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

To: Sun Tzu who wrote (281166)	6/23/2014 6:24:54 PM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi Sun Tzu; Bush was able to put together a team that could figure out the consequences of their actions as far as a year or two into the future. Recently Obama's been unable to figure out what was going to happen when he announced that he thought it was a great idea to trade 5 Al Qaeda generals for a deserter. And when Bush's team got caught in corruption, they were able to make much better excuses than the Obama team. Honestly, claiming that everyone's computer crashed a few months after Congress started asking about the IRS is the sort of thing a child would come up with. And then there's the recent CO2 push; even though the science has been under strong attack, temperatures have "paused" and international support for the idea has largely collapsed. And Obama got himself into all this trouble despite the fact that the media is about 90% liberal and have supported him at every point possible. When I was a youth, the Democrats were far more intelligent than they are now. But then as now, with both political parties, US foreign policy is all about domestic politics. This is disastrous. If we weren't such a powerful country we'd be in trouble. As far as the error in Iraq goes, the locals have been running fueds against each other for over a thousand years. They're living in various ages from 500BC to the early middle ages. Honestly, the Shia can name the horse that Hussein Ibn Ali rode to his death at Karbala over 1300 years ago. This horse returned without him, a subject of modern Iranian painting: A decade or two after we leave the Middle East the Shia will have forgotten the US as completely as they have forgotten 99% of the history of the last 1300 years. But they will still hate the Sunni for the sadness described in the above (modern Iranian) painting. Compare this with the US. American youth can't tell you which war was the one that freed the slaves, or what year the War of 1812 started, LOL. And besides, with the Sunni trying to rebuild the Caliphate on a religious basis (an impossible dream because a modern empire cannot survive without secularism), the Shia will have their hands way more than full for the next couple decades. One of our problems is that when foreigners from these bloody Old World states immigrate to the US, they retain their prejudices. Every now and then they end up in positions of power and it influences US foreign policy. And then they use the US military as the best hammer in the world, to beat up enemies they've been bickering with for a thousand years. This is not something unique to the Middle East. Our immigrants from the European nations did the same thing, with various successes. I think that one advantage we had back then was that our foreign policy was not so completely at the whim of domestic political considerations and Europe was not very well nationalized. Now we're driven by single issue voter opinions. -- Carl