Now, what about the statement that since the ordinary people are "too frightened to speak out", they're our enemy too? That doesn't apply to Iraq or Afghanistan now, because we have our own official governments there.
To have our own official governments there, we would need to do imperialism after the style of Lord Cromer - which is considered unthinkably reactionary, capitalistic, orientialist, racist, and oppressive.
Karzai has never won a fair and free election. He needs to be killed and the reason we are not killing him is because his replacement would likely be even worse.
As for Iraq: They
did have a fair and free election. The moderates won a plurality, not a majority. They are still trying to find an extremist faction to go into coalition with, but each extremist faction wants to kill all the infidels, and thinks the moderates are infidels. Most of those elected are extremists, but the extremists are split on the questions of who is an infidel and which infidels need killing first. It is thus impossible to form a majority coalition, an unstable situation which will end with a minority ruling by terror.
The program of exporting democracy is premised on the idea that most Muslims are moderate. Since moderation is dangerous to one's health, it is hard to tell if this idea is true or not, but whether it is true or not, exporting democracy at gunpoint has failed. We don't have our own official governments there.
That doctrine does apply to the Gaza Strip - Israel was within its rights to treat it as though it were a nation at war against Israel - but I believe they have made a serious mistake in fully availing themselves of that right.
The serious mistake was dragging the settlers out of Gaza. As subsequent events proved, the Israeli government was not protecting the settlers, the settlers were protecting the Israeli government. To fix the problem, let settlers back in, and kill as many Palestinians as required to make resettlement possible. Since the present status quo is intolerable, the glaringly obvious solution is to return to the status quo ante, the imperialism of James Anthony Froude - which, like the imperialism of Lord Cromer, is today considered unthinkably reactionary.
If the United States can bring massive forces to bear, it can protect the civilian populations of Iraq, Afghanistan, and any other countries (particularly Pakistan) which are or may be embroiled in this, and bring the conflict to a quick end.
Obviously the US cannot protect Muslims from each other, no matter how massive our forces, except possibly by using the highly successful methods of Lord Cromer or Sir Stamford Raffles, which methods are today considered unthinkable, and were controversial even in the nineteenth century Even back in the nineteenth century it was bit of a toss up whether Raffles was going to get knighted for services to the British empire, or hung as a pirate and brigand.
Which would quickly end up making a sizable fraction of the world's Muslims enemies of the U.S.
You seem to be under the impression that the majority of the world's Muslims are not already enemies of the U.S. You also seem to imply that Americans should care whether Muslims are enemies or not.
The only times that Dar al Islam has
not been making war on Dar al Harb was when we crushed them with overwhelming force, stole their land and resources, ravished their women, and treated their religion with contempt and repression - in particular the period from 1830 to 1960, which started with a near genocidal solution to the Barbary pirate problem. As soon as the last Christian settlers were dragged off Muslim lands in 1960, Islamic terrorism resumed - analogous to what happened when Israel dragged the settlers out of Gaza.
One can reasonably argue that Muslims are weak enough to ignore - but they are hostile enough it is ludicrous to worry about offending them, and thirteen hundred years of history demonstrate this. Doing bad things to Muslims always leads to less trouble, not more trouble. Back when we really were doing all those dreadful things to Muslims that people allege we are doing today, everything was fine. If Raffles had been in charge of the Iraq war, he would have put Baghdad to the sack for three days, would have ethnically cleansed Basra and brought in outside oil workers. Lord Cromer would have stolen the oil. And Raffle's dad would have thought Raffles and Cromer were politically correct softies. And back when those guys were taking care of business, imperialism made a profit, and Muslims gave no trouble.
Perhaps we should refrain from such measures because they are immoral, but history shows it is the way to reduce trouble from Muslims, that being nice to Muslims is perceived as weakness, and weakness provokes attack. The methods of the colonialists were successful, and not only profitable for the colonialists, but, like the Jewish settlers in Gaza, provided peace, safety, and prosperity for Muslims. Raffles did what we cannot do - protected Muslims and their property from each other. Of course he did not protect them or their property from himself, but overall his depredations were considerably less serious than their depredations against each other.
This doesn't mean Islam is an "evil religion". Under Sharia law, they treat non-Muslims about like Americans treated black people under segregation. The problem is that people who are under intense scrutiny, and who need, for their own survival, to be easy for us to distinguish from terrorists... can't afford to behave like that.
If Sir Stamford Raffles was in charge of our military program, they would need for their own survival to be easy to distinguish from terrorists (and even that would not always help) but the way things are now, it is a lot safer to be indistinguishable from a terrorist.
If Africa had the atom bomb in 1920, it would have been pretty foolish of the United States to practice segregation, wouldn't it? It isn't that we're making ourselves into their enemies. It's that they're making themselves into our enemies, and if they don't stop, there are terrible risks for them as this continuing conflict has the potential to expand.
Islam has always had a policy of chronic low level warfare, even when brief higher level warfare would have been more effective. Westerners tend to escalate when the enemy escalates, Muslims tend to de-escalate, thus things are unlikely to blow up the way they have blown up from time to time in disputes within the west.
One can make a reasonable case that it would be a lot more cost effective to simply ignore them, but ignoring them will result them taking more forceful means to get our attention. (Which would still probably end up cheaper) However a policy of ignoring them would require the guts to ignore them - would require us to handle the fatwas and Motoons business, and similar events, more courageously than we did.
My recommended solution is to issue letters of Marque and reprisal - authorizing private enterprises to steal Muslim lands, Muslim oil, ravish the women, ethnically cleanse desirable lands, and so on and so forth - in short, legalize the likes of Benjamin Raffles who was doing such a good job in the late eighteenth century, the wholly private enterprise colonialism commended by James Anthony Froude.