[Ryzorian]

I concur that some of individuals went off the deep end. They are being punished for thier actions. ( I would point out that before military requirements were lowered in 2004 some of those who reacted badly wouldn't have been in the army to begin with.)

Ghap, the divide and conquer bit, yes, you understand the point. That's partly what the US is doing.

As to the Whacko part, I understand the gist of your meaning and yes that's correct in the broad term. WW2 propaganda is full of that sort of thing. However, I've actually met some of these "Jihadi's" and nutso doesn't even begin to explain them. Believe me, I kid you not about this, as far as they are concerned, if we all don't convert to thier form of islam, they will keep trying to kill us. It's that simple.

It doesn't have anything to do with our "policy", we were targeted as a nation of infidals that required death and destruction back in the 1880's by the head of the Wahibbi sect himself. Not to mention our little beat down of the barbery pirates in 1815.

We told them to leave our ships alone and they told us to take a flying leap..they could raid our infidal ships and there weren't jack we could do about it...So we took over the country they came from. Part of the Marines fight song, the phrase "to the shores of tripolli" commerates that event. Except those guys were muslims and all muslims, by law, must avenge a muslim nation's defeat by a non muslim nation. That means the muslim world will not rest until they somehow avenge the barbery pirates from 1815 by destroying the US.

Interestingly enough the Marines nickname "leatherneck" came from this engagement, they had to wear thick leather neck collars as protection because muslims had the tendency to cut off your head.