Well-written and interesting article.

Now let us have another one.

"It is time to learn the lessons from the BBQ's black box."

Which are?

BBQ knobs? What a silly article, blaming us for Islamic barbarism. The "US and its allies including Australia" will do what they can to protect the West; that's us, pal.

Just think. This bloke was a multiculturalism commissioner in Australia!

The excuse making Author appears to be blaming the west for every middle east problem, in an exercise of blame shifting on a grand scale!
Yes we have tried to help where it served our interests, and in the pursuit of democracy, or endless futility?

But typically of stone age people with a stone age mentality, the minute you get rid of one tyrant they replace him with another, as happened in Egypt or Iraq; and then like the author they have the unmitigated hide to blame us for too much help or not enough.

If the author could be honest he would sheet home the blame where it lays, with themselves and their so called culture.

Which has been murderously combative with the advent of an eye for an eye sectarian Islam!

I'd like to know which part of western aid created ritual beheadings, crucifictions, rape, child brides and sexual slavery. All alive and well in middle eastern "CULTURE"for interminable centuries!

Down to me and my druthers I'd turn the desert sands into a sea of molten glass!

Surgically removing the whole rotten mess in the same way a clinical surgeon would remove a malignant tumour; taking enough of the surrounding tissue to be sure that it had no chance of returning and re infecting the patient!?
Rhrosty.

Yep...the truth as it is...America is owned and operated by cow boys, peopled by blind nationalists, and fuelled by overproof testosterone. It is safe to say that wars waged on this base will be equally senseless....

Rhrosty. You have hit the proverbial 'nail on the head' with each and every fallacious notion proposed by the author. Your idea of turning the surrounding deserts into glass has much merit. Perhaps the power required could be provided by numberless Chinese soar cells.
Quite a silly, supremely simplistic article. ttbn, like me, shudders to think that this bloke is a 'multicultural commissioner'. What more could we expect. I wonder if he has duel nationality?

This author says succinctly what i have been
feeling about the middle for decades.
I thank and enciurage him to srticulate these
views - judging by the other commentary it will
be wasted on many but truth will win through
one day

Unfortunately he is closer to the truth than most,he sure beats Singer hands down,the West has been interfering in the mid east since before the First world war.
The British and the French created and set the boundary's for the states that exist now with no thought to what the actual people thought about it.
As the Israeli military & intelligence services created Hamas so the we Australia,US,GB created ISIS with our blundering in IRAQ on a massive set of LIES.
The West seems to never learn as we again blunder into IRAQ for the 4th time I suppose the only person who will be happy about another War will be Abbott as the rest seem to be having a rethink.

ISIS may be Operation Cyclone 2.0
"Operation Cyclone was the code name for the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) program to arm and finance the Afghan mujahideen prior to and during the Soviet war in Afghanistan, from 1979 to 1989. The program leaned heavily towards supporting militant Islamic groups that were favoured by neighbouring Pakistan, rather than other, less ideological Afghan resistance groups that had also been fighting the Marxist-oriented Democratic Republic of Afghanistan regime since before the Soviet intervention[citation needed]. Operation Cyclone was one of the longest and most expensive covert CIA operations ever undertaken"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cyclone

Zbigniew Brezinski was a central player in Operation Cyclone. Brezinski met with Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan in 1979 and even had his photo taken with him.
Weeks before he died, former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook said.
"Bin Laden was, though, a product of a monumental miscalculation by western security agencies. Throughout the 80s he was armed by the CIA and funded by the Saudis to wage jihad against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan."
http://newsone.com/1205745/cia-osama-bin-laden-al-qaeda/

Evidence is mounting that US allies such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey have been instrumental in funding ISIS while US intelligence agencies were fully aware of this.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-05-23/secret-pentagon-report-reveals-us-created-isis-tool-overthrow-syrias-president-assad