Look I know leftists and anti-energy and anti-free market people want this to be the reasons the US is in these countries, Richard Cameron, but there is a far more plausible reason for us to be there.
We are trying to SHUT DOWN AND KILL the terrorist orgnizations that want to, and have come over here to kill us. We are at war with these people you idiots.
..and we did not start it.
Here's the deal...we need to be much more serious about killing these people and anyone who supports them, be it in a village, an urban area, or in the countryside. Just like we did with the Nazis and Imperalist Japanese.
We defeated and destroyed their military and humbled their people to the point they did not want anymore. As a result of keeping the gloves on, and beating them to a pulp and taking nothing short of uncodnitional surrender...we put them in the "mood" to be reformed and now they have been some of our strongest allies ever since.
We need to practise the same on the Islamic Jihadists and their support base or we will be facing these brush war insurgencies for the next 100 years.
At one time I thought that was the point of being over there, but it doesn’t make any sense now. There are less costly (in $ and human lives) ways to accomplish your goal of protecting us from jihadists. It’s called serious border security and stop importing muslims on educational visas and halt immigration from muslim nations.
That line of George Bush’s about “we have to fight them over there, so we don’t have to fight them here”, has turned out to be baloney.