WASHINGTON “” A Muslim group said Monday it had invited Rep. Virgil Goode, R-Va., to expand on biting remarks he made last week during debate on a House resolution disapproving of President Bush’s decision to send more than 21,000 U.S. troops into Iraq.
The Muslim American Public Affairs Council has “extended this invitation to Congressman Goode to give him a venue to explain his recent comments about Muslims and Islam,” MAPAC Executive Director Marc Conaghan said in a statement. MAPAC also asked Goode to share a dialogue with Jamal Badawi, an Islamic and comparative religion scholar”¦.
Last week, Goode said the nonbinding resolution would provide “comfort and encourage the radical Muslims who want to destroy our country.” He also said Islamic jihadists want U.S. currency to say “In Muhammad We Trust,” with an Islamic flag flying over the White House and U.S. Capitol. — from this article
Congressman Virgil Goode should start to figure out that in his entirely justified suspicion of Islam he does not go far enough, and does not make sense of all of the information available.
If he were to do so, he would not be supporting the “surge” in Iraq with its perfectly predictable outcome. He would be furiously opposing — for all the right reasons — the squandering of men, money, and materiel in Iraq to obtain a goal that is the exact opposite of the goal that should be sought: not “freedom” for “ordinary moms and dads in the Middle East,” and certainly not a “war on terrorism” that “we are fighting over there so we don’t have to fight them over here.”
Note that among those 17 Republicans who voted correctly, that is, against the surge, there were a number from the districts that include large military installations. These included Congressman Coble, whose district includes Fayetteville, North Carolina — that is, Fort Bragg. That should have been made much of, but who would have made much of it? The Bush Administration wouldn’t have. Those Democrats who opposed the resolution against that “surge” would not have done so either, for their reasons are completely different from those of many of the 17 dissenting but correct Republicans.
Those 17 Republican Congressmen included those most attuned to how the soldiers and Marines think, and feel. And even if not all of them know a thing about Islam, they know as a practical matter that the continued effort in Iraq, and the goals of Bush, Cheney, and Rice, of McCain and Lieberman and the two Kagans and those smug young lochinvars of the lecture circuit, including the comical William Kristol (issuing pronunciamentos about “victory” in Iraq at My Weekly Standard), are impossible of achievement. They know this because they talk to those officers and men who return, and then go back, and then return, all because the Administration is too obstinate and too confused to figure things out.
There is still time for them to figure out, and to spread among the other Republicans, the understanding not only that the “victory” Bush seeks in Iraq is impossible to achieve, but that the only “victory” that makes sense is a different one, and it was achieved well within the first year of the American invasion: the removal of Saddam Hussein and the toppling of all the pillars (his sons, his face-cards, his Sunni-run army) of that regime. That toppling made inevitable — not possible, not probable, but inevitable — the transfer of power from a Sunni despotism to the Shi’a of Iraq. And this, in turn, made possible, though not quite as inevitable, spillover effects in other Muslim countries, wherever Sunnis and Shi’a would identify with their co-religionists fighting or being fought in Iraq, and would lead to sectarian divisions widening all over Dar al-Islam. And if the Kurds are supported in making their move, then the spectacle of non-Arab Muslims throwing off the Arab yoke could inspire other non-Arabs, beginning but not ending with the Berbers in North Africa.
This too would contribute to the only goal that ever made sense, and certainly the only goal that justifies the crazed expenditure of $750 billion. That is now the average estimate for what the war in Iraq will have cost the American taxpayers even if the Americans announce their total withdrawal within the next few months, as of course they should, and should have done so, at the latest, by February 2004.