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Originally Posted by willravel
You're call I suppose. Agree to disagree, respectfully.
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Works for me. Bush's reasons were never mine anyway...they just accomplished something that I thought should've already happened.
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Originally Posted by willravel
You do understand that the single most destabilizing factor in the Middle East is the West, right? It's not Palestinians. It's those who have decided to base their economic strength partially (or solely) on resources that don't belong to them.
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I can agree that meddling by the West has been/is/and will be a huge part of the destabilization of the Middle East. In fact, I wouldn't be averse to the US drastically reducing - or even eliminating - the military aid it gives to Israel.
Access to resources, however, has been a cause of human strife for longer as long as there has been a human race. Should the OPEC nations have refused to sell the economic powers of the West thier oil, and denied themselves the revenue? Should the Western economies have voluntarily scaled themselves back, simply because their energy demands outdistranced their domestic energy resources?
How the area was destabilized is not the pertinent issues here. In my mind, there is a real opportunity to work out an Israeil-Paletinian peace, even back then. And Saddam's offering of a bounty to families of suicide bombers seemed to me to be one of the wedges driven between the two sides to prevent peace.