Shark Bacon
It's a little insane to me, the whole middle east situation. Like these people have been fighting since the beginning of time, but we feel it's our job to step in and bring them democracy. But that didn't work, and I don't really see it working, ever. All we did was knock big guys out of power so some other big scary guy could jump in and take control. We didn't fix anything, we armed people and made it worse.
So now these people are fleeing, and I do feel bad because it's scary and heart wrenching to imagine, and I read the stories of people paying tons of money to drown, and the ones that make it still have to fight for their lives.
But then there's also the other stories. The ones that mention that the majority of people fleeing are able bodied young men, not willing to fight for their country. The stories about how they demolish everything in their path and steal and murder.
I'm not there. I don't know who to believe.
But it does make me sad when I see a toddler face down in the sand because floating away on an overcrowded boat seemed safer than staying in your home.
Well, the
Taliban was once in control of 90% of Afghanistan, now there's a handful of insurgents on the run or hiding in Pakistan. Saddam was once control of Iraq, now the Iraqi military is a democracy. Neither of these organizations are currently contributing to the violence perpetrated by terrorist groups of insurgents, at least not on any large scale. There were 4 million refugees who probably would have died in Iraq without humanitarian aid and at least 500,000 people killed already, with Saddam set to try and wipe out the Kurds. The Taliban was a military force created by Pakistan in 1994, now Osama Bin Laden was taken down in Pakistan .8 miles from the military training academy.
This whole Syria thing, it's a completely different country, now supported by Russia. Iran is starting to cause more problems, and they're a different country. The middle east isn't just a conglomerate, there's individual countries, factions, and the like.
If it's any
solace, Libya, Egypt, Tunisia and Yemen have had pretty uneventful changes of power. Mubarik in Egypt, Gaddafi in Libya, Ben Ali in Tunisia, and Yemen pretty much with the old government. So, not everything in the middle east is bad. Syria is horrible, and with Russia backing Assad it's about to get a whole lot worse. But the conflict in Ukraine is also horrendous, and seems to be spreading in to Turkey. The main thing to keep in mind is, there's good and bad, and it's not as cut and dry as the middle east going up and down, everyone there being good or bad, and so on.