I always like the term "eternal war". Like war is eternal, it's never really going to end. All you can do is contain it. Look at antifa right, we are living in the best of times, and yet they still want to riot violently in the streets. The reality is, even if things are great, some people will want to find problems and make a mess anyways. So, I think we need to be prepared for the inevitability that war is eternal. And problably in a place like the middle east

What we don't want is for it to spread

Or maybe, you know, energy is a primary input on *everything* and if we produce 1/3rd and the ME produces 1/3rd and we can throttle them we have effective control of the majority of global energy production.

Or some dumb redneck shit. You right. Probably dem damned Joos.

well obviously they are going to continue fighting over there. The issue is why WE are there

We're not getting that much oil from the middle east. And oil is like a fraction of all energy production

its been decades

Like most of the oil we get from the middle east is from Suadi Arabia and we aren't at war with them

The iraq oil went to other countries

For the most part

our main source of energy is natural gas these days

no need for even the saudi's... although they help us make the USD more relevant by only accepting sales in USD

Yeah. It is not our energy. It is mostly Asia's energy.

Well wars take decades. When the Romans conquered gaul, they stayed there for hundreds of years. When the U.S. conquered dah germans and japanese, we stayed there for, as of now ,70 years. After a war there is the whole, rebuilding and containment phase

http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1948787,00.html

The oil mostly went to Russia, France and China

And we don't control it/profit off of it

thats no excuse for why we cant leave the middle east

A power vaccume will erupt the moment we leave, like in Syria, or like when we left Vietnam

Like it will lead to worse war; containment is not all that expensive

thats what the establishment would like you to think

who cares if a vacuum is created. its not us who live there

It doesn't take all that much money to keep a small skeleton crew there for a short while

Its totally pointless. They want you to believe that if we dont have troops there another 911 will happen.

Its just fearmongering

We should care because they are other humans, but, on top of that it will eventually come back to effect us. It's not as if the whole world destabilizes, or half of the world, even just 1/10th, that it won't effect us

You have me confused. I am not saying "should' I am answering 'why'. From a national interest perspective there is a good argument to leave and let them kill each other. The only problem with that is that it leaves Russia in charge of Europe (if they want to keep the lights on).

There is a good chance of the various wars spreading

Just look at say, the immigration crisis in Europe, that has been pretty bad, and that's not even the spread of war itself

The consequences won't be confined to a specific geographic space just beucase the problems originate from there

There's no reason to believe they will just stay there and not go other places, be it to wage war or otherwise

1. I dnt care because they are savages. Hardly human. 2. I do not buy that it will effect us if we leave. Its effecting us by us staying

It's not very expensive to maintain a small troop presence, or costly in terms of lives

We didn't lose a single soldier the whole time they were in that region, but now if we have to do a reinvasion to keep a lid on things we will

Also letting Russia pull strings over europe cant be any worse then what the EU is up to.

We did lose a few soldiers in some anti ISIS stuff though

We lost our hard earned tax dollars

Not really that particular region but it's connected

millions

you act as if them standing around is free dude

It's not all that expensive to maintain it

What we need is for more troops to be on our southern border