What to do re: ISIS? How about this? Get our US Military OUT of ME countries, period.

[dreamnightwind]

114. Yes, I've seen that sentiment raging around here

Last edited Sat Nov 14, 2015, 10:03 PM - Edit history (1)

I think many people are just not all that evolved in their thinking, and their views are reactive and derivative, put in place by the MSM zeitgeist.

I may well be a dreamer, but that doesn't mean I'm wrong. Sometimes, when you're been walking the wrong path for a long time, you need to re-evaluate what got you into a situation, rather than doubling down. I've been dealing with this in my own life. I think that's where we are as a nation and as a society. Usually there are external signs that such change is needed.

The fires of hate need fuel and oxygen to burn. The fuel is of course the hatred that emerges from other acts of violence and oppression, and the interests of those who profit from war and from the resource extraction industries. The oxygen is all of the attention and hair-on-fire focus given to the latest outrage.

This fire serves the interests of many, from the MIC to the MSM to the politicians they support, and on the other side the extremists who would love to blow our whole system to pieces. And I have to say they have some very valid reasons for that sentiment, which is why I work so hard for us to reform it through the political process. It must change, one way or another.

It's in the interests of the average person, most all of us, to withdraw from the whole war mentality.

We have to radically retool our energy approach anyway because of climate change.

Our troops in their lands will endlessly create more radical terrorists. There is no winning that war, the wars themselves by definition create more enemies.

The ordinary people in those countries are no more our enemy than the ordinary people in our own country. I spent a year as a child in Iran, I have some actual experience with the people there, they're people like us, living in a different context, with the same human needs we have, mostly good-hearted with the usual variance you find in any population.

Before the U.S. was fully captured by corporate interests, we were one of the most loved nations on this earth. Since we've been waging resource wars, and smaller acts of interference (coups, assassination of labor leaders, meddling in elections) in many more nations, all to support corporate interests, we are now hated by literally billions. There is no way to fight our way out of that, it only makes it worse.

Mind our own business when possible, when we have to act, do so as a police action, rather than as a military. Work as hard on restoring positive relations with the people in the middle east as we have worked to secure access to their resources. The vast majority of them don't want endless violence and war, especially not in their lands. And we don't need their resources anymore. With the money we spend on our military, we can retool our energy use to renewables, and we must, because climate change.

Terrorism is, for the most part, the last resort of people who have been completely disempowered in their own lives and nations, and who have no armies to fight for their interests.

We have a serious lack of external perspective in this country. How would it feel to have other countries' troops all over our country? To live in the shadow of drones? To live under governments set up and propped up by a foreign nation?

I can't imagine living in the shadow of drones overhead that can strike out of nowhere at anytime, extinguishing life with massive explosions, killing innocents as well as the people they rightly or wrongly target, where the targeting criteria is entirely in the hands of a foreign power.

If that were happening in our own country, I don't think many of us would see the people resisting it as evil-doers.

Restoring that perspective is the way out of this. In the meantime, some precise anti-terrorist actions will be necessary, but will only help if they are limited to targeting the actual terrorists. Otherwise, we're just adding fuel to the fire.