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Who is they? Also, have you even BEEN to the Middle East? I can assure you, not everyone walks around with bombs strewn across their chests.
TERRORISTS!! Hello!! They send out children to try and kill people that disagree with them. Seems like they don't have a great deal of care for life in general. Please show me where I said everyone. You can't because I didn't. And YES I have been too the Middle East.
Hey there Sailor. You have been out to sea way too long. We got rid of Bush and the repubs because he drove our economy into the ground.
1. No one got rid of Bush, his term limit prevented him from running for a third term (Civics 101).
2. The news media and people on these boards regularly accused Bush of causing Muslims around the world to hate us.
3. The news media and people here on these boards were saying Muslims would now like us and not hate us because Bush was gone and Obama, the great uniter, would get them to like us.
So what would YOU do if you were President? (And don't cop out by saying that if you were President, none of this would be happening. If McCain had won in 2008, it is extremely likely that this would be happening -- or that it would have happened three years ago.)
Well?
Ask China to intervene militarily. Bring tanks. Let them have the place as a reward. Would give new meaning to dhimmitude.
The North Vietnamese won before we ever engtered combat there, they had something to fight for, we didn't.
Regardless, it was still seen as a US loss, the point the OP seems to be arguing against in the section I quoted. I don't care if the US is seen as "losing" if the smart thing to do is get out and watch them implode from a distance.
For those who want to bring up the "what if they get a nuke" argument, just let Israel handle that on their own. They have 300 nukes and a solid military. If Iran or some other Middle Eastern rogue country gets 1, they can likely get the job done without our help.
Quote:
Originally Posted by pch1013
Yes, and our defeat in Vietnam colored U.S. foreign policy for three decades -- right up to the fall of Baghdad in 2003, because ever since 1975, war hawks had been eager to finally "win one" (the glorious liberation of Grenada hardly counts).
Harry Truman was widely pilloried for "losing China." Imagine how history would judge the President who "lost" the entire Middle East.
If you're using that point to describe potential negative consequences and realities, point taken.
I don't care about presidential legacies and I have a strong dislike for war hawks. I was simply giving the OP a workable solution to his/her questions. Of course this would take a statesman who doesn't care about legacy.
Who is they? Also, have you even BEEN to the Middle East? I can assure you, not everyone walks around with bombs strewn across their chests.
Who? Terrorist in Palestine (prior to Israel building the wall liberals hate so much), Iraq, and Afghanistan for example. At some point they ran out of adults willing to strap on the bomb and put them on mentally disabled people and children.
How would you handle the situation in the Muslim world?
It's physically impossible to kill 2 billion Muslims.
It's politically impossible to just withdraw from the Middle East entirely -- then the protesters would think they'd won.
It's militarily impossible to lob a few nukes at random Middle East cities without suffering massive fallout -- both literally and metaphorically.
So what would YOU do if you were President? (And don't cop out by saying that if you were President, none of this would be happening. If McCain had won in 2008, it is extremely likely that this would be happening -- or that it would have happened three years ago.)
Well?
Since apparently you seem totally unaware of this reality ... what could have been done would have prevented ALL OF IT. We could have NOT invaded Afghanistan and Iraq ... now two war torn countries teetering on the brink of full scale civil war. US, Israeli and British Intelligence then created this "Arab Spring" and funded the overthrow of Egypt's government ... Libya's government ... and Syria's government ... while creating unrest in Pakistan by means of constant drone attacks killing thousands of Pakistani citizens. Sudan, Somalia, the list goes on forever. Target Iran ... if you were to look at a map of the region, you'd see almost 4 dozen US Military bases just in the Middle East literally encircling Iran, as the entire region breaks down ... all by design:
The best course of action would be to begin immediate withdraw of all US Forces in the entire region ... and tell Israel that if they want World War III .... they'll have to fight it all by themselves, and without further US Aid. Then, this crap would end.
A nice little switch in foreign policy from endless war and destruction, to "GET THE FRACK OUT", and leave those people alone .... that's how. They don't hate us because we are free (because we aren't free) they hate us because we are KILLING THEM ... and DESTROYING THEIR COUNTRIES, one by one.
To all you foreign-policy experts who think you know better than the Obama administration...
I'd be JFK or Lyndon Johnson and pour tens of billions of dollars into alternative energy technologies and space exploration when things were looking good instead of selling out to the corporations so that we don't need the Middle East's oil to survive as a civilization today, nor the need to depend on Wall Street for our economic health.
But hindsight is 20-20
This didn't just blow up in our faces, it's planned. Now the governments of all the unfriendly Middle East countries minus Iran are totally destabilized and unable to unite effectively and we have a solid reason to begin the open full scale regional war that has been in the works for a decade.
So if I was "The Man" I would proceed with the plan and let the "unwashed masses" whine on web forums about how stupid and inept I was.
Meanwhile I would carefully manipulate the masses into hating Muslims without them realizing it so they don't mind as much when the photos and videos of mounds of corpses inevitably hit the net.
Previously, I will have encouraged and supported the widespread distribution of ultra-realistic looking, "guts and glory" Middle East war themed video games to prime an entire generation of new soldiers for my planned conflict. I would also let the public education system rot and do whatever I could to make more stupid, easily manipulable people without making it obvious that's what I am doing, making it far easier to keep things at home under control and all anger focused on the "enemy" instead of myself.
I would spend, spend spend! with wild abandon, trying to milk the dollar for all it's worth while it's still worth something on the world stage.
I would engage in a program of rabid disinformation and "tin foil hat" foolery to hide my agenda and when the right time came, I would send the full fury of the military in a blitz across the Middle East, wiping away all dissidents with little to no regard for human life and with very low casualties on my side thanks to all the unconventional "softening of the battlefield" I had instigated previously.
I would do my damnedest to keep China and Russia out for as long as possible and if they moved against us I would threaten them with with my full nuclear strike capability, along with a powerful missile defense shield using new secret technologies such as anti-missile lasers on aerial drones that can stay aloft for days at a time, hoping the threat of complete annihilation vs our capability to weather a counterstrike would keep them at bay.
If it all ended successfully, I would ditch the all-but-wasted away dollar currency, wiping away all past debts and introduce a new semi-global currency that we would share with our allies. This would be successful because I could blame it on the war and still keep the world's confidence. The oil would be mine, my competitors isolated and weakened and I could get along with "business as usual".
Please, somebody tell me it isn't gonna happen that way. It scares me just to type it; it's so diabolical.
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To all you foreign-policy experts who think you know better than the Obama administration...
