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Comment by conistonwater | Hacker News Reader

> Most of the Islamic fundamentalism that the USA is fighting today can be traced back to that one event.

This is just plain false. A nice book that I can recommend on the actual history of it is Ghost Wars by Steve Coll.

Assume that most of us haven't read that book, or even if we have that we don't recall it perfectly. What specific information in it would lead us to agree with the blanket statement "this is just plain false"?

You can start with the US and Britain intervening in Iran in the the late 1940s to protect oil interests and work your way forward from there. You could arguably go back to post-WWI with Britain, France and Russia arguing over the remains of the Ottoman empire (Sykes–Picot Agreement). The last century has been one interference after the next by Western powers and Russia in the Middle East:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sykes%E2%80%93Picot_Agreement

So to say that "most of the Islamic fundamentalism that the USA is fighting today can be traced back to that one event" (the US training the Mujahideen) ignores many significant events over the past hundred years:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_modern_conflicts_in_th...

At best, it's an overly broad claim.

>The last century has been one interference after the next by Western powers and Russia in the Middle East

The last two centuries, the interference was so common in the 19th century it inspired the name "The Great Game."

Thank you for the reference. I have some reading to do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Game

I can highly recommend Alexander Burnes' non-fiction Travels into Bokhara and Rudyard Kipling's fictional Kim, which in fact coined the term "The Great Game".

OK, we all agree that USA's military-capitalism policy has been enacted in many places for many years. Thread parent's actual point, that this is very harmful to human people, seems confirmed rather than contradicted.

It is so obnoxious to tell someone that they should read an entire book to know what is wrong with a single statement. At least throw a couple points out from the book.

It is not plain false then, it is much worse; not just that folly but many.

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