[quote=surveyor][quote=zk]Surveyor, I’d be interested to hear any remotely plausible scenarios where this doesn’t stay there.[/quote]
It’s already happening. Libya, Egypt, Bahrain will be taken over by Islamists. Islamists are already cultivating jihadis to strike at America and her interests. Pakistan is a whit away from being taken over by Islamists and the Iranians practically have the bomb. Saudi Arabia and other Arab states are desperate to get nuclear in order to counteract Iran. All of these places broadcast “hate America” and “America die die die” 24/7.
I agree, it will not be a major military confrontation like WWI or WWII. It will be more like what Israel goes through, with multiple jihadi attacks. You will probably see a lot of American citizens targeted or being killed abroad. Or it will be through major disruptions to our economy. Also consider this: our world is even more connected together and more interdependent today than it was in WWI and WWII.
Like I said, it’s already happened. 9/11 brought that chaos from over there to us here and it has continued. In all scenarios, I don’t see it NOT coming here somehow.[/quote]
I may have misinterpreted your comment about reading up on WWs I and II. You meant the Libyan conflict would be followed by world-wide conflict, not world-wide, country-on-country military conflict. There’s obviously a difference, and I thought you meant the latter when I can see now you meant the former.
That said:
World-wide conflict using terrorism is, as you said, already happening. And it’s quite possible it’ll get worse, depending on what happens in the middle east. You say Libya will be taken over by islamists. I agree that that’s quite possible and even likely. So why would we help them take it over, then? As I said on another thread, if gadhafi goes down, what follows is just as likely to be worse as it is to be better.
So, sure, we can get rid of gadhafi. But then what? We put a puppet in there? We fight the islamists? We try to put a democracy in there? We’ve seen how difficult and expensive installation of democracy is to attempt and that it may be impossible to accomplish at this point.
I think we can all agree that less terrorism is good. The question is, how do we get there? There seems to be this automatic assumption that getting rid of dictators is good for the U.S. (Unless, of course, that dictator is a U.S. puppet. If the pre-1979 Iranian dictator was a Russian puppet instead of a U.S. one and the hostages were Russians instead of Americans, we’d have been on the side of the rebels. But there would still be a theocracy in there). But is it necessarily good for us if a dictator falls? Sure, we’d like democracy all over the world. But will gadhafi or any other dictator falling necessarily bring us any closer to democracy? Is a country in chaos or a country ruled by a theocracy any closer to a democracy than one ruled by a dictator? And even the stated goal of more democracies assumes that what we really want is democracy and not a stable supply of oil. If Myanmar was having a rebellion, would we really care that much?
We obviously don’t care about the citizens of any country enough to engage in military operations or extremely expensive projects on their behalf. If we did, the world would be a different place. It’s strictly for our own interests. So, why is it in our interests for gadhafi to lose? What’s our long-term plan? Have we thought this through? What, exactly, are we trying to accomplish?
These are not rhetorical questions. I hope that there are answers to them that make sense. I’d like to think that we’re doing this for a reason.
So, surveyor, you implied that you support military intervention in Libya. Why?
