Draft of pamphlet, part 2

I posted Part 1 earlier. Here is Part 2:

Ongoing U.S. support for Islamist terrorism?

Whatever was covered up, a new investigation would most likely shed light not only on counter-terrorism policy, but also on the strange love-hate relationship that the U.S. government has long had with Islamist regimes and Islamist terrorism.

Islamism is the political doctrine that governments should be subject to Islamic law. (Islamism is not to be confused with Islam itself, the religion, which can be practiced within a modern secular society too.) Both Islamism and the more sexist, puritanical, and religiously bigoted forms of Islam are, in today’s world, far more prevalent than they would otherwise be, thanks to Saudi oil money plus U.S. government support for Islamist regimes and Islamist terrorist groups overseas.

In the 1980’s, the U.S. supported Islamist terrorists fighting a Soviet-allied government in Afghanistan. Not only did the U.S. give them military aid, but the CIA, with help from USAID and the University of Nebraska, spent millions of dollars on violently militant textbooks for Afghan schoolchildren. That war became the Soviet Union’s “Vietnam” and spurred the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The extreme Islamists also killed many of the more moderate Muslim leaders. Cheryl Benard, a RAND Corporation expert on Islam and the wife of future US ambassador to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad, has admitted that U.S policy favored “the worst crazies … we can find”and “allowed them to get rid of, just kill all the moderate leaders” (Robert Dreyfuss, Devil’s Game, 2005, as cited on the History Commons website)..

In the early 1980’s, there was the Iran/Contra affair, in which the U.S. government secretly sent arms to the radical Shi’ite government in Iran. Incredibly, this occurred soon after the embassy hostage crisis, which ended with the U.S. government sending billions of dollars in ransom money to Iran.

In Yugoslavia in the 1990’s, the U.S. and NATO helped Islamist Bosnian leader Alija Izetbegovic, at the expense of the more moderate and more popular Bosnian Muslim leader Fikret Abdic. Islamist terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda, were active in the Balkan wars, with support from Western countries, helping to provoke the anti-Muslim panics and massacres that were the stated justification for U.S. bombing of Yugoslavia.

Even after 9/111/2001, U.S. foreign policy has still tended to favor Islamist regimes (such as Saudi Arabia) over more secular Muslim regimes. And Bush’s so-called “war on terror” had the net effect of strengthening – not weakening – both Islamism and terrorism overseas.

In Afghanistan, the new, U.S.-installed government was another Islamist government, though not as extreme as the Taliban. Osama bin Laden and much of Al Qaeda escaped into Pakistan and were not even pursued there (until recently), let alone caught.

And then the U.S. invaded Iraq. Saddam Hussein, though a tyrant, was not an Islamist; he ran a relatively secular government. But now, thanks to the war, Iraq has become a stronghold of Islamism and Islamist terrorism. There was no Al Qaeda in Iraq before the war, but there is now. And the new, U.S.-installed government in Iraq has an Islamist constitution.

Despite the alleged “war on terror,” it is possible that the U.S. foreign policy establishment may still see Islamist terrorism as a useful weapon against Russia and China. There has been lots of terrorism in Russia, e.g. in Chechnya and Dagestan. And the U.S. foreign policy establishment seems to have both the goal of encircling Russia and China and a tendency to downplay that goal in public (e.g. the U.S. missiles in Poland, allegedly aimed at Iran).

To whatever extent a pro-Islamist U.S. foreign policy still exists, it is very harmful to all non-Muslims, and to women, and to gays. It is also very harmful to politically moderate Muslims, both by killing them directly and by sparking bigotry, on the part of non-Muslims, against all Muslims including moderates.