For his next address on this theme let me offer a very inspiring illustration of inter-confessional tolerance at work in a great cause. Around 930 AD the dowager Queen Toda of Navarre, a Christian, appealed to the caliphate in Cordoba, beseeching ‘Abd al-Rahman III to help her slim down her son Sancho I, who had been abandoned by his subjects in Navarre because he was too fat to ride a horse and thus unable to display himself properly as a kingly warrior. The caliph sent word he had this terrific Jewish doctor and promptly dispatched to Navarre his top court physician, a Jew called Hasday b Shaprut. The Shaprut Diet did the trick. A year later Sancho was back on the throne. E pluribus unum; i.e., out of many, many pounds emerged one thinned down Sancho. A Christian, a Muslim and a Jew, working together. But that was a thousand years ago and the reconquista of Al-Andalus was already under way, with the Crusades waiting in the wings. ”

http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn06052009.html

and on the funny side Onion also chimes in

http://www.theonion.com/content/video/obama_drastically_scales_back?utm_source=a-section

So let it be known and let it be written: Democracy is simply a system of Rules for playing the game (Read: Uncle Sam’s rules & ballgame), which allows some cosmetic measures of elections and participation in the Muslim countries. The folks in the Muslim countries are NOT exactly our slaves but nonetheless QURBANI KAA BAKRAS. To paraphrase Robert Fisk: “And of course, when an Muslim bestirs himself with unrestrained fury and takes out his incendiary, blind anger on [Uncle Sam & stooges], we will say it has nothing to do with us. Why do they hate us, we will ask? But let us not say we do not know the answer.

Chomsky says this a bit differently: Let’s come closer to home. Take, say the Western Hemisphere. Where is the worst atrocity in the Western Hemisphere? Well, it happens to be Colombia. Colombia is the worst human rights violator in the hemisphere. Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch, and the church, and everyone have tons of material on it. The atrocities are being carried out by the military forces and their paramilitary associates at a horrible scale. They get half — about half of US military aid and training for the hemisphere … So, there’s another one we can handle. And we could run through the world and find quite a number of cases where we could actually bring about security without doing much at all, just by withdrawing — It’s a little bit like asking how could the Russians — in pre-Gorbachev days, how could they have helped security in Central Asia? Well, one way they could have helped security is by withdrawing their troops from Afghanistan that would have helped security. Well, we’re a global power, so we’re all over the place, and there are a lot of things of this sort that we could do.

For Mr. Obama to win favor… he needs to address the challenges facing the Arab world, from poverty and inadequate education systems to limits on democracy and human rights.

That is exactly wrong and a complete misunderstanding of the roots of the basic problem. The imperial mentality of solving all such problems got the United States into its current riff with the Islamic world. To get rid of this dangerous source of friction, the United States should just stop meddling in that part of the world.”

http://original.antiwar.com/eland/2009/06/04/obama-versus-osama/

And the reality as per Andrew Bacevich

“As a direct result, it leads us to exaggerate the importance of places like Afghanistan and indeed to exaggerate the jihadist threat, which falls well short of being existential. It induces flights of fancy so that otherwise sensible people conjure up visions of providing clean water, functioning schools, and good governance to Afghanistan’s 40,000 villages, with expectations of thereby winning Afghan hearts and minds. It causes people to ignore considerations of cost. With the Long War already this nation’s second most expensive conflict, trailing only World War II, and with the federal government projecting trillion-dollar deficits for years to come, how much can we afford and where is the money coming from? ”

http://amconmag.com/article/2009/may/18/00020/