ONE THING IS CLEAR

Submitted by DANIEL REDMOND (United States), Nov 2, 2007 at 18:33

Out of the chaos that is the Middle East and its multiplicity of fractured alliances, historical conflicts and ethnic and religious animosities has come one glaringly obvious fact: United States foreign policy has been unequal to the task of stabilizing the region. From the misguided support of the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan twenty years ago, which led obliquely to the development of al Queda, to the ongoing nightmare of our military occupation of Iraq, whatever we do seems only to make matters worse.

We all know that our involvement in the region is mostly necessitated by the need to secure a continued access to Middle East oil reserves and it would probably be of benefit to simply acknowledge that fact openly, state that as our somewhat narrow objective, and discontinue these absurd attempts at bending other societies to our will in such misguided efforts as the 'democratization' of Iraq. Who's kidding who anyway? Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and a whole lot of other countries we consider our friends are decidedly NOT democratic states, so why is it so all-fired important to stamp our template of democracy onto Iraqi society?

In reality we now have a puppet government in Iraq going through the motions of sustaining a democratic process while behind the scenes it has signed onto such nefarious inventions as the PSA [Petroleum Sharing Agreements] which acknowledge nominal ownership of Iraq's oil reserves to the Iraqi government while placing all actual control of the oil fields in the hands of foreign (mostly American) oil companies. Our military presence serves primarily as a bodyguard contingent for oil company employees and other corporate entities. Without that protection they could not function. No wonder the Iraqis don't trust us, and, for that matter, neither does anyone else in the region.

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