traptunderice wroteIt's funny you mention the Iranian revolution. Do you know much about it? Do you know that the people turned to religion to create a mantra of solidarity against the U.S. installed dictator of the time and that religion was not in Iranian politics before the U.S. intervention?
traptunderice wroteth the Shah was a case of the US intelligence agencies failing to fully understand the situation.USA was obsessed with keeping Commies out at any cost (from Iraq in 1958 to Vietnam to Chile to Grenada to Afghanistan).The obsession against Communism was not done in a pragmatic way.Iran was a massive international relations flop. The Shah was propped up but never delivered anything much except keeping US arms manufacturers chugging along.
traptunderice wrote... which challenges the prevailing, oppressive, Western doctrines spread throughout the world. It is sad that the only way they can defend the last vestiges of their culture, no matter how awful it is which at heart it isn't, is to subscribe to a distortion, an awful, equally oppressive distortion of their culture which once was so great. The development of radical Islam is very much a development of the last 50 years which can be paralleled to the West's intervention in these nations which you so adamantly defend.
It started long before the West got involved in a major way. And the Soviets are probably more to blame than the West for the issues in the 1950s-1970s through sponsoring Nasser, Sadat, Sukarno, Hussein and other secular nationalist leaders.
Wahhabism which was one of the initial fundamentalist movements and whose influence is widespreading thanks to Arab generosity was created in Saudi Arabia in the eighteenth century as a sort of Protestant Reformation sought of movement which sought to make Islam "pure" again.
It was initially spread through out the Arab peninsula by the House of Saud initially through military conquest and since the discovery of oil in that part of the world, through charitable institutions ala hospitals, community projects and schools.
These schools (or madrassas) teach Islamic fundamentalism and have been a key recruiting ground for terrorists around the world including in Europe.
In addition, Islamic fundamentalism started to spread rapidly once the largely secular, nationalist and pseudo socialist regimes (Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Indonesia prior to 1965) failed to deliver in terms of economic and social reform or deliver on the promise of a free Palestine and the destruction of Israel.
The nationalist regimes as led by Egypt under Nasser and Indonesia under Sukarno were largely Soviet sponsored.
The other thing that happened is the war in Afghanistan.
Afghanistan saw highly fundamentalist Muslims do to the Soviet Union what the secular nationalists could not do against Israel.
Furthermore the rich Saudis began to splash their wealth around.
So the militarily successful and generous Islamists achieved what secular nationalism could not.
As such Muslims around the world shifted to Islamism over secular ideology.
US involvement in Iraq in 1991 gave them further ammunition - i.e. the basing of infidels in the Holy Land (one of the main reasons Saddam had to be toppled according to some international analysts and experts including former UN weapons inspector Hans Blix).
The growth of Islamism has been mainly of the Sunni variety as promoted by Saudi Arabia.
Iran is a pariah amongst Muslims as it's predominantly Shia. It's influence has been limited to southern Iraq and Lebanon's Hezbollah.
By the way Islamic movements have existed for centuries and generally have not needed Western influence to get started. For example the Islamic movement in Aceh, Indonesia has been chugging on its own since Indonesia became independent.
Islamism in India has been an issue since partition. And Western policies don't have much to do with the Christian-Muslim slugfests in Sudan or Nigeria.
I feel like I'm back at Uni doing international politics again! Thanks guys for the interesting discussion.
