04-05-2016, 02:11 PM
(04-05-2016, 01:38 PM)Benton Wrote: It's not a new problem, or a new solution.
Muslim sects have been killing each other there since before there were Muslim sects. The fighting isn't just about being Muslim (or the wrong Muslim) it's about culture, too. Geography. Society. All of it. This isn't anything new. Societies have been killing each other since one guy had more rocks than another guy. The problem is people usually don't interfere with that. When a group of people really wants to kill another group, most of the world used to stand back and let the two go at it.
But for the last century you've had a lot of outside intervention stepping in, trying to sort things out. We try to get them to get along or — more often — help one side fight another side.
The only way to resolve it is to let it run its course, get out of the Middle East. If the groups involved want to fight each other, they're going to. We've made ourselves one of those groups. So has Russia and a handful of countries. They don't see it as a Muslim problem, they see it as an ongoing conflict. We, on the other hand, keep labeling it an problem with extremist Muslims. We need to stop doing that. It's the same problem we had with North Vietnam. We labeled it a problem with Communists, but that's not how they saw it. We tried to make it about political extremism. It wasn't. It was the end of several hundred years worth of rule and smaller conflict resolutions. We just stepped into it trying to play referee and instead made it last longer and added to the body count.
It was the same thing that led to the founding of this country. It wasn't some war against the English for freedom of religion. It wasn't even just about taxes. It was several hundred years worth of disagreement by people with the monarchy, that led to a bigger, final conflict. But at the time, there wasn't a government that was going to intercede and tell the two factions (the colonies and England) to resolve it peacefully or else they'd kill more people.
tl;dr Only way to fix it is to get out, let them fix it themselves.
I agree. We ignore conflicts in Africa, but because of oil and Israel we are balls deep into the most unfixable conflict on the planet.
Because we now live in a world-wide economy we have a certain level of interest in maintaining stable markets for our goods and access to natural resources we require, but we need to lust pull out of this mess.
