chickens coming home to roost...

Ponder this sequence of events:

[1] 1980s: The US strongly supports Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War, thereby trying to screw Islamic fundamentalists in Iran. Islamic fundamentalists learn to hate America.

[2] During the same period, the US strongly supports the same brand of Islamic fundamentalists in their fight against the USSR's occupation of Afghansitan. Islamic fundamentalists learn guerilla warfare from the Americans and the British.

[3] 1991: The US and Britain trash Iraq.

[4] 1991 to present day: American military bases in Saudi Arabia seen as an affront to Islam by the fundamentalists.

[5] As we speak: Iraq disintegrates into civil war.

[6] 2003 to present day: Islamic fundamentalists benefit strategically from the disintegration of Iraq.

[7] Since the Seventies: Islamic fundamentalists see America as an imperialist occupier in the Middle East.

And this new idea of an Islamic fundamentalist super-state? Well, guess what! That idea mainly got fuelled by the threats posed to Islamic fundamentalism by America's machiavellian machinations in the Middle East.

But there's another dimension to analyse here: The Israeli/Palestinian conflict (and America's strong support of Israel), and its role in radicalising Arabs to the point where they found Islamist fundamentalist extremism attractive.

You have to ask yourself, do the Americans have any idea how to deal with Islamic fundamentalist extremism in the Middle East? I think not, because everything they've done to date has manufactured more support for the extremists from within the Muslim world.

But to fully understand the causes for the radicalisation of Islam, you need to broaden your gaze and analyse the cumulative effects on Islam, over the last 90 years, by the machinations of Britain, America, Israel and the USSR.

Often, when people go nuts, someone has driven them to it...