Worth reading and thinking about: this post by Digby about a Der Spiegel article revealing the origins of the current Middle Eastern evil baddies of the moment. Seems that they aren't in fact Islamist fanatics but an intelligence operation planned by a former Saddam secret policeman, as a way of using the Syrian mess to regain lost Sunni territory in Iraq. If this is true (and Der Spiegel bases the article on a recently-unearthed cache of planning documents by said henchman) then much of the Fox News blather about Islam's inherent violence is turned upside down. As Der Spiegel describes it, this was a mixture of the "long con" and the thought control tactics of a secular military underground.