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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: dumbmoney who wrote (141439)	7/25/2004 3:42:02 PM
From: quehubo	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Our meddling in the ME was not with the endgame in mind. When you support governments that fail to meet the needs of their populations there will be blowback. Why not Africa? Last I checked ME Muslims declared war on the West 20 years ago. When Africans start killing Americans maybe we will respond. Also other than Nigeria, Algeria and Libya there is not much oil that we are dependent on. Depressing, try living in a third world nation for awhile.

To: dumbmoney who wrote (141439)	7/25/2004 9:51:56 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Respond to of 281500

We weren't letting the Middle East "rot". That's our policy toward Africa. Our policy toward the Middle East is to meddle incessantly, and our reward for doing so is terrorism. Not at all. Our longstanding policy in the Middle East, until the first Gulf War, was to treat it as a gas station. They got to do what they liked so long as the oil flowed. The problem is that what they liked was tyrannical and disfunctional in the extreme. All it produced efficiently was a baby boom. On the Israeli/Pal front, we were several times induced to try to broker a peace by Israel and Egypt; unfortunately, when we tried it with the Palestinians, we found they were being paid much more to keep fighting than we could pay them for peace. The whole Arab world depends heavily on the eternal excuse of Israel. During the Gulf War, we did meddle, at the urgent request of SA and the Gulf States. I suppose you could say that "our reward" was terrorism. Had we known this in advance, we would have been a lot harsher on the Saudis' double dealing up front, but we stil would have done the same. We simply can never afford to have an aggressive nut like Saddam get control of 2/3 of the world's oil reserves.