No-one else is going to do it. So we should. The Soviet Union is gone, Russia is swirling the plug hole, the islamic world - however much it has been portrayed as the 'next big enemy' only needs to be properly bombed into submission from time to time.
"...only
needs to be
properly bombed into submission from time to time"
That sure is some bloodthirsty, bigoted bullshit.
To dig into it: I literally cannot imagine thinking that the correct and eternally ongoing course of action visa-vis an entire religion and its adherents, comprising a huge swathe of the world's occupants, is to give them a good bombing every once in a while so that they remember who's boss. I certainly can't imagine thinking I could say this with any kind of coherent moral framework backing it up, at least not one that wouldn't also justify them saying the exact same thing about me.
I guess I could imagine forming that opinion if I had precious little knowledge of what I'm talking about married to an unwarranted overconfidence?
Let's cast ancient history aside, where the Islamic world consistently and comfortably outdid the Christian "west" in terms of personal and religious freedoms. It's difficult to make relevant comparisons because most societies back then were based on principles we now consider grim. Well, some of us do, anyway.
Keeping this in topic, as recently as the early 1950s the actual elected government of Iran was
successfully struggling against regressive, oppressive forces that sought to drag it back into the dark ages and reinstitute a repressive regime. I'm talking, of course, about the UK and US.
Unfortunately it's difficult to hold a progressive government together when more powerful outside forces are simultaneously starving you of revenue and fomenting factionalism within your borders, and when it fell, we helpfully installed exactly the kind of oppressive client regime colonial powers had been gleefully installing for centuries. Purges ensued and, well, it's hard to keep up a liberal intellectual movement when you could die for it.
Nonetheless, even by the time of the 1979 revolution, there was still a huge current of modern liberal reformism present. If only those aforementioned regressive, illiberal forces hadn't picked the winning side, maybe Iran wouldn't be such a nightmare realm for so many of its inhabitants today. But we intervened, we fucked around and then we've spent the ensuing decades since then and now sponsoring their enemies and crippling their economy, all the while building on this narrative that somehow Muslim-majoriry regions are incurably backwards and we just can't do anything about that other than stochastically murder their inhabitants.
Of course, I'm not being fair. You also said they could just stop being Muslim, as if that's the magical solution. But if that's true (and it's not, but whatever) the what is it that the US and UK and other once-great powers like Russia who also fucked around in the region have to stop being in order for us to be reasonable neighbours to other nations? What core part of our identities would you ascribe our long-proven and ongoing bloodthirsty interventionist tendencies to?
I'm out. It's fine to criticise religion, but you have to know what you're talking about. Calling for nation-state-sponsored terrorism against regimes associated with specific religions is not it, and is not worthy of further "debate".
