@Alligator Ed Religious fundamentalism and inventiveness often don't mix.

to use, fighting Shia inside their own border. Poetic justice, if mass killing can be said to be poetic (which apparently it is according to Hillary and Neocons). The Iranians have centuries old history of being intellectually curious and inventive, maintaining that heritage even now despite widespread ostracism from US-led coalitions. The Saudis have centuries old history of being centuries old. What have they achieved technologically since 1100 AD? Nothing. In fact the great scientific enlightenment occurring in Arabia from about 800 AD oil 1100 was stifled by clerical revisionism from which they have yet to emerge.

@lotlizard
may not share America's values, but they definitely share the ambitions of America's ruling elite. One of which is to prevent at all costs, the formation of a stable and contiguous Shia crescent. To achieve this end, any number of America's values may be considered as expendable.

In the Western establishment’s foreign policy universe, the Saudis and the Gulf tyrants share our values! They’re willing to play ball with you-know-who! That makes them “moderate”!

Word of G~d (the New York Times, the Economist, Foreign Affairs magazine) tells me so!

Dictators? The West adores ’em, as long as they’re not (shudder) socialist! If they’re nepotistic and feudal, so much the better!

What’s so bad about these absolute monarchs, anyway? They’re (yawn) just another kind of plutocrat! Western elites love these guys! They do good works with their money! They’ve introduced reforms! Really! I heard all about it through the media they own! They’re just like (the plutocrats who own) us!

Seriously though, maybe the West deserves Trump? Taste of our own medicine, in a way? The type of guy the West regularly sets up to rule in other places, to keep the people in line?

@Not Henry Kissinger Right it would be like comparing Gnostic Christians to Pat Robertson.

Arabia with the entire Muslim world.

The enlightenment occurred over a broad swath from India to the Atlantic and was caused by the unification of the region under Islam, which brought knowledge and education.

But that unification never happens without nomadic tribes people able to travel long distances in a harsh climate to spread their message.

Later, after territorial consolidation, the enlightenment ended, but that wasn't because of religious revisionism. It simply petered out because there were no longer new places from which to gain new ideas.

Then the Mongols invaded... Then the Ottomans took over....

Also, your argument assumes that the sect of Islam practiced in Arabia in 1100 is the same as that practiced today, which is simply not true. Wahhabism has only been around for about two hundred years.

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal Send that message to the fucking glowing ball, blowhards.

Maybe they shouldn't have wholeheartedly participated in--and even invented some of--the policies that made it possible.

For. Fuck's. Sakes.

@native
Who created the conditions from which ISIS arose? Who fueled it, nurtured it and fanned the flames? This scourge would not have existed in the first place without priming from the illegal war of aggression waged by the United States of America - the Iraq War.

Nuremberg Tribunal's final judgment - Judge Norman Birkett:

"The charges in the Indictment that the defendants planned and waged aggressive wars are charges of the utmost gravity. War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone, but affect the whole world. To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."

How many of us knew what would happen back when the bombs first started dropping in the ME? How many warnings were given? Why were they all ignored?

The truth is, what we see happening right now is what the war hawks in the MIC and it's related agencies desired - the complete destruction and balkanization of any viable Muslim State in the MENA. It was carefully planned and implemented by propagandizing and weaponizing existing ethnic and religious fault-lines.

It is tantamount to dropping a hydrogen bomb on the San Andreas Fault in order to destroy San Francisco despite knowing there is a possibility of destroying the entire west coast and not giving a fuck if that occurs.

From the "Yinon Plan" to the "Ya’alon Strategy"
by Alfredo Jalife-Rahme

While the United States on the one hand, and France and Turkey on the other, are trying to reshape the Levant in their own way, Alfredo Jalife-Rahme highlights the continuity between the 1982 Oded Yinon Plan and Moshe Ya’alon’s present-day strategy. While endorsing the vision of both plans, Israel continues to pursue its own balkanization agenda. Historically, Israel has always sought to dismember the countries surrounding her.

"Syria will fall apart, in accordance with its ethnic and religious structure, into several states such as in present day Lebanon, so that there will be a Shi’ite Alawi state along its coast, a Sunni state in the Aleppo area, another Sunni state in Damascus hostile to its northern neighbor, and the Druzes who will set up a state, maybe even in our Golan, and certainly in the Hauran and in northern Jordan. (...) This state of affairs will be the guarantee for peace and security in the area in the long run, and that aim is already within our reach today."
Oded Yinon, “A strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties”, Kivunum, translated by Israel Shahak, February 1982.

As an aside, many of our discussions here in C99 remind me of Jay Farquharson. Do you know why he was BOJO'd by the Orange Stain?

that war is by far the worst of all possible evils -- and that therefore no war can ever be justified, anywhere, for any reason. The existence of ISIS has caused me to lose that certainty... or belief, or hope, or faith, or whatever it was.