So it's being reported that the US has essentially stopped funding and arming who we thought were pro-western, America-friendly Syrian rebel groups. We first paid them to resist the al-Assad regime, and them we paid them to resist ISIS too. But we know that they'll just morph into another radical-Islamic splinter group of anti-western terrorism. Sooner or later they all do.
My surprise isn't that we stopped sending them tens of millions of taxpayer money and weapons, my surprised is that we were stupid enough to think there is such a thing as pro-western Islamic militants, to begin with. The only people in the middle east who we can "trust" to look out for our interests are the strong-man dictators who we generously bribe to do so. If they mistreat their people, do we really care, as long as it keeps our gasoline cheap and Israel relatively peaceful? I know I don't.
Saddam Hussein, Hosni Mubarak, Moammar Qaddafi, and currently Bashar al-Assad all are or were, ruthless dictators, but who were moderate secularists who could be bribed with US money to behave as we wanted. They also kept a tight leash on the Muslim radicals in their countries.
Why the US feels the need to meddle in these countries just because the peasants there are unhappy is anybody's guess. Are we really that desperate to appear to the world to be humanitarians who deliver freedom and democracy like Santa Clause, to the third world?
2 comments:
Saddam Hussein was not somebody we could continue to put up with. He invaded Kuwait, if you recall, and had to be expelled. We should have settled his business then; things would have been a lot better over the past 23 years. He was trying his best to shoot down our aircraft enforcing the "no fly zone" while cheating on the "oil for food" program and planning to acquire WMD's when we finally took care of him. The fact that we screwed up the years after taking him out in no way diminishes the danger he represented. The status quo was not sustainable. Of course, no one can prove a negative. If the Allies has taken out Hitler and the Nazis in 1936, no one today would be saying, "Wow, thank goodness we avoided having WW2 and the Holocaust!"
I agree that pushing Hussein out of Kuwait was definitely necessary and we were the only country willing to do it, but keeping him reigned in, rather than deposing him and imposing democracy on a country that doesn't understand it, would have been better for the Iraqi's, no?
I'm just saying I think the die was cast when we invaded Iraq in '02 or whenever. There was never going to be a different outcome other than a militant Islamic state or a no-man's land of chaos, just as there isn't going to be a different outcome in Libya, Egypt eventually, Syria, possibly Turkey, etc.
Secular dictators bring stability. Stability with the price tag of ruthless brutality, rape rooms, gassing people, etc.
I can sleep at night with a limited, localized amount of that if it keeps the US from being bogged down there intractably for decades....which is basically where we are.
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