Forward to the Past- Moslem progress---Assessing the Islamist Threat, Circa 1946
Busy day...

The Moslem world sprawls around half the east, from the Pacific across Asia and Africa to the Atlantic, along one of the greatest of trade routes; in its center is an area extremely rich in oil; over it will run some of the most strategically important air routes.

With few exceptions, the states which it includes are marked by poverty, ignorance, and stagnation. It is full of discontent and frustration, yet alive with consciousness of its inferiority and with determination to achieve some kind of general betterment.

Two basic urges meet head-on in this area, and conflict is inherent in this collision of interests. These urges reveal themselves in daily news accounts of killings and terrorism, of pressure groups in opposition, and of raw nationalism and naked expansionism masquerading as diplomatic maneuvers. The urges tie together the tangled threads of power politics which, snarled in the lap of the United Nations Assembly, lead back to the centers of Islamic pressure and to the capitals of the world's biggest nations.

Riddle me this Batman, when was the preceding bit written, this morning? Try 1946 in an analysis piece by the War Department asking its best intelligence minds what threats they saw in a post-WWII world. Do both of us a favor and read the entire thing. They didn't just get it right; they drew a path that we have since wandered down for 60 years. The stage for our current impasse was set by the downward spiral of Moslem culture and the awful job done when the Europeans dismantled their colonial empires. It is almost painful to read this document as it presciently documents our current troubles, and yet somehow has been ignored or overruled by the Arabist wing of our diplomatic corps.

The first of these urges originates within the Moslems' own sphere. The Moslems remember the power with which once they not only ruled their own domains but also overpowered half of Europe, yet they are painfully aware of their present economic, cultural, and military impoverishment. Thus a terrific internal pressure is building up in their collective thinking. The Moslems intend, by any means possible, to regain political independence and to reap the profits of their own resources, which in recent times and up to the present have been surrendered to the exploitation of foreigners who could provide capital investments. The area, in short, has an inferiority complex, and its activities are thus as unpredictable as those of any individual so motivated.

The other fundamental urge originates externally. The world's great and near-great powers cover the economic riches of the Moslem area and are also mindful of the strategic locations of some of the domains. Their actions are also difficult to predict, because each of these powers sees itself in the position of the customer who wants to do his shopping in a hurry because he happens to know the store is going to be robbed.