Pentagon Advisor Doubts Wisdom of U.S. Military's Recruiting Muslims
by Chad Groening
January 4, 2007
(AgapePress) - - Retired Lieutenant Colonel Bob Maginnis, a Pentagon advisor and national defense expert, believes U.S. military officials are making a radical mistake by trying to make America's armed services more attractive to Muslims. The Pentagon has lately gone out of its way to attract Muslims into the U.S. military, citing the need for officers and troops who can speak Arabic and understand Islamic culture. And recently, Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England said that Muslims and the Islamic religion are totally compatible with Western values.
However, Maginnis disagrees with that assessment. In fact, he contends, "Someone who's an adherent to the teaching of the Koran and then abides by what it says, that person -- as far as I can understand -- is incompatible with Western culture."
The retired Army officer says U.S. military leaders may well agree with his concerns, but they will not go against the policy of the Bush administration or even their commander-in-chief himself. "The President says Islam is a respectable faith, that it's a great faith," Maginnis notes. "If President Bush says there is not a problem, then you can't expect that his subordinates are going to come out with a contrary view."
Obviously, the lieutenant colonel observes, people in the military who live in Muslim-dominated cultures and "who deal with these issues day to day can, in the privacy of their conversations, say the types of things that I've expressed." But even if these military personnel believe, based on their experience of Islam, that its true adherents are inherently anti-Western, he asserts, "they can't publicly state that."
Maginnis feels the Pentagon's policy toward Islam is naïve, at best. And judging by what has happened in Western Europe and other parts of the world where Muslim ideology has taken hold, he believes the U.S. military's ongoing effort to recruit Muslims will prove to be a radical mistake.
Chad Groening, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
