Dear Mr. Obama, Mr. Biden and Prime Minister David Cameron of the United Kingdom: before you launch
Dear Mr. Obama, Mr. Biden and Prime Minister David Cameron of the United Kingdom: before you launch a new global war on terror and another coalition of countries to fight ISIS, please note that the last three decades of your global war on terror have sparked the greatest expansion of Islamist militancy and terrorism in modern history. This is partly, maybe largely, because your military actions in Islamic lands usually destabilize those lands, allowing your enemies to organize and take root, and also provide the greatest magnet that attracts mostly fringe and lost young men to give meaning to their lives by joining what they see as a defensive jihad to save Islamic societies from your aggression.
Military action certainly has some role in a wider political, economic and social assault on freak extremists and terrorists like Al-Qaeda and their derivatives such as ISIS. Yet if military strikes after three decades have only expanded the reach and territorial control of these movements, isn’t it about time that we all resort to rational analysis to address the root causes of this threat that haunts us, instead of falling back on the failed legacy of George W. Bush – vintage sophomoric emotional jingoism and flag-waving militarism that only demean the otherwise fine values of the American flag? When does logic play a role in this process? When does adult intellectual and analytical maturity trump the destructive consequences of the childlike impulsiveness of perplexed politicians who need to show their manhood on the global stage?
Al-Qaeda, ISIS and many other such groups emerged from a modern historical process that combined the brutality and developmental failures of Arab-Asian dictatorships with nonstop American-Western-Israeli-Russian aggression in Islamic-majority lands. GWOT, with its armed invasions, regime changes, drone fleets and other means, has only sustained and even expanded the Al-Qaeda- ISIS phenomenon, because the twin drivers of Arab-Asian autocracy and foreign aggression remain virtually untouched.
A “coalition of the willing” that mainly comprises Anglo-American militaries that shatter Arab lands, along with Arab and Asian autocrats in whose jails the seeds of Al-Qaeda were incubated in the 1980s, is not a serious venture to fight Islamist military and extremism. Such a combination of states is the very force that has given birth and sustenance to them.
Read more: http://www.dailystar.com.lb/Opinion/Columnist/2014/Sep-06/269713-avoid-a-rerun-of-the-war-on-terror.ashx#ixzz3CdgtMvbT
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Stop making sense. 
not to you 
Absolutely spot on. There are many things that the US can be blamed for in the Middle East (propping up brutal dictators, invading countries under false pretenses, etc.), but one thing the US can't be blamed for is the rise of salafist jihadi terrorism. That is entirely home grown. And it's roots really do go back long into the past. I would argue even before the Muslim Brotherhood to the founder of Wahhabism, Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab, born in 1703 - long before any European colonization. This was the age of the Ottomans. Wahhab was as fanatical as it gets. A fundamentalist's fundamentalist. And it is his violent, hateful, utterly intolerant ideology that has given rise to so many of today's Islamic terrorists. Wahhabism is also the official state religion in Saudi Arabia.
This article in The Huffington Post explains in much more detail about Wahhab and how his ideology gave rise to salafist terrorism, and I post the following excerpt from it. I recommend reading it in full.
Like Taymiyyah before him, Abd al-Wahhab believed that the period of the Prophet Muhammad's stay in Medina was the ideal of Muslim society (the "best of times"
, to which all Muslims should aspire to emulate (this, essentially, is Salafism).
Taymiyyah had declared war on Shi'ism, Sufism and Greek philosophy. He spoke out, too against visiting the grave of the prophet and the celebration of his birthday, declaring that all such behavior represented mere imitation of the Christian worship of Jesus as God (i.e. idolatry). Abd al-Wahhab assimilated all this earlier teaching, stating that "any doubt or hesitation" on the part of a believer in respect to his or her acknowledging this particular interpretation of Islam should "deprive a man of immunity of his property and his life."
One of the main tenets of Abd al-Wahhab's doctrine has become the key idea of takfir. Under the takfiri doctrine, Abd al-Wahhab and his followers could deem fellow Muslims infidels should they engage in activities that in any way could be said to encroach on the sovereignty of the absolute Authority (that is, the King). Abd al-Wahhab denounced all Muslims who honored the dead, saints, or angels. He held that such sentiments detracted from the complete subservience one must feel towards God, and only God. Wahhabi Islam thus bans any prayer to saints and dead loved ones, pilgrimages to tombs and special mosques, religious festivals celebrating saints, the honoring of the Muslim Prophet Muhammad's birthday, and even prohibits the use of gravestones when burying the dead.
"Those who would not conform to this view should be killed, their wives and daughters violated, and their possessions confiscated, he wrote. "
