When waging peace, it is often difficult to accomplish the mission with only military forces.
These forces play a mandatory role, but something we don’t hear enough about is the other types of forces that are required, the economic and political forces.
These forces should dominate the stage, whereas military operations must play the supporting role.
Civil war across the region may be something on the horizon given the building tensions, but the USA had a civil war and came out the better for it. These wars are not often welcome but can address ideas that need to be taken care of. I don’t advocate allowing civil war to erupt, but I do say much of the problems in the region need to be addressed internally and that we should offer as much support as possible in facilitating diplomatic missions and free trade agreements.
An insider can shed real light on a topic.
Abdel Rahman al-Rashed (Pictured above) speaking about terrorism. Originally published in Al-Sharq Al-Awsat
“Self-cure starts with self-realization and confession. We should then run after our terrorist sons, in the full knowledge that they are the sour grapes of a deformed culture… The mosque used to be a haven, and the voice of religion used to be that of peace and reconciliation. Religious sermons were warm behests for a moral order and an ethical life. Then came the neo-Muslims. An innocent and benevolent religion, whose verses prohibit the felling of trees in the absence or urgent necessity, that calls murder the most heinous of crimes, that says explicitly that if you kill one person you have killed humanity as a while, has been turned into a global message of hate and a universal war cry… We cannot clear our names unless we own up to the shameful fact that terrorism has become an Islamic enterprise; an almost exclusive monopoly, implemented by Muslim men and women. We cannot redeem our extremist youth, who commit all these heinous crimes, without confronting the Sheikhs who thought it ennobling to reinvent themselves as revolutionary ideologues, sending other people’s sons and daughters to certain death, while sending their own children to European and American schools and colleges.”
Once again Friedman’s book The World is Flat inspires me to think about world issues…
When waging peace, it is often difficult to accomplish the mission with only military forces. These forces play a mandatory role, but something we don’t hear enough about is the other types of forces that are required, the economic and political forces. These forces should dominate the stage, whereas military operations must play the supporting role.
