James Kunstler -- World News Trust
As the bombing of the Golden Dome in Samarra last week resolves into the Iraq civil war that everyone has feared, expect a more widespread uproar against western interests generally through the Islamic world, with Iran doing everything possible behind the scenes to incite the main actors: underemployed young men from Algiers to Jakarta.
The west and Islam have reached an inflection point. American influence in the eastern hemisphere may be the main object of Islam's wrath, but Europe can no longer pretend to be a disinterested bystander. The big issues are the perceived weakness of the west, the steady draining of the Islamic world's most precious resource, oil, and the hateful presence of western persons and culture in the Islamic ummah.
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What has kept the big quarrel contained so far is the sheer geographical fact that most of the world's oil comes out of this likely battleground. American and Europe cannot risk the destruction of those wells, terminals, refineries, and pipelines, and none of the parties on the Islamic side are especially keen to trash all that stuff, either, since they have little besides figs and tangerines to fall back on.
The current scandal in the United States about the Dubai-based company being invited to run U.S. port facilities only underscores America's weakness, our feckless pretense that there is no fundamental conflict between Islam and the west, that we are so generous, open-minded, good-willed, and self-confident that even the boundaries of political common sense have dissolved. Of course, some Americans may be wondering why we can't find any American company to run American ports. But the American press is too stupid to even ask that question.
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http://worldnewstrust.org/modules/AMS/article.php?storyid=2444
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