Is it time for the U.S. to withdraw from the Middle East?

[islandman]

Or at least scale back its presence to its bilateral defense agreement with Israel and whichever 'friendly' countries in the region that remain?

After all, 40+ years of intervention in the region has not increased stability.

Has it been proven that democracy is not a "god-given right" and that we should let the region settle on whatever form of government they choose/is imposed on them from internal forces?

Discuss.

 

[islandman]

With regard to energy concerns, I could see opening up in full all N. American energy fields to exploration and extraction, combined with alternative energy sources.

 

[Bert Notorius]

have we cum yet?

 

[hogjack]

The Middle East has great beaches, oil, cool restaurants and figs. Oh, and awesome olives.

Leave? NEVER!

 

[bux_fan]

Pull all of our people and replace them with nukes.

 

[BotanyBoy]

You know I lived there for 4 1/2 years.......and the most obvious thing I observed was that we can't force peace/prosperity there, it will never ever ever ever ever ever happen. History backs that up....So the only answer is to either let the chips fall where they may and working with the victors once they sort their shit out or try and force a good hand by picking sides to work with.

Personally i think we just need to leave, let them sort their shit out and then have a good heart to heart with whoever comes out on top about how our relationship is going to go....b/c no matter who wins out over there they only exist because we allow it.

However if you wanted the most effective and quickest results you would have to get br00tal and pick sides, annihilate the other side and just take over. Seize all assets, manage them as your own imperialist style....and hopefully leave a friendly nation to do business with in a couple decades.

 

[Sean Renaud]

The Ottomans didn't own that turf at one point did they? I heard they were okay finnancially. Romans? No. We should accept that history has proven that these people are animals because racist pond scum pot heads tells us they are.

 

[fuckwaffle]

The Ottomans didn't own that turf at one point did they? I heard they were okay finnancially. Romans? No. We should accept that history has proven that these people are animals because racist pond scum pot heads tells us they are.

As opposed to drunken pond scum?

 

[KingOrfeo]

Withdraw our Big Stick from the Fertile Crescent?!

 

[Sean Renaud]

As opposed to drunken pond scum?

I assume you're about to school me on how that area has never been prosperous cus if you're not kindly shut the fuck up. I don't want to add you to the iggy list but you don't ever post anything inteligent. You don't even post anything dumb, you post absolute ignorance and filth and nothing but. You simply post infrequently enough that thus far I've just let it slide.

 

[islandman]

You know I lived there for 4 1/2 years.......and the most obvious thing I observed was that we can't force peace/prosperity there, it will never ever ever ever ever ever happen. History backs that up....So the only answer is to either let the chips fall where they may and working with the victors once they sort their shit out or try and force a good hand by picking sides to work with.

Personally i think we just need to leave, let them sort their shit out and then have a good heart to heart with whoever comes out on top about how our relationship is going to go....b/c no matter who wins out over there they only exist because we allow it.

However if you wanted the most effective and quickest results you would have to get br00tal and pick sides, annihilate the other side and just take over. Seize all assets, manage them as your own imperialist style....and hopefully leave a friendly nation to do business with in a couple decades.

History has shown that we suck as nation-building.

 

[VaticanAssassin]

MacArthur did a pretty good job......

 

[BotanyBoy]

The Ottomans didn't own that turf at one point did they? I heard they were okay finnancially. Romans? No. We should accept that history has proven that these people are animals because racist pond scum pot heads tells us they are.

Racist? how was any of what I said racist? Where did I call them animals? Do you just sit around thinking of bullshit like that along with lame ass insults like "racist pond scum pot head"?

If any of our half ass's police style PC actions in the middle east had proven effective we wouldn't be having this discussion would we?

So yea...if saying we either need to get in the fight and win the 2000 year old fighting between all the various sect's of douchery or get the fuck out of it and let them sort it out themselves makes me racist pond scum (wtf? lol) then I guess that's what I am.

History has shown that we suck as nation-building.

Oh I agree....which is why I think it's best if we just gtfo. I just don't think mainstream america and the PC police could stomach a real conquer and occupy/make ours type war which would really be our only other legit option.

