Hologram wrote:Yeah. We should've just bitch-slapped those Iranians for doing what they did. But we didn't, and what do we have now? Oh yeah, crazy Iranians that almost have nukes. So much better.Jenos Ridan wrote:Hologram wrote:First Barbary War: The man who ruined everything in the war and destroyed all respect we may have earned in the middle east in this early conflict: Consul Tobias Lear.
Sold out a very successful naval and land campaign for a $60,000 peace and an exchange of prisoners. A rather high price considering that the US had assembled an incredibly large naval squadron in the Mediterranean and that William Eaton had successfully taken the capitol of Tripoli's largest province, Derne. There's also the point that the only thing that Arabs really respect is force, and since the US had payed for peace instead of putting Tripoli in its place, Tripoli, Tunis, Algiers, and Morocco all began preying on US merchantmen as soon as the squadron had left, almost as if the squadron had never been in the Mediterranean at all. If the US had used its force instead of paying for peace, we would have not only won that war, but we would have set the proper precedent for all foreign affairs in the middle east.
Who knows, maybe we wouldn't be in the current mess that we're in.
Hmm......
That, and remove Jimmy Carter from the White House during the Iranian Revolution.
good god lads, get your blinkers off!
World history is influenced by the powerful nations not the ones pissing around in the dust for the scraps!
have a look outside of what you think you remember and study what may actually have been important.
We can go back many more years but perhaps if we go only as far as 1953 and the US/British coup d'etat which overthrew the democratically elected Prime minister of Iran; Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh.
The CIA lead operation was in response to the.. did i mention 'democratically' elected government nationalizing the oil industry. The action which brought it into conflict with the worlds powers sought to benefit the the populace with some of their own natural resource. Most of the profits were syphoned-off to helped keep Britain afloat as a world power after the 1st world war.
After the coup a puppet dictator, the young Shah, ruled for more than 2 decades in an increasingly repressive and brutal regime; propped up by US arms and monetary assistance.
In 1979 the revolution ensued and brought to power a group of fanatic anti-Western, religious clerics whose government sponsored acts of terror against American targets, and that government also inspired fundamentalists in other countries including next door, Afghanistan, where the Taliban came to power and gave sanctuary to Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.
You should also look into the Iran Iraq war; read up on the play-ground of war which US and Soviet power-brokering, armed and funded a remote-control struggle where-by they could test weaponry and flex muscles without loss of their own nationals lives.
etc etc ... and now it is the nutters faults in Iran.. silly me!



