Beiruty wrote:As I said, ME needs a great civil war to come up as a strong unified nation. A nation would have it is place among the other great nation. Live in peace and prosperity.
Good thing, I am a US Citizen. Living Free with Liberty.
TAM and other, politics is emotional discussion. Please no hard feelings for any.

Beiruty, no hard feelings, and I agree that the ME needs a giant revolution. Unfortunately, like all big revolutions, and given the heated passions of the region, it will be very bloody. I think it would be a HUGE mistake to be involved in it.
I also agree that our foreign policy has often been misguided. But we haven't colonized any country. We didn't steal their resources.....we paid for them. Take our presence in KSA....the minute they tell us to leave, we'll be gone. We left Iraq. We left Afghanistan. We left Panama. We left the Philippines. Etc., etc., etc. You can argue that we shouldn't have been in those places in the first place, and you
might have a good argument......but in the end, we did not STAY, which means that we are not colonizing those countries. Yes, politics is a sensitive subject, but there are certain facts that are inarguable. And one of them is that, as a United States taxpayer, other nations have taken my money, and failed to deliver any value on that money.
So my final conclusion is that we have wasted an ENORMOUS amount of money over the decades since WW2, trying to buy the friendship of other nations. It was money badly spent, because in the end, they hate us. We should let them determine their own outcomes, and then deal with (or
not deal with, as the case may be) whatever that outcome happens to be. It's not our job to cajole other countries into changing if they want our dollars. We either trade with them, or we don't. It's not our job to feed the world. It's not our job to heal the world. It's not our job to protect the world. It's not our job to punish any country which hasn't first attacked us. It is
our job to feed, heal, and protect
ourselves. Until our leaders recognize this, our economy will continue to weaken as it bleeds out under the effort of trying to fix the rest of the world's geopolitical psychoses. And "psychoses" is the word which
exactly describes the situation.
The ONLY exception I can think of to this would be military responses to events like 9/11.
SOMEbody had to pay for that attack. Attacks like that cannot go unanswered, otherwise, a nation admits that it no longer exists. It doesn't matter if UBL had a long list of imagined grievances. It doesn't matter that the average Afghan Talib wasn't involved. Collectively, the Taliban created an environment which nurtured that psychopath UBL and his plans. How many people were officially members of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan on 9/11/01? A few hundred.....maybe a couple of thousand? The Taliban
could have easily said, "not in OUR backyard" and killed all of them. But they didn't. Instead, they sheltered AQ, and they refused to give up UBL when the US quite legitimately demanded he be remanded over for trial. If they had just given him up, thousands of American and Afghan people would still be alive today. Because they did not govern responsibly and boot AQ out of Afghanistan, 3000 people died on 9/11. And because they wouldn't surrender UBL to a lawful request for extradition, 91,000 Afghans, including civilians, soldiers and militants were killed between 2001 and our withdrawal, as well as 2,238 Americans (as of 2014). The deaths of well over 96,000 people are on the heads of the Taliban, and that doesn't include the maimed and injured..... so frankly, I couldn't care less if they were carpet bombed.
“Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”
― G. Michael Hopf, "Those Who Remain"
#TINVOWOOT