I have heard that there are a ton of muslims in the UK and France, must be fairly interesting to see the reactions of that population during times like this...My main experience with them comes from some encounters in LA growing up, and the few times I was deployed to their countries in both war and peacetime operations... I found most of them to be really just pissed at our middle east policies and the blatent disparity of our treatment of the palestinians vs israelis (not that I'd ever get into THAT chicken or the egg argument) lol...but it surely is lop-sided today, I doubt anyone in their right mind would argue that...
as for your reply to 4...I surely hope we don't 'liberate' Iran, although Kissenger thinks it's pretty much a done deal...and I'm not sure if I can disagree with his line of thinking...this is surely about oil but it also has some merit as a discussion of global security, what i think is HUGELY lacking in any current day standard political discussions is how to fix our fucked up foreign policies so that they do NOT have an argument to bitch about when they attack us...
ok, so we
1) Stop treating one more favorably in the Israeli/Palestinian area and if needed, back out of those negotiations entirely and hire the tibetan buddhists to do it...
2) Get out of Saudi and run our operations from welcoming governments in the region, or from a distance that's purely out of their neck of the woods (we do have a kick ass Air Force and Navy that can ship people over there fast as needed to do any required ass kicking)
3) Speed up the process of turning Iraq & Afganistan back over to their governments, run it from a distance if needed and just outsource the gun toating people to another UN country or one of their neighboring countries...
4) Bottom line, leave them the fuck alone, so the next time they attack us anywhere in the world, and we've 'left them alone and or treated them equally fairly' they have "ZERO" argument for attacking us OR RECRUITING new members to their cause...
take the wind out of their sails so to speak...
...and if they continue to fuckup after that, we proceed with Operation GLASS FACTORY
