:: The Rational Radical Blog ::

Sunday, April 11, 2004

When U.S. Aided Insurgents, Did It Breed Future Terrorists?

[I]n the eyes of Mahmood Mamdani, a Uganda-born political scientist and cultural anthropologist at Columbia University... the spread of terror as a tactic is largely an outgrowth of American cold war foreign policy. After Vietnam, he argues, the American government shifted from a strategy of direct intervention in the fight against global Communism to one of supporting new forms of low-level insurgency by private armed groups.

... Using third and fourth parties, the C.I.A. supported terrorist and proto-terrorist movements in Indochina, Latin America, Africa and, of course, Afghanistan, he argues in his new book, "Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War and the Roots of Terror" (Pantheon).

Is this proposition not widely accepted? What else were Unita, the Contras, etc?

Jack Clark 10:27 PM [+]   
Post #108174764265054371