Reply #7: Your analysis fails to note

[markses]

That these "religious nutcases" IN IRAQ only started shooting female principals, bombing movie-houses, and cutting the throats of those selling alcohol after the American invasion.

Saddam Hussein's regime was certainly a terror of first magnitude, but it was a secular terror for the most part, and one could sip wine without fear of reprisal on the streets of Baghdad (and, I suspect, Mosul), and Iraqi women were - before the first Gulf war certainly, and even after - among the most "liberated," and educated women in the region, vis-a-vis religious dictums.

You also fail to note the historical connection between nationalism and religious fundamentalism throughout the Middle East, the latter rising as a cohesive mechanism to bolster the former, particularly in times of revolt or crisis. In a stunningly beautiful and terrible scene in the film "The Battle of Algiers," a group of children attack and beat a drunk Muslim as he stumbles along in the Casbah. The idea is clear - the violent fundamentalisms do not exist in a vacuum; they are always responses to other social forces. Isolating the fundamentalisms now raging violently in Iraq from the sheer social fact of the US/UK colonizing invasion is absolutelunacy, absolutely ahistorical, and ultimately foolish.

However, as you pose it, people just want to attribute X to "Bush." We can, however, take a longer view, and think clearly through tyhe various social forces at work. Instead, you want to do the reductive opposite of the reductive move. Not "Blame X on Bush," but "Blame X on religious nutcases." Both approaches are wrong.