Islamists are fighting Islamists -- that is precisely my point. Only Islamists (plus a few remaining secular dictators, like the ones in Syria and Algeria) are capable of fighting Islamists in the Middle East.
US (and multinational) imperialists, liberals and leftists in the West, secular and Muslim liberals in the Middle East, and so on are incapable of and unwilling to fight the dumbass Islamists, i.e., Sunni Islamists of the al Qaeda tendency (often backed by money, etc. from the Gulf states), who wish to turn back the clock to the 7th century. Imperialists are incompetent; Western liberals and leftists are out of the picture; and secular and Muslim liberals are too few and too soft (if they haven't signed up for the empire already) and their economic ideology repels working masses of the Middle East.
Who are to defend modernity and civilization -- both Eastern and Western civilizations -- from the 7th-century Islamists? The only effective defenders of modernity and civilization are the 21st-century Islamists -- of Iran, Hizballah, Hamas, and so on -- who believe that Islam tells them to see to it that women be educated, that birth control be practiced, that AIDS be combated through sex education, that wealth be redistributed for the benefit of masses, that technology be developed to put the East on an equal footing to the West, and that popular sovereignty be defended from the multinational empire.
These 21st-century Islamists, needless to say, are far more capable, far more disciplined, and far better organized than Western and Middle Eastern liberals and leftists. We ought to back them and defend them from imperialists the best we can, in a war of position in the West, so that they can defeat 7th-century Islamists. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>