J842P
Veteran Member
Sooo.... by your own admission you now claim he did not support the war?
Anyway, again, you are certainly right that the US has meddled in the Arab world to disastrous effect, and also in Central Asia (Afghanistan, Iran).
Harris's quote that you provided agrees with you on this point. It even agrees with you that the current situation in Iraq is mostly the fault of the Bush administration.
Honestly, I think you need to read things a little more carefully and with a little more good faith effort towards trying to understand the author's point of view and not just simply trying to fit everything into your narrative.I don't disagree with you, and neither does Sam Harris, that the proximal cause of the sectarian violence in Iraq was the invasion in 2003. The underlying sectarian divide, however, is certainly not the fault of the West, let alone the United States. I am certainly open to the possibility that the United States has only served to strengthen that divide and maybe even that the United States is responsible for promoting fundamentalism through its actions involving economic imperialism. Indeed, I have argued that very point on this and the previous boards with regards to Iran and the overthrow of Mosaddegh. I am less inclined to accept that is the case in Saudi Arabia. The Arabian peninsula has always been the source of Islamic fundamentalism. In Iran, it is a phenomenon that was imported and that does not cohere with Persian cultural values. I am willing to grant you for the sake of discussion, however, that Saudi Arabia would be less of a hotbed for the Wahhabi brand if we removed Western influence. I still do not think that somehow that makes the Sunni/Shia divide a product of the West. At most, the West, and particularly the United States, has meddled in the Arab-speaking world while being ignorant of or foolishly ignoring that underlying divide, and as such, bears responsibility for having "poked the bear."
All of this is not really related to Harris's contention that mainstream Islamic ideology features, as evidenced by poll results from Muslim countries, many abhorrent ideas. These ideas are are sanctioned by a literal reading of the Quran and the hadith literature, and indeed, these are plausible reading of these religious texts. The Christian world was mired in a similar situation not too long ago and it wasn't until Christian values and ideas "collided with" secular, post-Enlightenment values and ideas that the Christian world began to change. As Harris also mentions in that video I posted previously, it also took centuries of bloodshed before the Christian world got tired of that status quo. Instead of denying the obvious, perhaps what Affleck should have stated is that one of the ways to speed along this process in Islam (assuming it is even on course for changing) is for the West to stop antagonizing the Islamic world.
Finally, I'm finding it harder and harder to believe that you are actually trying to have a discussion for the purpose of arriving at the truth of the matter rather than merely trying to preach your political ideas, to someone who already agrees with you for that matter, especially when you insist on equivocating between the Muslim world and the Arab world. I will ask you again, what does American foreign policy actions in the Middle East have to do with the opinions of Indonesians regarding the proper punishment for adultery and apostasy? To argue that US foreign policy interventions in Saudi Arabia caused the promotion of Salafist/Wahhabi ideology, which in turn caused Indonesia to adopt those ideologies is a tenuous chain of causation at best and frankly seems to me like a facile attempt to promote a politically motivated narrative. Although each individual link might have some truth to it, the history and development of Islamic thinking is much more complicated than that, and many of the major issues developed before the United States was even a country.
