Picture of the Day - 2 - The Next Wave

This is face of the future.

A great wave of Muslim disquiet.




George Bush went to war in Iraq, to some large part, because he believed in a modern day domino theory, that if Iraq went democratic, it would offer a an ideological, as well as a physical launching point, from which the US could manage a series of populist democratic takeovers of other nations in the region. The domino theory was a fallacy in Vietnam, and it is a fallacy today.

The issue with this poorly rooted design, as has been the case with alot of the Republican foreign policy since Reagan, is that in its grand sweep, it took no account of the potential blowback.

The US, in it's efforts to democratize the middle east at the point of a gun, has aggravated the Muslim world in the same way that the Israelis' aggressive policies have aggravated the Palestinians. Should we be surprised that given the freedom of choice, people of the Arab world would choose a leader who vowed to aggressively go after those that are attacking them regardless of the other consequences?

That's more or less what the US did in the last election.

So, take a look at this young face and remember the demographics. 1.3 billion Muslims, half of them under 25. This is the blowback from Bush's highly theoretical but poorly considered foreign policy. This is the face of the future. This is the next wave of terror.