a_majoor said:
OBL's personality is no indication of what sort of man he really is; Adolf Hitler in person was a soft spoken vegetarian, who loved classical music, dogs and the scenery of the Bavarian Alps. When you sat him behind a podium, an entirely different person emerged....
Ok, but I'm still trying to find out why he is a nutter? The comparisons above were to dictators who murdered their own people with totalitarian policies. From what I seem to gather, Osama bin Laden left the comfort of being a male in Saudi Arabia's second most powerful family to dedicate himself for over 20 years now to what he believes to be right (jihad).
In his view, he is right, and obviously, due to the fact that we have attacks throughout the world, active insurgency in the Middle East, people cheering the Al Qaeda actions in the streets, and Islamic Scholars (radical, conservative, and liberal) getting on board with his proclamations many, many Muslims agree with him.
Until I see the medical diagnosis, I'm only going to take him for the above - a dedicated and capable foe who, to his very core, believes in Submission to the Word of God and has stuck to his guns consistently throughout his time as a leader of the Islamic Insurgency. Let's not suffer from hubris of our own and assume that we are right and the others are simply not right in the head.
We aren't worried about India and Israel's nuclear capabilities for the same reasons we don't loose too much sleep over the UK's nuclear deterrent; these are relatively stable liberal democratic states which are broadly in alignment with the Anglosphere and Western Alliance. Pakistan is something of a wild card, running hot and cold depending on how their being useful to us benefits them. A nuclear Caliphate would be implacably hostile, and not even under the minimum sort of restraint the formar USSR was (the logic of MAD would not apply).
Well, who really cares what
we think about an nuclear armed India and Israel (which I think increases the possibility of nuclear conflict by order of magnitude), because we are North Americans sitting at home. I was reffering to the fact that many Muslims see hypocrisy in the fact that two countries on the boundaries of Islam, both of which are actively fighting with Muslim peoples (Palestinians, Kashmiris/Pakistanis) have been allowed to arm themselves with nuclear weapons while the world condemns Pakistan for doing the same thing. As I said, this doesn't really take the history of Indo-American relations into account properly, but it is easy to see that the perception could be there for a person sitting in Karachi, Basra, or Cairo.
As for not worrying about India, did you see some of the stuff the BJP was willing to do? One of there election platforms was to knock down a mosque. They, IMHO, were no better then hardline Islamic governments in the Middle East. Thank goodness they were voted out, but the fact that they were there in the first place jaundices my view of Indian democracy.
Islam is like Christianity, an expansionist religion. I suppose Che could find us the exact references, but the short version is followers of the Prophet are to make every effort to encompass the entire world into Dar-al-Islam. Christians were very big on "spreading the Word" with fire and sword not all that long ago (they use electronic media now), and it isn't hard to see OBL and his fellow travellers actions as being a global mission to subdue Dar-al-Harb and bring us all into Dar-al-Islam.
Ok, and I'm sure some believe that. But from what I've seen, this viewpoint doesn't underscore the driving motivation for the Islamic Insurgency. Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda's proclamations and fatwas consistenly make specific claims to the 6 main points on policy that they find offensive to Islam.
Even today, with the attacks in London, the group (Al Qaeda in Europe) released a statement - they never stated "This is the first strike in the invasion of England" or "Convert or Die!"; they pointed out that British support for Zionists (Israel) and the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq were the reasons for the attack.
Make no bones about it, a united Ummah under a Caliph will present a threat to the neighbouring regions - just as it did with the Islamic Expansion in the 700's and the expansion of the Turkish empire in the 15 and 16th century. But this is a given, and is nothing specific to Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda, or the Middle East in general. But for now, I don't think this is the real issue - just a pipedream by some of the idealists in the Islamic Insurgency.
