So Islam is a religion of peace?

Ailedhoo said:
World War One started in spite of the massive build up of armies that should have scared armies...

WW1 could plausibly be blamed on the buildup of massive armies particularly the massive Russian buildup begun in 1913 and the resulting fear on the part of Germany that the window for a winnable war was closing. while other facotrs played a role, german calculations were firmly on the side of fighting a war while it was still possible to win. so when austria decided to invade serbia regardless of what the germans said or did, and when the russians decided that serbia was worth invading austria over regardless of what the germans did... the germans rather than push back against the tide went 'toss it, better now than later'. the french under somewhat different circumstances - relating to their own inadequacies viz. the germans - decided on war because abandoning russia would have been tantamount to national suicide. in this case german strength made the french think war was the better option.

in saner times the conflict would have been averted with france/germany working to restrain austria and in doing so russia. serbia was willing to come to the table, and had already agreed substantially to austrian demands, so that wouldn't have been an issue. austrian intransigence was but austria/russia sans germany was an austrian nightmare anyways, so that wasn't insurmountable either. buuut with france/germany tilting towards respectively 'war now' and 'we suck, need russia' that wasn't going to happen.

tl;dr security dilemma.
 
World War One started in spite of the massive build up of armies that should have scared armies...
And how was World War One ended....? By the side with the most troops and the most guns.

Peace through superior firepower. When nobody has superior firepower, on the other hand, there are far too many idiot politicians in the world who are willing to take that fifty-fifty chance.

Uh what

Do you have any idea how war works
Yes. You kill the other guy, then he can't shoot at you any more. And you have peace. Suicide bombers can't suicide bomb if they're already dead. With, as I said earlier, one exception.....

And whine over the strawman as much as you want. It's not a slippery slope argument
Yes it is. A straw man and a slippery slope. And any argument that contains either is worthless. The only way you will ever have any chance of convincing me of anything is to use arguments that don't include any of this garbage.

I agree that the US need another Civil War.
Lots of Republicans have been saying that for a while now. Glad you agree.
 
BasketCase, it's not a slippery slope. Holding that superior strength ensures peace is like holding that peasants don't revolt against superior powers that utilize maltreatment towards them to ensure their position. It's like holding that Syria's revolts are only possible because of too little military spending or violence towards the population.

World War One didn't really end when it did. The very fact that you think militant policy was the way to ensure safety in its trails showcases how little you understand the proper use of military. It laid the foundation for a much more atrocious conflict instigated by the very country that was terminally harassed through abuse by the winners, supported by the military dominance you so blindly enjoy. Bang, he's dead is an oversimplification of solutions to the world's conflicts; if you don't recognize it will create emnity towards you, then I hope you have absolutely nothing to do with the foreign policy of your country for the sake of your countrymen.

EDIT: I'm not against military per se, I do just not believe this sentiment of warfare is helping anyone's security position. I thought that, fx, Americans had learned their lesson after the immense number of failed American initiated conflicts in the Middle East that has done nothing but worsened the international position of the US.
 
EDIT: I'm not against military per se, I do just not believe this sentiment of warfare is helping anyone's security position. I thought that, fx, Americans had learned their lesson after the immense number of failed American initiated conflicts in the Middle East that has done nothing but worsened the international position of the US.

Perhaps - I think the world is much safer for us now than it was on September 12 2001. The wars may not have done much for our (I'm using that to mean 'Allied' now) international standing, but they did seriously hit the ability of the terrorist groups to cause havok on our soil. Before he went on deployment out there a few years back, a young man - now a young officer - I had as a cadet came to visit me, and we had a good old-fashioned Talk about leadership and war, and I asked him if he was convinced that what the Army were doing out there was right. Now this was a time when the war out there was possibly at its most intense, and he said to me that he didn't know about the high-level politics of it all, but he did know that if him and his men were out in Helmand and the terrorists were trying to kill them, that would mean that the terrorists were not in London trying to do the same to our civilians. Had we not gone into Afghanistan, we would probably have felt it back home.
 
And how was World War One ended....? By the side with the most troops and the most guns.

Peace through superior firepower. When nobody has superior firepower, on the other hand, there are far too many idiot politicians in the world who are willing to take that fifty-fifty chance.

Yer... at the cost of millions of lives, a load wasted due to bad tactics. Victory also came by blockades (which is fire power but in the not using of it) at more lives cost.

War is a lot more complex then your simple statements on the issue.

Also you said how peace came: you moved the goal post.

Yes. You kill the other guy, then he can't shoot at you any more. And you have peace. Suicide bombers can't suicide bomb if they're already dead. With, as I said earlier, one exception.....

War is a lot more complicated then that mate. Your simplication of it is... unChamber like and rather questionable for someone on a Civ forum. Killing alone results in no gain.

