2016 Elections

[Mudhammam]

You can't just pretend like U.S. military intervention isn't the primary cause for the existence of groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda. The former are, after all, former members of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, which consisted of Ba'ath party loyalists in Saddam's regime... A regime we also propped up in the 80s before completely destabilizing the region with Dubya's invasion...What do we expect to occur when we go into Muslim nations and establish rulers who treat their people with absolutely no dignity?

The acute and the chronic in short. Ugly spectacles like the piles of naked bodies at Abu Ghraib don't help. It was this and the waterboardings in secret jails that soured me on Pres. Bush, whom I was willing to support on the initial action against the Taliban in Oct. 2001. It's arguable he should have stayed out of Iraq to begin with although impossible to predict what would have resulted. Presumably Uday would have inherited from Saddam and continued the extreme repression we now know was the only thing holding the lid on the place.

The chronic goes all the way back to Napoleon's entry into Egypt, beginning a 200-year run of shortsighted Western abuses in the Middle East. Yet we have to deal with the situation as it is today. The Taliban, Al-Qaeda, and Islamic State (indeed Al-Baghdadi split off from AQI  ca. 2009, see Wood in Atlantic Monthly) cannot be allowed to operate unopposed. I don't think we can negotiate with them as if they were legitimate players in the world system, either. While these groups feed on anti-Western resentment, it's not just the West and its pro-Western lackeys they hate. They literally want to return their societies to the 7th century. They may well have arisen sooner or later even had the West never become involved in the region.

When we're doing everything within our power to 1) pressure our "allies" and "partners" who are habitual human rights abusers to cease the deplorable actions they commit against their own people (which can never truly happen so long as our politicians are themselves beneficiaries of such tyrants and warlords and responsible for our own culture of abusive policies and actions), 2) support those who are poor and/or indoctrinated with economic aid and education, either by directly establishing relations with businesses and authorities in those countries able to effect change, or literally dropping books and food instead of bombs in those without any political stability, and 3) formulate a coherent strategy for not simply destroying cities and terrorist organizations that control them, but that helps establish actual systems of government that the common man, woman, and child will benefit from no matter what their color or creed is, then I will 4) support drone strikes and surveillance in a very limited way.