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"At worst, Islamic jihadism is a regional problem--in Europe, the Middle East and parts of Africa and Southeast Asia. But as Gilles Kepel and other experts on Islamism have argued, even in the case of the Middle East, bin Laden-inspired groups have been remarkably unsuccessful in shaking any government (except for Afghanistan in the 1990s) or in galvanizing the Muslim masses into action. And they would have been even less successful had it not been for counterproductive American actions, especially the war in Iraq. It is not a coincidence that the governments that feel most vulnerable to Islamic jihadism are those that have had a close association with the United States, or on whose soil the United States has left the heaviest footprint....
The region, of course, does need democratic and economic reform, and Arabs are frustrated by Washington's support for authoritarian governments. But this does not mean that the lack of democracy is the principal cause--or that an American push for democratization is the principal cure--of terrorism and Islamic jihadism. In an exhaustive study, political scientist Robert Pape has concluded--correctly, in my view--that occupation is the single biggest cause of suicidal terrorism worldwide. And as Afshin Molavi of the New America Foundation has documented, what the people of the region want most is jobs and economic opportunity--understandably so, since unemployment runs as high as 25 percent in many Arab countries and even higher among the two-thirds of the population under 35....
In exhorting liberals to support occupation and nation-building in Iraq, Friedman perhaps unwittingly revealed the emptiness of the neoliberal hawk worldview: Liberalism from this point forward would be defined not by new programs to strengthen America at home but by noble activism abroad. The neoliberal agenda, in fact, has stood the traditional relationship between foreign policy and domestic society on its head. Traditionally, the overarching purpose of American foreign policy has been to shape a world order favorable to the American democratic way of life. But now our foreign policy ambitions are to define our domestic society, not vice versa. Thus in the view of many neoliberals, it is perfectly reasonable to spend more than $200 billion and to send young men and women to die in Iraq but unthinkable for budgetary reasons to commit even a smaller sum to rural or urban redevelopment at home...." ----
Are people calling neoconservatives "neoliberals" now. That's a good way to get everyone to hate the word "liberal".
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