Also the suicide bombing issue is a social observation of trying to stop recruitment. What is your policy in stopping recruitment? Become a socipath and kill anyone who might be a suicide bomber?

Lots of Republicans have been saying that for a while now. Glad you agree.

Fanatics like violence.

BTW why does this have to do with "So Islam is a religion of peace?" thread? If you want to talk about how to bring peace set up another thread. This is about "is Islam a religion of peace?" which I answer "yes it does seek peace" with evidence.
 
Perhaps - I think the world is much safer for us now than it was on September 12 2001. The wars may not have done much for our (I'm using that to mean 'Allied' now) international standing, but they did seriously hit the ability of the terrorist groups to cause havok on our soil. Before he went on deployment out there a few years back, a young man - now a young officer - I had as a cadet came to visit me, and we had a good old-fashiocned Talk about leadership and war, and I asked him if he was convinced that what the Army were doing out there was right. Now this was a time when the war out there was possibly at its most intense, and he said to me that he didn't know about the high-level politics of it all, but he did know that if him and his men were out in Helmand and the terrorists were trying to kill them, that would mean that the terrorists were not in London trying to do the same to our civilians. Had we not gone into Afghanistan, we would probably have felt it back home.
Did he ever stop to consider that the distinct people shooting at him in Afghanistan would just be plain old not-shooting if he wasn't there in the first place?
 
in saner times the conflict would have been averted with france/germany working to restrain austria and in doing so russia. serbia was willing to come to the table, and had already agreed substantially to austrian demands, so that wouldn't have been an issue. austrian intransigence was but austria/russia sans germany was an austrian nightmare anyways, so that wasn't insurmountable either. buuut with france/germany tilting towards respectively 'war now' and 'we suck, need russia' that wasn't going to happen.
No, it couldn't have. Austria was going to go to war regardless. Restraining action on the part of Germany would only have destroyed the Dual Alliance; it would have ceased to be useful to Austria, since the Austrians failed to gain serious advantages from the cataclysmic reordering of the Balkans in 1912-13 via it and instead, through its exercise in favor of restraint, saw their position worsen fairly dramatically. Restraining action on the part of France would have been counter to Poincaré's understanding of French state interests; he believed that the breakup of the Habsburg monarchy should be encouraged, actively connived at same in concert with Russia, and had little reason to prevent it from going to the brink.

Serbian supposed "willingness" to come to the table is irrelevant. Even if the Serbians had agreed to the only Austrian demands worth enforcing - they did not, because same would have revealed the extent of Apis' control of state apparatus immediately before the Serbian electoral showdown between Pašić and Apis' cronies and would have crippled the prime minister's ability to fight the election - the Austrians were not interested in negotiation, they were interested in starting a war. No negotiation could get them what they wanted, namely, an end to the prevailing situation and system of politics under which Austria lost relative to its enemies and neighbors no matter what it did.

I don't think that the classic model of a security dilemma - despite the fact that the classic model of a security dilemma was constructed on the (original) understanding of how the First World War happened - applies all that well here. Arms-race factors were relevant to Austro-German calculations, but not wholly; they were based on an understanding of peacetime politics that saw both countries losing out in peacetime politics no matter what happened, even if the Russo-French Alliance did not elect to fight and win a war after the completion of the so-called Great Program.
 
Perhaps - I think the world is much safer for us now than it was on September 12 2001. The wars may not have done much for our (I'm using that to mean 'Allied' now) international standing, but they did seriously hit the ability of the terrorist groups to cause havok on our soil. Before he went on deployment out there a few years back, a young man - now a young officer - I had as a cadet came to visit me, and we had a good old-fashioned Talk about leadership and war, and I asked him if he was convinced that what the Army were doing out there was right. Now this was a time when the war out there was possibly at its most intense, and he said to me that he didn't know about the high-level politics of it all, but he did know that if him and his men were out in Helmand and the terrorists were trying to kill them, that would mean that the terrorists were not in London trying to do the same to our civilians. Had we not gone into Afghanistan, we would probably have felt it back home.
I'm not sure how accurate that is. Looking first at Iraq, there is little to no evidence that international militant groups operated in Iraq with any greater strength that the other ME countries. If anything, due to Saddam's hatred of Islamic militancy and the sanctions there was less international terrorist activity under his reign than anywhere else in the Middle East. Our invasion of Iraq and subsequent administrative failure created perfect grounds for both domestic militant groups to form and let international groups make inroads.

