Hi LindyBill; Re: "You might as well face the fact that one of the side effects of our fighting the war on terrorism is that we are going to end up running the ME."
Just like we ended up running Southeast Asia.
Re: "We are being forced into it because it is such a mess."
Yeah, it is quite a mess. Just like Southeast Asia was back when the French were pissing off the locals.
Re: "I don't like it, but the alternative is to leave these Muslim Fundamentalists in a position to constantly come back and attack us."
The Middle East is a hornet's nest. If we stick our peckers in there we're going to get stung. We've been stung already. To destroy the hornet's nest would require the same sort of fumigant that destroyed the evil German and Japanese governments. To get rid of hornet's nests is not easy, in this case. You have to go all out and kill every prospective hornet, not just the ones that you know for sure have stung you. The alternative is to stay away from hornet nests, and this is working very well for most of the world, but the US, nah we're the world's policeman, so we're the ones that have to put on bullet proof vests and get shot in the face.
Re: "The choice we are faced with is, keep killing Alligators, or go ahead and drain the swamp. The Alligators learned to bite too well on 9/11. We are going to drain the swamp."
The last time we drained a swamp was in WW2. We did it by killing or imprisoning every German or Japanese national, military or civilian, we could get our hands on for most of 5 years. The result was a pretty much completely drained swamp. I agree that if we were to do the same thing to the Middle East it would drain the swamp.
But if we instead follow Israel's weak and ineffective military policy we'll end up with the same result that the Israelis have -- war forever.
And by "weak and ineffective", I don't mean the left wing Israeli policy, but instead to describe also the current Israeli policy. They're killing fewer people than we killed in our unsuccessful attempt to make the Vietnamese like us, LOL. The hell could they expect such mild actions to result in a population that gives up militarism? Jesus weeps, more Palestinians choke to death on chunks of lamb meat, or slip in bathtubs, than the Israelis kill. To solve their problem the Israelis would have to do the same thing that we did to solve our Nazi problem. Kill every one of them that we can get within the range of our guns, and continue until the remainder beg for mercy.
If we go into this area with the same soft touch that our military has used ever since WW2 ended, well, we're going to make zero impression on the locals, and end up with the same problem that we had in Vietnam. We pissed off the locals without killing enough of them to make the survivors knuckle under to our way of thinking.
When we went into Iraq in the Gulf War we wore our usual kid gloves. We killed as few civilians as possible, and the end result was that the Iraqis are still fighting. The Iraqis are part of an Arab nation that extends all the way to the Atlantic. If we go in now, we'll end up occupying only a very small part of the Arab nation, and not truly defeated it. This is just like what we did in Vietnam, when we tried to occupy just half the country. The same thing worked in Korea because their land borders were so short (at the place where peace was eventually declared), but Vietnam had huge land borders, and so does Iraq.
Freedom is not just another word. People will blow the shit out of themselves to acquire it.
To defeat the Arabs, we would have to kill substantial numbers of them. But killing millions of Arabs isn't on the secret war plans of the Bush administration. So an invasion would be the beginning of another glorious failure in foreign policy.
And then, 30 years from now, after the US ignominiously pulls back in retreat and isolation from the Middle East, the next generation will be complaining that Bush #2 and his advisers didn't fight the right way in Iraq (just like the neocons are now saying that we didn't fight the right way in Vietnam). They'll be complaining about the same gradualism that the neocons are now complaining about in Vietnam. And they'll be right, but the truth is that we don't have it in our guts to put the Arab nation down any more than the Israelis have it in their gut.
-- Carl
P.S. But I still say we're not going in. We're older, wiser and sadder now than we were in 1954. |
