You can’t moderate Islam. It’s been tried before...and it’s lost every time. That was basically what Bush was attempting to do in Afghanistan, and as long as it was advantageous and safer for Karzai to appear “moderate,” he did so. But that means we have to be there every moment of the day, keeping them “moderate” only because they’re scared of us.
As soon as it became obvious that they had nothing to be scared of, they went right back to their old Islamic ways, and there is absolutely nothing that is going to change that. Islam is vicious and violent at its core, and unless it is completely suppressed, it will burst forth again.
We should never have allowed either Iraq or Afghanistan to enshrine Islam in their constitutions. We blew our chance to make a serious change there (which, again, Muslims will do only when they’re scared of a more powerful force) and to throw away more American lives trying to create “moderate” Islam out of a fanatical, irrational, 7th-century Arab-supremacy cult is shameful.
We should simply have leveled Mecca, destroyed the black rock and set these people free from the Satanic evil that is behind Islam.
You are confusing tribalism with republicanism. The vast majority of Muslims are moderate. We cannot compare their worst to our best. That most Muslim countries are highly tribalistic is why you see such a Machiavellian outcome in our relations with them. Have you been to Cook County?