Looking now at Afghanistan the relation between the Taliban and Al-Qaeda wasn't what one would call friendly. The Taliban's focus was local and Al-Qaeda's was fundamentaly international. In fact, during one of Robert Fisk's interviews with bin Laden, bin Laden expressed his dislike of the Taliban and the Afghani mujahideen in general. He disliked the Taliban because of their provincial focus and most of the Afghani mujahideen because of how quickly they turned on each other. Also, the Afghanis weren't necesarily fond of al-Qaeda due to their puritanical aspects (such as the veneration of tombs being condemned by al-Qaeda).
Moving back to who we were fighting, our primary enemies were either the Taliban or the bandits/local warlords. While al-Qaeda did definately play a role in fighting the American/British forces in Afghanistan, their role was much smaller than that of the Taliban or local warlords. As such, I question how accurate the belief of "better to fight them in the dirt of Kandahar than at Trafalgar Square" is because most of the fighting is against native Afghanis who had no interest in international militant action.
 
Did he ever stop to consider that the distinct people shooting at him in Afghanistan would just be plain old not-shooting if he wasn't there in the first place?

Although the Afghans themselves weren't neccessarily friendly towards or involved with terrorism, the fact was that in 2001 Afghanistan was a base from which terrorists could operate with impunity - and, of course, now that there are plenty of Allied troops in the country, all of the terrorists fancying a potshot at us have gone there to try their hands. It's naive to think that they would have left us alone had we left them alone.
 
When you talk of a religeon of peace, you have to define what you mean by peace, I guess even the most war like muslims beleive peace with God comes through Islam, so it is quite possible that for them to say Islam is a religeon of peace.

However if we see peace as an abcence of violence things are a little bit more complicated.

it depends how Muslim's interpret Islam, obvioulsy sucide bombers who do it in the name of Islam aren't following Islam in a peaceful way or Al Qaeda. But if you said to them that they do not follow true Islam they would disagree with you.

If you said Islam was a religeon of peace to a former mulsim like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, she would disagree with that as well.

Of course there are those who want to manipulate the violence of Islam to attack ordinary Muslims which is dispicable, but we don't counteract them by denying that within Islam there are violent elements who often make lives of non-muslim's in muslim majority countries intolerable, such as the copts in Eygypt, of course there are mulsims who oppose these elements, and they are sometimse attacked by the violent ones like a judge who was killed in Pakistan for defending a Chritian against the death penalty.

From all this I actually think that the term Religeon of Peace has been a mistake.
 
Although the Afghans themselves weren't neccessarily friendly towards or involved with terrorism, the fact was that in 2001 Afghanistan was a base from which terrorists could operate with impunity - and, of course, now that there are plenty of Allied troops in the country, all of the terrorists fancying a potshot at us have gone there to try their hands. It's naive to think that they would have left us alone had we left them alone.
Only they apparently couldn't operate with impunity. The Afghan government merely asked for proof that the Al Qaeda and bin Laden in particular were responsible for 9/11 before handing them over, and the GWB administration refused to provide any.
 
BasketCase, it's not a slippery slope.
It is a slippery slope. And I just realized it's a bogus one as well.

You support weeding out people, and that will have them hate you, eventually to hurt your country, your descendants.
The United States shot a lot of British people two centuries ago (and a couple other times besides). The United States shot a whole lot of Germans and Japanese during World War II. Many of them civilians. And at other times we shot Spanish people, Mexicans, Canadians, French, Italians, Sioux, Cherokee, Iroquois, and lots of others.

How many of those groups hate us today and launch terrorist attacks against us today?

None. Fact is, human history proves you false with every culture on the planet.

Except one. Muslims. The United States has shot, stabbed, bombed, burned, pillaged, nuked, plundered, and otherwise harassed its way all over the entire goddamn planet and killed people from all manner of ethnic/religious/cultural groups. Yet only one of those groups responded the way you describe. That one group would be Muslims.

Which just goes to prove the point I made from the start of this thread: it's obviously Islam that has a problem.


There was other stuff I was gonna write, but I'll get to that later. The above is pretty much a complete body slam that happens to be actually relevant to the original topic.
 
Only difference is that decades have passed since those conflicts. Decades haven't passed yet since the "end" of the War in Iraq and the War in Afghanistan is still ongoing. We will only be able to compare the Muslims with those other groups in the future.
 
That's weird because I don't remember the American policy in post WW2 American-German relations being "We have more weapons than you, become our friends now!!".
 
That's weird because I don't remember the American policy in post WW2 American-German relations being "We have more weapons than you, become our friends now!!".

This exactly. There's a reason WW3 didn't come in the tail of WW2 like how WW2 was provoked by the horrible handling of Germany after WW1; a handling which was pretty much "We shot you and we are stronger than you: Submit to us and there will be peace."
 
lord_joakim said:
This exactly. There's a reason WW3 didn't come in the tail of WW2 like how WW2 was provoked by the horrible handling of Germany after WW1; a handling which was pretty much "We shot you and we are stronger than you: Submit to us and there will be peace."

The Treaty of Versailles was just one factor that lead to World War Two.
 
More like the foundation. Da'ah.

