Cole, Juan. “Fisking the `war on terror.'” Informed comment, August 2, 2005.

Summary: Under Ronald Reagan's regime, the United States armed Muslim radicals in Afghanistan, gave them enormous amounts of money, and persuaded several of our Middle Eastern allies to do likewise. The muhajideen learned that, with enough money and arms, they could effectively oppose even a superpower (the Soviet Union, back then).

Later, when the United States set up bases in Saudi Arabia and Israel continued to oppress Palestinians, the Taliban (a faction of the muhajideen) began to use the techniques that they had learned to oppose the United States, in a sequence of terrorist attacks culminating in 9/11.

The Bush administration responded to these attacks by the former proteges of Ronald Reagan by putting the old Mujahideen warlords back in charge of Afghanistan's provinces, allowing Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri to escape, declaring that Americans no longer needed a Bill of Rights, and suddenly invading another old Reagan protege, Saddam's Iraq, which had had nothing to do with 9/11 and posed no threat to the US. The name given this bizarre set of actions by Bush was “the War on Terror.” ...

Then in July, 2005, General Richard Myers, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, announced that there was not actually any “War on Terror” ... The American Right, having created the Mujahideen and having mightily contributed to the creation of al-Qaeda, abruptly announced that there was something deeply wrong with Islam, that it kept producing terrorists.