Say it ain't so, Bin Laden!
(With apologies to Joseph Jefferson "Shoeless Joe" Jackson (Career batting av. - .356, 3rd highest), the Chicago White Sox, and Major League Baseball.)
Note: I have found Answers .com helpful in improving my understanding of words and phrases bandied about as buzz words by the media. So I have included some links below.
I report and link. You decide. - BJon
From a Pajamas Media .com, Victor Davis Hanson, Works and Days blog section, The perfect storm (Scroll down):
The perfect storm [/] Five things accounted for the rise of al Qaeda
1. Afghanistan. The Afghans, with Western weapons and Gulf money, defeated the Soviets in Afghanistan. Of nearly 800,000 resistance fighters, there were rarely over 2,000 Arabs fighting at one time. But because of the Russian collapse, and Mullah Omar’s coddling of the multimillionaire loud bin Laden, al Qaeda was able to pose to Muslim youth as the saviors of Islam that had destroyed the Soviet Union. That Arabs had little to do with the Afghan victory, much less the collapse of the Soviet Union mattered little. From 1989 on bin Laden was enshrined as some mythical Saladin.
2. Islam and globalization. There were in the last 1400 years always wannabe Great Mahdis and zealots who declared jihad. But in this period of globalization and Western-inspired modernism, Islam, autocratic tyrannies in the Middle East, and the languishing Arab Street have all come together to recreate another Islamic wave of jihadism. Bin Laden’s ever expanding list of grievances, from Kyoto to mortgages, reveals that his hatred, born out inferiority, envy, and pride, is existential and elemental.
3. American appeasement. That sad tale from the Iranian hostage taking of 1979 to the attack on the USS Cole is now well known. But in the words of the terrorists themselves, the image of a static, impotent America was fixed, and with it the invitation to hit our assets at will without fear of retribution.
4. The Wall. Richard Clark, George Tenet, and Michael Scheuer may be loud critics, but prior to 9/11 no Americans had more opportunity to save us from known terrorists in the United States. Yet petty jealousies and turf battles ensured that the NSA, CIA, and FBI stayed on parallel, quite separate tracks, as these egomaniacs refused to share information that would have empowered all three agencies. Those walls are now hopefully, down, and with their fall, and the absence of the three above, we have been making good progress rounding up the terrorists among us.
5. Petroleum. Without petrodollars, there are no madrassas, no House of Saud cousins freelancing by pouring money to jihadists, no bought and paid for mullahs mouthing anti-Western drivel, and no chance to get weapons of mass destruction to kill us all. [My ellipses and emphasis]
Jim :) Smiling aka Brother Jonathan aka Toto Of Kansas | Link to my Blogs, Forums & Essays
