Since when did liberals become such hateful little pricks?
Hey, can't let you right-wingers have all the fun now can we ?

That aside, the fellow originally linked is so full of it he's probably done like the Chagga men pretend to and lost his ...Rear Unloading Orifice. And that around the time he moved out of the Mideast. 'Course, by what I know of ole Rush the very fact he calls the show pretty much accounts to as much, but I digress.

Put bluntly, he sounds like a fscking nazi. The sorts of people who like to claim overwhelming force to be the only solution have a tendency to. Between the lines his little speech reads as "nuke 'em all and let's see if they dare to mess with us again", or in any case close enough as makes no difference.

What really beats me is why Gawain even linked the twerp's outburst. Mostly it makes it look like he doesn't practice the noble art of Source Critique, and/or sort of fails to realize linking that kind of ultra-rightist BS casts some serious doubts on the integrity of his judgement. I mean, some nameless goon who *says* he moved from the Middle East *over twenty years ago* telling how *the bad rag'eads won't rest 'till we're all dead so we better show 'em* on some pretty dubious arguments ? And he links that ?

Sheesh. There's character assasination and then there's character suicide.

Now leaving that aside, let's remember here that politically active Islam was a rare beast until around the Iranian Revolution, after which it has been markedly more on the agenda (my mother, old enough to have been paying attention and clever and educated enough to formulate reliable views, tends to observe that before Iran everybody in the West, Left and Right alike, thought Islam to be something of a nonentity in the field of international politics...). In the vast majority of cases if and when there's a radical Islamist organization operating inside a Muslim nation, it is more or less at constant loggerheads with the regime. Most of the regimes of these nations are reasonably unreligious and have reasonably good relations with the West in general and - at least the oil-producers - with the US in particular. This, and the more-or-less (usually less, but anyway) modernising agenda they have tends to put them at a basically opposite footing with the fundamentalists.

Why the fundamentalists are there in such numbers is another topic, and has more to do with sociology and social psychology and such things; for brevity let's just say it's a rejection reflex against the increasingly overbearing, alien, intrusive, bewildering and unprincipled "Western" brand of modernity that even many people in the West are rather uneasy with.

However, those regimes also have internal politics to worry about. The Saudis, for example, essentially bargain for internal stability with their domestic overly religious folks by making concessions - this keeps most of the more ardent believers happy enough that they don't actively start causing trouble. But, as we can see for example from a certain scion of the bin Ladens, not all of them are willing to buy it.

As for invading yet another country in a hunt for terrorists, get real. The US military is already stretched thin with just Iraq and Afghanistan (and it gets some UN aid in the latter too) and the whole thing makes the poor old national budget creak very alarmingly. For one you'd be doing that one *totally* alone - there's only so much even the most ardently pro-US statesman is willing to do for zero returns, especially seeing how he could pretty much kiss his career goodbye. An acute lack of legitimacy is problematic that way. Moreover, all it'd do would be to provide the next generation of Muslim militants with yet another chaotic live-fire practice range.

Besides, the bomb-throwing zealots are a pain in the butt for the local governements too. They're on your bloody side in that at least.

And Saudi Arabia ? God. You know what Osama tended to cite as his about main reason for turning against his erstwhile patrons the Americans ? The presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia offended him deeply; the Saudis are bnasically the guardians and caretakers of the two most sacred places in the whole religion, and the extended presence of infidel soldiers on the same national soil as the holy cities is apparently quite insufferable to sufficiently devout (ie. extreme) Muslims. There's actually some murky historical reason for that, something about some early Caliph resettling all non-Muslims from the immediate area elsewhere, but anyway.

Now you get about three guesses what happens if you invade the place... The fact that the Europeans would be leaving you seriously high, dry and lonely so as not to be caught in the blast radius would be only the tip of a very big iceberg of pure trouble.