Breaking news from the department of the obvious (see tbogg):
The U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq have created a shared anti-American cause among otherwise-divided Muslim extremists and raised the stature of the radicals in the eyes of ordinary Muslims, a Pentagon advisory panel says....
Gee I just can't believe this. No one could have possibly seen this coming.
At the root of the problem, the report says, is a fundamental misunderstanding of why many Muslims are hostile toward the United States. They “hate our policies,” not our freedom, it said.
Hate the policies, heh. It's not the freedom then. wow. Who would have thought? Give me an order of those policy fries please.
If it weren't for the tragedies involved, would conclusions such as the following not seem more like parody than news at this point?
“The dramatic narrative since 9/11 has essentially borne out the entire radical Islamist bill of particulars” against the United States, the report said. “American actions and the flow of events have elevated the authority of the Jihadi insurgents and tended to ratify their legitimacy among Muslims...
In the eyes of Muslims, American occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq has not led to democracy there, but only more chaos and suffering,” it said. “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.”
Certainly Rumsfeld's gang will be right on top of this startling report:
Bryan Whitman, a spokesman for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, said Wednesday the report will “stimulate debate and add to the existing body of ideas” about how the Defense Department communicates.
I do think more debate and ideas are needed. I mean, who could have predicted this? We're not all Kreskin.
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