Re: "Okay, so what do we do now?"
I thought I made my policy proposals abundantly clear in the seven links I posted....
Message 23112351
Start out by getting our guys out of the middle of the Sunni/Shiite civil war. (Not our affair. We can only make matters worse by our continued presence there, in the middle of the crossfire, with a big fat target on our backs, being used as an EXCUSE for all that is wrong with the place by every group of extremists.)
We can maintain our military ties (& bases...) with all of our allies in the region (Turkey, Kuwait, Kurdistan, Israel, etc.), and of course we will tell everyone who will listen that we will (as always) support Democracy, justice and civil rule of law, Capitalism and free trade, religious freedom, civil rights, and the basic human right of political self-determination --- which means the right of a people to decide for themselves under what form of government they wish to live, by civil war if necessary --- but that we are not going to take any side in a local civil conflict....
(The fact that Sunni and Shiite fundamentalist extremists, and radical Arabs and radical Persians, attacking each other actually plays toward a strengthening of American and Western strategic interests globally, while true, is a fact that we need not spend much time publicly trumpeting, as that would be counter-productive and make us appear to be 'bloodthirsty' which is in fact NOT true. Never-the-less, those in-the-know, practitioners of Real Politik, are already well aware of this.)
In the final analysis, the extremists will exhaust each other fighting to a long and bloody stalemate... and likely become held in widespread disrepute by by Arab and Persian populations (the elites and the governments of Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria, etc., are ALREADY massively unpopular, and the Theocrats are only going to go further downhill by being tarred with a bloody, mindless, and failed conflict).
Out of this failure, I hope to eventually see an eventual rejection of extremism (helped by the fact that 'American foreigners' could no longer be blamed for any of this...), and political and social developments conducive to producing the long-overdue 'Islamic Reformation'... and an eventual respect for pluralism and religious freedom and more secular societies.
It took over 100 years of extremely bloody inter-Christian warfare in Europe (after which Christian extremists on *both* sides were held in much public disrepute) to pave the way for the Reformation and the Enlightenment.
Hopefully our 'modern' age moves faster still.
And, I am guessing that perhaps a maximum of 20 to 25 years will be required to produce a victory for pluralism and Democracy and self-determination throughout the region sufficient that it can't be back-tracked upon. |