 

[LillyO]

MacArthur did a pretty good job......

Under totally different circumstances.

 

[VaticanAssassin]

Under totally different circumstances.

True. He had a much bigger stick. May there is
a lesson in that...

 

[BoyNextDoor]

Or at least scale back its presence to its bilateral defense agreement with Israel and whichever 'friendly' countries in the region that remain?

After all, 40+ years of intervention in the region has not increased stability.

Has it been proven that democracy is not a "god-given right" and that we should let the region settle on whatever form of government they choose/is imposed on them from internal forces?

Discuss.

It is time. It is well beyond the time when the US should have pulled back from a lot of what we are doing. Not just in the ME, but all over the globe.

 

[KingOrfeo]

As opposed to drunken pond scum?

Well, you won't find many of those in Al-Qaeda!

 

[doubleover]

Who needs their oil we have the Volt.

 

[Sean Renaud]

Well, you won't find many of those in Al-Qaeda!

Oh god, I'd almost forgotten how many of those countries are dry and how much shit we went through trying to get people to send us "special" Listerine.

 

[zipman]

Or at least scale back its presence to its bilateral defense agreement with Israel and whichever 'friendly' countries in the region that remain?

After all, 40+ years of intervention in the region has not increased stability.

Has it been proven that democracy is not a "god-given right" and that we should let the region settle on whatever form of government they choose/is imposed on them from internal forces?

Discuss.

What do you mean by withdraw?

Politically?

Military?

Both?

 

[islandman]

What do you mean by withdraw?

Politically?

Military?

Both?

Both.

We stop butting into their politics (or whatever passes as their politics).

No more military support; recall all troops.

We maintain economic/humanitarian ties...with caveats.

 

[Colonel Hogan]

You know I lived there for 4 1/2 years.......and the most obvious thing I observed was that we can't force peace/prosperity there, it will never ever ever ever ever ever happen. History backs that up....So the only answer is to either let the chips fall where they may and working with the victors once they sort their shit out or try and force a good hand by picking sides to work with.

Personally i think we just need to leave, let them sort their shit out and then have a good heart to heart with whoever comes out on top about how our relationship is going to go....b/c no matter who wins out over there they only exist because we allow it.

However if you wanted the most effective and quickest results you would have to get br00tal and pick sides, annihilate the other side and just take over. Seize all assets, manage them as your own imperialist style....and hopefully leave a friendly nation to do business with in a couple decades.

If peace can never truly exist in the region, then what is the significance of "coming out on top"? What does winning get you?

Wait. I think I get it. What you really meant is that peace has no enduring chance in the region as long as Israel keeps coming out on top, which they did during their 1948 War of Independence, Egypt's attempt to deny access to the Suez Canal, the Six Day War and on numerous other occasions before and since. Faced with that unsatisfactory repetitive condition, there will always be multi-national, anti-Jewish interests committed to Israel's destruction. Since there isn't a similar alliance of officially declared Jewish states supporting Israel, Israel must rely on whatever alliances she can cobble together based on various regional interests germane to those potentially allied states. Interests presumably more compelling than an intellectual assent to the concept of zionism, which has become its own dirty little word except when everyone is discussing a guaranteed homeland for Palestinians.

If the failure to secure such an alliance should ever result in Israel's destruction (almost certainly characterized by both a total military defeat and a second Holocaust destined to eclipse the first by the hundreds of millions of people -- whatever it takes to truly secure the peace, don'tcha see.) then that blood, as well as the blood of victims current and past will be on the hands of the entire international community, not just the United States.

You can't go back in history far enough to find the handful of countries who truly have no dog in this fight, whether it be the conduct of Britain during its rule of Palestine under the British Mandate to the majority of nations in the brand new UN General Assembly that supported the 1947 Resolution 181 calling for a patchwork of non-contiguous lands supposedly resulting in an independent Jewish state and an independent Arab state coexisting peaceably side-by-side. Yeah, right.

No, as bad as the situation in the Middle East is, abandoning Israel and the rest of the region and giving tacit approval to all parties to slug it out "one last time" in a winner-take-all-cage-match would only increase the strategic threat to the United States, not reduce it.

