Big thanks to Glenn Reynolds for posting this link. He runs a little blog called Instapundit, maybe you've heard of it.

It turns out that the "root cause" of all the totalitarian fascists in the middle east is not the religion of Islam, or anti-Semitism, or American diplomacy, but rather french imperialism, coupled with french military incompetence.

Bernard Lewis lays it out for us at the National Post

Here's the dirty secret the frenchmen don't want you to know -

"In 1940, the French government accepted defeat and signed a separate peace with the Third Reich. The French colonies in Syria and Lebanon remained under Vichy control, and were therefore open to the Nazis to do what they wished. They became major bases for Nazi propaganda and activity in the Middle East. The Nazis extended their operations from Syria and Lebanon, with some success, to Iraq and other places. That was the time when the Baath Party was founded, as a kind of clone of the Nazi and Fascist parties, using very similar methods and adapting a very similar ideology, and operating in the same way -- as part of an apparatus of surveillance that exists under a one-party state, where a party is not a party in the Western democratic sense, but part of the apparatus of a government. That was the origin of the Baath Party."

I guess that old saying is true; "Every time a frenchman waves a white flag, a dictator gets his wings."

As the Baath party was not enough nice with the US governement, US sponsored actively a new promising candidate to its leadership : Saddam Hussein....

"Every time a frenchman waves a white flag, a US president spits blood on it."

Nah, you got that one all mixed up, MarK. The old saying goes:

"Every time a frenchman raises a white flag, the US Marines spill blood lowering it again."