VictortheMonarch
Victor the Crusader
Rather single-minded and arrogant, but true none the less. to give up on it entirely would be showing our neck.
What do you think the US's policy towards Israel should be?
- Thread starter WolfBear
- Start date
If you want free trade and less delays in production/resource exchange the Suez needs to remain open. So this is a fair point.
Not true at all. Should we have avoided the fight of WW2 w/Germany? Should we have ceded the Pacific to Japan? Should we let terrorist destroy our buildings and kill our citizens with no response?
I don't think you meant to be completely pacifistic with that statement, but is there a point where you see fighting as necessary?
Not wrong here. Current Islam in the ME is violent and definitely not tolerant. Apparent weakness invites aggression.
King Arts
Well-known member
Do I think we should have no. But you can be reasonable and think that we should. There is a good argument that no matter what the Nazis would not have been able to hold all of Europe, so why send Americans to die there? As for the Pacific again we only clashed with Japan because we wanted our empire there, and the Japanese wanted to make an empire there. If you are a hard core isolationist or then you can make the argument that we should not move one inch from our borders.
As for terrorism that is a problem you yourself made, by leaving your homeland or inviting in foreigners you give them an opportunity to attack you, how come Japan does not have any problems with radical Islam? According to their book they don't get the option of second class citizenship with extra taxes like Christians or Jews instead of conversion, they get the option of slavery, and death or conversion, since the Japanese are Shinto and Buddhists both Pagan polytheistic religions. It's because it's less about Islam itself and more targets of opportunity and politics.
The biggest problem with the ME is that they've wed their religion to their politics, and the politicians abuse their religion and followers to point them in certain directions.
King Arts
Well-known member
Is it abuse to mix religion and politics though? Assuming it's not corrupt. Let me say I'm not a Muslim, I would never abandon the religion of my forefathers, but damn if I can't respect Muslims from taking their religion seriously unlike many Christians.
The simple point is that in the Islamic world, separation of religion and state is a curious imported foreign concept at best, and outright blasphemy at worst, while in the west it was originally a political compromise reinforced by treaties after everyone finally got sick of the Protestant-Catholic wars and the sheer damage they caused, which over the last couple centuries, coupled with general reduction of religion's significance in average citizen's life, eventually became something so ingrained in the western culture that it became taken of granted, and few can even think of any alternative as realistic.
Funny enough, they have pretty similar issues to what Europe had when it took religion that seriously. But hey, Europe had to figure out its own solution, there was no UN to ask, beg, or bribe them to stop killing each other, no foreign humanitarian organizations to prevent famines resulting from everyone being too busy fighting or surviving, and no exotic, rich nations to welcome all the people who lost their livelihoods with access to a generous welfare state and path to citizenship.
LordsFire
Internet Wizard
Do you know anything about what Islam actually teaches? Its history and how it spread through the world?
Yes, but my point was not so much with the religion itself, but that the politician/religious leaders in charge don't give a crap as long as they remain in power and grow their wealth. Pretty much a universal thing for politicians, they just have a very convenient lever to pull on in order to move their people...no matter what their religion says.
It's gotten to the point that they're viewed almost with the same lense as the papacy was when it could not err.
It's gotten to the point that they're viewed almost with the same lense as the papacy was when it could not err.
Israel is normalizing relations with various Islamic nations now. Such normalization should help avoid fights entirely.
And our "fights" in the Middle East have almost nothing to do with Israel regardless of whether they were good ideas or not. The Persian Gulf War was about protecting Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and all of their juicy oil. The Iraq War wasn't undertaken "on behalf" of Israel but for other reasons completely. The Libyan Intervention was to ouster Qaddafi and grew out of the Arab Spring stuff. Libya wasn't a threat to Israel that America decided to secure the Jews from.
LordsFire
Internet Wizard
'Convert the world, if necessary use force, if the kufars still refuse, put them to the sword.'
This is the explicit teaching of Islam. There is no need for Islamic leaders to distort anything in order to turn muslims in that direction.
prinCZess
Warrior, Writer, Performer, Perv
If the US is going to faff about in the region (which our refusal to properly exploit domestic/North American oil makes virtually mandatory...or at very least makes guaranteed to happen by the DC rulers because of concerns of a 70s oil-embargo retread or second-order stuff of European effects because them turning to Russia is one the American politico class isn't going to abide), Israel is an objectively better ally--in both pragmatic and in principled terms--than Saudi Arabia, Turkey, or basically any other state in the region. Realignment in modern years has even made it an easier, less damaging one to maintain as other ME countries slowly thaw relations with Israel because they all hate them some Iran and the Jew is less threatening to them than the Shia.
Turkey (and the Shah's Iran) used to be somewhat better/more-useful allies in terms of the pragmatic sanction since Turkey was in NATO and could confront the USSR and Iran was a useful guardian of Russia's traditional path to cold-water ports...And in both cases there was even something to be said for the French-styled secularity of their regimes in contrast to the Saudis or others in the region...Of course, particularly in the case of Imperial Iran there were also compromises to principle in that SAVAK was some brutal enforcers...
Point being that both of those alternate-allies have self-destructed in many ways--Iran literally and Turkey by its gradual drift away from founding principles and towards being another run-of-the-mill ME strongman-nation.
More ideally, US middle-east interests would be so minimal because of domestic/closer oil and energy production that the relationship with Israel would gravitate only around how useful they are as a test-site for anti-missile systems and the relationship with Saudi Arabia and the other petrol states could be 'We do not care'.
