Jay, you should run for the Republican nomination; you make way more sense than any of the candidates supporting the war. You bring up substantial points, needing substantial answers.
And back when they were doing just that (bombing folks on the other side of the world), we didn't care or do a damn thing about it. Hell, even when they were bombing our troop barracks, embassies, or naval vessels we didn't seem to care all that much.
It was when they took the fight to us six years ago that we started to care.
And the genie's out of the bottle....
You're right that we didn't care until six years ago, as a rule. I know I didn't; I was still happily cruising along believing that everything our government did was basically good; that I lived under a moral government that used its exemplary military might for good, even if sometimes it was well intentioned but poorly executed.
But as it turns out, Middle Easterners didn't appreciate our
government's military presence in their back yards - and who could blame them - and that very presence fomented a strong and growing homicidal hatred for our
nation. This is your "genie," and yes it's out. But it's out because our government rubbed the lamp.
We have killed over 70,000 Iraqi civilians in 5 years. Let's just deal with this figure. We don't need to lower ourselves by saying, "Better us than them." 70,000 people dead because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, in 5 years. 70,000 innocent people killed because of our efforts. We didn't mean it, of course, but war is an extraordinarily sloppy activity, and must only be entered into upon the most serious of circumstances, and I do not believe that the bad Iraqis we've killed justifies all the good Iraqis who've perished by our hand.
They're not going to magically stop hating us even if we pull up stakes and take every last American home.
I don't think they will stop hating us if we pull up stakes, but I do think it will be a sign of goodwill to many of them. At that point, we would collectively feel like we are retreating from a fight - something we collectively despise - and probably many Middle Easterners would see it that way. Probably they would see it as victory, that they repelled the infidel invaders. But we know better than that. We know that it wasn't a good fight to begin with. We know that we provoked them. We also know that in the history of mankind no army has been able to stamp out every vestige of rebellion against its occupation, so why were we even trying? The nature of it is that in order to fight them, you need to kill them, and the more your kill, the more you create, until finally you need to either give up, or kill them all. Neither option is acceptable to us, but let's be truly honorable and choose the true lesser of two evils here. And let's collectively know that we are doing the right thing for the right reasons. Who said what and who fleeced whom are a different discussion. What we have is a military entangled in another nation's - in another region's - problems.
If they still have energy left to come get us after their V-Day celebrations, I would be very surprised. If we turn the tables on them, and make them come get us, I'd be surprised if they would choose what we chose. They don't have the might, they don't have the wealth, they don't have the technology. And they still need our oil money. I have never heard of a terrorist who didn't still like our money.
In fact, I posit that would embolden them even more to come after us - we'd be the true paper tiger they thought us to be pre-9/11.
And if they are that stupid, then they will get what's coming to them. They aren't the only ones who can defend their own turf with dogged persistence. And I'm sure many on Northeastshooters would gladly oblige them
.
You can call it drinking Kool-Aid or whatever cutesy term you'd like. I prefer to think of it as being realistic.
We ignore these people at our own peril....
I don't think withdrawing our forces from the region is ignoring them. We still have scary surveillance capabilities.
...They will not be satiated by driving us out of the holy land; they will not be satisfied by making us retreat to within our borders.
One need look no further than Europe - how does your isolationist view square with the "Islamification" of western Europe? A. It doesn't. The Europeans participated in the Crusades. The muslims are angry at them for the crusades. We are the descendants of the Europeans.
It's not isolationism, it's nonintervention. There's a big difference.
How many terrorists are actually out to get all of us, as you suggest? There's only so much that the severe minority of people with these kinds of psychopathic delusions can do. The 9-11 terrorists exploited a government imposed weakness in our security, with its government induced security coma. There will never be another civilian jetliner smashing into skyscrapers, because even though the government continues to deny us our right to self defense in the air, terrorists would have to kill every man, woman and child before they could get to the cockpit, and then they'd have to kill the combative pilots as well, before assuming control of the plane. No way. And as for car bombs and backpack bombs, we've never had a problem with them, even before 9-11. I don't know why, but there must be some reason preventing them, because it's a hell of a lot easier than hijacking airplanes, you would think. Neurological or nuclear weapons? Please. At the risk of sounding cavalier, I'll worry about that after I see the mushroom cloud. I.e., never.
Your reasoning towards the end here borders on paranoia and fear mongering. It simply will not be that bad.
Besides that, what happens when we withdraw from the Middle east and they seize the oil fields?
As far as oil fields, what is the worst that can happen? It will only affect us economically. This won't hurt anybody. It may drive our markets and lives into temporary instability, but our markets and lives always eventually stabilize. The oil in the Middle East is valuable because it costs less to extract it from the ground than most other places, but Canada, America and Russia have a lot more oil than any Middle Eastern nation. So we'll have more expensive petroleum products - we've lived through price inflation before. American inventiveness will solve that problem like it solves every problem. And again, no blood spilled.
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So, good discussion. Your serve.