After WWI by contrast Germany was perfectly capable of defending itself – or at least it would have been if it had not been artificially crippled by the Treaty of Versailles?

What enemy would be scary enough to Iraqis that they’d accept Anglo-American occupation as the lesser evil? Israel doesn’t cut it as it’s too small. I’m beginning to think it’s a pity we don’t still have the Soviet Union around…

Hey, you voted for Labour, not me…

The only answer is long term. Lets not rip-off Iraqi oil revenues too much and let the Iraqis have their own oil and wealth in their own country. The sooner we pull out the better. We can see from Iran, that a decent increase in wealth will foster democracy (slowly). We should throw billions of dollars of investment at the Palestinians instead of at foreign wars, for christ sake there is only a few million of them, give them all a ferrari, they’ll soon **** Islam off!

Anyway we’ll be alright in a couple of decades when the oil runs out because we wont need to invade the Arabs then.

Terrorism is a tactic that will continued to be used by other groups with completely different goals than Al Qaeda, as it has been previously. Primarily, because for groups without access to significant military hardware, terrorism is a “cost-effective” tactic.

I think this distinction is more than simply one of semantics.

One, that the removal of the current set of regimes will end Sunni jihadism.

Two, that these nations are going to develop on paths towards greater “Westernization.” The political future in the Islamic world is Islamism. This doesn’t mean Al Qaeda, or something like it necessarily. But it does mean that groups like Dawa and SCIRI in Iraq, the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria and Egypt, Al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia, Hamas in Palestine are ascendent, not the other way round.

Three, that Islam and the Islamic world posssesses some kind of absolute unity, and that “it” somehow attacked us. No, a group of Bolshevist madman attacked us – the “Islamic World” didn’t. That, say for example, creating a weak Shi’ite Islamic state in Iraq is going to anything to stop a movement its members are drawn from sects that hate Shi’ites. I could go on.

Which leads to four, that a nation like Iraq had any real connection to the “root causes” of jihadism – either now or five years ago. Not for nothing, but no major terrorist attack on “western targets” in the current jihadi dispensation has been carried out by a) an Iraqi, and b) a Shi’ite Muslim.

What do you make of ? Published in American Conservative, an interview with the academic who has carried out the most detailed ever study of suicide terrorism and who says:

“Since suicide terrorism is mainly a response to foreign occupation and not Islamic fundamentalism, the use of heavy military force to transform Muslim societies over there, if you would, is only likely to increase the number of suicide terrorists coming at us.”

Does this not confirm that dsquared’s hornets’ nest annalogy is indeed a good one?