In today's edition of Inside the Ring, Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough offer this assessment by General John Abizaid, the man in charge of the bulk of fighting in the war on Islamic extremists:
"I believe that our strategy for the area can't be to control it. No nation on Earth has ever controlled the Middle East. As a matter of fact if you try to control the Middle East, you'll rapidly find out that the Middle East is going to control you.""We need to build capacity, local capacity, to do the institution building to make societies that are going to be more resilient against the broader extremist trends in the area. The extremism is not mainstream. In many ways we're kind of at a point where we could have been if we decided to resist Fascism in the '20s or Bolshevism in the 1900s."
"The problem is, you know, a lot of [people] have a hard time understanding why it's to our advantage to be out there in the middle of this. And it's to our advantage so that these terrible ideological movements do not become mainstream and start moving us in a direction that can move toward World War III."
Sounds about right to me.
Comments