>>If you say it's about oil, that's only part of the picture; if you say it's
>>about weapons and terror, that's also only a part of the picture. You have
>to
>>stand well back from the tapestry and get a good look at the whole of it to
>>recognize the thing for what it is: an attempt to redraw the map of the
>Middle
>>East in its entirety.
>
>Considering the fact that most of the governments in the Mideast are
>barely-tolerable tyrannies as it stands, even among our "allies", I
>don't know that that would be a bad thing to try and do, is all.

Which would be, on the face of it, a valid counter...except that the
governments we tend to install in our wake are often, or soon become, every bit
as bad as what was there in the first place.

We helped put in and prop up the Shah of Iran, creating a situation that was so
awful, so corrupt, so full of human rights violations, that it led in time to
the growth of the fundamentalist forces that overthrew him and gave us the
current Iran.

Remember that, because we didn't like the russians, we helped arm the Afghanis
and trained the people who would in time become the Taliban and Al-Quaeda.

When we didn't like Iran, we gave Iraq the very weapons that we're not
complaining about, in many cases. When it looked like he might use (and may
have used) chemical weapons in the Iran/Iraq war, our government was decidedly
silent. No one was making a big deal about it at the upper echelons of
government, because we knew he had chemical weapons but he was using them in
"our interests."

The bottom line, apart from all this, is very simple: is it the business of the
United States to go out overthrowing governments when and where we feel like
it? Is that really what the Founding Fathers had in mind when they drafted the
Constitution?

jms

(jmsatb5@aol.com)
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