I thought we’d be done talking about the Clinton impeachment by now.
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I would trace everything wrong in the Middle East to European colonialism and the Sykes-Picot Agreement. Start with the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of League of Nations mandates instead of giving the brown people Independence.
Uh, the end of the American Civil War is a pretty bad example.
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What exactly are we keeping from falling apart?
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Global trade in oil.
Why is it America’s job to stop things from falling apart in the middle east? What evidence is there that we’re currently stopping anything from falling apart? Where do we get our authority to decide for another country whether they’re about to fall apart and send in troops to stop that?
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The US pulling out and the region descending into one form of chaos or another is a lock no matter when we do it(well a likely worse version it is already a mess). That’s actually the opposite of an argument for staying though. Pointlessly wasting trillions every decade is really bad. Just rip the bandaid off already.
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I’m of the belief that things need to go to hell for an indefinite period of time before they can get better. The modernization of Islam may require a period like the Wars of Religion in Europe. The current boundaries need to be erased and reconfigured. Let there be smaller states. Partition Iraq. Let religious minorities and various sects have their own states.
Reconstruction wasn’t a complete success. Though if the primary goal was to prevent another split between the two, then it was even if it wasn’t perfect. Hell, ending it is part of why Rutherford B. Hayes is considered such a shitty president.
In risk management there is an inherent bias to the status quo. If something is risky, its easy to blame your predecessors if the risk blows up. If something is risky and you change it and THEN it blows up, you get blamed.
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understatement of the year
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One argument is that we have a global economy and everything is so interdependent that things need to be prevented from falling apart in one part of the world because that will have repercussions everywhere, including the US. Someone needs to act, and if not the US, then who else?
That behaviors don’t happen in a vacuum and that we need to protect ourselves from the actions that other people take instead of just letting them do whatever they want is the same justification for things like mask mandates in a time of COVID. It’s a matter of proportionality.
Do I believe that some dangers theoretically justify US intervention in the Middle East? Yes. Do I believe that every danger that has been cited to justify US intervention in the Middle East actually justified such action? No.
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Although Reconstruction died with the Hays presidency, it was severely weakened from the out-set due to Johnson’s Southern sympathies.
However, it turned out that many Northern whites didn’t care all that much what happened to the newly freed slaves.
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If the US pulls out, other countries will move in to fill the power vacuum. US involvement is partially about cock-blocking countries such as Russia and China.
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How would having China or Russia pumping trillions into the hopeless situation that is the current ME instead of us be a bad thing?
There is also the fact that our intervention has been a complete failure. Desert Storm was 30 years ago now and we are farther from our goals now than when we started. Outside of that we have killed millions in the region in this quest to fix it. It’s immoral.
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Is it just me that remembers ISIS controlling massive swathes of several Middle Eastern countries, broadcasting weekly mass torture/execution porn, getting stronger/expanding its territory/besieging a new city every day and inspiring terrorist attacks throughout the world?
Must be because, conceding that the US created the conditions for ISIS in the first place, I’m honestly baffled that people keep asking “what do you mean by things falling apart/how could things possibly get worse”?
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Is there someone here saying they don’t think leaving will increase the instability in the short run?
To me that seems like an obvious and inevitable outcome. Take SE Asia after we left the region for example though. Yes it got much worse in places like Cambodia and the like in the short run. In the long run they were better off not being essentially occupied by US forces and we were better off for not occupying them.
Unless we literally are planning to police the region for the rest of time eventually we will leave and chaos will likely ensue. Again though that isn’t a reason to stay. Quite the opposite.
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The US is simply too broke to continue this war. Supporting Middle Eastern intervention is taking food and medicine away from the homeless people in your neighborhood. Sorry!
It’s too bad we aren’t rich enough to bring capitalism to the world. I’m very sad that the uniquely American way of bankrupting sick people can’t be imposed on “struggling” countries.
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What does the Middle East look like if it falls under the sphere of influence of China or Russia? How does that affect the US, Europe, and the global economy?
What seems likely to me is that Russia taking more influence in the Middle East will lead to an expansion of Iranian influence at the expense of the Saudis and a strengthening of the Assad regime. Should we care about this?
I am not some America First isolationist. I do believe that the US has some responsibility to intervene, but I disagree with what American goals have been in the past. I believe in fostering democracy in the Middle East and I believe that involves the support of the existence of non-secular Islamic democracies that we tolerate doing things we would oppose Christian conservatives from imposing on the US. I believe in letting them impose sharia law, so long as the law is enacted through democratic means.
I think that this is a fine argument and probably where I end up. But you are conceding downside to the plan, and many posters are not.