Jonas E. Alexis: Islam and the West, Have the East and the West

Always been at war? If you are going to write history, you must sacrifice to truth alone, ignoring everything else. Well, my historian should be like that: fearless, incorruptible, frank, a friend of free speech and the truth, determined, as the comic poet puts it, to call figs figs and a tub a tub, indulging neither hatred nor friendship, sparing no-one, not showing pity or shame or diffidence, an unbiased judge, kindly to everyone up to the point of not allowing one side more than it deserves, a stranger without a stake in his writings, independent, serving no king, not taking into account what any man will think, but simply saying what happened. Ten years after the invasion of Iraq, editor of Front Page magazine David Horowitz declared at the end of last month: This is a war whose aims and purposes make it very hard to understand, how anyone who is a supporter of human rights, or who believes in freedom, could be against it. In four years, George Bush has liberated nearly 50 million people in two Islamic countries. He has stopped the filling of mass graves, and closed down the torture chambers of an oppressive regime. He has encouraged the Iraqis and the people of Afghanistan to begin a political process, that gives them rights they have not enjoyed in 5,000 years. The rationale for this war was not, as critics claim, stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. This is a misunderstanding that was the product of political arguments during a Democratic primary season, that was intended to unseat a sitting president, but had a grave fallout for the credibility and security of the nation itself. Horowitz has to dismiss all of history, in order to perpetuate the neoconservative fabrication, that the Iraqis and Afghans had been enslaved for 5,000 years. What he indirectly ended up saying, is that Iraq and Afghanistan only needed the neoconservatives in the twenty first century, to sexually, politically, economically and intellectually liberated them from the shackles of tradition and historical backwardness. It was reported last month, that 16,000 Iraq war prisoners are still unaccounted for. According to Agence France Presse: Kidnappings became increasingly common, in the years of violence following the US led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003, especially after militants bombed a Shiite shrine in Samarra in 2006, sparking a bloody sectarian conflict. While the violence has been brought under a semblance of control, many Iraqis are still searching for family members who went missing, holding on to hope that they are alive.