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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (804834)	9/2/2014 5:30:16 PM
From: combjelly	1 Recommendation Recommended By bentway Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1578006

I stopped reading after that. Of course you did, Tenchu. First you complain about the quite accurate impression that Republicans are war mongers, then you rapidly abandon it. As far as Obama's foreign policy... I dunno, it seems to work. Assad has given up his chemical weapons and joined the treaty regulating them. Osama is dead, and his response to the Russian incursions into Ukraine are a lot more effective than Smirk's response to Russian incursions into Georgia. Granted, the ME is otherwise a mess. But that is the result of decades of supporting strong men to keep the heat off of Israel. By removing Saddam, we upset the balance of power we spent decades tuning. Unless we want to invade every country there, replace their governments, redraw borders to be more sane and occupy it for a few generations, we will do an awful lot of standing on the sidelines waving our hands. It was going to happen sooner or later. It just turned out to be sooner. But all isn't bleak. For a number of reasons, not the least of which is their brutality towards those they now rule over, ISIS has just about reached their peak, if not passed it. They likely won't gain any more territory that they can hold for more than a week or two. And what they hold will dwindle away. They are stretched thin over what they took, they can't help but lose most if not all of what they have in Iraq. If restricted to Syria, there are several rebel groups that are about parity with them, 2 or more ganging up against them spells their end. In Iraq, they finally woke up and canned Maliki, the favorite of the Bush administration. With him out of the picture, Iraq has a chance to put together a more inclusive government that isn't a puppet of Iran. Not that this is a slam dunk by any stretch of the imagination, but they never had the chance before. And Kurdistan is almost certainly going to be independent with a deep and acknowledged debt to the US. It isn't going to be quick or painless. But there is reason to hope the ME will start to stabilize. There wasn't before. As to Russia, they are overdue for a lesson in humility. Putin cannot recreate the Soviet Union. That ship has sailed. Even if he can attract some breakaway republics, he still won't have enough resources to put together a parallel economy that is independent of the West. I suppose a coalition of Russia, China and India could go a long ways toward that, but there is no reason that Russia would be in the drivers seat. But the EU is the one to teach this lesson, not the US. What you see as failure is really a longer view. We don't have a quarterly report on the state of the globe. Short term fixes are not even desirable, band aids give way and often at impromptu moments. As we are seeing. We have been applying short term fixes since the 1950s. We need a different strategy. Not that Obama has been flawless, far from it. But you never have perfect information. Still, his strategy has been more or less taking the long view and encouraging everyone to work together for the long term. And that is the only way towards long term stability.