Shadowboxing With the Devil

[David Morris]

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-091801scheer.column?coll=la%2Dnews%2Dcomment%2Dopinions

September 18, 2001
Robert Scheer:
Destined to Shadowbox With the Devil

What is unfathomable to us is the depth of the terrorists' hate. From what 
has been revealed of their lives, these are the very people who should have 
been won over to modernity. They came from the oil-rich nations of the 
Mideast that the U.S. protected during the Cold War and they were 
welcomed—-nay, courted—by our finest schools and business institutions.

Yet how easily their wrath against the old Soviet Union after its invasion 
of Afghanistan was turned to even fiercer anti-Americanism. More intense 
even than their hostility toward Israel.

>From what we can tell about Bin Laden's followers, these are not people who 
would settle for the redrawing of national boundaries, even generously, so 
as to create a Palestinian state, or to expel the Russians from Chechnya.

No, unfortunately they are driven by what to them appears clearly a higher 
purpose, to overturn the international modernization of the 20th century. In 
the name of God no less.

In that respect, even Saddam Hussein is their enemy, someone they have 
called a "bad Muslim" because he has essentially presided over a secular 
state.

The same was true of the last shah of Iran, derided by the religious 
fanatics who overthrew him as anti-religious because he was attempting to 
build a modern cosmopolitan society.


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