Actually, i think i'm in the sad position to say that US and Israel policies pose a much bigger risk to my country than the Arab world and have been so for a few decades. In a recent visit by the Israeli PM to Athens, among the issues discussed was a possible attack against Iran. Our "genius" of a PM is supposedly sympathetic to the proposed plan. So, 6 months from now 100 IAF aircraft will stage through Greece and Bulgaria to Georgia, where from they will strike against Iran.
What does this accomplish for the debt-ridden state of Greece? It cuts us off from states like France who have been the most supportive towards our troubles (financial and territorial), severes any and all ties with Russia and China which have at times served valuably as a counter-balance against our allies screwing us over, leaves us to the mercy of the US since this will probably be an operation that's not officially sanctioned by them and most of all, it infuriates the entire of the Arab world into backing Turkey in its territorial claims against Greece.
Israel gets what it wants, which is nuclear monopoly in the middle east, the US gets someone else to look bad by doing the dirty work and we get royally shafted every which way imaginable. So, since we're deep in debt and can't support military expenses for defensive posturing to prevent a war, our government starts negotiating and cedes half of our mineral wealth in the Aegean sea to neighboring states, wealth that could have been used to gradually pull us out and away from the financial crisis. Not to mention the influx of mulsim immigrants from the middle east who get trapped in Greece while waiting for political asylum applications to get approved, living in squalor in the streets of the capital or in detention centers in various islands. That's a prime pool for an islamic militant group to recruit from and thank God, we have many in the Balkans thanks to the NATO interventions in Yugoslavia (more on this later).
Essentially, going into this leaves us with all the baggage of a war that's not our business to wage and none of the benefits. Excuse me for saying so, but it feels like i'm being dragged in to clean someone else's dirty poop
I think Iran wants nukes mostly for posturing and it's an iron-grip state. I'm more concerned with Pakistan's nukes, a supposedly US-friendly state where the local secret service actively plays taliban and US agencies against each other at their whim. It's easier for a Pakistani nuke to fall at the hands of a loon than it would be for an Iranian one. It's just that if Iran gets nukes, Isreal won't be able to unilateraly bomb whoever they want anymore, or violate already agreed-upon points of peace negotiations by sending settlers to occupy arab settlements, or blockade the civilians of Gaza until they have no food and water, etc etc. That's what all the fuss is about really, nuclear monopoly equals impunity.
Someone mentioned the Kosovo war a few pages back. Well, the Kosovo war was not a case of "A invades B, let's go help B", but a case of "breakaway province in a state we consider Russia's lapdog in the soft spot of Europe, let's help it break away and weaken Russia's friends, mess up the possibility of an EU-Russia fuel deal for a few years and show those weaklings in Europe how it's done and why they need us, by flying 2/3 of the sorties ourselves in a show of force".
The US parallel would be the hispanic population of Texas taking up arms and asking for independence, the US army stepping in to face the guerrillas and an outside force bombing the civilian infrastructure of the entire US to force them to retreat, because they can't find the US army to bomb. All of you know about the mass graves or the allegations about them, but what most of you don't know is that it wasn't as one sided as CNN and the rest of the media made it out to be.
Funnily enough, when Russia did a somewhat similar thing with their invasion of Georgia, all of our countries were up in arms. And the reason i say "somewhat similar" and not "same" is that while Russia did in fact attack a sovereign state friendly to the west to help two break-away provinces gain independence (just as NATO did in the Kosovo war to harm a state with Russian ties), Russia also afforded a few points of "moral legalization" in the entire affair that NATO's wars have lacked altogether: 1) There were indigenous Russian citizens dying in the provinces in question, while there were never any NATO-member citizens in the middle east or the balkans before NATO send troops there
2) There was a clear ultimatum in the sense of " you have 2 days to stop shelling residential areas" and none of the usual "our hands are tied by the other side/we will liberate this and this" rhetoric that goes hand in hand with the euphemism and shifting of blame so prevalent in our wars.
