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fcadcock, you sound like the same tired propaganda that is all over the mass media. It has no truth to it.

The Christians in Kosovo had it done to them just as much if not more than the other way around. But we hardly hear about it. Why is that? Someone has an agenda? Christians have been brutalized by Muslims for centuries in that part of the world.

It is very easy to sit in a well sheltered country and theorize that Christians elsewhere are free to leave or free to get killed or free to have their organs stolen or free to give up their land or free to be turned into slaves. Doesn't sound like much of a freedom to me. In reality, Christianity is being wiped out in the Middle East. And we are largely to blame.

In the Middle East, those "freedom fighters" you speak of are merely CIA funded islamist thugs that are ten times worse than the oppressive governments they aim to replace. So it logically followed that the plight of the Christians got ten times worse. It was the only possible outcome.
Many of these "uprisings" would have never happened were it not for our instigation or open interference/occupation, because our empire feels the need to gain new geopolitical footholds with complete disregard for local populations.

"Syrian jihadists use local populations as a human shield for their rat warfare, and we applaud and arm them."  This is precisely what is going on. The terrorists take over urban neighborhoods and hide behind the civilian population. BTW, lots of those terrorists are foreign jihadist fighters that come from places like Saudi Arabia.
The US government would shell our own neighborhoods in much the same way if we had foreign armed terrorists occupy whole city blocks and attack the police and others. Don't kid yourself. "Peaceful protestors" is a manufactured lie. This is not what is actually happening.

NATO air strikes have likely killed more Libyan civilians than did the Gaddafi forces. And then there are all those deaths at the hands of the islamist terrorists, codename "peaceful protestors". So the notion that we were there for humanitarian purposes does not hold water. Regime change at any cost is the name of the game. Locals don’t matter.

If we know full well that one oppressive government will be replaced with a worse one, how is it caring for the locals or spreading freedom? If Saddam killed a few thousand of his own people, but there are over 1 million Iraqis killed as the result of our occupation, how was this better for the Iraqis? And the killings will still go on for quite some time.

Turn off FAUX television and maybe you will begin seeing things for what they are, instead of repeating the same old falsehood. The situation on the ground does not support your claims that things are changing for the better in that region, but just the opposite is true.

fcadcock, you sound like the same tired propaganda that is all over the mass media. It has no truth to it.

Turn off FAUX television and maybe you will begin seeing things for what they are, instead of repeating the same old falsehood. The situation on the ground does not support your claims that things are changing for the better in that region, but just the opposite is true.

I don't need Fox news.  I spent the better part of the last decade on the ground in the middle east.  First with the Army, and then with the defense department investigating terrorist bomb-makers.  You speak of the "situation on the ground" through third and fourth party news services.  I left my own blood on the very ground you're reading about on numerous occasions.  When you read about a bombing or terrorist camp uncovered in that part of the world, chances are either I or one of my close friends was there at some point.

The honest truth is that the vast majority of the people in the middle east are great people.  They don't want violence in their streets or any others.  But they don't like Americans showing up in their neighborhoods because violence follows us like seagulls follow ships.  They want us to come home and stop sticking our fingers in their business.  For the most part, I have to agree.  Except in situations like Iran who is looking into building nuclear weapons, we should try to keep out of their business and stop telling them what they should do unless they ask for it.  How would you like China telling us that unless we allowed homosexual marriage and adopted a 1 child policy they would call up our debt and stop buying new debt.  It would cause a war.  We have done the exact same thing to the muslim countries since the end of WW1 when we demolished the ottoman empire and created them as separate nations.

The story of what's going on over there isn't some 2 second sound bite or photograph.  It's been going on for hundreds of years and is extremely complex.  Some of the people I met there told stories of the cruisades as if they had happened just a generation or two ago. These people have a long memory and we will be paying for the things we have done for a very long time.  Truth be told, Unless Israel starts lobbing nukes or moabs into every major city in the region soon, they're as good as gone already.  The only difference between their fate and ours is an ocean.

JP, I'm done with this thread, I'm tired and need to sleep.  I hope you have a great Monday tomorrow, but please don't bother me with anything unless you're sure you know what you're talking about.  That means this conversation should be done.

We would have absolutely no interest in Afghanistan except for the Taliban and Al Queda connection. Not to mention that our presense there gives us a presense on Iran's Eastern border, as our presense in Iraq gives us a presense on Iran's Western border. (Not an accident in my opinion). Saudi Arabia IS repressive and oppressive, but is a major supplier of oil, which is the life blood of the world. Without that, we could tell them to pound sand.By the way, the Saudi Royal family is about as scared of Iran as anyone else. And they should be.

