Brice & Michael
It's nice to see civil talk thank you. But I think the current 
administration has deemed the public and or "the media" could not grasp 
the real reasons why we are in Iraq. If you want to bring Democracy to 
that region Iraq was the obvious choice. They had some form of a 
government already albeit a dictatorship but the government was installed 
and working. The rest of the region pakistan, afghan are all very 
tribal/nomadic with almost no local government/judges. The second reason 
is that Iraq has become the new buffer zone between Iran and the rest of 
the region. Iran may be part of Opec but they dislike Arabs/Saudi almost 
as much as Israeils. Granted the house of Saud has regained control of the 
country after near collapse in 2002/2003. They still fear there own 
relgious sect which now controls most of the Universitys and public 
debate. The administration cant come out and say we are protecting them 
after the whole dust up about ferrying Bin Ladens family out after 9/11. 
So we moved our troops out of Arabia when we got a firm handle on Iraq. 
The second benefit has been it attracted all the Jihadeist to one area. 
Before everybody gets upset here are some reasons. The Saudis never had a 
large enough force to protect it self during the first Gulf war. They do 
not have much of a qualified armed force. They welcomed world wide 
internvention even if it pissed off the relegious clerics of having 
western infedels on sacred land. If Saddam had ventured into Saudi then 
the world economies would have a full scale collapse. Between the first 
and second Gulf wars Saudi Arabia changed economically there GDP is down 
30 %. Take home pay for the average Saudi went from 31k to 21k by 2002. 
There people where becoming poorer. Yet a huge building boom was taking 
place. That buiding boom was done by outsiders mainly western countries. 
So now the local populace has become lazy to boot the relegious sect has 
hit upon this and has turned the citzenship againts western thought and 
ideals which started to creep in after the first Gulf War. Hence we will 
be in Iraq for a long time. To protect Saudi Arabia just for economic 
reasons. Personnly I think it would of been intresting to turn our backs 
on Saudia Arabia and let Saddam roll into Arabia. He would of rooted out 
the Jihadist there and then let him roll into Pakistan to get Bin Laden. 
He had banished Bin laden twice out of his country. He's been our stooge 
before during the Iraq/Iran war of the 80's. But then again that's why 
where in this mess today.

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