist enemies and others come to slit our throats.

I'm just tired of this appeasement mentality. "Be nice" doesn't work - it is a dishonest strategy that we have employed for decades - since the sixties - and look at the mess we're in now.

All religions and all cultures are not of equal value to the world. And no matter what the propaganda artists say, Islam is not a religion of peace. I know this runs counter to the massive brainwashing we're receiving, and I know the counter-arguments from the left are all attacks upon Christianity and other religions/cultures in an attempt to bring us all down - the psychological self-loathing approach, i.e., 'you think they're bad, well, America is evil too.' Hogwash. In modern times, there has always been greater success, greater peace, greater stability, and greater achievement among western cultures and religions. There has always been more strife, war, instability, and hatred among middle-eastern cultures and religion.

Generations of diplomacy between us HAVE NOT WORKED. We have given appeasement a chance and learned that our enemies will still blow us up no matter how nice we are or how much money we send them.

No more appeasement!

["shazbat"]

This raises the question:
"Does culture create the channel of religious belief or does the channel of religious belief create the culture"
Nelson, even as a "liberal" I largely agree with your comments.
Some observations:
The only wars in which we have been successful (except one, described below) have been against nations that share our christian heritage. Thus diplomacy works because we all have a common cultural ethic. The one exception has been Japan, and we all know how we beat them.
We have not been successful against differing cultures because we don't comprehend them and can not successfully understand how to either work with them or destroy them other than by "overwhelming force" and "extreme means" (Japan again)
With "overwhelming force" you can supplant the existing culture, not likely to happen one nation at a time in a hemisphere filled with culturally like nations. Especially as large blocs of culturally like people have immigrated and integrated into most of the nations of the west.
Does anyone think we are likely to "outlaw" Islam as a religion and make it go away?
Our victory against Japan, the means of which were heinous in itself, was acceptable to the greater world because of Japans' history of violent conquest in their region. Also Budhism is not a religion that espouses the intolerance of Islam, thus there were no strong religious cultural ties across national or regional boundaries to bring in allies to their aid.
There are and have been "moderate" influences in Islam, but they are not radical enough in their aversion nor powerful enough in their armament to quell the radical influences.
The only two ways to defeat this type of enemy is to cultivate and passivate the moderates to quell their own countrymen without our presence or to wholesale anihilate the entire region, good, bad and ugly.