The War in Iraq: Was it partly a Holy Crusade?Follow

I was just a boy when the infidels came to my village in their Blackhawk helicopters. The infidels fired at the oil fields and they lit up like the eyes of Allah. Burning oil rained down from the sky and cooked everything it touched. I could only hide myself and cry as my goats were consumed by the fiery black liquid death. In the midst of the chaos, I could swear that I heard my goats screaming for help. As quickly as they had come, the infidels were gone. It was on that day I put a jihad on them. And if you don't believe it, then you'd better kill me now, because I'll put a jihad on you, too.

We saw pics of your "wife". No surprises there.

You're wrong because you used the word "crusade" in a highly inaccurate way, and compared it to what fundamentalist Muslim terrorists have done in recent years. What they're doing isn't a crusade. It isn't a jihad, either. It's just crazy fundamentalist bullsh*t. They're using words like that to give themselves a legitimacy they don't deserve.

What are you [sic] doing then? 0 points if you say "war on terror".

I'm doing nothing. Australia pulled out of Iraq in 2007, thank God. Not that we were doing that much there anyway. It was more about impressing Bush than prosecuting a war.

I think the larger point is that words like this will be used to evoke specific emotions based on the target audience and the speaker. If OBL wants people to view the actions of the US as some kind of religious oppression, then he'll use the word "crusade". I think you'll get yourself into trouble trying to find any deeper meaning than that...

Sorry to say this, but yeah. That's really obviously what he was doing.

I think the fatwa was made in response to American military bases in the Arabian peninsula following the first Gulf War, so invoking crusader imagery would have been appropriate for this particular cause. That doesn't make the Americans "crusaders" in any sense. He's just misusing the word so as to sway gullible people into his craziness.

You can't use the word for anything you want. A crusade is specifically a Christian concept. It comes from the French word for wearing a cross. It has a secondary, nonviolent meaning, but the religious implications and the sense that one is pursuing righteous goals are still present. You can't just slap the word crusade onto any cause you want for ideological legitimacy because that is misusing the word.

Personally, I think both wars are a gigantic waste of time for Australia, but that doesn't make them religiously motivated. The Australian involvement in the Iraqi and Afghan wars were primarily for the purposes of shoring up political relations with the United States. We have no ideological or strategic reason for being there, but we most certainly don't have a religious reason for being there.

Dude. I have a @#%^ing copy of the fatwa right here. I know all that already. I don't see how it's relevant. The fact that Osama fell out with the Saudis after the Gulf War doesn't make the Americans crusaders. The Gulf War wasn't a crusade just because Osama bin Fuckwit said so retroactively.

Australia pulled out of Iraq in 2007

The Australian involvement in the Iraqi and Afghan wars were primarily for the purposes of shoring up political relations with the United States.

Well, okay. You can modify or change the meaning of a word, but doing so without consideration for the word's origin causes problems. If we hear Osama calling the Americans crusaders, that colours our image of the historical Crusades, in the same way that our knowledge of the historical Crusades would colour our view of the Americans if we believed what Osama was saying.

They're complex terms. Using them hamfistedly just creates confusion between what you're trying to say and the actual historical events you're referring to when you use the word.

...when I asked a top White House official how he would characterize Rumsfeld’s assistance in the response to Hurricane Katrina, I found out why. “It was commonly known in the West Wing that there was a battle with Rumsfeld regarding this,” said the official. “I can’t imagine another defense secretary throwing up the kinds of obstacles he did.”

Though various military bases had been mobilized into a state of alert well before the advance team’s tour, Rumsfeld’s aversion to using active-duty troops was evident: “There’s no doubt in my mind,” says one of Bush’s close advisers today, “that Rumsfeld didn’t like the concept.”

Three days after landfall, word of disorder in New Orleans had reached a fever pitch. According to sources familiar with the conversation, DHS secretary Michael Chertoff called Rumsfeld that morning and said, “You’re going to need several thousand troops.”

“Well, I disagree,” said the SecDef. “And I’m going to tell the president we don’t need any more than the National Guard.”

The problem was that the Guard deployment (which would eventually reach 15,000 troops) had not arrived—at least not in sufficient numbers, and not where it needed to be. And though much of the chaos was being overstated by the media, the very suggestion of a state of anarchy was enough to dissuade other relief workers from entering the city. Having only recently come to grips with the roiling disaster, Bush convened a meeting in the Situation Room on Friday morning. According to several who were present, the president was agitated. Turning to the man seated at his immediate left, Bush barked, “Rumsfeld, what the hell is going on there? Are you watching what’s on television? Is that the United States of America or some Third World nation I’m watching? What the hell are you doing?”

Rumsfeld replied by trotting out the ongoing National Guard deployments and suggesting that sending active-duty troops would create “unity of command” issues. Visibly impatient, Bush turned away from Rumsfeld and began to direct his inquiries at Lieutenant General Honoré on the video screen. “From then on, it was a Bush-Honoré dialogue,” remembers another participant. “The president cut Rumsfeld to pieces. I just wish it had happened earlier in the week.”

But still the troops hadn’t arrived. And by Saturday morning, says Honoré, “we had dispersed all of these people across Louisiana. So we needed more troops to go to distribution centers, feed people, and maintain traffic.” That morning Bush convened yet another meeting in the Situation Room. Chertoff was emphatic. “Mr. President,” he said, “if we’re not going to begin to get these troops, we’re not going to be able to get the job done.”

Rumsfeld could see the writing on the wall and had come prepared with a deployment plan in hand. Still, he did not volunteer it. Only when Bush ordered, “Don, do it,” did he acquiesce and send in the troops—a full five days after landfall.

Today, when I presented this account to Rumsfeld’s then homeland-affairs assistant, Paul McHale, he denied that Rumsfeld’s actions resulted in any delay: “This was by far the largest, fastest deployment of forces probably for any purposes in the history of the United States.” McHale argues that Rumsfeld’s caution was due to his conviction that Bush could not send in the military as de facto law-enforcement officers under the Insurrection Act. But as one of the top lawyers involved in such scenarios for Katrina would say, “That in my mind was just a stall tactic so as not to get the active-duty military engaged. All you needed to do was use them for logistics.”

Ultimately, Rumsfeld’s obfuscations about National Guard rotations, unity-of-command challenges, and the Insurrection Act did not serve his commander in chief, says one senior official intimately involved with the whole saga: “There’s a difference between saying to the president of the United States, ‘I understand, and let me solve it,’ and making the president figure out the right question to ask.”

“What it’s about,” says this official, “is recognizing that in an emergency, the appearance of control has real operational significance. If people are panicked, everything becomes harder. If we had put those troops in on Thursday, the narrative of Katrina would be a very different one.”