You guys are... still talking about Iraq huh. Bummer.

@Invictus

The French lost four of their personnel in the first day - one in a downed attack helicopter, two commandoes trying to rescue an intelligence officer held since 2009 in Somalia, and then the intelligence officer who was executed during the botched raid.

Days later French troops were in hand to hand combat in Diabaly.

So... I'm not sure your point holds up. The French have much more of a stomach for war than your average American seems to think.

The fact that the US doesn't depend on the oil from the region doesn't mean its closest allies (the lovely Sauds who are actually a gold mine for the US defense contractors) don't as well. The Strait of Hormuz is one of the most important bottlenecks in the world, maybe the 2nd after the Malacca one. Securing the sealanes is one of the obligations the US took on itself along with the police cap. That brings us to Iran, which has stopped playing the ball after 1979 and can render the strait unusable pretty quickly. That also brings us to the defense situation of Israel, which would seriously deteriorate with no American presence in the region. After Europe (through NATO) and East Asia (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan), the Middle East is a region where the US has the most defensive obligations. Heck, it's the last region of the world where some regimes stay alive only because the US is backing them.

still goin huh

You seriously think Americans are interested in discussing something like Mali? ;)

there's like 5-10 dead americans in the saharan sands because of it. americans usually tend to look up from their grease plates when blondies get canned in shangri-la or timbuktu lol

or maybe that's only when it's women. these are all men i think. that could explain it. no "missing white woman syndrome"

I think that if you said to a random stranger on a street "5-10 Americans died in Mali!!", he would:

a) think they got trampled in a new store opening
b) think you're pronouncing mall funny

There's only so much of the world people can process at once. Sorry, Mali, you don't make the shortlist. Although the rappers could make somy rhymes about all the bling Mansa Musa had.

mali was mentioned in the us presidential debate. i understand that people usually dont know anything about africa, but mali has had a fuckton of exposure since the intervention. nyt, cnn, wapo, etc. joe the plumber might not know where it is, but you guys definitely do

Yeah... I've always thought the various conspiracy theories about how the US (or Bush's friends) were going to profit from the war and that was why we went were truly, truly absurd. Basically on the level of people who think Obama is secretly a Muslim member of the weathermen, trying to convert the US to Islam and blow it up (in indeterminate order).

Okay okay okay fine I'll comment.

I think what all that was was people who misunderstood a legitimate moral critique which was the invading Iraq was a cynical attempt to buy an ally in the MidEast with blood, and why does that matter? Because friends and stability in the MidEast is essential for our energy supply and the global economy.

This was probably eventually "telephoned" until it became "Bush is stealing Iraqi oil!"

Lol.

That could be true, Thucy, although the former situation you describe, besides being factually more complicated, is also morally much more complicated than simply attacking a country to steal its oil.

thats what i just said....

i guess the game of Telephone continues lol

Wait a second, Semck. The USA has a long standing history of corporate corruption intertwined with politics (not just Republicans); it isn't a conspiracy theory, it's a fact. Though I make no accusations re: Bush et. al, a person who would is in no way comparable to a person who thinks Obama is a secret Muslim - which is just ludicrous and fundamentally racist.

At worst they're as bad as Hannity spewing off about "Chicago Style Politics as usual." Don't you think there's a bit of a difference between those kinds of rhetoric? One doesn't need to look much further than out his front door to know that the big corps will stop at nothing to secure their bottom line.

@thucy that is a much more moderate, and probably more correct, assessment.

Oh OK. lol. I took you to be saying, "They transformed morally bad situation X into equally morally bad situation Y." Whereas I was saying, "They transformed morally murky situation X into morally terrible situation Y." But I guess I can see that I was inferring stuff that you didn't actually say.

No, YJ, I think this kind of thing is hysterical paranoia of the left, in just about exactly the same way as the examples I pointed to are on the right. It just seems better to you because that's the cultural background you're from. (Much as I used to be more accustomed to being surrounded by people who thought the former).

Pointing to "Chicago style politics as usual" would be maybe like accusing the GOP of taking marching orders from a church on some social issue. Accusing the President of the United States of starting a war because corporate friends told him they wanted him to in order to make money off stolen oil is looney toons crazy.

Haha OK, I don't see it as anywhere approaching the same, since wars started for resources aren't exactly unheard of in our great nation, nor any other empire. Bottom line, I agree more with Thucy's words than my own insinuations, so maybe it's useless to challenge the mere level of comparative foolishness involved.

Corporate corruption and starting a war because few fat cats said so is on a wholly different level. That's more similar to theories that 9/11 was an inside job to fire up patriotic jingoism or that the 1999 Moscow bombings were carried out by FSB to create a new war in Chechnya that would raise Putin's popularity and carry him to presidency. There's moral bankruptcy like Watergate and there's orders of magnitude worse moral bankruptcy like this.

6 AM and I'm defending Bush. Good stuff.

Well I'll ask you this, Ulytau, since we all agree that the government sees the middle east as needing to be under Americas "umbrella," don't you think it likely that moneyed interest lobbied quite intensely to get the contracts, leases, permits, in these regions that they want?

No, it isn't exactly the same thing, but I surely wouldn't put it past them to encourage a bit of jingo if it'll help them turn a profit. I mean, if America is going to be there anyways, we may as well extend our economic interests too...

Does this make me looney toons crazy?

Lobbying, sure. Bossing around the POTUS? Errr...

Also don't take my "looney toons" remarks too hard, YJ. The beliefs in question are, indeed, looney toons crazy, but the PEOPLE are not. The people are often pretty intelligent. That's one of the tragedies of the polarized country we've developed. Smart people with good things to say (on both sides) go off and get in such an echo chamber that they end up seriously considering or even believing crazy things, because they seem reasonable in the feedback loop they live in.

(I realize you're not pushing the belief in question anyway, and we've both accepted Thucy's position. I'm just talking about the hypothetical believer of the Bush theory, or the Obama theory).

"Smart people with good things to say (on both sides) go off and get in such an echo chamber that they end up seriously considering or even believing crazy things, because they seem reasonable in the feedback loop they live in."
Bizarre as that may be, doesn't that just give the USA a special vibe as well? I'd really wanna know if there's a feedback loop for redhouse.
Anyways, what about Mursi people? That islamic nutcase is against the French intervention in Mali too huh? Why are we his BFF's again? One election does not a democracy make. What are people's opinions? Hugs.

morsi is shit-for-brains

im hoping his government will lose elections soon