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.