Back to the Future: Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya

The 2016 presidential campaign so far has given us a Hillary Clinton, the former Secretary of State, who takes no responsibility for Islamic State's rapid gains in Libya in the wake of the American-led "coup-by-air" to remove Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, and a Republican Party who wants to blame President Obama for the continuing messes in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Although there are many things to worry about with Donald Trump--a neo-fascist tendency to scapegoat Muslims and immigrants and just general demagoguery--he did do the country a great service by reminding it of George W. Bush's responsibility for allowing the 9/11 attacks to happen on his watch, for retaliating with a war in Afghanistan that got bogged down in "nation-building," and then for lying the country into an unrelated aggressive invasion of Iraq that ultimately led to the creation of al Qaeda in Iraq and its successor--the even more brutal Islamic state.

Now President Obama, who foolishly caved in to Hillary's pressure to oust Gaddafi in the first place is now thinking about going back into Libya, as he has Iraq (adding a bombing campaign against the Islamic State in Syria to boot), to clean up a previously American-made mess.

Have we cited enough idiotic decisions from American politicians yet? No, we really need to start back at the beginning of the encouragement of modern radical Islam and its propagation.

Militant strains of Islam have existed for centuries in faraway reaches of the globe and never really bothered the United States too much. However, during the Cold War, it seemed like a great idea at the time to use any movement with a distaste for communism to counter the U.S. archrival Soviet Union. The Saud family, who runs Saudi Arabia, had long made a pact with fundamentalist Wahhabi strain of Islam in order to stay in power. Saudi Arabia has exported this militant Islam overseas in by creating madrassas, or Islamic schools, in many Sunni Islamic countries around the world.

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ivan-eland/back-to-the-future-afghan_b_9289956.html