Tag: Middle East

And if anyone says the analogy between Vietnam and the current conflict is debatable, that’s just the point. Rather than a rush to yet more war, it’s time to have a real national debate on the subject.

“What we need is a Higher World Order where building nations is more profitable than destroying them; conducting fair trade with other nations is more mutually beneficial than occupying them and stealing their resources; and living in a multi-polar world is more peaceful and profitable than one nation hopelessly clinging on to a dangerous fantasy of a unipolar world.”

We can't defend everything, not without losing everything in the process. We should be ashamed to be such a fear-based society here in the home of the brave.

Expanding the base infrastructure in the Greater Middle East will only perpetuate a militarized foreign policy premised on assumptions about the efficacy of war that should have been discredited long ago.

Ted Cruz may be able to build up his poll numbers by promising to carpet bomb foreigners in the Middle East of whom we are fearful, but at least we know that biology doesn’t have to dictate our response. Our brains don’t have to stay in the Stone Age.

“Iraqis, now Syrians, and by extension even the Europeans who are now awash in refugees from the wars we help foment, and the US taxpayer, and, documented by a Brown University study, the US job seeker—these are the losers.”

Peter Van Buren did something no US diplomat is allowed to do. He told the truth and told it to the wrong people – us. Our government is not in the habit of telling us – the governed – what it's up to.

Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, is “in the process of setting the agenda in Syria.” It is time nations joined together to figure out a solution to take down ISIS instead of working solo.

For a rich and powerful nation to conclude that it has no choice but to engage in quasi-permanent armed conflict in the far reaches of the planet represents the height of folly. Power confers choice.

We waded into conflicts in the Middle East we did not understand, propelled forward by fantasy. And our folly spawned a death spiral of political, social and economic collapse, widespread poverty, massive displacement, misery and radical jihadism.