rationalskepticism.org

Arjan Dirkse wrote:

crank wrote:And to also recognize the rise of all of the extremist Islamic forces is the result of the West's meddling in the region.

Seriously? Islamic extremism predates the founding of the United States, and Western meddling...Islam was "extremist" right from the start. It has had periods when there were more enlightened leaders, but extremism in Islam goes right back to the beginning.

2.3 What is the Problem? Who Are We Dealing With?

The information campaign — or as some still would have it, “the war of ideas,” or the
struggle for “hearts and minds” — is important to every war effort. In this war it is an
essential objective, because the larger goals of U.S. strategy depend on separating the
vast majority of non-violent Muslims from the radical-militant Islamist-Jihadists. But
American efforts have not only failed in this respect: they may also have achieved the
opposite of what they intended.
American direct intervention in the Muslim World has paradoxically elevated the stature
of and support for radical Islamists, while diminishing support for the United States to
single-digits in some Arab societies.
• Muslims do not “hate our freedom,” but rather, they hate our policies. The
overwhelming majority voice their objections to what they see as one-sided support in
favor of Israel and against Palestinian rights, and the longstanding, even increasing
support for what Muslims collectively see as tyrannies, most notably Egypt, Saudi
Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan, and the Gulf states.
• Thus when American public diplomacy talks about bringing democracy to Islamic
societies, this is seen as no more than self-serving hypocrisy. Moreover, saying that
“freedom is the future of the Middle East” is seen as patronizing, suggesting that
Arabs are like the enslaved peoples of the old Communist World — but Muslims do
not feel this way: they feel oppressed, but not enslaved.
• Furthermore, in the eyes of Muslims, American occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq
has not led to democracy there, but only more chaos and suffering. U.S. actions
appear in contrast to be motivated by ulterior motives, and deliberately controlled in
order to best serve American national interests at the expense of truly Muslim self determination.

• Therefore, the dramatic narrative since 9/11 has essentially borne out the entire
radical Islamist bill of particulars. American actions and the flow of events have
elevated the authority of the Jihadi insurgents and tended to ratify their legitimacy
among Muslims. Fighting groups portray themselves as the true defenders of an
Ummah (the entire Muslim community) invaded and under attack — to broad public
support.
• What was a marginal network is now an Ummah-wide movement of fighting groups.
Not only has there been a proliferation of “terrorist” groups: the unifying context of a
shared cause creates a sense of affiliation across the many cultural and sectarian
boundaries that divide Islam.
• Finally, Muslims see Americans as strangely narcissistic — namely, that the war is all
about us. As the Muslims see it, everything about the war is — for Americans —
really no more than an extension of American domestic politics and its great game.
This perception is of course necessarily heightened by election-year atmospherics, but
nonetheless sustains their impression that when Americans talk to Muslims they are
really just talking to themselves.

Warnings that trying to defeat ISIS by doing more of the same of what led to its rise in the first place are falling on deaf ears.



In a recent interview with Shane Smith, the founder of VICE News, President Barack Obama said: “ISIL is a direct outgrowth of Al Qaeda in Iraq that grew out of our invasion, which is an example of unintended consequences.” This admission is evidence of the general causality between Western military interventionism in the Muslim world, and the rise of reactionary armed militia groups. In this particular case, the US-led invasion of Iraq undoubtedly paved the way for the rise of the self-professed ‘Islamic State’, better known as ISIS. Depending on who highlights this “unintended consequence” when commenting on recent events in Iraq and Syria, it is usually given very little importance or completely dismissed. Understandably, the pro-war policymakers in Washington and London who orchestrated the invasion of a sovereign state based on false intelligence, would rather focus on how to “degrade and destroy” the monster they created, as opposed to acknowledging fault and accepting blame.
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