3) Russia is a country that has never been afraid to put troops in harm's way. This way their military casualties are bigger, but overall the gain is substantial. Instead of prortacted bombing campaigns and calling in air support or an overkill amount of firepower to swat a mosquito on the wall that result in high civilian casualties and susbequent resentment from the local population, they send their footsoldiers first. A soldier can be killed, but he can also discriminate much better between a car and an APC from a distance of 100-200m, select an appropriate weapon and minimize civilian death, than can a camera mounted on a jet that's travelling at mach 0.8 and the smallest thing it has available is a 250kg HE bomb. They went in, did what they wanted to do in a week, and got out, minimizing the chance of protracted conflict and civilian death. If we were to talk about guts and why we lack them in the west, it wouldn't be because of not going to war, we go to a lot of them...it would be because we're too chicken to fight in a way like this that gives the moral high ground, putting the troops in harms way to prevent loss of life to non-combatants.
In the end, Kosovo was the culmination of the interventions in former Yugoslavia. What did these interventions accomplish? They created homogenous tracts of land to be inhabited by muslim populations in the soft underbelly of Europe. And while American flags soared high on many an occasion in Pristina or Sarajevo due to the instrumental role of the US in forming these state/political entitities, the bombing attacks in London and Madrid that occured a few years back where traced by Interpol agents to Bosnia and Kosovo.
Essentially, under the leadership of the US, NATO created in Europe what NATO is fighting against in the middle east
But instead of rooting out terrorism by making it worthwhile for the locals to support something else (or not have to turn to these groups for provision of basic amenities, which is what usually happens in the middle east), i wouldn't be surprised if 10 years from now NATO bombed into oblivion the balkan states that it bombed into creation 10 years ago. Remember those awful, baby-eating, bad Serbs our media propaganda machine was featuring back then? They've been receiving NATO financial aid to rebuild core portions of their armed forces, as early as 2-4 years ago. What forces? Special, counter-terrorist ones. So, while the western allies press for the recognition of the independence of Kosovo, the silent admission of "we f*ed up" is there in the military cooperation with the "bad guys" whom they bombed in the first place? Why would they cooperate with them? But of course, because they need them to take out the trash if and when the poo-poo hits the fan.
Am i the only one who sees this as a total failure to institute rational policies or even a non-scandalous use of resources (from money to lives)?
"We need to be there and tell people how to run their own country, so let's back A against B under some vague pretext, forget about him, then 10 years from now we'll back B against A because somehow the Russians have come to like A, but B is still holding a grudge against us from way back, so we're trying to find a 4rd party, C, to balance things out, but these guys are cozy with China, so we don't know what to do now but we can always send more troops or use more firepower, even if we don't know the reason why"....and the knee-jerk reactions continue ad-infinitum. There's no sense of schedule or long term planning at all, just a series of isolated brute-force approach incidents, which the instigator easily forgets but the ones on the receiving end remember for decades.
It seems like a black-and-white seesaw where the only possible outcomes are good (this must always coincide with us or our allies) and evil (which applies to whoever disagrees), but it's becoming clear that failure to see gray and recognize motives to the opposition is much of the cause for the failures of western policy as of late.
If we outright denounce the opponent's human nature, we've just shut ourselves off from the whole discussion of "why does he do this? what motivates him? what forces his hand, in case it's not voluntary?", which leads in failure to profile the opposition, or decide on a reasonable course of action. The solution is not simply "more firepower" when millions are willing to die for a cause we don't understand, simply because we're too lazy to study it.
That's why i don't believe for a second that it's about morality, good and evil. There's been so much use of double-standards, back-room dealing and backstabbing, even among allies, that everyone can see what it's about. Certain circles of power operate in the west and mostly within the US. These are not the countries/nations per se nor the fault of said naitons exclusively, they are like parasitic organisms that lve in a host nation/state. What happens is that they back their host so that it can become the biggest bully on the block, then when the time comes to split the spoils of war among the population, the parasites gulp up the majority of it and the cycle starts afresh. That's why your people are dying in a war over imaginary WMDs and real oil, but the access to Iraqi oil fields couldn't prevent the collapse of the economy...there are people who march and mobilize entire nations to kill,maim and steal from each other and split the trophies among themselves while we stand here debating the morality of wars that we'll be forced to fight for them.
