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Zonie63 -> RE: Foreign Policy -- The Complicated Road Ahead (9/15/2014 7:31:06 AM)
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ORIGINAL: cloudboy
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Rogers: The very idea of firing the Army, police and every Baathist in govt., rounding up as many innocent Iraqi patriots as not, imprisoning and torturing them. from 2003 - 2005 or 6, we were all witness to a complete civil breakdown in Iraq.
Treasonous incompetence and malfeasance all. Couple that with installing the sectarian Maliki as Prime Minister.
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Zonie: It really depends on your point of view whether you think other religions pose a problem.
The Middle East is not our land, not in our sphere of influence, and not culturally aligned with our values. How do we ***on the outside with such a poor record of foreign involvement*** invest in that region now to promote stability?
At this point, there's probably very little that we can do to promote stability. If we had stayed neutral and not taken sides with one faction or another, we might have had more credibility as an outside mediator. Moreover, we've taken sides with regimes which are decidedly undemocratic, tainting our position even further. How can we promote any kind of stability at all when our own position and policies are tainted and unstable themselves?
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I agree with the Obama ADM that the international community needs to be more involved and the actors of the region need to exercise more care and control to promote order and a workable liberty for the locals.
Arming factions just leads to long-term problems -- AKA Reagan arming the Taliban and galvanizing the Jihad movement back in the 1980s. In hindsight, communist rule looks a lot more palatable than Islamic extremism. In hindsight invading IRAQ was a poor decision. In hindsight destabilizing IRAN led to the IRANIAN revolution.
Heavy handed US colonial and military involvement in the region has not yielded peace, order, or democracy. In the region we have all the credibility of Ray Rice lecturing others on family values.
In the final analysis, Americans will have to figure out exactly what they want in a foreign policy. We can't seem to decide whether we want to make the world safe for democracy or whether to just make it safe for big business. It's this kind of indecisive duplicity which has dominated our foreign policy throughout the Cold War and in the years since. We don't follow any consistent set of principles, and the people of the world have learned not to trust what American politicians say (just as the American people have learned).
If there are those who believe that America is an "empire" and advocate policies along those lines, then at the very least, that's the public face our government should display.
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