... Germany's position of being in rubble was a prominent place for an extreme nationalist to rise to power. I think it's hard to disagree with that. Although please do expand on my knowledge if there was another fundamental reason for WWII; I understand that other factors had influence on the Great War's continuation, but I see the other factors as being secondary and the primary one that Germany had experienced a massive national trauma violently forced onto them by the Allies.
 
The Great Depression upset the wonderful efforts of the Americans to dig Germany out, which re-created the German economic mess and allowed Adolf Hitler's ideology to come to prominence (other people can explain the mechanics far better than I can, but effectively the people were desperate enough to need someone who was promising grand and simple solutions in place of reasoned policies), which set Germany on the rather curious course of foreign policy which it pursued until 1939. Of course, the appeasment of the Great Powers in that era must also be taken into account; being able to get away with things certainly boosted Hitler's confidence in taking ever-bigger gambles (there' s quite a historical debate as to whether he actually planned out his schemes or just made them up as he went along, with modern opinion tending towards the latter)
 
Well, the Nazi party coming to power had a lot more to do with the broken nature of party politics in 1930s Germany, and as for appeasement, it played a negligible role.

Hitler was fully prepared to go to war over the Sudetenland. Whether or not Germany would have been on as good of footing in 38 is a question that has different answers for different countries, and involves a lot of factors not known in 1938.
 
More like the foundation. Da'ah.

... Germany's position of being in rubble was a prominent place for an extreme nationalist to rise to power. I think it's hard to disagree with that. Although please do expand on my knowledge if there was another fundamental reason for WWII; I understand that other factors had influence on the Great War's continuation, but I see the other factors as being secondary and the primary one that Germany had experienced a massive national trauma violently forced onto them by the Allies.
The national trauma wasn't "forced" on anybody; if anybody inflicted a trauma, it was the Germans that inflicted it on themselves, or rather some Germans that inflicted it on the rest of the Germans.

To be sure, the peace that was made at Versailles was a bad peace. But it was a significantly more effective peace than the one made at Potsdam and other places in 1945, and most importantly, it only contained "the seeds of its own destruction"; somebody else had to plant those seeds. The Versailles system was kept up fairly reasonably effectively, especially with respect to Germany, for about a decade. The peace of Potsdam broke down within two years.

Peace isn't a natural state of being any more than war is. States have to make an effort to maintain peace arguably more than they do to maintain a state of war. That diminishes the relative importance of specific treaties and increases the relative importance of systems that grow up around the peace created by those treaties. Versailles was a bad peace that was converted into a reasonably decent peace for awhile, then was not kept up; Potsdam was a bad peace that was not kept up at all.

More to the point, the specific terms of the Treaty of Versailles were not what fired German revanchism. The fact that Germany had been defeated at all was the true problem. Much like France after 1871, Germany was going to resent its position to some degree regardless of the terms inflicted upon it. The fact that these terms were inflicted in a particularly humiliating and - considering the actions of the British - genocidal way merely added fuel to a fire that was already going.

The reason that some countries have ended age-old animosities and ceased to pursue them as revenge for humiliations inflicted in war has little to do with whether a peace is good or bad. France ended its conflict with Britain in 1815, despite a few hiccups along the way, not because the Vienna peace was a good peace, but because the French ceased to view their relationship with Britain as a conflict and more as a rivalry. There was no particular reason why they should have done this instead of redoubling their efforts to defeat la perfide Albion. The poor behavior of British, Prussian, and Russian troops in the occupation of France up to 1818 would have provided ample fodder for French nationalistic hatred. Similarly, the occupying Russians, British, and Americans did not exactly cover themselves in glory after 1945, and the peace that they created then was objectively bad, especially with respect to Germany (a final settlement on Germany took forty-five years to figure out, and required the collapse of the Soviet empire to put into place). The Cold War was a greater humiliation than the relatively benign occupation of the Rhineland or France and Belgium's occupation of the Ruhr, but one caused the Germans to effectively give up an aggressive, militaristic foreign policy, and the other caused them merely to redirect it temporarily.

If the distinction of whether a given peace is good or bad has little effect on the countries involved and their willingness to continue to make war, so does the effect of superior firepower. By any calculation, the Western Allies at the end of 1918 dwarfed German military capabilities. That was as clear a peace by superior firepower as any in history save perhaps the Second World War. Yet the myth of the German military's invincibility persisted in Germany anyway. By comparison, France was not militarily crushed in 1815, and certainly not after 1818; within a decade, the French army was once again one of the greatest in Europe, depending on where you stand with respect to the military reforms of Nikolai I. And yet France did not use that army aggressively until internal revolution - an internal revolution unconnected with the peace settlement of Vienna - brought down the government in 1848. Peace with Japan in 1945 was made much as it had been with Germany in 1918, with roughly the same amount of superior firepower, but that peace endured while the German peace collapsed. Clearly, relative strength is no more decisive than a good treaty.
 
Top Bottom