This does not mean there is no conflict there, or in Iraq, or anywhere else. It means one appalling method of waging war has been successfully curtailed. But Iraq is still inundated with warriors, and so is Syria. There seem to be many people who would readily shed blood.
Like people who might use Russian weapons, or US weapons in a pinch.
I'm not for the US getting involved so much.
4 comments:
I'm not for the U.S. getting involved AT ALL.
We do nothing but make things worse in that part of the world. It's high time we recognized that fact and just cut it out.
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Hi Vixen, I agree with the sentiments expressed here. I would prefer we were not deeply involved in the Middle East.
However, that begs the question, doesn't it? Our likes and dislikes have very little to do with whatever the best decision might be.
My best shot was to install a base in Iraq for a couple hundred years while we killed terrorists and did nation building. Educate everyone, try to inculcate civilized values, and hope that after 3 or 4 generations Iraqis would look at the world from a different perspective.
None of this occurred. And so now we are faced with a new contingency.
One of the problems is that if terrorists gain control of a state, the next step is to obtain nuclear weapons from some of the parties willing to cooperate with them. Then we have terrorists in the grip of religious fervor committed to destroying the USA and killing all of its people.
Not good. A religious zealot with his knife at your throat is less than an optimal way to pursue peaceful co-existence.
At least this issue is not being decided on the basis of partisan grounds. Rand Paul and some other Republicans reject military intervention, and I believe I have heard a few Democrats suggesting that military intervention would be the wisest course.
I simply do not know.
What I do know is that I want to be able to trust such leadership as we have to make the right decision. And currently, I simply do not have that trust. This is not because the president is a Democrat. I used to like Senator Sam Nunn on military issues, and so I know good judgment can exists on both sides.
I wish we had the wherewithal for the best shot you indicate, Formerly Amherst, but I think that there was bad blood enough that our side was too war-weary to continue propping up Iraq, and the al-Maliki government had no interest in our continued involvement. That Obama carried out the directives in the status of forces agreement signed under President Bush, and ended the War as he was in some respects elected to do, I don't know what choices he had to do otherwise. I have a feeling that our maintaining a presence in that region would have been ultimately prohibitively costly. And we'd have ended it sooner or later in sheer exhaustion.
As for the civilized values--I am not sure we're so far from getting ourselves civilized in the west that we necessarily can dictate what civilization is to the folks of the fertile crescent where civilization was invented in the first place. We've have our global conflicts in the west, and I am Irish enough to say that we've had our religious sectarian ones, too. I can't say we could have told them how to avoid the pitfalls of conflict, when we're as apt to fall for the bait of war ourselves.
Vixen, this is neither here nor there, but I would have used Iraqi oil to pay for our entire presence, and I would have made normal rotations in the military rather than extending people's time and service beyond their natural discharge date.
I do entirely agree that the idea that the US is civilized is an extremely dubious proposition.
You may find it amusing to know that the entire dynamic of this life is governed by the first three chakras. In fact, human motivations stem from the same bases as animal motivations.
The bottom chakra is sometimes symbolized by a dragon confining gold or a beautiful princess. They don't know what to do with them; they just hoard and confine them.
The next chakra needs little comment. It's all about sex in its fascinating facets of extended possibilities, entanglements, and enchantments.
The next chakra is the diaphragm chakra and is basically the drive that we see in Washington politics. Power and the herd and pack motive for becoming alpha.
It is not until human influence moves into the heart chakra that anything other than animal motives begin to inform the thinking, feeling, and behavior. It's where "civilization" begins.
In the Qaballah we have a concept called a "speaker". We do not have mineral, vegetable, animal, and human. We have, rather, mineral, vegetable, animal, and speaker.
So the idea is that if your thinking is all about the stuff that animals do, then you are still an animal. And as you can see, this fits very nicely with the understanding of the dynamics of the first three chakras with, finally, the heart chakra being a step beyond.
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