[what's up]

1979...the fateful year.

I believe the Peanut Farmer was in charge then...

[SolidWood]

In your other thread a I was talking about the disastrous year of 1979. Nice coincidence. Thanks for the article.

[Puddleglum]

bump to remember to read this book

[woofie]

As for the errors of the United States, Trofimov is equally blunt. Policymakers in Washington completely misunderstood what Uteybi represented - he was a home-grown Sunni Muslim, but they thought he was a Shiite agent of Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini - and drew the wrong conclusions. Trofimov is especially critical of Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, who envisioned the rise of violence-prone Muslim zealotry as a tool that could be useful in combatting Soviet communism rather than as a threat to the West.

[Pontiac]

"At the time," Trofimov explains, "such an embrace of the Wahhabi orthodoxy seemed like a wise survival policy for the House of Saud.

Appeasement never works.

I also question the wisdom of quickly executing the rebels. It is much wiser to slowly extract every last bit of intelligence from them. Who are their allies? Who are their Imams?

Only after you know every thing there is to know about who these men are how they came to do this deed and you have their allies in your hands can you kill them.

[G Larry]

For a more complete look at the history of A.Q. read “The Looming Tower” by Lawrence Wright.

[antinomian]

This book was featured on BookTV and you can watch it here.

[GOPJ]

bump for later