"I confess it took me a long time to see and then acknowledge that the Pentagon was not serious about defeating or degrading or doing anything else with regard to the Islamic State. The questions then became: Could it be that Syria is a replay of Afghanistan in 1979-1980, when Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s national security adviser, persuaded the peanut farmer from Plains to finance the Islamist militias that eventually became al-Qaeda?"