Deacon923
Scooter Banks
Jesus. You need to stop assuming things. It makes an ass out of you an me, and all that. I brought up the "two options" argument to illustrate that the moderate course isn't necessarily the best course. I'm not actually saying that there were only two ways to deal with the Arab Spring. There were many ways to deal with it, those are just the two I think would have been most successful, and would have harnessed the energy of the events towards furthering U.S. policy. Another option would be to completely withdraw from the Middle East. We could also carpet bomb the entire region. But yeah, you are correct. I am absolutely trying to present as fact the idea that the Obama administration has no overarching strategy for the Middle East. Feel free to disprove me.
You were asking me to provide an example of what I would have done. I did. Now you say I have no facts. I'm not sure what you mean by that. If you mean I can't prove the counterfactual, you are correct, but that doesn't make my argument unsound. I also can't prove that if the United States had backed Britain and France during the Suez Crisis, France wouldn't have withdrawn from NATO. Generally most critiques involve assumptions. Mine is no different. It's a petty intellectual copout if you are going to arbitrarily invalidate my entire argument over the fact that I can't prove the counterfactual.
I think taking this any further is going to be an argument about an argument about an argument, which is more meta than I want to get, and then we're going to get into whether one of us is mischaracterizing what the other said, and at the end of the day it's going to look like an RJ vs. DeacMan slapfight which is not how either of us needs to spend the afternoon. Suffice it to say that I am not convinced by your argument, but I do appreciate your willingness to engage in a civil manner and the fact that you are well informed on the history and realities of the region.