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How would nuking the holiest site of a quarter of the global population, not to mention more than two million innocent men women and children. In an American ally no less for the actions of a few thousand radicals in the mountains of Afghanistan save the US trouble. It would turn the world against America. And easily be a worse atrocity than anything Muslims have done in recent memory. It would be a great evil and barbaric tribalism. Not mention stupid seeing as the Saudi government is a cooperative ally of the US.
Religions can die. Countless religions lie in the trash heap of history. Even if it didn’t die completely, Zoroastrianism is no longer important.
Islam is much stronger but much more brittle than Judaism. I doubt they’d survive long after the destruction of their holy site. It’s a religion that’s much more “particular” than most in that it’s formally attached to a set of places and yet claims universality through historical conquest.
Islam can’t handle huge setbacks in the secular / physical world, it’s part of the reason 9/11 happened in the first place. It was almost like a violent outburst born in a fit of narcissistic rage on a societal level.
Ironically there was an Iraq war era general that I will paraphrase here: you pay the butchers bill up front or you pay it with interest over time. The network of Islamist parties in the decade after 9/11 were directly responsible for the butchery of millions of people, mostly Muslims.
Leveling Mecca and fatally humiliating an awful religion into obscurity seems very tempting given a full and honest accounting of the bloodshed directly caused by Islam in the 21st century.
The United States was explicitly modeled on the Roman republic, and this is one aspect of our pagan past I wish we would have the balls to recover: the ability to unashamedly and utterly crush our enemies without moralizing or hemming and hawing about it.
The whole world would turn against the US, you say? I say a US government acting in the best interests of its citizens would find that to be essentially inevitable, and the last 25 years have vindicated me.
If you put those that would have opposed a punitive war against Islamism directly after 9/11 and those “allies” who have been leeches and fair weather friends in the last 25 years into a Venn diagram it would be a goddamn circle.
Mecca was sacked by the Qarmations and the Kaaba destroyed in 930 and the black stone carried off where they held it for 20 years. I don't think nuking Mecca would be any different. The Saudis would autistically search through Mecca for shards of the black stone rebuild the Kaaba and pilgrimages would resume once safe, just as before.
How in the world have they vindicated you, there have been since 9/11 about 130 deaths in the US as a result of Islamic extremism and for that you would launch an apocalyptic war of extermination against 2 billion people, and you say this is what the US would do if it was acting in the interest of it's citizens? How is that it my interest? What gain would be achieved? As an American I don't feel threatened at all by Islam or Islamic Extremists because the actual number of deaths is so low. More people have been killed by disaffected teenagers in that time about 500 according to AI. I don't feel the need to ban guns for that and I don't feel the need to start a global war over 130 deaths.
We did launch a punitive war against the people who actually did it. We invaded Afghanistan and anyone who was even vaguely connected to the attacks has been killed by US special forces or at best has got life in prison. What good or what benefit would a "punitive" expedition against places like Bangladesh and Senegal do? And while America's Muslim allies are fair weather friends they are pretty united in fighting Jihadis as they are a threat to their government.
Also it's morally wrong. An unprovoked nuclear attack on an allies city that we are at peace with to destroy religious holy sites and cause millions of causalities is about as unjust a war as you can get.
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I sympathize, but it's wishful thinking. Islam is culturally strong and will not evaporate over minor theological issues or temporary humiliations.
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Oh, so that's why Canadian society gets along so well with them.
That's hilarious. Come on, man. Americans are constitutionally incapable of doing this. (And somehow I don't think the Romans were either.)
You have written in your supreme law that it's permitted to prepare for a war against your own countrymen, and your founding posture is that this is inevitable. Most of the laws in that document grant similar powers for the same purpose.
Even more incredible is that your militiamen/law enforcement actually honor these laws even though it makes basically zero logical sense for you to permit citizens to do even half the things they get up to.
