By Ted Belman, IsraPundit

Before 9/11, Islamists attacked American forces, ships, diplomats and Embassies from time to time with relative impunity. The enormity of 9/11 demanded that the US put an end to such attacks. Her first response which came within 24 hours of the attack was to enable planeloads of Saudi VIPs to leave the country. Thus even before determining who was responsible and what course of action to be taken, Bush decided to absolve and protect the Saudis. Incredible, considering that 15 of the 19 terrorists were Saudis.

Nine days later, Bush identified the perpetrators as the “enemies of freedom” (how generic) and named al Qaeda as the culprit declaring that it follows a “fringe form of Islamic extremism” thereby absolving Islam also.

Although he grandly declared that “we will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorists” he did no such thing except for invading Afghanistan.

I urge you to reread my article What War on Terror? which sets this out in greater detail.

President Bush studiously avoided the Islamic requirement of Jihad in the name of which al Qaeda was operating and the fact that Saudi madrassas and mosques all over the world emphasize this duty. Nor did he mention that al Qaeda is financed by individual Saudis and perhaps by the government of Saudi Arabia.

Instead, after invading Afghanistan, he substituted another enemy, namely those who were pursuing WMD. This change of target lead to the invasion of Iraq with disastrous consequences. When the Bush administration accepted that there were no WMD in Iraq (preferring not to pursue them in Syria) they shifted the rationale for invading to an humanitarian one pointing out the hundreds of thousands Iraqis, Sadaam Hussein had killed and continued to kill. Then, after Sharansky’s book, The Case for Democracy was published, democratization became the rationale or elixer.

Humanitarian intervention is never done for humanitarian reasons. Thus Rawanda wasn’t invaded to prevent the slaughter of the 800,000 Tutstis and Sudan is not invaded to prevent the slaughter of over 200,000 persons around Darfur.

There must be self interest before invasion is warranted. Thus Serbia was invaded not because of the alleged genocide (less than 2500 bodies have been found, being both Serbs and Moslems) but because of geo-political reasons. Similarly Israel is restrained from killing Arabs in self defense, not because anyone cares about the death of Arabs but for geopolitical reasons. Arabs kill thousands of other Arabs and no one cares but if Israel kills one Arab even in self-defense the whole world is up in arms. Nor is there any attempt to prevent the killing of Jews, just the opposite (look at the international support for Fatah and Hamas), once again for geo-political reasons.

Continue reading…

---

---

Related: Arab/Muslim World, Iran, Islam, War Against Islamo-fascism, Iraq

---