| | Just two short points: Americans are wrong to imagine that the Islamists and their program, which brought down the World Trade Center towers twelve years ago, are simply blowback for real or imagined recent U.S. government foreign policy slights. [Empahsis mine] I think it is wrong not to see "blowback" as part of the equation. My brother describes the various Islamic sects as crabs in a bucket. You put your hand into the bucket and they all rise up to attack your hand, even if it is the hand that is feeding them. If no one puts a hand in the bucket, they all turn viciously on each other.
But unlike crabs in a bucket, this is a clash between a millenniums-old, barbaric culture that has risen to rule large parts of the world many times in the past, and wants to do so again.
It would be in violent conflict with our civilization at some point, even if we had never entered that part of the world. And to the degree that we are free and modern and happy would be the extent to which they would hate us. But it is also true that our being over there made that conflict happen now. If we hadn't been over there, they wouldn't have come over here... now. But even though that aspect of blowback is true, it shouldn't dictate our actions.
--------------- The Muslim Middle East is going through a wrenching transformation from pre-modern to modern, a process that took many bloody centuries in Western Europe. What it needs most desperately are strong advocates for the philosophy of reason and freedom that underlies the modern world. I certainly agree with the last sentence. They need a philosophy of reason and freedom in that part of the world. But I disagree about the transformation being one that is going from pre-modern to modern. That process had been going on... look at Lebanon before its collapse, a Secular Iran, and look at Egypt under Anwar Sadat. Look at Israel. But that trend ended a while back and the new trend is the resurrection of the next Caliphate - the return of the barbarians - the spread of fundamentalist Islam by force.
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