From Yale Global online, comes the brilliant insight that illuminates nothing except why Foggy Bottom, full of Yalies, is completely out of touch in the War on Terror.
Explaining how the US can defeat the islamic fascists while winning over the much ballyhooed but never seen "moderate arabs", Fawaz A Gerges, the Christian A. Johnson Chair in Middle East and International Affairs at Sarah Lawrence College, states:
"Notwithstanding the weakening of Al Qaeda, the struggle against this transnational network cannot be won on the battlefield. The most effective means to put the global jihad out of business is to complete its internal marginalization in the Muslim world. Muslims almost universally reject Al Qaeda’s global jihad. Yet the Bush administration only pays lip service to the war of ideas, and has not taken effective measures to win Muslim minds. US priorities should include extracting American troops from Iraq, earnestly promoting reconciliation and peace between Palestinians and Israelis, and investing socio-political and economic capital in the rule of law and democracy in Muslim lands."
Aren't the first two requirements for winning over the "moderate arabs" also the first two demands made by the islamic fascists? So we can win the war on terror by giving the terrorist their two most desired goals, then making the moderate arabs rich and content? This fits every single disproved stereotype of the war on terror perfectly. That the islamic terrorists are poor, that they only yearn for democracy, that they are angered by the imperialistic stance of the US in the middle east, that they believe the US needs to support the arabs as much as we support Israel in order to be more fair. Should this scholar ever bother to do more than read AP and watch CNN, he'd be pretty suprised to find out that for every scholar like him, there are a hundred imams who preach hate of everything western, and death to every infidel. But there will be people who believe this babble and ignore the world that stands stark and threatening in front of them.
How very Chamberlain. How very diplomatic. How unbelievably stupid.
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