How a world-wide war of Islam against the rest will begin.

[rogerashton]

No, it has not yet begun, not quite. However, a broad international conflict between Muslims and Non-Muslims in Africa -- which could be set off by events in Somalia -- would invite intervention by Iran and Egypt, and the western countries would then face yet another nasty dilemma -- try to oppose this intervention, taking sides in an international Anti-Islamic war, or sit by and watch while Muslim extremism massacres the African opposition.

http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewForeignBureaus.asp?Page=/ForeignBureaus/archive/200607/INT20060728d.html

Of course, nothing is inevitable -- unless we are governed by very stupid people --

[Virginia Dare]

1. In other words...we're screwed....n/t

[villager]

2. home "sapiens" may want total war everywhere at the moment

but eventually the resources will no longer be there to have constant round-the-clock battles round-the-planet.

The only question is: at what cost will the end of this madness come?

[sui generis]

3. fortunately not all muslims are extremists and many

are even secularists when it comes to government.

They would have just as much interest in preserving their stable way of life from extremist ideologies as non-Muslims.

So crazy mullah can bray all he wants; he's power mad and he wants to be the king of the world, and religion is his backdoor, or so he thinks, but they're not known for rationality.

Lesson #2, recently learned from Iraq, again: You can't destabilize a secular muslim administration into civil war and then actually unite them again to do anything useful. Once you saw someone's head off for not wiping their ass in the proper direction, they tend to hold grudges, and grudges get in the way of accepting central leadership.

It's a lesson we seemed to have learned in turning an "insider" to help get rid of the embarrassing fleshy al-Zarqawi; create a desire and struggle for power within the organization and you decentralize their administrative focus on external goals; they fall apart.

[rogerashton]

4. You have a point but

in east Africa it is the non-Muslim Ethiopia that is currently intervening in Somalia, against an Islamist insurrection that has pretty much defeated the government. I'm sure you are right that many Muslims are far from extremist -- but the violence-counterviolence cycle that we see works against the moderates and for the extremists.

You know, terrorists do win, sometimes. Take Yugoslavia, for example -- I'm referring to the period 1913-20.