...that sounds like a bunch of grasping at straws. Bin Laden's father moved to Saudi Arabia 40 years before Osama was born, and ingratiated himself to the House of Saud (Wahhabi), eventually becoming the person allowed to restore all the (Sunni) mosques. Not to mention that Qutbism is from Egypt and the Muslim Brotherhood, and Osama bin Laden learned it in the refugee camps along the Pakistani border from guys like Zawahri, who went there to practice medicine and preach Muslim Brotherhood stuff during the Soviet-Afghan war in the 1980's. And the Taliban come from Sufi areas, but they were all madrassah people that Ahmed Rashid says knew nothing about their native culture, only about Wahhabism taught to them in their schools. So as long as you don't mind neglecting a few pertinent facts and shuffling a few dates, and allowing people to absorb culture before they are conceived or born...The kind of connection only Billy Pilgrim could follow. Reminds me of the doppelganger generals who underlie the theories about meetings between bin Laden and the Iraqis in Sudan.

Very interesting. The Gurdjieff thing was quite weird. I can understand the effort to draw a distinction between real Sufism and the various others, as well as the effort to make sure that people realize that many of these mystical traditions come from definite roots and don't somehow coalesce into a primordial non-denominational oneness.

But some of it, like the drive to consolidate all the other into a great primordial Gnosticism is a bit strange. And my humble understanding was that Annie Besant had a lot more influence on Theosophy than Blatavsky. She "discovered" Krishnamurti and went off on multiple different strains. The piece also ignores other non-Abrahamic influences (especially contacts between the Jews (Essenes) and the religions of the East) and mislabels some of them, like Mithraism, which has early influence in the East (going the other way), both on Zoroastrianism and early (Vedic) Hinduism.

Qutb does often seem to have been more influenced by European social and economic thought than people usually credit. Perhaps Marx and Spencer are members of a secret Islamic cult?

Were you disgusted by the whole grab bag nature of things, or by underlying philosophy of a particular group?

With all due respect, and a nod for giving some much deserved criticism to Joe Klein (again):

If you want to find out what is going to happen with Iraq, you need to focus your attention on what's going on with respect to David Petraeus. Regardless of what is popular to say about this man, he has more in common with a Colin Powell, or, to use a recently cannonized formerly bad guy, James Comey. He is a straight shooter, he is very smart, he knows counterinsurgency inside out like very few do (because nobody wanted to study it after Vietnam -- a denial thing).

I'm sure, if he had his druthers, he'd put in a lot more troops -- say up to 400K-500K, mostly trained to do special forces/police work interacting with the populace, winning people over one at a time, making the various insurgent groups unpopular, working methodically at it for 5-10 years. That's because that is his business. If he had been in Shinseki's position, he'd have said the same things as Shinseki, for all the same reasons. Did you know Shinseki's numbers came from multiplying the police to citizen ratio in New York by the population of Iraq and then adding some support personnel? This isn't really guesswork, he has a record.

The questions are: Why did the Bush people pick him? and What is he allowed to do/say? This isn't really about a face and a legitimacy, that's the obvious part. Are they looking to rally behind 400K troops for 10 years? Don't put it past them. Did they promise him they would get him everything he thinks he needs? Why did a guy like that take the job? Will they make him a public face of an engineered "Democrat cut-and-run failure"? Do we really know what he will say in September?

The other questions are: As some of us predicted, opposing White House Iraq policy without having a clear plan for all contingencies in Iraq is weak. How weak? We just found out. Too weak to carry out a clear popular mandate. I didn't know the Democrats would back down so abjectly, but I did know they weren't speaking from a strong place. Unless and until they come up with a comprehensive plan that tackles the "bloodbath issue" head-on and either puts it to bed or offers a solution for it, they will continue to have to back down. General Batiste is available, maybe he knows how to tackle it.

The dominoes didn't fall in Vietnam, but 2 million Cambodians did. You have to be able to say credibly that it won't happen again.

Two problems: Petraeus and bloodbath. A cogent response to Bush passes through their solution.

...in my earlier post. You need to know the answers to two things: What's going on with Petraeus, and what is the answer to the bloodbath. Ramadi just put up the bloodbath, his post went through here like a cold breath of dry ice.

We can get out of this mess, but we need to figure the bloodbath out first, not complain about people who mention it.