MUST READ: Today's 'Islamic Fascists' Were Yesterday's Friends

Brendan O'Neill:

What we have today is not a World War between a principled West and psychotic groups from "over there," but rather the messy residue of decades of Western meddling in the Middle East...

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.

If you have not seen it before, Juan Cole has an excellent write-up complete with pictures showing how the West helped create 9/11. For example:

The Bush administration responded to these attacks by the former proteges of Ronald Reagan by putting the old Mujahideen warlords back in charge of Afghanistan's provinces, allowing Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri to escape, declaring that Americans no longer needed a Bill of Rights, and suddenly invading another old Reagan protege, Saddam's Iraq, which had had nothing to do with 9/11 and posed no threat to the US. The name given this bizarre set of actions by Bush was "the War on Terror."

Now that, Mr Howard and Mr Rumsfeld, is REAL HISTORY!