But that would require Europe get off their hind-ends and become the guardians of the region for their own sake. And they're both intent on shooting themselves in the feet in terms of energy policies, and their last guardianship of the ME was not exactly competent.
Turkey (and the Shah's Iran) used to be somewhat better/more-useful allies in terms of the pragmatic sanction since Turkey was in NATO and could confront the USSR and Iran was a useful guardian of Russia's traditional path to cold-water ports...And in both cases there was even something to be said for the French-styled secularity of their regimes in contrast to the Saudis or others in the region...Of course, particularly in the case of Imperial Iran there were also compromises to principle in that SAVAK was some brutal enforcers...
Point being that both of those alternate-allies have self-destructed in many ways--Iran literally and Turkey by its gradual drift away from founding principles and towards being another run-of-the-mill ME strongman-nation.
More ideally, US middle-east interests would be so minimal because of domestic/closer oil and energy production that the relationship with Israel would gravitate only around how useful they are as a test-site for anti-missile systems and the relationship with Saudi Arabia and the other petrol states could be 'We do not care'.
But that would require Europe get off their hind-ends and become the guardians of the region for their own sake. And they're both intent on shooting themselves in the feet in terms of energy policies, and their last guardianship of the ME was not exactly competent.
Chiron
Well-known member
No we don't need to be top dog.
All we need is enough nuclear bombs to make real threats glow in the dark if they're stupid enough to fuck with us. Smaller threats like Al-Qaeda we simply find out who in the neighborhood also hates them, slip them a suitcase of cash and a gun and maybe a car ride to take care of the issue.
Israel is not our concern, it is an Anti-Semitic Apartheid State holding two territories full of indigenous Palestinians in open air prison camps with routine collective punishment. And last I checked Palestinians are Semites which makes the Israeli Actions even worse.
We as a nation can't tolerate or be part of that shit.
Being a believer in the maxim that doing less is more: Simply stopping all aid, closing our missions in Israel, closing all but their UN mission in the US, revoking the non-profit status of their advocacy groups and enforcing applicable laws, and simply ignore their calls will either change their behavior or Europeans will be their new suckers. In which case we aren't the ones getting the ire of the downtrodden masses in the MENA region or wasting our money.
In return all the money we wasted on Israel, and all the knock on effects that follow it, can instead be invested right here in America to fix our infrastructure.
Pre-Pearl Harbor, there were many Americans who thought that we should have, actually.
That's doesn't answer the question.
And we'll find that out.....how? Even if we assume you can knock out a large organization like that with a few assassinations (you can't, BTW, we escalated to a full on war with military hunter-killer teams and still didn't manage it), finding both the people we want dead and the people who want them dead is the sort of thing you need really good intel for, intel we don't have and have historically struggled to obtain.
The perhaps the Palestinians shouldn't have voted terrorists into power and adopted a foreign policy of "kill jews first, do anything else never". Because their present situation is the logical conclusion of that behavior.
We can and have tolerated that and so much more. We buy piles of stuff made with Chinese slave labor, butter up the saudis despite their own horrific human rights record, stay allies with Pakistan despite them actively aiding and sheltering Bin Laden, etc.
It's very strange that intolerance for alliances with allegedly inhumane regimes only seems to apply to Isreal, and none of our other morally dubious allies catch near as much flak.
Those are both massive diplomatic insults, and are basically only done to countries we're outright at war with.
It's unconstitutional to just arbitrarily revoke non-profit status like that.
It's been pointed out several times that our alliance with Isreal is not really the root issue of our problems in the middle east.
1. We just spent like a trillion dollars on infrastructure, and arguably didn't need it to, because our infrastructure is fine.
2. It's hilarious that you think merely because we spent money on something else already, that the government would be deterred from spending even more money on something else.
3. US aid to Israel is only a small amount, a couple of billion dollars, and it's not actually "aid" as in no strings attached money they can do whatever they want with it. They are obligated to spend most of it buying weapons and equipment from US defense contractors. It's corporate welfare for US defense contractors.
ShieldWife
Marchioness
I have a number of people to respond to, some of which with more involved replies, but let me get this one out of the way.
I’m not a pacifist, I’m a non-interventionist and I think that our military should only be used if we’re attacked.
I do believe that we should have remained neutral during WWII and if we had stayed out of the Middle East that the 9/11 attacks wouldn’t have happened, furthermore I think that a proper response to the Twin Towers attack doesn’t involve invading countries that didn’t even have anything to do with the attack.
I’m not a pacifist, I’m a non-interventionist and I think that our military should only be used if we’re attacked.
Me. I’m on the America First side of the debate.
If you think a lack of money is the chief problem with American infrastructure, you got it very wrong. Obama tried throwing money at infrastructure with 'shovel ready' projects, only to find them bogged down by red tape. You need to deal with that long before anything else will matter.
The idea that antisemitism means being against Semites is a classic misunderstanding about how language works. A word means what people use it to mean. Dissecting a word can help you figure out it's meaning from context, but doesn't override how it is actually used. So antisemitism, as people use it to mean 'jew hating' not 'semite hating' means 'jew hating'. Just like homophobia doesn't mean 'fear of the same' but instead 'bigotry/disgust to LGB (and sometimes T) people'.
To the rest of the crap here, Battlegrinder covered what I want to say.
I have no problem with that POV. I just wanted to make sure what you were aiming at with your previous comment.
I think we'd do a lot better if we were less prone to putting our thumbs on the scales of other countries, especially in a military manner.
What we do need is a relatively clear cut set of rules that state when we would be willing to discuss intervening, not that we're bound to intervene. I don't like the idea of having another party determine our course of action b/c it's in our play book.