Yes, we should have intervened in Sudan, but oil is a big player in that morass also. Our regime change ploys have been for our own protection and little to do with Democracy, though it is arguable that a Democratic freedom loving state is less likely to be problems like we have seen with the dictatorial nutcases in the world.

Depends. If you compare the US to countries like Canada, Australia, UK, and many European countries, then no. Certainly however, the US has greater freedom than countries that have been crippled with war, tyrannical governments, and deep poverty.

Aside from nanny state entitlements (that they can't afford) in places like Canada, UK and many European countries, how do they have greater freedom than the USA? Will America have greater freedoms or less when we become like Greece, Italy or Spain and teeter on the cusp of bankruptcy?

Yeah, any oil man will tell you we shoulda had an energy policy in place especially from 1973 forward. We just kept kicking the can down the road.

Jaime, of course you are absolutely right, we should have had a much better energy policy in place for decades.
And it would have masked over the more fundamental problems for a while, and saved some REAL lives too.
But be it as it may, whatever circumstances we are in, our actions speak to our character.
More and more we look like some super rich gangster driving down the road and stopping to rob some pennies out a beggar's hat.
Considering how much better off we are then the nations we rob, it makes our behavior much more despicable.
IMHO

I don't think we look like gangsters at all. If we had taken Iraqi oil - maybe so. If we had told Japan and Germany to eat cake after WWII, maybe so, People like Imanutjob in Iran, Saddam in Iraq, etc etc are dispicable. With a proper energy policy, we could tell all the oil rich Arab nations to poind sand, provided they don't foster terrorism against us or threaten the interests of the rest of the world - being of course the free flow of oil. We would have had no interest at all in Afghanistan if not for 911. And we would not have unduly feared what Saddam might have done if not for the appalling successful mayhem of a handful of evil folks with box cutters, much less a dirty bomb or a biological weapon. Saddam wasn't involved in 911 presumably, but the POSSIBILITY of what he might do being the nutcase he was, was untenable at the time. It's like if out here in my area, if you discover a nest of rattlesnakes under your house, you DO something about it, and not wait for the inevitable. You don't hope and pray that a rattlesnake does not get inside the house and jeopardize your family. We did wait and postpone prior to 911 with the Cole incident and the 1993 WTC bombing and many other incidents thereby emboldening the rattlesnakes to do what they would inevitably do. We were not dispacable, the rattlesnakes of terrorism were.

No, pretty much every intelligence agency in the world thought Saddam had WMD. I think he did and he moved them, likely to Syria with the Russians help, specifically following a large earthquake where Saddam hid his true intentions by the appearance of truck convoys of "flood aid" to Syria in 2002, actually weaponry. Why that is such an improbably thing to some I will never understand. All Saddam had to do was cooperate with the international inspectors and he refused. He knew the jig was up in his heart, but hoped America would knuckle under as they had before. Heck we politely left him in power in the first Gulf War, obviously surprising to him, emboldening him to be more brash.  

We have never taken anyone's oil Libya or Iraq. We haven't "expropriated" anyone's oil. American ingenuity preserved Kuwait's oil after the hundreds of fires set by Saddam. We preserved it for THEIR use. We didn't take it.

And yes, 30 years of previous administration's (beginning primarily with Carter and continuing through Clinton) failure to deal with the rattlesnake nest IS why 911 happened. The evil ones understand only power, and we exhibited weakness when flaunted.

We had nothing to fear from Saddam using WMD against us BUT, with the spectre of him giving a biological weapon or dirty bomb material to an eager terrorist group WAS most certainly a reasonable fear.

The flow of oil has been the reason for unstable world events since oil was first discovered. Ensuring the free flow of the world's lifeline most certainly prevents other motivations for war, like starvation and self preservation of folks that don't have much oil and depend on the world's supply.

There was no sinister motivation for Iraq other than a President was sworn to protect his citizenry the best way he could while face with unprecedented and totally discombulated means. We had never faced such an ominous and uncontrollable or unrespondable situation like radical Islam had presented. Especially with our open society and borders.

We do live in a global economy and society, and when there are trouble makers, the powerful good guys, (us by the way) are depended on by the rest of the world, whether right or wrong. I don't want us to be the world's policeman, but we do bear responsibility for keeping the world from descending into chaos, I believe. Just like we did in WWII. The only difference was that the people we were fighting fought under a flag with particular uniforms on. Our parents saved the world. They could have taken the selfish route and thumbed their noses, but they didn't. Our country did the right thing. As they most times do, and I am thankful for that.

We are doing and have done the right thing concerning the war on terror. I salute Obama for at least continuing the drone attacks on the terrorist and especially for taking out Bin Laden. He has also apparently seen the light on the Gitmo thing and dropped his demand to close it. We are at war and will remain at war for at least a couple of decades, I believe.