Brainpolice: “”The left” is always wrong about everything.”
Exactly! I have a much, much higher threshhold for accepting anything from the left than from the right. My personal experience is that the left will climb a tree to tell a lie when they could stand on the ground and tell the truth. Marx was one of the greatest liars of all time and his followers immitate him. Over the years, I have caught the left telling hundreds of lies, while I only occasionally catch the right in them.

Fundamentalist:

Promoting the exception to the rule, as the rule.

At least when it fits his rightist rhetoric.

Fundamentalist wrote “…in the 1950′s when Nasser overthrew a US supported government in Egypt”.

No, it wasn’t. At that early stage there was British hegemony in the area, and the USA was still one of the ring-barkers/white-anters.

Michael Barnett sounds like an idiot.

I, and most libertarians I know personally, came from a Syndicalist paradigm (what he’s calling leftist).

None of us have ever been “patriots,” we’ve always been anti-American, we’ve never liked governments, but only rhetoric made us unlibertarian.

Even then, however, it seams easier to convey to the Syndicalist Libertarians the contradiction of a “Libertarian” Party than it is for conservative, reformist piss-ants like you.

Niccolo: “Why did Iran “slip out of the grip” of the IUSA? Why not Egypt and the rest? I don’t know. Why do any exceptions occur? ”

How many “exceptions” to your rule does it take to prove the rule wrong? The clearest mark of an unthinking ideolog is someone who ignores all exceptions and blinding follows his ideology. You have given no proof, or even evidence, that the US controls any Middle Eastern country. You assume that financial aid and diplomatic relations with a country proof that the US controls those countries with an iron fist. Would you be interested in buying bridge in Brooklyn?

Niccolo: “I’m done debating with a conservative pig enslaved to his precious empire. I hope you bathe in the coals of hell for defending the zionists and crusaders.”

Did you borrow those insults from a Marxist web site? They’re as lame as they are old and stale.

Peter, That’s an interesting quote from Barnett. The reason the left can’t tell the truth about anything is that Marxists subscribe to polylogism. For them, objective truth that everyone arrive at through reason doesn’t exist. Different truths exist for each class. Truth is nothing but what serves your class. If lieing about the US’s involvement serves the Marxist cause, then by definition it is true.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not defending US foreign policy in the Middle East. It has been short sighted and stupid since WWII, but the US has not been the evil genius that the left claims. There isn’t anyone in Washington smart enough to pull off what the left accuses them of.

Since the Arab oil embargo in 1973 (?) our policy has focused on keeping the oil flowing through the Persian Gulf, as if Arabs and Iranians are too stupid to sell their oil. The first Gulf war was largely about that, less about rescuing Kuwait. Even though the US gets less than 10% of its oil from the Middle East, Washington thinks it’s the US’s job, and no one else’s, to keep the oil flowing.

Everyone remembers 1973 and intents to never see a repeat. But this is not 1973. Back then the Arabs and Iranians got more dollars for their oil than they could spend. For the past 20 years, all of those countries need to sell their oil to feed their people. We’re not dependent on oil; they are. No matter who controls the oil, they can’t eat it; they must sell it. But until someone in Washington learns some basic economics, we’re condemned to repeat the same mistakes.

If anything, I think the Arab countries control US policy far more than we influence theirs. Anyone who knows the US State Department knows that most of its bureaucrats have “gone native.” In other words, they have fallen in love with the country they are supposed to represent the US in, and as a result they reverse roles. Instead of pressing the Arab country with US demands, they spend most of their time and effort trying to change US policy to meet Arab demands. I have personally witnessed that shift in attitude with Americans in the Middle East. For those who have “gone native” everything about the native culture is wonderful and everything about life at home in the US becomes abhorent.

I have had a one-man campaign for years to persuade congressmen to kill the Camp David accord in which Jimmy Carter promised that the American tax payers would give Israel $3 billion and Egypt $2 billion annually from 1978 until eternity. But I usually get the response back that they depend upon the opinion of the state department on the matter and the state dept insists that Egypt is our greatest ally in the region. This is in spite of the fact that I have given them evidence that the Egyptian government has always, and is still, poisoning the minds of Egyptians toward the US with anti-American propaganda in the state-owned media daily. For example, the largest Egytian newspaper, the state-owned Al-Ahram, accused the US of dropping poisoned food into minefields in order to kill as many Afghans as possible. It accuses US soldier in Iraq of using children for target practice and giving children poisoned candy. It accuses US soldiers of regularly raping Iraqi women and claims that the night vision goggles enable soldiers to see through women’s clothing. Those are just of few examples of what you will read every week on the al-ahram English web site.

In short, the state department carries water for the Egyptian government. The US has no control over its own state department, let alone over Egypt. In fact, that “gone native” attitude is the reason Bush kept the state dept out of the planning for the Iraqi invasion.