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Cleaning up the middle east

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Cleaning up the middle east

The thugocracies can no longer be tolerated

from JoeUser Forums

There's an old Star Trek episode in which Kirk and crew beam down to a planet that had been influenced by organized crime in Chicago. A whole planet run by organized crime.  It made for a kind of silly episode since the concept was so absurd.

And yet much of the population in the middle east lives in an environment in which organized crime runs their daily lives.  This outstanding article (posted at USS Clueless) gives a detailed look at the situation in that region.

For all the idiotic claims that US action was driven by the OOOOIILLL, it is easy to forget that the combined GNP of all the middle east, with all their oil wealth is less than half that of California alone. Needless to say, no one ever accused anti-war protesters of being particularly bright. Not too many business majors in the anti-war crowd I suspect.

The middle east is just such a mess. And they have no one to blame but themselves. An apathetic population has allowed gangsterism to take over.  For all the talk about Islam as a religion of peace, you don't see too many heads being chopped off elsewhere.  The American left and intelligentsia in Europe are always ready to excuse the monstrous behavior on public display in the middle east. It's almost a politically correct form of racism. As if the Islamic world are childlike in their understanding of adult civilized behavior and hence can be excused.  You can imagine the world reaction would be if Americans started arbitrarily rounding up Muslims and chopped off their heads. Heck, imagine the damage even a hundred fanatical Americans, well armed and trained could do throughout the Muslim world.  Luckily for them, Americans do behave in an adult civilized way.

Those who oppose US actions in the middle east haven't come forward with any constructive alternatives to current US actions. At best, we get impotent whining about Israel -- as if a country of a dozen million can be blamed for the vile behavior occurring in countries with a combined population of around 400 million.

Something has to be done. The corruption of the thugocracies in the middle east is affecting the rest of the world now as 9/11 made painfully clear.  I can't say I'm terribly happy with how the US occupation in Iraq has gone but I certainly can't think of any realistic alternatives than aggressive military action in the middle east to reshape it so that order and the rule of law can be firmly established in that part of the world and the hateful extremists can be weeded out.

We tried doing nothing for 8 years and that didn't work out too well. I fear that things are going to get a lot bloodier all around before things get better.

7,020 views 28 replies
Reply #26 from JoeUser Forums Top
P.S. I see what you are saying, I just don't think there is room for self-doubt in this case. When you personally doubt yourself, you do it in seconds or minutes, and then you make up your mind. If our representitive society starts to rethink its policies it will be years of bandying and playing the devil's advocate while they continue to lop people's heads off.

I don't doubt that you may be right, but I think we can risk embarassment and regret if the outcome is a fundamental change in how the mainstream Middle East views terrorism. When it is as hard to fuction as a terrorist in Syria as it is in the US, I think you'll see a brighter, happier, more prosperous Middle East. These people have been victimized and they don't even know it.
Reply #27 from JoeUser Forums Top

I just wrote an article about dehumanizing the middle east.

The Arab world is effectively dehumanizing themselves. I was at a neighborhood party and the subject came up repeatedly. These are mostly non-political people of considerable means and the increasing consensus is that if they're not human enough to recognize the barbarity of cutting the heads off of people then perhaps the solution is to just exterminate the whole lot of them.  Turn troubled cities in Iraq into radioactive waste.

I was on the side of restraint arguing that such an act would lower us to their level. But the fact is, these actions over there are convincing a growing number of Americans that Arabs are an alien, slightly less than human culture in which the normal restraints shouldn't be reserved for any longer.

Such talk makes me fear more for the citizens of the middle east than for Americans. Despite what some of the idiotic left wingers spout out, Bush and the US aren't barbaric. But I can envision scenarios in which barbarism was carried out.  After all, the US could wipe out every man woman and child in the middle east pretty easily without any dramatic real world push back (i.e. there's nothing stopping the US from doing this than our own humanity).

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