The Liar In Chief

The Chimperor declared to a grinning American Legion audience that America's battle with "terrorism" is "the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century." He went on with his carefully crafted speech -

Despite their differences, these groups form the outline of a single movement, a worldwide network of radicals that use terror to kill those who stand in the way of their totalitarian ideology," he said. "And the unifying feature of this movement, the link that spans sectarian divisions and local grievances, is the rigid conviction that free societies are a threat to their twisted view of Islam.

In case that did not scare you into giving up your civil liberties, Bush resorted to the oft-abused Hitler comparison to drive the point home, explaining that the Islamic terrorists "are successors to fascists, to Nazis, to communists and other totalitarians of the 20th century."

This fascinating exercise in propaganda would be humorous if the American sheeple did not take it so seriously. In a few sentences, Bush insults the intelligence of anyone who has studied history by claiming that what we are witnessing is the coalescence of one global movement hell bent on attacking "free societies" and they are the sucessors to Hitler and communism.

Taking the Liar-In-Chief at his speechwriter's word, though, one must question why the United States funded, supported and encouraged these groups for decades if they are as dangerous as now claimed.

As explained by Brendan O'Neill,

both British and U.S. intelligence supported the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, the group from which so many of today's radical Islamic sects – including Hamas and even al-Qaeda – have sprung. Indeed, in the 1920s, the British, then the colonial rulers of Egypt, helped to set up the Muslim Brotherhood as a means of keeping Egyptian nationalism and anti-colonialism in check. The immediate precursor to the Muslim Brotherhood was an organization called the Society of Propaganda and Guidance, which was funded and backed by British colonialists. In return, the Society provided Islamist backing to British rule in Egypt. It published a journal called The Lighthouse, which attacked Egyptian nationalists – who wanted British forces out of Egypt – as "atheists and infidels." Under British patronage, the Society set up the Institute of Propaganda and Guidance, which brought Islamists from across the Muslim world to Egypt so they could be trained in political agitation, and then take such anti-anti-colonialism back to their own homelands.

In his book Sleeping With the Devil, former CIA officer Robert Baer said there was a "dirty little secret" in Washington in the early 1950s:

The White House looked on the Brothers as a silent ally, a secret weapon against – what else? – communism. The covert action started in the 1950s with the Dulles brothers – Allen at the CIA and John Foster at the State Department – when they approved Saudi Arabia's funding of Egypt's Brothers against Nasser. As far as Washington was concerned, Nasser was a communist.

During the Afghan-Soviet war from 1979 to 1992, American and British intelligence once again supported radical Islamists against, in this instance, secularist and communist forces. Where the Cold War began with America and Britain supporting the Muslim Brotherhood and other radical Islamists against popular secular movements, it ended with America and Britain arming, financing, and propagandizing on behalf of radical Islamists fighting the Soviet Union's last stand in Afghanistan before its collapse in the early 1990s.

Throughout the 1980s, the CIA and the British intelligence organization MI5 arranged for the arming and training of thousands of mujahedeen in Afghanistan. But now we watch as Muslim men who attended these CIA-run camps are thrown into Gitmo. American and British elements, together with Saudi Arabia and the Pakistani intelligence service ISI, ensured that the mujahedeen had everything they needed to wage war against the Soviets. Can anyone forget the scene from Fahrenheit 911 of the Taleban leaders being given a tour of Washington D.C.?

Then there was that embarassing Iran-Contra scandal wherein the American public learned that the United States was arming the Islamic Republic of Iran, which we are now supposed to believe poses an imminent threat to world safety.

If this struggle is about ideology, then Saudi Arabia should be America's first target. It is home to state-imposed Wahhabi Islam, a disgusting, violent interpretation of Islam that prohibits women from living as human beings and that considers weekly public beheadings a source of entertainment. There are few societies on this earth that are less free than the desert prison-nation government by the House of Al-Saud. But America says nothing.

If we are indeed engaged in an ideological struggle, who is fighting on behalf of "free societies" since our brilliant leaders have been on the side of Islamic extremism for decades?