Communicating Arts - Main Web SiteThe Internet's many online communities may stand in for the family dinner table. Instead of my father, the trolls play "Bait, challenge, and humiliate." And when they're not around to provoke one into "writing a letter", other forthright but less antognistic personalities put up or pass along the news and opinion that shapes one's day. From time to time on this interactive commons, I'm going to post my responses to someone else's comments from elsewhere with the hope that you'll take them in and care to comment on and correct this writer's ideas as you see fit.
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The reference offered by the original poster at Modelmayhem.com: an op-ed piece by columnist Mark Shields appearing on Ocala.com, "Someday They'll Ask 'Who Lost Iraq'" .
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Frank, I'm never sure whether you're leading or provoking or secretly powering up the middle of the river.
Lebanon, with the intent of killing off a handful of AQ-type guys working out of a Palestinian refugee camp, has been bombing the living shit out of some 40,000 souls for about two and half days near its Tripoli neighborhood. At the moment, under truce, they're letting into the camp the angels of mercy or scavengers of misery, whichever.
Israel, having made its concessions to the Palestinian cause, has been ramping up the hard line on the continued random stoning of its citizens by rocket: fundamentally, Hamas is at war with Israel, no ifs, ands, or buts and wherever its boys set up a launcher and have the poor luck of being detected, they and the party draw the worst kind of fire: objective, on-target, merciless, remorseless.
Ethiopia, threatened about a year ago by the Islamic Courts Union in Somalia, reports it has removed two-thirds of its forces from the country in the wake of a “regime change” that may be called successful as it leaves behind an interim Federal government, African Union peacekeeping forces, familiar enough warlords who may be interested in getting rich on peace this time around, and, back in the bush, a disassembled AQ-type guerrilla cell that looks like it has no role to play anywhere in the country except that of terrorist.
Morocco (2007):
"RABAT, May 6 (Reuters) - Moroccan security forces broke up a network helping to recruit fighters for al Qaeda's North African branch and arrested around 20 people overnight in several towns across the country, a government official said on Sunday.
The gang was involved in sending volunteers to training camps run by the Algerian-based al Qaeda Organisation in the Islamic Maghreb, formerly known as the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), the official said, confirming an earlier report by state news agency MAP."
I guess I’ll have to check out the news from Iraq next, but it’s the same-old, sharing much with the current history of AQ and fringe Islamic cell and militia-level violent moral entrepreneurship elsewhere. In such wars, or “guerrilla” or “low intensity” conflicts, winning has to do with getting the size of the problem down from state proportions to less exciting criminal ones.
As much seems to be happening at least in state official terms in Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Morocco.
There are no standing armies in Islam engaged anywhere in other than internally suppressive or loaned-out peacekeeping operations.
Even Iranian and Syrian forces, if they’re at play at all, would be working in the shadows through this warfare.
In such bloody street debacles—a bomb goes off somewhere; a freelancer gets off an RPG; a gang slips out at night to “patrol” a not necessarily unfriendly street with AK-47’s—it may be unfair to ask who is losing what?
A glance at the “internally displaced” refugee reports tell you that most of those victimized in these conflicts lose their businesses, families, and homes if not their lives, but I have seen nothing to suggest any acquire or lose their religion or obtain any new freedom or security from the intermittent violence promoted by so many small forces scurrying through the dark, all of them either politically unrecognized or officially declared by established governments—not only the United States—as unlawful.
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