"Success" in the middle east?

This is a quandary about “success” in the middle east. I have a hard time with this subject because I am a Republican and a Gulf War Veteran and I have relatives in Israel. First I have to go off track for a minute to build background. The way I see it if we had never become allies with Israel we would not have been involved in any of these situations over the last thirty years, especially now. We only did that to ensure our oil interests would be protected by a strong local military presence. When I was growing up in the seventies I can remember the hatred that decision had already led to. Even the biblical story of the how Israel came to be is not a nice one. You can try to sugar coat it all you want but long story short the land was taken from the Palestinians by force in the middle of the night using mercenary Roman military techniques. There has been a very real and very volatile conflict over the land that became Israel and the way it changed hands ever since. There is of course the obvious religious conflict fueling the fires of war as well. Bottom line, the rest of the countries in the region whether they get along or not, have agreed to disagree with Israel. We on the other hand have chosen to be Israel’s staunchest ally. The really interesting thing is that we are even less popular in the middle east than Israel. Fast forward to our involvement with Afghanistan against Russia at the end of the cold war. We feigned allegiance with very dangerous muslim extremists to justify an end to the cold war and then reneged on our post war promises.

This brings me to my next point. There have been wars taking place continuously in the middle east for hundreds of years, we know what caused them and we also know how committed all parties involved are based on their ideologies and need for retribution. Why then did we feel the need to get involved…there was the cold war and obviously as I mentioned above, the oil but, WHAT DID WE EXPECT? If most of the sugar in your neighborhood was across the street in a house that was surrounded by police who were in a twenty hour standoff with two violent gangs that were trying to kill each other, would you try to make friends with a next door neighbor who had access to the sugar by promising to pay for weapons so they could defend themselves while stealing the sugar? Probably not, you would try to find another less dangerous source of sugar or you would find a substitute for the sugar. I think that nearly anyone in that scenario would take the later course of action but for some reason we not only took the first course….we stuck by it for decades at the cost of trillions of dollars and countless deaths on all sides! The part that bothers me is that based on this theory our involvement during the last decade may have been avoided altogether. This thought perplexes me because I served in the Gulf, I am patriotic, I have family there, I support our troops and our Commander in Chief but, I can’t go around waving my flag and shouting because it wasn’t our fight! We chose to get involved for oil. We had plenty of warning about the possible outcomes and the severity of this dependency.

You may be thinking that hindsight is 20/20 so let’s talk about now. We are finally realizing the folly of dependence on foreign oil and making changes to our infrastructure to support alternative fuel and green industry. In my mind this means our primary interest in the middle east should start to wane. Unfortunately because of the political process implementation we have undertaken it will probably be necessary for us to maintain military and political presence there indefinitely. In doing so we are defending only one of the many opposing sects and even they never asked us for a democratic solution. That is us imposing our will on them to ensure our future influence in case we can’t sustain our own energy needs. The theory that we can conform the middle east into a democratic union of states is ridiculous to me. They don’t want to get along in fact they are by nature of their existence, proximity and natural resources competitive to say the least if not full blown enemies. Let us remember why we went there to begin with. Because of all of our involvement over the years we were attacked by muslim extremists led by Osama bin Laden. We could not get the support we needed to take bin Laden out directly so we waged war against Saddam…again. His capture and execution while personally satisfying did nothing to eliminate bin Laden. We decided to stay after overthrowing Saddam’s regime because we didn’t want another tribe sympathetic to bin Laden to come into power? The fact that there are several factions loyal to bin Laden which makes them hostile to us even after we liberated their country should have been a clear enough message to us to get out!

So, in a very round about way I have gotten to my quandary….what does success in the middle east actually mean? For me it means they form their own government of their choice (maybe even subdivide the country into three or four seperate states) and take care of their own problems. We wean ourselves off their oil and make sure we never need another resource from a culture whose ideology makes them our mortal enemies! Last but not least we rethink our support of Israel in the future. I know there will be republicans reading this who have a knee jerk reaction to my lack of support for Israel but I ask you to take a moment of quiet reflection and ask yourself just why you think supporting Israel is an extremely important principal of our party? I think it is antiquated and we all need to start looking at our cornerstones to determine if any others are in this category. We are losing some presence and importance in the general population of the USA and that is very dangerous. There are issues in our party that are like strategic hills on a battlefield and I don’t want to die on some of those hills! Our party must make a comeback in order to heal our country so please understand I am just trying to ask the rest of you if this path we are on is really the path back to the White House and prosperity.  I welcome your opinions on this matter as I am conflicted by my own perception and analysis.

