My running, personal theory is that Muslim fundamentalism (and in general, most fundamentalisms) get going when the locals gain a persistent sense

At 12:15 PM 9/19/04 -0400, Tyler Durden wrote: that

they're gettin' screwed over,

See "Crusades", which aint over til the tall buildings fall. and that their current government ain't

helping a whole lot.

The Saudi royalty is the best the US can buy! It's kind of a devil's bargain to obtain a source of

strength. By necessity it needs to reject a lot of the local culture, otherwise there isn't sufficient motivation to fight. In general, it's probably on many levels predictable and even reasonable.

Of course, this can boil over into bizarre, "fanatical" behavior, but

Religion (of any form that posits an afterlife) is a terrorist weapon. Faith in the man with the silly hat is a WMD. then

again as Mr Young so aptly put it, "fanatical" is what the screw-ers normally call mass behavior they don't like.

Winners write the history books.

In the case of Nukes, I'd point out that the nuclear nations have a distinct advantage at the UN or any

other bargaining table, so if I were Iranian I'd be working pretty hard to get something quasi-viable together that could be called a "nuke". Of course, the few truly "fanatical" members of the local nuke-wannabees might get a hold of the block box and, well, that sucks.

1. The UN doesn't let Rogues (tm) into the Security Council and thus a nuke is only *de facto*, not diplomatically useful in deterring colonial regime-changing. 2. Far more likely is that a decade's worth of work, a lot of money, and a few scientists will be vaporized by an Israeli Hellfire, made in the USofA by those proud flag-flying folks at Raytheon Death, Inc. The counter to 2 is to have two or more, one mounted on a missile on a mobil platform, how do you say MX in Farsi, and keep everything really really secret. The first nuke is for demonstration purposes, which might be a waste if its a U-gun type (except in making abundantly clear how far along your R&D is :-). (Remember the Hiroshima bomb was *not* tested, so sure were the scientists. Trinity was a Pu-implosion finesse job.) The interesting thing is that Iran isn't buying a few from Pakistan. Oh that's right, the U$ bought the Paki 'leadership'. Also means that Al Q isn't willing to share their stash with Iran. They probably think they have higher-priority uses for them.