[TheRealThing]

⬆⬆ I was speaking of Iraq, Afghanistan and the ME.

No you threw Viet Nam in there too.

I don't have a thing against you personally there taco breath. However, you come on here, which I am certain that you are as welcome as any of the rest of us, and speak authoritatively about subjects that you read about. Like the deal with Ali and the case you're trying to make in which American military intervention is ultimately supposed to be a bad thing, and the people of the world hate us for it.

Both of those are liberal talking points 101, and they're nothing more than a politicization of the real world. They are the liberal's college classroom interpretation, shaped and clouded, (and revised) by an ideological whim. In other words, not real. Here is what kills me about all of this. You say you were there for the Reagan days, right? So you're what, early 40's possibly late 30's? You had to have seen the relative stability of the Middle East during most of your life. How you could dodge the steely missiles of reality with regard to the explosion the Middle East during the Obama Era is mind numbing.

If you know your history you are aware that the political structure of the Middle East as it is, was put in place at the end of WW2. There is and was a very good reason for that as that region has always been a powder keg. Though the peoples there will never co-exist in any form of harmony or long term peace, the past 65 years or so have been among the most peaceful in history. Now, I am in the camp which holds that had we left a viable force in Iraq, ISIS would have not proliferated into the threat they represent today. I am also a realist however, and believe that the region must have a military presence there to act as both referee and enforcer to hold things, tenuous as they may be, together. And BTW, when they started flying our own 767 jumbo jets through buildings like the World Trade Centers, it was time to act.

The reason, I believe, that operation Desert Storm did not reap long term lucidity (attitude adjustment wise) among the bad actors in the region, is because they are driven by a radical extremist religious ideology. Many of them don't really care if they die for the cause of Islam and the rebirth of the Caliphate because of the rewards they think await on the other side. Therefore military strategists have rightly determined the only likely course of action in the Middle East is that of the moral enforcer mentioned above. For that to work would mean our motivation would have to be on it's face pure. Though the radicals would never buy in, the regular folks would.

Like it or not, mankind is moving inexorably toward the apocalypse of Biblical prophesy. It doesn't matter what we do, the so-called two state solution, Nancy Pelosi's and John Kerry's epic and myriad diplomatic failures notwithstanding, will all ultimately fail. We are being pushed toward Armageddon by the irresistible force spoken of by God Himself as history has already been written in the form prophesy within the Scriptural texts. There is a concept or God's character that I find fascinating, and as you are no doubt familiar with it too, I would like to do a touch-n-go on it one more time for the sake of understanding here;
2 Peter 3:8 (KJV)
8 But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.

In other words because God is omnipresent, He is in no way constrained by time as are we. He is free to look forward and backward in time, sort of like we would run a VCR tape forward or back. Prophesy from our view, is history written by His hand, before it happens and yet knowing with certainty that it will. Therefore I am more than comfortable in using Scripture to make heads and tails of current events. In that light then, I say that men in so many ways have no real ability to change the course of history. But, as I have said, my hope is that within that scope of unalterable certainty, it will turn out that we Americans will have shown the backbone and character this election season, to reject the drive towards liberalistic government, and return again to the more conservative and traditional form. If we do that, it could mean that the Lord may yet use this nation to act as salt and light in this world, and that we may therefore have a bit more time than it looks like we do. If we do not turn from the drive towards liberalism, then in my mind that is an indicator that we have as a society, passed by certain sign posts which indicate we have lost our moral authority to do the things both domestically and globally which once made us great. We can't expect the people's of the world to respect us if our priority policies are things like the advancement of homosexuality, the wholesale slaughter of our own precious unborn, or the laughable and naïve pursuit of the brotherhood of man, 21st Century thinking style.