Wednesday, September 19, 2012
The time has come for the United States to leave the Middle East
When a suicide bomber killed 241 American soldiers in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1983, President Ronald Reagan wrote, “Perhaps we didn’t appreciate fully enough the depth of the hatred and the complexity of the problems that made the Middle East such a jungle. In the weeks immediately after the bombing, I believe the last thing that we should do was turn tail and leave. Yet the irrationality of Middle Eastern politics forced us to rethink our policy there.”
Reagan was very reluctant to remove American forces after the Beirut tragedy, fearing it would be interpreted as a sign of weakness, but pull them, he did. In Reagan’s opinion, the Middle East, due to its very cultural, religious, and political nature, was a place in which further American involvement would’ve only worsened things.
Reagan’s observation about the unstable nature of the Middle East remains true to this day. When Libya Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were brutally murdered in Benghazi last week, the attacks occurred in places where the United States has continued to use a heavy interventionist hand. Both the Bush and Obama administrations had supported dictator Muammar Gaddafi, and last year President Obama gave moral and material support to Libyan rebels, who many believed were just as nasty as the tyrant they overthrew. The United States’ intervention in Libya was a lose-lose proposition for our nation from the very start. Regardless of whether these murderous acts were carried out by radical Islamists who were upset about a silly movie or simply an anti-American mob, the lesson learned should be as clear to us as it was to Reagan: We need to leave.
What does the United States stand to gain by sending dollars, soldiers, and resources to countries like Libya, or so-called allies like Egypt and Pakistan? You will continue to find an army of Washington experts who insist America must remain heavily engaged in the Islamic world, lest we risk ruin. But what these experts fail to recognize is that U.S. involvement in the Middle East has produced nothing but ruin for nearly a half-century.
Full article: http://www.charlesto … /Content?oid=4177513
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