Isolationism didn't work out all that well when the world's oceans could only be traversed by ships. It's even less feasible now that missiles can cut the trip down to a matter of minutes.

 

[LongPenStroke]

It's not that we need to pullout of the middle-east, we need to approach it from another angle.

People have this weird preconceived notion that wars are actually won on battlefields, and they are anything but won on battlefields. Trying to impose our will through military might will never work. Iraq is the perfect case study.

We bombed the country into oblivion, knocking out clean water, power, destroying homes, farm fields, roads, schools and anything else needed for a healthy living, then we took years to replace it. Four years into the war and there were still people without the basics of power or access to clean drinking water.

Imagine if that happened in the United States. People here throw a fit when a car veers off the road and tears up their grass.

I have a friend who works for the local power company. Over the weekend we had a major storm that knocked power out for 15k people. One upper-class neighborhood went apeshit when 3 hours went by and their power wasn't on. Now imagine trying to go four years and at the same time the rest of your environment is continually being destroyed by a foreign entity. I would imagine you would get pretty pissed, too, and start looking for ways to retaliate.

 

[islandman]

It's not that we need to pullout of the middle-east, we need to approach it from another angle.

People have this weird preconceived notion that wars are actually won on battlefields, and they are anything but won on battlefields. Trying to impose our will through military might will never work. Iraq is the perfect case study.

We bombed the country into oblivion, knocking out clean water, power, destroying homes, farm fields, roads, schools and anything else needed for a healthy living, then we took years to replace it. Four years into the war and there were still people without the basics of power or access to clean drinking water.

Imagine if that happened in the United States. People here throw a fit when a car veers off the road and tears up their grass.

I have a friend who works for the local power company. Over the weekend we had a major storm that knocked power out for 15k people. One upper-class neighborhood went apeshit when 3 hours went by and their power wasn't on. Now imagine trying to go four years and at the same time the rest of your environment is continually being destroyed by a foreign entity. I would imagine you would get pretty pissed, too, and start looking for ways to retaliate.

What's the other angle?

 

[islandman]

If peace can never truly exist in the region, then what is the significance of "coming out on top"? What does winning get you?

Wait. I think I get it. What you really meant is that peace has no enduring chance in the region as long as Israel keeps coming out on top, which they did during their 1948 War of Independence, Egypt's attempt to deny access to the Suez Canal, the Six Day War and on numerous other occasions before and since. Faced with that unsatisfactory repetitive condition, there will always be multi-national, anti-Jewish interests committed to Israel's destruction. Since there isn't a similar alliance of officially declared Jewish states supporting Israel, Israel must rely on whatever alliances she can cobble together based on various regional interests germane to those potentially allied states. Interests presumably more compelling than an intellectual assent to the concept of zionism, which has become its own dirty little word except when everyone is discussing a guaranteed homeland for Palestinians.

If the failure to secure such an alliance should ever result in Israel's destruction (almost certainly characterized by both a total military defeat and a second Holocaust destined to eclipse the first by the hundreds of millions of people -- whatever it takes to truly secure the peace, don'tcha see.) then that blood, as well as the blood of victims current and past will be on the hands of the entire international community, not just the United States.

You can't go back in history far enough to find the handful of countries who truly have no dog in this fight, whether it be the conduct of Britain during its rule of Palestine under the British Mandate to the majority of nations in the brand new UN General Assembly that supported the 1947 Resolution 181 calling for a patchwork of non-contiguous lands supposedly resulting in an independent Jewish state and an independent Arab state coexisting peaceably side-by-side. Yeah, right.

No, as bad as the situation in the Middle East is, abandoning Israel and the rest of the region and giving tacit approval to all parties to slug it out "one last time" in a winner-take-all-cage-match would only increase the strategic threat to the United States, not reduce it.

Isolationism didn't work out all that well when the world's oceans could only be traversed by ships. It's even less feasible now that missiles can cut the trip down to a matter of minutes.

Withdrawing troops and influence from the area is far cry from isolationism.