OT: Kellzey (Political satire & opinion), Just wanted to tell you Options

[Curvie Roadlover]

I love your new avatar. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smilie_pokal.gif) (IMG:style_emoticons/default/lol2.gif)

[KaptKaos]

Curvie,

I do not know the motives of other countries. I do know that the French, the Germans and the Russians had a lot of business dealings with Iraq. I also know that the Mulim population of France is large and growing rapidly. Do these factors mitigate their position? I do not know, but these are fair questions to ask.

Neville Chamberlain was the PM of the UK in that late 1930s. "Peace in our time" was his infamous quote. He felt that appeasment of Nazi Germany was the best approach. Clearly he was proven wrong. Chamberlain's sentiments were the prevailing ones of the day. Nazi Germany was admonished many times before and AFTER they took Poland. They rolled into Poland and they got a good talking to. Why should they stop if that's all people were willing to do to stop them. Why would the extremists stop?

In my opinion, leadership is doing what is right regardless of the what people might think. Leaders need to make the toughest decisions, and suffer the consequences of them. That is why we have them. If the decisions are too easy to make, then they should not be made by the President. The President should be making the hardest decisions on the planet. The things the President needs to decide upon must be the most gut wrenching, touturous, challenging and difficult decisions that anyone should have to make. That's the job. Would it be easier to pull out of Iraq and Afganistan, certainly. Would that be good leadership?

I do not assume that our current strategy will bring us security. The only other strategy put forth has been isolationism. I know that isolationism will not work, so what else should we do? I think we have seen that Europe, other than the UK, have little stomache for this. If we get attacked again, what should we expect our allies in Europe to do?

Lastly, you wrote:

"I fear that the attitude"We're the USA, We'll do whatever we want wherever we want regardless of what the U.N. or anybody else thinks," just breeds more hatred towards us in the world and makes more future terrorists bent on causing us pain."

The USA has a long history of supporting govenments in the Middle East. We have supported them for political reasons, oil and strategic purposes. We prop up the Saudis, we supported the Shah in Iran, we pay lots of money to Qatar for operations support, we supported Afganistan in their war with the USSR, and we currently support Isreal. Of all of these, the only one that we should be doing is supporting Isreal as they are the only true deomcracy in the region. This should not change. By virtue of this fact alone, we are the target of extremists. If we were to get out of the Middle East, but still support Isreal, it wouldn't change anything. Isreal is the the cornerstone of this problem and it is the best hope for the Middle East.

- Joe