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Originally Posted by dalakhani
Solution for Despotic rulers? We've created more despotic rulers than any country in the last two hundred years.
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First of all I don’t believe for a minute this statement. Yes we’ve supported and propped up and used despots, but what was the choice? There’s not a lot to choose from in some cases. Should we have postponed any and all strategic relations until democracy was in full bloom? Even without our involvement I don’t believe that you can say for sure that the same regimes wouldn’t have thrived anyway, or that even more tyrannical ones would have existed in their place.
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Originally Posted by dalakhani
How can our support of Israel be viewed in any way as "cheap". I dont get that. Help me here. Arent we over 100 billion into them yet?
Im still waiting for an answer- why do we send so much money to Israel? And if we have to send money out, if it is our duty, why so much more to them? How do they help us?????
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It is more than we give to any other nation, but over all these years it’s a drop in the bucket at around 100B. We’ve pumped around 90B into Iraq for rebuilding since the takeover of Baghdad.
The region is of vital strategic importance. Without Israel acting as our surrogate what strategy would have held in check the Soviet Unions ambitions and at the same time prevented the further expansion of fanatical religious regimes, given us the amount of intelligence that we currently share with Israel, and at the same time costing us less in terms of blood and treasure?
We give so much more to them simply because they are a stable, strong, democratic ally acting as our surrogate in a region of huge strategic importance, as I mentioned above.
There is not another country that can offer this to us and that is why more goes to them. Until recently we have given far less to others in the area, typically Egypt. But now with Afghanistan and Iraq on the receiving end of huge amounts of US aid our overall expenditures in the region are balancing out.