Reply #7: You Would Seem To Be Engaged In What You Denounce, Ma'am

[The Magistrate]

From the twenties to the fifties, the norm was direct colonial rule, or 'protectorate' status, with governments put in place after World War Two being headed chiefly by figures who had been puppets of England or France earlier. These governments went down in a wave of nationalist military coups in the wake of Israel's victory in the '48 war. The Soviet Union won the bidding war with most of these governments, which as modernizing nationalist lines were hostile to fundamentalist religion. Fundamentalist bodies arose in the years after the First World War, and steadily gained strength, quite independent of foreign favor or disfavor. Most actions by them in the Near east, typified by the assassination of President Sadat, were quite inimicable to U.S. interests. The United States did indeed foster fundamentalist zealotry in Central Asia, in opposition to the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, during the eighties, and did a damned poor job of cleaning up afterwards. But even there, it hardly created the movement, which dates there back to the mid-nineteenth century, or even strengthened it very much there, save in the narrowest military sense.