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>>>They can't make the choices based on the wishes of people who don't understand the situation. This was very true in the Cold War and it is equally true now. The threat of Islamo-fascism is very very real. It is not based on a misunderstanding. In fact, if we understood them better and they understood us better the divide would only be greater and the struggle would intensify. It would certainly cause our side to be more aggressive.
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>>Since when did the US come to understand this threat? Because in the previous decade it was helping the same mujahedeen all over the place - my old place, I mean. And it still points a finger at Russia for dealing with them in Chechnya.
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>A question of greater risk. This would be like saying in 1943 we didn't understand one day Stalin would be a problem. But in 1980 we didn't know the Cold War would be all over except for the blackmarketing of the Soviet arsenal in ten years. And at that time it was a pretty safe bet that Islamic ire was going to focus on USSR for a while - they were, after all, oppressing a lot more Muslims within their own border and all we were doing was propping a lot of corrupt sheiks in places where there wasn't exactly a viable alternative anyway. (Saudi Arabia without the house of Saud would still be some kind of horror show out of the middle ages. )

You get a modernized horror show instead :).

I still don't understand how could the complete apparatus of US Services buy into this story that somehow Tuđman in Croatia, a proven Holocaust denier and a person with a lot of sympathies for his predecessors from 1941, and Izetbegović in Bosnia, whose book was an open proposal for establishing an Islamic state, and who more or less openly received help from Iran and others (Osama bin Laden probably still has the Bosnian passport, and the mujahedeen are finally being expelled from there after 12+ years) were somehow on your side, while Milošević, who was pretty much the same piece of work as they, was the master villain. The official story is that they played PR much better, while he played PR to the "the worse, the better" tune. That may be an official explanation, but I'm not buying that - CIA should have known better. German Services knew, the French knew, but nobody listened. So in the end you get the KLA classified as a terrorist organization by FBI and at the same time receiving lots of aid from the military and CIA. That's what I don't get.

>>All true except - what was it that was needed to accomplish? Saddam was a toothless tiger. The country was in apathy, just like any country gets after a decade of sanctions. Going there in the first place was the first catastrophic decision (which was made in September 2001, IIRC), everything else followed.
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>The problem was we didn't do the first Gulf War as what it should have been - a war for oil. It would have been a very good time to make a deal with the Kuwaitis - those who liberate you get oil at $15 a barrel forever ( and remember what happened to Hamlin when they didn't pay the Piper ) <g>

That's assuming that the right of the might is the underlying principle of the international relations. If it is, why not simply occupy the whole world and stop pretending? May turn out cheaper.

>You will get no argument from me about Saudi Arabia not being our friend. I was rather hoping the purpose of the bases in Iraq was to offer us options.

I still don't understand why would any soldier on any foreign soil be treated as anything but a, well, a soldier of a foreign country, ergo occupier, ergo a legal target for any rebellion which may be trying to liberate the country.

>>And, as for leadership coming from somewhere else - there were plenty of initiatives coming from elsewhere, and what's on the record there? How did the US respond?
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>I hope you don't mean the United Nations? Do you think we need another Kellog-Briand pact? Perhaps some Security Council resolution forbidding people from doing bad things?

There's the incentive on the table to reform the SC (not South Carolina :). What's the reaction here? I didn't hear much, if any.

There were many offers to mediate on Middle East, specially around Palestine, but they were largely ignored by the US. Ms. Rice's reaction last summer was not just a show of NIH syndrome. Also, during the 1999 bombing, we heard a lot of stories of European generals being fed up by American generals bossing them around.

>I will certainly grant you that our disfunctional relationship with those who have never accomplished anything as a culture other than to have lived someplace when somebody else who had invented things that had a use for it discovered oil under their sand is troubling.

They may have lost it during the colonization, but Arabs were a proud civilization, probably far ahead of Europe during the Dark Ages - which were dark only in Christian countries. Just look at their influence on Spain while they kept parts of it, or their invention of algebra (yes, it's "al gebr al mukabala" - "about moving from one side (of equation) to the other"), advances in astronomy, navigation, medicine and, let's not forget, Renaissance wouldn't have been possible had the Arabs lost the Greek originals and their transcripts. But they kept them and studied them, and delivered them to Europe when the time came.