Thousands of Afghans staged new demonstrations Friday over the burning of Qurans at a U.S. military base in Afghanistan, evidence that President Barack Obama's apology has so far failed to quiet the outrage over the incident.
That the deaths are taking place in Afghanistan and not in the rest of the Moslem world should tell you that like the Koran flushing incident, this violence is a Taliban effort designed to gain followers in Afghanistan, separate the Afghan government from America, and possibly to reduce our will to stay in Afghanistan to win.
So I don't mind that President Obama has apologized for the incident. I'm sure our military asked him to do so to try to calm the immediate crisis. I'm equally sure that President Bush would have done the same thing. Before we do anything else we need to calm the situation. And we did screw up by putting the religious tracts in a burn pile. Apologizing doesn't make the violent response legitimate--the apology recognizes we face nutballs who can use this incident to defeat us. Don't let them use this incident to defeat us.
Not that this is riot- and death-worthy. I'm not defending that reaction. Indeed, the whole incident shows why I do not in fact have to respect Islam. As long as incidents like this provoke riots and murder among some and fail to inspire most Moslems to condemn the violence, I won't respect Islam. Oh, I'll tolerate their faith. But that's all our society asks us to do. I don't expect others to respect my religion. I do expect not to be discriminated because of it. Of course, this brings up more questions about our faiths as much as theirs.
And when the crisis calms down, maybe we can ask why it wasn't an insult to Islam for Moslem Taliban to scrawl in their holy book and use it as a note pad. Just where do they draw the line between "How's the jihad going, Muhammed?" and "I hated the rice pilaf, today. How about you?"?
What happened was wrong by our standards and more important--stupid--because our enemies are nutballs. Our enemy will try to leverage the incident to defeat us. We shouldn't help that objective along by getting our panties in a twist over the unfairness of it all and throw our hands up in frustrated rage while walking away.
It's a long war.
UPDATE: Hey, if I can react with annoyance to a comment by someone who I think would be a superior president to Obama (a low bar, I admit) as an unfair attack on him, I guess I can say I don't have Obama Derangement Syndrome. After watching the unhinged opposition to Bush, that's no small thing in my mind.
UPDATE: I can't say I disagree with this author's frustrations over the Koran riots and murders. He makes many excellent points that I was getting at. Yet still, as a tactic to get past this violence--which I am sure is being stoked by our Taliban enemies as a tactic (or have I missed the global riots that show it is a Moslem thing rather than a Taliban thing?)--I have no problem with our apology. If an apology allows us to get on faster with the serious business of killing jihadis, what's the problem?
