Creating Instability in the Arc of Instability

[Watser?]

If you think Iraq is the only part of foreign policy the Cheney administration managed to fuck up, here is a look at the bigger picture.

Just five days after the September 11th attacks in 2001, in a Q and A with reporters on the South Lawn of the White House, a President with a new mission, a new cause, and a new purpose in life told the American people that, though they had to "go back to work tomorrow," they should now know that they were facing a "new kind of evil." He added, "And we understand. And the American people are beginning to understand. This crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take a while."

This crusade, this war on terrorism. It had such a ring to it; in the Arab world, of course, it was a ring many centuries old and deeply disturbing. And it came so naturally, so easily off the President's tongue (though it took days of backtracking by his spokesmen and prominent presidential references to "the peaceful teachings of Islam" perverted by "a fringe form of Islamic extremism" to begin to make up for it). But that little "slip" of the tongue spoke volumes.

...

in a bare few years, he and his collaborators have managed to create the look of a genuine "clash of civilizations," of, in fact, a war against Islam. In the eyes of many, the United States is now, indeed, a crusader nation.

Creating Instability in the Arc of Instability

Just take a glance at a map of what, in their heyday, the neocons and other Bush administration supporters used to call "the arc of instability" -- an area that extended from the Chinese border and the former Central Asian SSRs of the ex-Soviet Union across the Middle East, down through the Horn of Africa and across North Africa -- and that managed to coincide with the oil heartlands of the planet. This vast region from Afghanistan to Somalia is now either aflame or threatening to be so.