No irony. You've given a remarkably incorrect response.

None at all? I find at least a little, especially when the usual line I hear from many is that "violence/war is what got us into this mess" when, in this cluster of the past thirty some odd years, it was "making friends".

I can't wait to find out who we'll be friends with next in the Middle East. What friendly dictator/rebel/revolutionary/resistance do you think we're going to give money/weapons/training to this year?

Better to simply walk away and have no policy; only slightly better, to arm both sides and let them fight each other until they have no fight left. All our money should now go to Canada, to help them retrieve oil from the tar sands.

This got me thinking, in the west when a young man wants to make his mark, be "somebody", be known & remembered, he has to make a choice.
He can buy a guitar and practice night and day in Mom's cellar; he can go to school and become a famous Doctor/Lawyer/Indian Chief; he can work at becoming rich and getting his name on a library/stadium/endowment.

The Muslim kid, in the Middle East, has choices too. Become a cleric and try to build more power and influence than the other clerics; become a genocide bomber; start an al-QED clone, of his own.

Being a contender in the Middle East ain't easy.... and that would tend to stifle ambition to be more than a sheep...uh, follower.:cool:

That's an interesting point Bruce......but y'know there are also musicians and doctors in the Middle East. Playwrites, poets, artists and authors too.

I mean after the Moors were driven out of Spain. :p

"Some says yes, and some says absolutely." -- Walt Kelly

And in place of this (pretty much the standard for international diplomacy for the past five centuries or so) you'd do... what?

That's the problem with the people who take this approach to What To Do About It All -- damned seldom do workable alternatives emerge from these people's minds.

In Iraq? Absolutely nothing. It wasn't any of our business. Regardless of whichever of the myriad of reasons you happen to subscribe to for our "need" to invade Iraq, application of any of them as "standard international diplomacy" is about as intelligent as the current desire of The United States to fight an ideology as an army. Applying it in one instance is going to have negative repercussions for decades to come. Applying it everywhere would be suicide.

I almost said we're the ones that started this mess decades ago, but the situation we've entangled ourselves in and cannot remove ourselves from until we build a stable country, essentially from the ground up, was absolutely avoidable.

Again, I'd love to know who you think we're going to "make friends with" in the Middle East next and how you think we should do it. I tend to think we could have made fewer enemies by leaving Iraq alone.

Sure, but how can you make money that way? war is good business. :rolleyes:

The enemies we've made, were, I think, enemies already without any input from us. Are not the troublemakers a crew of bigots? -- for it is the religious bigotry of our opponents I find their most striking feature.

Never forget, too, how often it is in policy that one is presented only with a choice of blunders -- in which case probably the best choice becomes to choose that blunder from which one's policy may best recover. This isn't a science; never has been.

One should not, I think, be afraid of "making enemies" -- some greedy, sociopathic Lider Maximo will always be found kicking up a fuss precisely because he's a greedy sociopath.

The remedy for these people is usually either two bullets transecting the cranium or blowing them from the muzzle of a field gun. Their sort doesn't quit without getting Ceausescu-ed.

We might want to be careful about sending all our money in that direction. In 2006, the National Energy Board, Canada's regulatory agency, did start to look more closely at U.S. markets. However, prior to mid-2006 the focus was on shipping crude to Asia, with a pipeline from Alberta to the Pacific coast due for completion in 2009. Prices in the U.S. have risen; if they rise in Asia again, the crude will go there. Canada will be determined not to commit itself to primarily U.S. sales.

MOOPS! They're the MOOPS!

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Of course they didn't become enemies with input from us -- most of the money and weapons went through Pakistani ISI agents, first. I'd say the influence on the Iraqi public and political groups we're having right now is pretty damn direct, though.

Oh, oh, please tell me how we can best recover from this. I'd still love to hear more about friend making through these actions, but now I'm really interested to hear how not getting into this in the first place would have been a "blunder" more difficult to recover from than the shit we've firmly embedded ourselves in, now. What thought process, in your mind, makes this and this invasion and the decades of fallout/political instability to come worth it? Do you even see the same colors everyone else does?

Well, you certainly leave little doubt that your version of "international policy" boils down to little more than memories of your previous military training. Besides countries that present an imaginary threat, would you care to mention what other worldly problems would be best solved with ammunition? Who else that hasn't attacked us needs to have our boots on their soil?

"Imaginary threat" is an interestingly head-in-the-sand way to describe an Iraq that first attacked Iran, and then some years later attacked Kuwait. Real peaceable, real quiet, and a really good global village citizen, wasn't ol' Saddam? Just what would have sufficiently demonstrated his bad character if it were up to you? It's this sort of absurdity that makes the antiwar crowd such a lot of dopes. You can't figure out when force is actually called for -- demanding, or purporting to demand, an impossible, indeed nonhuman, standard of, uh, proof. It doesn't look like getting raped bent over your own rider mowers would suffice. Talks? Not that much negotion goes on during rapes, IMHO.

My position has a more elegant simplicity to it.

What you fail to recognize, and what by contrast I appreciate fully, is that we took Iraq out happily before Saddam could build himself into either the Emperor of Oil, or some new edition of Nebuchadnezzar -- the none-too-smart still try and follow the imperial paradigm, as they don't understand nor respect the virtues of free trade and a world economy so based. Saddam, whose career most resembled that of a Mafioso who made Godfather, crossed with a Soviet-style purge or two, should be entered among those none-too-brights.

Keep in mind: the whole of the human world's political troubles spring from the un-democracies. Democracies not only are more easily richer, they behave better too. The less a country is a democracy, the worse it behaves, as a rule -- and for a clear example, we may look to Saddam's Iraq and the last, er, election. A dog-and-pony show that everyone went along with that they might survive, par for the course for an un-democracy. I don't think you have personal experience of such a social order, or I'd hardly have to work this hard to persuade you.

The answer to your rhetorical question is EVERYBODY who isn't a democracy needs our boots or someone's all over them -- make them tired of being anything but a democratic republic, or a republican democracy.