Originally Posted by jayeff

Oh get off it. What the heck do you think motivated all the groups you mention, if not US foreign policy in the middle east over the past 80 years?

Why do I bother: I can anticipate your response. But if you have even a fraction of the knowledge you profess about these issues, whatever you write, you know damn well that prolonged interference in other countries' affairs would have produced the exact same results wherever we had pursued such a policy.

Pan-Arab nationalism and religous fundamentalism were the inevitable consequences of our sustained efforts to keep the region unstable. It is total fantasy to imagine that otherwise the people of the middle east would be any more anti-american, anti-western than say, the people of Singapore.

The middle east was the crossroads of the world for hundreds of years. The region had particularly close ties with Britain, some countries not seeking independence until the 1950's and 1960's. There is nothing whatever to suggest that left to their own devices, there would be such a thing as arab or islamic terrorism today.