(02-19-2015 07:14 PM)Brokeback Flamer Wrote: I am all about energy independence. It gives the U.S. lots of better options. (Bringing back manufacturing would too but that's another story). But the US is not the only customer for ME crude. They would still get their money, maybe not as much but still plenty.
Fine, let them have their money. I see no problem there. But if they're not getting it from us, then we don't have as great a temptation to go in there and micromanage them. Get us off their oil. Let China and India and Japan depend on them for oil. Then it's China's and India's and Japan's problem. Let them deal with it.
Quote:I think you kind of contradict yourself. On the one hand you say that if we leave them alone they will leave us alone. Then you, accurately, state that the ME mind set is not like the Western mind set. And specifically, not the Islamic, radical or otherwise, mind set. While the 'typical' Muslim may want Islam to be the motivating religion of the World, they aren't going to kill for it. However, the AQ's and Isis's of the World don't feel that way. And now they have the means to strike blows at their mortal Religous enemy, Christianity and Secularism, whether we leave them alone or not. They will take the opportunities and even though their percentages are small their numbers are large. Larger then people want to realize
No contradiction at all. I think you're missing a piece or two. Yes, the AQ's and ISIS's of the world feel that way. But the number who truly feel that way are a tiny, tiny minority. They need additional numbers to reach critical mass. AQ got big enough to pull off 9/11; ISIS is big enough to fight battles and occupy territory. We provide them with those additional numbers by pissing off a bunch of otherwise moderates because we meddle too much in their affairs. There are moderate Muslims, lots of them. But their positions with respect to, say, women would antagonize westerners immensely. When we insist on westernizing their treatment of women, we drive them to join the radicals. I remember a piece on, IIRC, NPR about a school we had built in Iraq where boys and girls now took classes together. The Pentagon spokesperson was quite excited because they had taken some surveys and 90% of the people loved it. All I could think of is, "The other 10% are down at the al-Qaeda recruiting station signing up."
As I've mentioned before, when I first got to the region in 1970, State Department's client state was Israel and most diplomatic contacts with the Arabs were run through the oil companies. Exxon didn't give a damn about burkhas, they just wanted a commercial relationship, reminiscent of something like Hudson's Bay Company in Canada or East India Company in India. So things actually worked great, and in particular facilitated the possession of power by moderate Muslims who were similarly interested primarily in commercial relationships.
Four events in the 1970s changed that
1) The Brits abandoned East of Suez in July 1971. That left a power vacuum which we ultimately filled. Whereas the Brits had taken a "hands off" approach, we were far more interested in micromanagement.
2) Two offshoots of the 1973 Yom Kippur war. One, the Arabs figured out that Israel had nukes and wouldn't mind using them. They largely stopped confronting Israel directly and instead kept subsidizing surrogate groups--Hamas, Hezbollah, PLO, etc.--to take pot shots.
3) The Arabs realized that oil made them economically relevant for the first time in 500 years. That changed the bidding in a lot of ways. It was the last of the oil companies as diplomatic intermediaries.
4) We allowed the overthrow of the Shah, who was probably the most moderate Muslim leader of them all. That made other similarly moderate leaders uneasy. Since then we have replaced, or acquiesced in the replacement of Saddam, Qaddafi, Mubarak--with pretty much worse situations after than before in every one of them.
With all that, we've made it a lot harder for moderate Muslims. Keep in mind that, in comparison to the people who replaced them, every one of the leaders we removed was more moderate that whoever followed him.
This is where I say Harf is full of sh*t. It isn't about poverty, it isn't about oil, it's about telling the women to take off their veils. Now, it's obviously impossible for a secular humanist to comprehend that, particularly one who is as ethnocentric as Harf.
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Obama wants to fight ISIS with a ............job's program.
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