Blocking Sunlight

DNI:

Blowback is a particularly good fertilizer for the seeds of hatred, and it has a long, black history in the Middle East:

• Iran is what it is today, in part, because of long-term consequences of our intervention to oust Premier Mossedeq in 1952 and replace him with a puppet Shah. We preempted because Mossedeq, a secular politician, wanted to nationalize Iranian oil production...

• Israel's ill-starred preemptive policies created its most capable and fanatical enemies, Hamas and Hezbollah, while steadily weakening the secular PLO...

• What is not widely understood is that the Soviets invaded Afghanistan preemptively to prevent the rise of religious extremism in its Central Asia "republics." But that threat was fanned in part by US policies aimed at seducing the Soviets into a quagmire...

Among the unintended consequences of the Soviet "Vietnam" so gleefully sought by the US was the rise of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden and the propagation of Islamic fundamentalism throughout the Arab world  Now we have poured gasoline on the fire we help to light 30 years ago by waging yet another preemptive war in Iraq.

I've been calling it kudzu for a few years now.  I wonder what it would be like if we stopped planting foreign shit in other peoples' backyards for a change...

ntodd

PS--Kudzu the vine; Kudzu the comic.