'Think' Tanks have planned to use Islam as the 'phantom menace' since 1993

[ck4829]

July/August 1993, Page 18

To Tell the Truth

Reviving the "Strategic Consensus": This Time Against Islam

By Leon T. Hadar

One of the few contributions of President Ronald Reagan's first secretary of state, Alexander Haig, to American diplomacy was the coining of the term " strategic consensus." Haig argued that instead of continuing to implement President Carter's Middle East agenda by focusing on a Palestinian-Israeli settlement, Washington should place that problem on the back burner and try to devise a strategic consensus (SC) between pro-American Middle Eastern states, including Israel aimed at containing the then-existing Soviet threat in the Middle East.

The SC eventually became a major component of Reagan's Middle Eastern policies. Indeed, this writer recalls standing with other reporters on a sunny day in 1983 in the White House Rose Garden and listening to President Reagan explaining to visiting King Fahd of Saudi Arabia how the Muslim "freedom fighters" in Afghanistan and the "imprisoned" Jews in the Soviet Union faced the same long-term threat from international communism, implying that they were united in some sort of anti-Soviet global alliance.

There are signs that some foreign-policy thinkers in Washington are trying to revive the now moribund SC by suggesting that Iran-sponsored Islamic radicalism should force Israelis and Arabs to unite under an American umbrella against this common threat.
http://www.washington-report.org/backissues/0793/9307018.htm

[theresistance]

1. And Samuel Huntington's "Clash of Civilisations"

Has been around since 93. See: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/chap1/clashofcivilizations.htm

He has been pushing this "clash" between the West and Islam since then.

[HysteryDiagnosis]

2. If we get on with Russia again... do you think the Mujahedeen would

swing back over to our side again and ya know, "help an old Texas cowboy out??" All this hypocrisy makes me ill.