America's adventure is ill-informed, at least compared to the non plans and benign neglect suggested in the article. - check.

Islamic radicalism didn't really exist before 1996. Or if it did it didn't rise to the level of forcing us to look at it. - check.

Somehow, somewhere, it's Israel's fault. - check.

There is a vague plot afoot that holds sway over even Rumsfeld. - check.

Some kind of dictatorship we can ignore is preferable to one we can't. - check.

If only warring factions, factions I might add that have either always been at each other's throats or only since such time as one could blame any random US administration for it, could simply get along. - check.

The West hates Islam. - check.

Of course I had to make sure I wasn't reading the Onion when I read this: "Dreyfuss, who covers national security for Rolling Stone,".

In the end Brzezinski may wind up being right. Because some stirred-up Muslims is really only an issue if we choose to make it so. You can't have it both ways, can you? Really, in the big scheme of things, how has the middle east essentially altered our lives here in the west? The price of some products has increased and once in a while some people are murdered by fundamentalists who already live here. So perhaps they really aren't so much of a big deal as the big deal we created to market the threat.

But to be fair no one should be distracted from a long history of cynical policies of all the world's major powers in the middle east. The arab leaders were sitting round the camel dung fire in 1920 and shortly thereafter were discovered to be sitting on the world's largest pile of liquid wealth. They could not be expected to master the tools to run these 'countries' in such a short time and the history of places like Iraq which have had one bloody coup after another since all the way back to the end of WW1 are the rule not the exception. Countries that certainly were created on some European cartographer's wall chart, randomly but countries all the same.

And in the end the post colonial experience of the middle east isn't that materially different from that of Africa. It does however have these advantages:

It's easier to get to

The climate is better

It isn't as deadly as Africa

Oil power is easy to understand

I've always said that activists have a soft spot for the misery of people living in places they themselves would like to vacation in some day. And we simply can't have all these carbombings if we're to plant our leisure flags there some day.

Well, perhaps it's not truly about the oil, per se, but I think you've forgotten to examine one neoconservative motive: money.

These folks are not necessarily driven by their ideology - unless that ideology is money.

These are the folks who know how to turn on the Treasury taps for a war.

And they are the descendants, both spiritual and direct, of earlier generations of profiteers and conmen who have traditionally fleeced the American people during wartime.

Just as Hitler and Mussolini revved up their industrial engines to create cash flow; just as Reagan brought the "wisdom" of management accounting methods to bear on what is essentially a temp job (being President); so, too, does this cabal of Halliburton and Carlyle Group shareholders engage in increased production and export of war for personal profit at the expense of US national interests.

Okay, I agree that America made many mistakes in Afghanistan. And the right wing supporters of the mujahedin either glorified or pretended not to see many of the atrocities committed by the people on "our" side.

But let's not forget that the Soviet invasion in 1979 did more to stimulate terrorism than anything we could have done. Their invasion is the only reason why we even know the name of Gulbuddin Hekmatyr. That was their choice, it had nothing to do with us, and they bear the sole moral responsibility for that choice.

But lucky for the USSR -- it's gone! How can it take any responsibility now? If the USSR hadn't collapsed as a political organization, then we'd be able to point the finger at that organization and America would not be left holding the whole Blame Bag for the Taliban by itself, as it seems to be doing now.

The good name of socialism seems to be coming back these days in Latin America, but in Afghanistan, the socialists were every bit as intolerant, bloody and totalitarian as the fundamentalists were. They competed to see who could incarcerate and torture each others members the worst when one group was in power and the other out.

The bloody horrific rivalry between Afghan socialists after the collapse of the Daoud regime was partly what motivated the Soviet Union to invade in the first place. They thought, wrongly, that all the country needed was a few years of responsible socialist leadership to set it on a stable course of peaceful five year plans.

Alas, that was proved to be a delusion on their part.

Also, that was a pretty slick maneuver to tie Hekmatyr to the Taliban as if they were kindred souls from the start. The Taliban first gained their political power in Afghanistan by getting Hekmatyr out of Kabul. Hekmatyr's troops turned Kabul into a Rape-a-palooza after they drove the Soviets out. Believe it or not, many people originally welcomed the Taliban for protecting women from the ravages of Hekmatyr's rule.

It would have been really nice if all the foreign aid money could have gone to the Mojadeddi and Gailani groups, who were the only moderate groups of mujahedin. But neither of these groups could have done much with it. Mojadeddi's group consisted of intellectuals and Gailani's group were all supporters of the royal family. Together they represented a tiny fraction of the total fighting force, and being mostly intellectuals and Afghan royals, they didn't really have the best fighting teams on the battlefield.

If this history could be repeated with today's knowledge pumped in through a time machine, I'll bet everyone would still do everything just the same.

The Afghan socialists would still alienate the population away from modernism and socialism by forcing change on them at gunpoint. The Soviet Politburo would still be run by arrogant decaying old farts detached from modern reality, and they would still order the invasion. The fundamentalist mujahedin would still be the most ferocious and well disciplined fighters in the whole war, and they would still end up with the lion's share of foreign aid money.

Maybe one thing we could have done better was help Massoud in his early struggle against Hekmatyr, before the Taliban came in. But I don't think the American government or public was intelligent enough to do that. It's completely our fault Massoud is dead. He was the biggest threat to the Taliban, and we let him down big time.

His assassination came two days before 9/11. Obviously his murder was part of their plan to prepare for their attack on us.

What really appalls me is that so many people in the Bush administration knew so much about how and why the Soviet military lost in Afghanistan, and they still committed our troops to Iraq!