You have civil war statues that venerate the enemies of the Union, and people don't want to take them down precisely because they are symbols of you not wanting to do this. The colors of that existential enemy are still publicly flown in a way that also invokes this, but from the other direction. (It's also the root justification given for why you're allergic to most varieties of collectivism, be that the red star or the black swastika variety, of which you are both and neither.)
You settled with the Indians despite really not needing to. (And the Germans, and the Japanese, in stark contrast to what was normal conquest behavior at the time.) You have foreign prisoner accounts that, and this is true with respect to the Soviet Union as well, that what you considered sub-citizen treatment and what they considered a propaganda picture are one and the same.
You go to war under the guise that you fight for your enemy's right to collectively decide to be your enemy (or "for democracy")- absurd nonsense by the standards of any historical power. Your media machine continually bombards the populace with this conclusion, even in movies that really don't have much to do with war.
Your civil religion has a God whose entire statement of godliness is a posture of specifically targeting what's wrong over who's wrong. Perhaps most of the above posture is the logical consequence of a people who are expecting God in the gaps that your laws create, like the Virgin Mary appearing on a piece of toast.
The day the US government fully embraces acting in the best interests of its citizens is also the day it ends.
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I've discussed how certain theological claims of Islam are more brittle than its Abrahamic brothers before but I think you're not accounting for inertia and adaptation and the fact that these religions have absorbed enough from Judaism to follow the same path.
Judaism adapted because it had to, it once also had the problem of not being able to handle earthly failure. David's kingdom did not in fact last forever, despite the unconditional covenant. The Deuteronomist message of obeying to avoid punishment via curse and political cataclysm didn't really work out: given where the Jews were geographically, they got rolled over despite trying to be faithful anyway and we got apocalypticism instead.
Islam hasn't had to adapt, despite having a rough time in modernity, because it's had the demographic weight as a cushion against total calamity.
Here's the thing: a lot of these adaptations are already within the Qur'an. The Qur'an is inherited apocalypticism but paired it with a more high agency response in jihad (George Bush's invasion of Iraq led to a rise in apocalyptic feeling), it already has a detached corpus and distributed system of religious common law, and already has pragmatic adaptations to the inability to fulfill divine commands. It maintains the locale-weakness but Judaism shed this without dying.
Christianity is evidence that disconfirming events are no obstacle to human stubbornness. Too many people believe in Islam to stop, there's no reason to think it will not be amenable to the same cognitive dissonance management strategies the Jews and other apocalyptic cults were, especially given how much it draws from the former.
Especially if you just mega-super-duper-jihaded them. The Kabba didn't fall into a sinkhole, Mohammed's tomb wasn't hit by an asteroid. A kaffir President in the Dar-al-Harb (this is a concept a lot of Muslims don't think about but, trust me, it'll be relevant again) simply brought the war to Islam. It's not a refutation, it's a validation. That's what kaffir are supposed to do. It's the sort of attack that unites people. Plenty of Muslims were disgusted by 9/11 (what you see now from many younger Muslims in the West is a response to the idea that their elders apologized for a decade for something that had nothing to do with them, to no end), every Muslim will be aligned against the US if it robs all of them of the Hajj.
As for the lack of the Hajj: Islam would lose something in terms of being able to get everyone back on the same page yearly but modern telecomms allows that anyway. The Arabic tenor of the faith won't end because it's tied to the Qur'an itself which is portable and beyond questioning for Muslims (it's not really a problem, ime all of the criticisms of Western language dominance and so on apply mainly to Westerners and it doesn't even occur to Muslims to apply to Arabs). Why on Earth would it break the faith rather than lead to scholars simply accepting that a commandment that cannot reasonably be fulfilled doesn't count against someone? Hell, you can end up in an even worse situation: without Hajj some might suggest other ways of accruing religious status (jihad) count for more.
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I guess it would show that Allah was not powerful if the American government could destroy islams holiest site.
Did Judaism end after the Temple was destroyed (twice)? Did Christianity end after all Jesus's OG disciples were dead and buried ("some of you standing here will not taste death...")?
They're perfectly capable of creating new copes. In fact, they'll probably just steal the original: "God has punished us for our degeneracy."
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