Who are the real suicide bombers? Who are the real fanatical martyrs?

[JDPriestly]

We hear, and I believe it is true, that the Muslim suicide bombers kill themselves and others to further their religion. I don't understand how killing people spreads your religion, but I understand that the suicide bombers believe that they are martyrs for their faith and that they will be rewarded after they die for their sacrifice.

It seems to me that our troops have been sent to martyr themselves and to act in a sense as suicide bombers, snipers and killers also. In Iraq they are ordered to enforce an American peace and to support an American sponsored government and, when challenged as they do that, to kill the Iraqi people. The odds that our troops will die or suffer serious injury as they attack those Iraqis who oppose them are extremely high. The Muslim suicide bombers face certain death. Our troops just face a high likelihood of death or maiming injury.

So, I could understand why they would as individuals do this if they were fighting to protect our country from a truly imminent threat or danger or even to achieve an ideal of great importance. But, at this point, it appears that our troops are simply fighting to protect an ungrateful and unpopular government and, above all, to ensure that the multi-national oil companies get a high percentage of the profits from the Iraqi oil. Besides the fact that it is going to require continued military force to enforce any agreement granting those companies their oil deal, how do those reasons for dying and being maimed compare to those of the people dying because they think they are furthering their religion. Are they all just suicide bombers and martyrs?

Does our government have the right to ask our troops to suicide bomb and martyr themselves for an unpopular Iraqi government and oil company profits? What does that have to do with our purposes as a nation under our Constitution?

[youngdem]

1. Nicely put

I will say however that I disagree that suicide bombers do it for religious reasons. I think some do, but most are fighting a war against the imperial power of our generation - US. They aren't suicide bombers because they want to be, they are because they feel it is the best of very limited options available to them to strike out with the most lethality against a well-protected army.

Many are also just angry to the point of wanting to die in a last charge. So many have had loved ones killed, it is easy to imagine the rage they feel and the ability they have not to value their own life when attacking US soldiers in vengeance.

They are signing up to fight the empire to stop us from stealing their oil, their other mineral wealth, poaching their intellectuals, and acting behind the scenes to prop their governments up with Western-friendly stooges.

So, they fight us the only way a poor, relatively unarmed person can against an imperial army with the most powerful, advanced military in world history - you go kamikaze.

That's all most of them are doing. Their lives are HARD because they live hardscrabble lives of subsistence in horribly poor countries, and have little to lose. They find meaning in fighting the empire which has robbed them of wealth and an honest government. And they find comfort in the idea that paradise is waiting for them on the other side - just like the kamikazes and just like many Christian soldiers believe.

And the only means available to five pissed off guys who just had a sister killed by some soldier with a happy trigger finger is a couple of artillery shells a neighbor can get them, so they can seek revenge. What else are they gonna do? Fly a sortie in their non-existent planes over the Green Zone? Hunt down the guilty soldier and kill him? Go to the police or the Occupation Liason office for justice and compensation? HA! No. They do what they can. And the longer this goes on, the harder it is to blame them.