They don't want our liberty. They want to be told how to live and forced to live that way under threat of decapitation. Democracy is poisonous to Islam. They don't want it, and never will want it, as long as perfect conformance to religious ideas matters more to them than being "free". Maybe I'm just not idealistic enough to think that 1000 years+ of culture and belief can be undone by an invading nation of infidels telling them they should adopt a foreign system they don't understand.
I certainly hope your being sarcastic. If not you are very much out of touch with the reality of what is taking place there, why it is taking place, and how the current progress is taking place.
Let's get the terminology straight. Liberty is the ownership of ones own life. Your life belongs to you is liberty. Stating they don't want 'our liberty' leads me to believe that you mean they don't want to become Americanized. Either that or your saying they don't want ownership of our lives. Either way I agree. They
do however want ownership of
their own lives.
You don't have to be idealistic to understand that people want ownership of their own lives. Arabs and Persians, whether Islamic Muslims or not, are as human as you. The Islamic fascists don't define the culture. In fact they are currently being FOUGHT by the very people you claim don't want liberty. The work of General Petraeus over the last year is succeeding BECAUSE they want liberty and the Petraeus approach has been a bottom up, or local to central, assurance that they CAN live how THEY want as long as they DON'T kill their neighbor for living how THEY want. Then keeping that promise. Soon the people themselves saw AlQ as the one telling them under threat how to live not the Americans. And as the promise was kept the Iraqis chased AlQ off with the Americans.
Take hold of the concept of liberty as ownership of ones own life and that Persians and Arabs are human and also desire that. As Americans we take for granted our liberty. We have enjoyed it for so long that we have developed an expectation of justice. We actually EXPECT justice. This is counter the the culture in the middle east where people expect injustice. The desire for liberty is usurped by the desire to survive. The assertion of their desire for liberty has been met with death until now as they didn't have the strong ally we did in France to overcome the overwhelming power that kept that desire down.
The dramatic progress in Iraq wasn't from bombing Iraqis into submission. It has been by a bottom up or local to central change in the expectations of Iraqis. They are seeing a possibility that they may be able to expect justice.
Dollars and oil are of less value then the force of liberty and the change of expectation from expecting injustice to expecting justice in the culture of the middle east. The spread of that will do more damage to the threat of terrorism then bombs. That is the WHOLE Operation Iraqi Freedom premise. To spread this in the middle east. THAT, not money is the POINT.