Subsidizing our enemies.

Our only quibble with the following from Eternity Road is that if Mr. Porretto has any negative thoughts about Islam he should just come right out and say so, instead of beating around the bush the way he does:

Islamic culture coheres around an evil religion and a conviction of inevitable triumph over the "infidels." The religion is so vile that intelligent persons cannot cleave to it; one must be mentally subnormal to accept its lunacies and savageries as the actual revealed will of God. The ugliness of the Islamic creed is nonetheless Islam's major advantage in maintaining insularity; it repels outsiders and their probes almost automatically. That makes it hard to attack directly so long as the Islamic states remain intact.

Islamic culture would not be dangerous to the rest of the world if it were required to survive on its merits alone. The West has not done this; rather, it has subsidized world Islam in both direct and indirect ways. Indeed, there have been occasions when we've embraced great hardship and expense to prop up states such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, that they not fall to the fates their indolence and degeneracy had earned for them.

If the Islamic states had to subsist on their own productivity, in an ecology closed to imports and unable to export, they would degenerate to the stone-ax level in about two years and would be no further trouble to the civilized world.

"The Long War: Strategic Re-Focus." By Francis W. Porretto, Eternity Road, 8/18/06.