I am starting to change my mind on what I think we should be doing in the middle east. I don't think we're winning any hearts or minds. We've killed 176 children in Pakistan in drone strikes.
I am starting to think we should pull back all American troops to within american borders. Bring our people home, and defend our own lands. Stop being the world police. Stop killing kids in the name of freedom.
Unfortunately, we're attempting to determine workable policy without access to much of the critical information necessary to protect the long term strategic interests of our nation. My understanding has always been we maintain our presence in the M.E. in order to pump the oil out from under them before we are forced to pump it out from under ourselves. We're also wrestling for resource control with the two other large, industrialized, militarized, and organized enterprises on the globe: Russia and China. Everything else is small potatoes, tragically, in the instance of children and predator drones.
ReplyDeleteMy greater point in that post is that I am starting to believe that there is not a winnable outcome for any operation in the ME. I suppose that you'd argue we're staying tfor oil. That argument is terminally flawed given the opportunities currently provided by shale in the US. I'm assuming you'd call Iraq2 an illegal war and that we were there to steal oil. You might consider asking someone who works in the energy industry just how preposterous that supposition is. Additionally, if we really wanted some good oil, we'd be camped in Libya, which produces light sweet crude, not the propper ME's sour crude.
DeleteMy greater point is you can't characterize any operation as "winnable" or "unwinnable"... That is not the proper metric because the scope of our goals is much larger than any single operation, or even series of operations. "Hearts and minds" was never the impetus, although I am sure pursuasion is preferred. We're after different goals than the "official" reasons supplied, and were operating through proxies and our own assets, civilian and military, to achieve those greater ends, i.e., resource control among two or three competing spheres... Namely, U.S./Europe, Russia (and "independent" former soviet states), and China with her strand of pearls. The rest of the worlds nations line up according to those three camps.
DeleteI find the idea of war being legal or illegal preposterous, as it is also the wrong metric. Necessary or unnecessary is perhaps a better determination, but it begs the question as to exactly who decides which is which.