Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald: AUAA

That's a very reductionist analysis. The Muslim Brotherhood has existed since the 1920s. However, it was a secular, Marxist, anti-colonialist ideology that was most successful in the Arab world for the next few generations. Then these secular Arab states lost the Six Day War, and failed to provide either good governance or economic opportunities for their populations.

The reason that Islamists have become so powerful is that the governments of many Arab countries have proven themselves to be completely bankrupt. If you're young (and the population pyramids in places like Egypt are very fat on the bottom), and you have very few economic opportunities, and your society is incredibly corrupt, then a radical change becomes very appealing, particularly if the people advocating that change are seen as pure and uncorrupt. The fact that Islamist groups oppose the US is one aspect of their appeal, but it's really only one factor. The fact that Hezbollah and Hamas are actively opposing Israel, while Egypt made peace with Israel in 79 is also a factor.

> How does this relate to politics? Well, I suspect that governments today are more concerned with the loss of their ability to control and regulate the behavior of their citizens than they are with their citizens' discontent.

> How do we make that work for us? We can devise means, through the application and sophistication of science, to remind governments that if they will not be responsible stewards of our rights, we the people will implement systems that provide for a means of not just enforcing our rights, but removing from governments the ability to interfere with those rights.

> You can see the beginnings of this dynamic today in the statements of government officials complaining about the adoption of encryption by major technology providers. The idea here isn't to fling ourselves into anarchy and do away with government, but to remind the government that there must always be a balance of power between the governing and the governed, and that as the progress of science increasingly empowers communities and individuals, there will be more and more areas of our lives where -- if government insists on behaving poorly and with a callous disregard for the citizen -- we can find ways to reduce or remove their powers on a new -- and permanent -- basis.

> Our rights are not granted by governments. They are inherent to our nature. But it's entirely the opposite for governments: their privileges are precisely equal to only those which we suffer them to enjoy.

> We haven't had to think about that much in the last few decades because quality of life has been increasing across almost all measures in a significant way, and that has led to a comfortable complacency. But here and there throughout history, we'll occasionally come across these periods where governments think more about what they "can" do rather than what they "should" do, and what is lawful will become increasingly distinct from what is moral.

> In such times, we'd do well to remember that at the end of the day, the law doesn't defend us; we defend the law. And when it becomes contrary to our morals, we have both the right and the responsibility to rebalance it toward just ends.

I like his idealism, but I just don't foresee the substantial changes that he's calling for occurring any time soon. Frankly, most people don't give a shit, and there are just too many vested interests involved to ensure that can't happen (e.g. Koch brothers donating $1billion dollars in the next election cycle, Citizens United, etc). Sure, there will be some pandering by both sides of the aisle next election about how they're the only true candidate that will protect individual rights, but once they've been sufficiently elected and absorbed by the machine, they'll continue along the trend that started 50+ years ago. Obama was a constitutional lawyer ffs.

But hey, as long as gas prices are low, Netflix stays up, and I can get my $10 Domino's large pizza delivered to my front door, I'll vote for whoever sounds good and promises me the most shit. /s

When young people are angry in Iran, they're angry at a theocratic, clerical government. When young people were angry in Syria, they were angry at a secular, socialist strongman. If you're disaffected in a theocracy, you don't become a supporter of theocracy. If you're disaffected in a Baathist regime, then it's natural to become an Islamist.

To my knowledge there has never been much evidence that the US funded Bin Laden in the '80s. The CIA funded Afghans to fight the Soviets, and some Arab Islamists were also fighting the Soviets. My understanding is that the CIA did not fund the Arabs. (My source for this is Ghost Wars, by Steve Coll, which is excellent).

The Guardian article you're citing is actually talking about something completely different than US training of ISIL. There are many factions in the Syrian civil war. ISIL is one faction that emerged out of al-Qaeda's Iraq branch with some members from the dredges of Saddam's regime. These people have been fighting the US for over a decade. There are also groups that oppose both ISIL and the Assad regime. These groups are being supported by the West.

All of that being said, I agree with the fact that the invasion of Iraq produced extremism. However, the place to start when studying the Middle East is not "What did we do to these people that caused them to hate us." What happened is much, much more complex than that.