Reply #59: Not to put words into your mouth, but...

[14thColony]

This sounds like a long version of "the devil we know is better than the devil we don't," a succinct expression of the Realist view of the situation. And the Realist view is as American as apple pie and cheap Chinese products, having brought us Pinochet, Batista, Somoza, Shah Pahlavi, Saddam Hussein, and a host of other swell guys, all because of the fear that the "unknown something else" MIGHT have been worse than them. If that's what GOOD foreign policy looks like then we might as well all throw in the towel.

By the way if by "in Afghanistan, it was The Taliban" you mean our support for the Mujaheddin in the 1980s, those guys were no more "The Taliban" than I'm a corporal in the Swiss Guard. The Taliban formed in 1994 as a Pashtun reaction to the years of civil war and squabbling among the Mujaheddin warlords in 1992-1996. The guys we supported became the Northern Alliance and were at war with the Taliban.

And by "Lebanon - Hamas" I assume you mean Lebanon - Hezbollah, right? Since Hamas is Sunni and based in the PA territories and Hezbollah is Shia and based in Lebanon, right?

But beyond that, everything else was spot on.