rass bai...you on a roll

He is plainly stupid. Not only is his analysis off vase but it is exactly what would piss people off and have the FBI up his backsides.

America did not make the middle east what it was. It did not create the war between Iraq and Iran or saddam's invasion of Kuwait or his murdering of some half a million of the swamp arabs.

Afganistan has been at war for some 400 years with itself. I read a document written a hundred years ago which described the meeting of a European with and Afghan. He was described as elegant, decked out with armaments, and spoke onlu in terms of his skill  at fighting. The contrast was he lived in a dump, his children were ill fed, his numerous wives were huddled as anonymous slaves who could not utter a word or be in the same room as him. That prevails today.

America brought that place into the 30 century, built its first cross country roads, dug hundreds of wells, left them with the option to open up their society to different options. Their women were beginning to go to school and hold positions of influence. But yet they refuse to get out of the darkness of their ignorance.

The Arab spring was self initiated after decades of oppression. It was not a US or European matter. What will happen if the gulf states begin to decay into chaos as is threatened. Saudi Arabia is not safe nor is any of the Emirates. Radical Islam has metastasized from the same core of belief that has women in burkas.

Stormy,

I believe that the following happened:

• The Ayatollah Khomenei held those hostages after overthrowing the Shah back in 1979. The hostages were freed in 1980.
• The Iraqis, backed by the US, got into a war with the Ayatollah Iran in 1980 that lasted to 1988. See any connection?
• At the end of that war (hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives lost in a cause the US promoted) the Saudis called in their war loans.
• The Iraqis complained in the Gulf Cooperation Council for a couple of years about (i) Kuwait stealing their oil; the Saudis kept oil prices at least $10 a barrel lower than economics would determine (to help out the US of course), thus causing Iraq to forgo $10 x 3 million x 365 for 10 years  - billions and billions.
• When Saddam lost his patience and invaded Kuwait, the US put boots on the ground in the "Holy Land" of Saudi Arabia - Al Qaeda was born.
• 9/11 happened and Bush invaded Iraq in 2003. The Maliki Shiite government sent the Sunni and other ethnic Baathists packing. After the Sunni Awakening in 2006 (lots of CIA money doled out to Sunni leaders) Abu-Bakr Al-Bhagdadi broke with Al Qaeda in Iraq and those banished Baathists joined up with their armaments and ISIS was born.

If you disagree with the above then yes, the US had nothing to do with the Middle East chaos.

Eh Stormy?

Don't waste my time on specious argumentation....the list is about Muslim chicanery from top to bottom not the west brutality or intrusive probings into their business. Their only business this past century is to be monumental screw ups pedaling a specious story about the perfect book ( the ground of anti intellectualism) They are as one scholar puts it; and I paraphrase  "the heaviest chains ever that shackled humanity"

I  see.........totally ignoring the facts. As usual.........nothing on the hundreds of thousands of civilian lives lost in the criminal invasion of Iraq? Nothing of the geo-political calculation of the US following the Ayatollah driving the US out of the one crown Jewel in the Middle East (Iran)? Nothing on what bin Lladen said gave rise to Al Qaeda?/ Eh, Stormy? Feel free to use the word "specious", a la Colbert's word of the day.

I am not ignoring the facts; I am just bypassing the obfuscation and rationalization that always return to the status of Muslims being victims of external forces. Theirs is a their complete lack personal responsibility for what is a condition of inherent and unarguable truth of anti modern backwardness that leaves them destitute.

Yes former absolute rulers in the Bathist party met Bhagdadi in jail and the intersection of their paths produced ISIS. It is besides the point how they got there. It is what they produced as an offering and why that revivalist tradition located in a fictive era of golden age Islam so easily lure thousands to a culture of bestiality. That  is what matters.

Absolute rulers meeting an agency of an absolutist faith produces the awful reality of an Islamic scourge that is totalized mayhem; completely anti life  and bent on of course, subjugating women and others not of their creed. It is what the religion does at its best and lacking a reformation in the Ulema that is where it will remain.

Its ills emerges from the absolute authority of the book; laws treating men and women disproportionately and the complete subjugation of others deemed the dhimmitude. No exegesis of the faith is ever entertained. One cannot question, that is blasphemy.When you decide to face the reality that something produces the external recurrences of endless quarrels between Muslims and their neighbors since the inception of Islam, you get to a point that something  internal to it is the worm in the apple.

External events become catalysts for expression of this internal conflict. If one  has the perfect book, the perfect religion, the perfect manual for government and perfect rituals to coerce the faithful to its creed, one cannot be productive of what is wrong. You have to blame it on someone else!

First it was the unbelievers in Mecca then  Medina, the Christians in Jerusalem, the animism of the black Africans the Hindus...beat them all down....seize their holy places and erect your temples and all is well with the world.

That worked for a while but alas that kind of ideology cannot move a modern world it has to reform itself as absolutist Catholicism has done to liberate minds from subservience to the faith and to a Pope. It does not mean the religion is watered down. It means it becomes relevant not enforced  and necessary.

Absolutism is the path to failure and since the 13th century the West has fought its own demons and emerged a force to reckon with.  It has emerged to be open, diverse, and seeks no vassals. Even women be its leaders and they can walk as close to naked if they so choose. There is no need for a permanent caliph or a caliphate.

All western  politics are subject to elected temporary, secular rulers. There is no state religion, and the secularist can shout down the priest in the market square or the woman the man! This reality and the diversity that engenders the creative flow of human beings that is the source of all technology, all innovation, and productive of excesses food, water and shelter. And to top it off they have the best in weaponry to boot because wealth produces a need to defend it.

That is what is at stake here...modernism vs a backward 7th century philosophy that is productive of nothing but still need to blame everyone else for its lacking.

that's some good stuff Storm...no one should have to follow these religions to the T.. 

Stormy,

No one's talking bout Arab Muslims being the victims of foreign intervention, and no one is saying that some of these societies are not backward; but an acknowledgment of how we got here is important for all your proselytizing about religion. Your commentary would be incomplete without the bigger picture. You're focusing on the narrow obvious dastardly societies and the illegal use of religion in the name of horror and atrocities.

They shouldn't follow religion ...period.

Riff, Some people are too STUPID not to know that trying to defend/make excuses for inhuman Animals is only hurting them.