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Politics : Politics of Energy -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (3852)	1/3/2009 6:03:39 PM
From: RetiredNow	Respond to of 86356

If you were there as a soldier, I salute you and honor you for your service to safeguard people like me. Most of my family has served in the military, so we have a long tradition within my family of patriotism, Republicanism, and favoring a muscular foreign policy. So I know how you feel. I myself have been Republican most of my 48 years of life. However, in 2003 I changed my mind and voted against Bush. Did it again in 2008. Bush was bad for this country and I won't vote Republican again until they get their act together. Having said all that, one key strategy employed by this country over the last couple of centuries is to establish and maintain a balance of power. In the Middle East, that worked successfully when Saddam and the Ayatollah were battling each other interminably. We upset the applecart and took Saddam out. Now Iran is destabilizing the region in their wholesale support of terrorism and in their progress towards a nuclear weapon. If all we think with is our muscles and not our brains, then we end up with what's happening in the Middle East right now. It is obvious to anyone who watches that situation that we were better off having Saddam the strongman keeping Iran distracted. Sometimes, it's better to agitate both sides of a war when both of those sides are your enemy. It keeps them fighting each other and not you. Instead, we've wasted $800B and we've traded one enemy for another. Not smart. You think we have checkmated Iran, but I don't see that. You say we have them surrounded and yet we are distracted by events in Iraq and Afghanistan. The fighting isn't over in either of those countries, so we are not in a good position to open up a third front with Iran, should the need arise. And now they are building a nuclear bomb and none of our threats are working. The world is exhausted by our wars in the Middle East. We no longer have military, monetary, or diplomatic leverage to open up a war with Iran if they get close to building a bomb. That is how weak our position is. Bush lead us to this. Had we a smarter man, we could have followed the exact same strategy with a great deal more success. Bush was a moron and he surrounded himself with morons. Time for the grown ups to start running this country.