solarz
Brigadier
Some particularly interesting points:
But there's not one American in 1,000 who realises that if we were fighting an enemy who hated democracy and liberty and women in the workplace and beer after work, that the threat wouldn't even rise to the level of lethal nuisance.
They wouldn't have any of the things we have in our own country. But they're not fighting us because of who Americans are, how we live or how we think, they're fighting because of what our government has done in the Muslim world over the past 40 years.
Whether it's support for the Saudi police state, our military presence in various Muslim countries and probably the most dangerous thing now is our unqualified, unquestioning support for the Israelis. This is a very substantive religious war from the perspective our enemies.
And none of that really is to say that our policies are evil or were made by mad men. But if you're going to understand how to defeat an enemy, you best understand his motivation. And right now the United States government, under both parties, is fighting an enemy that doesn't exist. There is not an enemy out there who's just crazy wild to die because my daughters go to university.
And I'm afraid much of the media turned out, turned their credentials in as reporters and became cheerleaders. In Tahrir Square they interviewed 100 or 200 middle class, English speaking, democracy talking, well groomed Egyptians. Then they read their Facebooks and their Twitters and then they extrapolated that over 85 million devout Muslims, more than 60 per cent of whom are illiterate, and decided that secular democracy was blooming. I think that can only be described as a fantasy.
But in terms of the Arab Spring over the course of the entire area of North Africa, it's been an enormous advantage for Al Qaeda and other Islamist groups, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Libyan Islamic Fighting group. They've overrun numerous arsenals, the flow of weapons into the hands of Islamists in Africa now is enormous.
And they've also opened up gaols and Gaddafi and Mubarak and Ben Ali filled their gaols with Mujahideen, with Islamist fighters. Some portion of those fighters are going to return to the ranks of the Mujahideen with a very, very strong grudge to work out.
They won't be ruled by tyrants but there will be not be a secular democracy ma’am. The people who want secular democracies will be eaten by the revolution. NATO has just supplied air support for a group of people fighting Gaddafi in Libya who, if they were in Afghanistan, would be known as the Taliban.