On a totally separate note I had the displeasure of picking up the June issue of newsweek magazine the other day while I was waiting for an oil change. While I remember it being a somewhat liberal rag years ago when I occasionally paid any attention to it I hadn’t realized the extreme swing the publication has taken even further to the left of left. The anti American sentiment is astounding. The writing sounds like communist propaganda. If I didn’t know the publication was housed in, owned by and distributed from America I would think it was the work of Al Qaeda or at least Venezuelan Presidente Chavez. It really was disgusting to read what little respect these a$$holes have for our country, our service men and women and the untold sacrifices that have been made just for them to abuse the principal of journalistic freedom and lack of integrity. Even more insane is their need to make comparisons between white supremecists and conservatives insinuating that there is a connection and praising the department of homeland security for saying that right wing extremism is more of a threat in America than the foreign terrorism we perceive! In the same issue they referred to Obama as "God", called returning vets "crazy" and said that our military service men and women don't deserve to be awarded as many medals as they have and calling capitalism "evil". Yes, there are countless shows, blogs, publications and pundits that fall into this category but I happened to pick that POS up. So here is an open handed pimp slap salute to all of you communist "journalists" out there spreading your misleading anti american propaganda!...but while I was sitting there reading this garbage there was an elderly woman, a young man and his mother and a less than articulate gay guy sitting in the lobby watching the news and I heard them discussing the news that was being broadcast when some negative commentary about President Obama came on. The news anchors and the people in the lobby except for the young man all got upset and the kid said “Why are you all so protective of this guy? He hasn’t made anything better. I think it might be worse than before!” The boys mother said “Are you kidding me, anything is better than how our country was being run with that illiterate imbecile as president!” The old lady and the gay guy chimed in as if in unison “Amen!” They all began discussing their liberal philosophy and the boy who was sitting next to me just put his hand on his forehead to rub the pain of the discussion away. I leaned over to him and said “Don’t worry there are plenty of us out there that don’t buy into this. Don’t be afraid to say what you believe and speak out against this uneducated babble you hear in your home, school and public. These are people who are getting their “facts” from the liberal news machine and such competent sources as Comedy Central.” He laughed and said “Thank God!” This was a very encouraging moment for me because it made me realize that there is a shinning beacon of hope in our youth for recovery and restoration in government to the principals which made our country great. Before I left I slipped him a print out of an email I had in my computer bag that reads…

Subj: Barack Hussein Obama's First Six Months' In Office Accomplishments...

1. Offended the Queen of England .
2. Bowed to the King of Saudi Arabia .
3. Praised the Marxist Daniel Ortega.
4. Kissed Socialist Hugo Chavez on the cheek.
5. Endorsed the Socialist Evo Morales of Bolivia .
6. Sided with Hugo Chavez and Communist Fidel Castro against Honduras .
7. Announced we would meet with Iranians with no pre-conditions while they're building their nuclear weapons.
8. Gave away billions to AIG also without pre-conditions.
9. Expanded the bailouts.
10. Insulted everyone who has ever loved a Special Olympian.
11. Doubled our national debt.
12. Announced the termination of our new missile defense system the day after North Korea launched an ICBM.
13. Released information on U.S. intelligence gathering despite urgings of his own CIA director and the prior four CIA directors.
14. Accepted without comment that five of his cabinet members cheated on their taxes and two other nominees withdrew after they couldn't take the heat.
15. Appointed a Homeland Security Chief who identified military veterans and abortion opponents as "dangers to the nation."
16. Ordered that the word "terrorism" no longer be used and instead refers to such acts as "man made disasters."
17. Circled the globe to publicly apologize for America 's world leadership.
18. Told the Mexican president that the violence in their country was because of us.
19. Politicized the census by moving it into the White House from the Department of Commerce.
20. Appointed as Attorney General the man who orchestrated the forced removal and expulsion to Cuba of a 9-year-old whose mother died trying to bring him to freedom in the United States .
21. Salutes as heroes three Navy SEALS who took down three terrorists who threatened one American life and the next day announces members of the Bush administration may stand trial for "torturing" three 9/11 terrorists by pouring water up their noses.
22. Low altitude photo shoot of Air Force One over New York City that frightened thousands of New Yorkers.
23. Sent his National Defense Advisor to Europe to assure them that the US will no longer treat Israel in a special manner and they might be on their own with the Muslims.
24. Praised Jimmy Carter's trip to Gaza where he sided with terrorist Hamas against Israel .
25. Nationalized General Motors and Chrysler while turning shareholder control over to the unions and freezing out retired investors who owned their bonds. Committed unlimited taxpayer billions in the process.
26. Passed a huge energy tax in the House that will make American industry even less competitive while costing homeowners thousands per year.
27. Announced nationalized health care "reform" that will strip seniors of their Medicare, cut pay of physicians, increase taxes yet another $1 trillion, and put everyone on rationed care with government bureaucrats deciding who gets care and who doesn't. (See cartoon.)

Bloomberg: Daschle says, "Health care reform will not be pain free. Seniors should be more accepting of the conditions that come with age instead of treating them," while former Colorado Governor Dick Lamm says seniors have "a duty to die."

If this does not sufficiently raise your ire, just remember that the President, Senators and Congressmen have their own special gold plated health care plan which is guaranteed the remainder of their lives and they are not subject to this new law if they pass it.

Please use the power of the Internet to get this message out. Talk it up at the grassroots level. We have an election coming up in one year and four months where we can reverse the dangerous direction of the Obama administration and its allies. In the interim, we can make their lives miserable. Lets do it!

If you disagree, don't do anything.

…from outside I could hear the kid laughing as he read it out loud to his mother and the people in the lobby started getting angry and trying to defend these socialist accomplishments. I looked at the kid and he gave me a “thumbs up”. So that is what I leave you with today.