Mate, you don't create a free Iraq by making it a killing ground for all sorts of different arab factions with you standing in the middle. You certainly don't create a free country anywhere by killing the people you're supposedly helping.
I live in a country where the boundaries between eastern and western lines of reasoning are pretty thin. I live close to these people you're upsetting, you're not. And if they get royally p***ed off and your guys are out of Iraq guess who they'll go for first...me, no matter if i've been tolerant to their different way of life since decades or even centuries. Why? Certainly not because they're muslims. I think it's because someone p***ed them off and left and now they have to vent their frustration somewhere.
As a citizen of a EU/Nato country i would kindly implore you pass this on to your leaders. Stop messing around in my hood, because when the going gets tough you'll just pack your bags and go and leave me to deal with your mess. Just like it happened in the Yugoslav wars, you were all up in arms about it and then you decided you want a different hotspot playground.
Guess who got left babysitting all those countries crawling with rogue nationalist factions? The EU. Now there's Afghanistan and Iraq and while we have no troops in the latter we do have a couple of hundred in Afghanistan but in non-combat jobs (mainly doctors and engineers). Now that it's getting out of hand there too you are asking me, who had no say in your decisions to get involved there in the first place, to risk my life for a flawed decision that your leaders made? Thanks but no thanks mate. Nobody fights other people's wars unless there's a suitable "villain" figure to make it their cause too. And i'm not convinced that the whole of the middle east is populated by extremists.
It's mostly populated by poor people ruled by guys that your administration puts in place, then discards them with a convenient excuse once they're spent. Poor people that are rightly annoyed (to put it mildly) at the so called "liberation" at gun point and the worst thing of all is that when it get's too hot your leadership tries to drag others in the fire. The war in the middle east is not a war against terror, it's a war to impose our way of life and our standards upon a vastly different culture, which only serves to ignite similar sentiments to the local population and make more of them susceptible to the very thing you're supposedly fighting in the first place...religious extremism. I'm not an atheist, but organised religion is not divine, it's a human organisation and as humans have flaws, so it does too. I believe in a higher power, but i don't believe in organised religion.
If you would allow me to generalise a bit for the sake of presenting an example, the reason a guy straps himself with TNT and blows himself up is because someone deprived him of every single reason to live so he can drive a 5.0 litre car. Religion is just a catalyst to that, not a cause.
To put in in a mathematical, "cold hard facts" type of context. Greece is less than a day from Yugoslavia and a couple of days from the Middle East. As a citizen of this country i have to accept a loss of state money to care for the refugee wave someone else is responsible for. I have to tolerate a rise of racism among the local authorities, because people lose their jobs to/get mugged/robbed by the starving refugees someone else sent packing. I have to lose even more state money, which is my own money actually, because the racist treatment that some of my idiot countrymen are exhibiting brings forth fines from the european human rights court. But if i look at the string of events and trace to the beginning, it's someone else who lit the fuse and he lives a few thousand miles away.
What's even better? The fact that i do all these things for him since i have no choice and his holier than thou ungrateful majesty sees fit to screw me over in every major aspect of international politics that have a bearing on my well being and still manage to call me an "ally" with a straight face.
And on top of all that, i have to die fighting for the people that caused all that?
This is the moderate view of US policies during the last couple of decades in Greece and it's also why recent polls show a 70% sympathy towards Russia in a EU/Nato country. The more extremist line of thought involves pelting the US embassy in Athens with anything ranging from coins and eggs to molotov cocktails. I don't condone it obviously, but i can certainly understand the frustration behind it.
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