6 More Kidnappings

I just heard on NPR that 6 truck drivers in Iraq were kidnapped with the demand that the companies they work for must leave Iraq or be beheaded.  Apparently the companies are Egyptian and Jordanian.  The companies and families of the truck drivers can thank President Arroyo of the Phillipines.

UPDATE: Actually, the company is a Kuwaiti company, but the individuals are Kenyan, Egyptian, and Kuwaiti.

What do these guys think?  That getting companies and capital to leave Iraq is going to....what?  I've never come across anyone who thought the world would be better off if everyone was super poor and jobless and homeless....but that's sort of what they seem to espouse.  No wonder fundamentalism never caught on amongst the mainstraim.  Once people are given a choice, they choose the same things over and over again, regardless of culture, experience, history - freedom, safety, the ability to reap the rewards of your own labor.

The sad thing about the world these days isn't that the Islamicists have an appeal -  they don't - but rather there is a big divide between folks: those who know something must be done about the Islamicists and those who don't want to think about it.

And it's unfortunate the type of personalities that fall into both camps.  War-mongers, always happy to find a new bad guy, have latched on with great zeal to the war on terror.  They're not always the wisest people, but always ready to fight.  These people tend to be Republicans.  And then there are the people that don't really want to think about it, and I don't blame them, because frankly, the Islamicist message is pretty horrific at its core.  These people tend to call themselves liberal and in the very core of their beliefs is that ALL people are generally well-intentioned and similar and due equal rights and equal opportunities, and given those things, would be good.  They want to believe that somehow the larger world is to blame the problem of terrorism and that if you cure the larger world, the terrorist would go away.

The liberals might be right in a theoretical sense.  Had things been done differently way back when, we might not be in the boat we are in.  It reminds me of soccer players I knew who would always rehash and go over the games we lost and say, man, if we had just done this and that and this and that, and not gotten that bad call, or blah, blah, blah, things would have been different.  Perhaps.  But perhaps it's also a coping mechanism, a way to face something difficult - a loss, or a horror, where you retreat into a shell of self-blame, castigating the "system" for producing these bad outcomes.

To me, that's what so much of this anti-Bush sentiment amounts to - a diversion from talking about the real problems with the world.  If the Celebrities and Michael Moore and Moveon put as much zeal into thinking about the problems and contributing to possible solutions to Islamic terrorism or Sudanese genocides, well, I'm sure they wouldn't be as successful, as powerful, or as well heard...but they might be actually talking about the more relevant issue.

And the irony is that we can't win the war with war-mongers leading the way.  We can only win by fighting a "liberal" war, one in which we appeal the humanity of those fence-sitters and stand-byers in the Arab-Islamic world.  We can't be bossy.  We must inspire.  But all those liberals capable of inspiring choose to inspire bush-bashing, because, well, it's a heck of a lot easier and more lucrative.

UPDATE: And then there's these people, who believe me, are not friends of liberals or conservatives.