Earlier I posted a comment about who we are fighting in Iraq. We are fighting a small group of Islamic fundamentalists.* Not Muslims but Islamic fundamentalists. The two can easily be confused with one another. The Islamists, as I said in the Fastest Way to End the War thread, are Muslims who believe in the actual teachings of the Prophet Muhammad, PBUH**. He taught that Allah had given him the religion of Islam and that the world is to become an Islamic world. That is the basic tenet of the religion of Islam, that Allah has ordained that the world will be Islamic. The Islamic fundamentalists believe that and have, ever since the founding of the religion, sought to spread the religion by conquest as the Prophet Muhammad, PBUH**, did. The Islamic fundamentalists have patiently sought to conquer the world for Allah. They have been at it for about 1400 years. To defeat them we must have at least one tenth of the patience that they have shown. So Pres. Bush's requests for patience are a drop in the bucket compared to the patience our enemy has shown.
*The size of the Islamic fundamentalists is open to debate. A conservative estimate is that they are 10 to 15% of the Muslims worldwide. With 1,000,000,000 Muslims worldwide that would mean about 100,000,000 to 150,000,000 Islamic fundamentalists.
**PBUH is an acronym for Peace Be Upon Him which all Muslims say after they say the name of the founder of the religion of Islam, the Prophet Muhammad, PBUH.
