Are the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan religion-based?
Some people would say they are about freedom, but that is a very ambiguous concept. What freedom means is hard to understand, particularly when people try to preserve our freedom by taking away our civil rights. A lot of Muslims see our presence in Iraq as a religious war. When President Bush first talked of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, he specifically used the term crusade, which refers to Christians and Muslims fighting one another. Of course, it is hard to completely separate religious principles from political principles. Is equality a religious principle or political principle? Is individuality a religious notion or political notion? There is a lot of talk about the clash of cultures. I think this is a dangerous notion. There is no clash of cultures as the pundits mean it. The vast majority of Muslims in the world share the same fundamental principles as the vast amount of Jews and Christians: tolerance of other religions. What we see in the Middle East in the past 10 to
