Hi Bob,

Much of what you assert has some credibility, but it may not be all that relevant. Has it occurred that sometimes, in some situations, the US has little power (wash my mouth out !) on the one hand - and on the other, that 1.5 billion Muslims may have their own world-views, their own internal dynamics, their own internal disputes and controversies, their own detailed 'understandings' of their own religion and its role in the modern world ?

As well, from an ethnic point of view, Arabs have been feeling aggrieved for some time, well, since the Crusades really, against the west. They may see that their rightful place is as world leaders - after all, that worked for hundreds of years after Muhammed. And force was seen as a legitimate means of asserting that power, the sword, slavery or dhimmitude for non-believers, the absolute power of the Sultan.

So on the one hand, a long-held sense of grievance, and on the other, for both Moslems an for Arabs, a sense of their superiority, the limelight of which has been, they would suspect, 'stolen' by the West. There's enough material there for any number of endogenous anti-Western movements, even while they were so totally dependent on the technology that it has spawned.

Yes, maybe the US contributed to the creation of this pack of wild dogs, but - if you can put aside your conspiracy theories - that was a long time ago: they have very little power to control or even manoeuvre in the current Syria-Iraq situation against ISIS. They had ideas about the universality of democratic possibilities (naive, as we now can see, with hindsight) about an Arab Spring, but in the context of a history of nothing but absolutism in both secular and religious rule, they were out of their depth.

Hence Putin - another dictator totally familiar and comfortable with dictatorships - is outplaying them now. No, the US is not all-powerful and never has been and never can be, in the Middle East.

Joe

Hi Joe, that presumes the US wants to spread democracy in the Middle East.

I think one has to be incredibly naive to accept this. The trick is to look at what they do, rather than listen to what they say.

If you look at what the US has been doing, you see it fights wars of aggression sometimes overtly, sometimes covertly to further the interests of big business. They have used their military power to overthrow many democratically elected governments who voted "irresponsibly" in ways that hurt American business interests.

Egs of DEMOCRATICALLY elected governments covertly overthrown by US/CIA.

Iran in 1953
Guatamala in 1954
Congo in 1961
Brazil in 1964
Chile in 1973
Haiti in 1994 and 2001
failed coup in Venezuala 2002

I think a better hypothesis is that their military interventions are designed to spread chaos and destabilise the Middle East.

Here is a Youtube clip of Dick Cheney in 1994 where he points out that removing Saddam Hussein would be a disaster if there was nothing to put in it's place - it would destabilise the whole region.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YENbElb5-xY

Dick Cheney: "No.... Once you got to Iraq and took it over, took down Saddam Hussein's government, then what are you going to put in its place? That's a very volatile part of the world, and if you take down the central government of Iraq, you could very easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off: part of it, the Syrians would like to have to the west, part of it -- eastern Iraq -- the Iranians would like to claim, they fought over it for eight years. In the north you've got the Kurds, and if the Kurds spin loose and join with the Kurds in Turkey, then you threaten the territorial integrity of Turkey."

Now the US has taken down not just Saddam Hussein in Iraq (2003) but Col Gaddafi in Libya (2011) and they have spent the last 4 years unsuccessfully trying to oust Assad from Syria. And you still think they are trying to spread freedom and democracy?

" And you still think they are trying to spread freedom and democracy?"

BJelly, some people will believe anything especially the braindead admirers of the U.S.

The U.S. deserves universal condemnation. It is a greedy rogue nation the like of which the world has never seen. Even Germany didn't pretend it was going to save the world and spread freedom and democracy!

The US is pretty powerful.

It has by far the world's largest military force - it is bigger than the next 10 countries COMBINED - and that includes some of it's rivals such as China and Russia as well as allies, UK, Saudi Arabia, France and Germany.
http://breakingdefense.com/2012/03/the-military-imbalance-how-the-u-s-outspends-the-world/

That doesn't include the many private contractors or mercenaries (PMCs) it uses abroad - like Xe/Blackwater and DynCorp.

That also doesn't include the massive amount of funding the CIA gets for its covert operations through its drug running.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-real-drug-lords-a-brief-history-of-cia-involvement-in-the-drug-trade/10013

The CIA was responsible for trafficking crack cocaine into black neighbourhoods in the 1980s - remember the Iran-Contra affair? The crack came from Nicaragua which funded the CIA backed Contras, because the CIA couldn't get legitimate government funding due to the Boland ammendment. It is no accident that opium poppy production went down under the Taliban, but has gone up since the US invaded Afghanistan. it is no accident that Bolivia's coco production has plummeted since they stopped accepting US DEA's "help" and have implemented their own scheme.

Bob & David,

No, I'm suggesting only that the US thought it could capitalise on any movements towards democracy in Arab countries, if only because, as they thought, that would open up those countries to all sorts of opportunities for them that may not be available under dictatorships which favoured other powers such as Russia or Iran or China.

So the questions now are: should the US set out to help destroy ISIS ? Should it co-ordinate its activities with Russia, Iran and Syria to wipe out the Islamo-fascists ? And what might happen once that has been done, in a few years' time ?

Any ideas ? Or are you content to just snipe from your caves ?

Joe

Hi Joe, here is what I said on page 7 about how to deal with ISIS
"To get rid of these Islamofascists, we need to get our allies like Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey to stop supporting them. And the US needs to stop "accidentally" dropping supplies to them."

We could help Russia defend the Assad regime, against ISIS, but considering that the US and its allies supported Al Qaeda and aided the rise of ISIS, in order to remove Assad from power, that may be a little awkward. But the US has a gift for hypocrisy and with a compliant MSM to keep information like the explosive interview below off the front or even back pages of the newspapers, they may decide to play it that way.

As I've posted before, but I will post it again, the interview ret lieutenant general Michael T Flynn, where he admitted that as head of the US Defense Intelligence Agency he saw an intelligence report in August 2012 that the US was supporting radical muslim groups eg the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Nusra, Al Qaeda (the so-called moderate Muslims the US was assisting) to help oust the Assad regime in Syria - as well as the risk these groups might form a calaphate, but nothing was done - not just ignored, but worse.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SG3j8OYKgn4 - need to go 8 minutes into interview.