Leave or Stay

**82redleg** · 10-24-2011

Originally Posted by omarali50

The question is how to get out while obtaining the best possible consequences. And that depends on what the desired ends in the region are.
My hope (vain hope) would be that the US gets out while making friends with Iran and India and while getting Pakistan to do the same.
Of course, I know thats not going to happen. But what a boon that would be to the people of the region!

I think that the US is already "friends" with India- to the extent that nations can be friends.

Why on earth do you think we would be anything but enemies with a regime in Teheran that opposes our existance and everything that we stand for in the world? When the Iranian people finally get rid of the crazies, then there will be something to talk about. Until then....

**omarali50** · 10-24-2011

Here are my reasons for being friendy (ier?) with Iran:
1. it is a real country with a real culture and its not going away.
2. Its people are some of the most "modernized" (in the deep sense of the word) in the entire region and already are, and will be, a force to be reckoned with in that region.
3. Its cultural influence extends well beyond its borders and is a huge step above the cultural influence US ally Saudi Arabia has been peddling in the region for the last few decades.
4. Its regime is not crazy. They certainly don't "hate us and everything we stand for" with anything approaching the hatred the average Wahabi or even the average ISI officer feels for "everything we stand for".
5. I dont take their rhetoric too seriously..its not meaningless, but they are not as crazy as they sometimes sound.
6. There ARE truly dangerous people in that regime (dangerous most of all for their own countrymen and neighbors, less for for faraway United States) but so, there are dangerous people in the Pakistani and Saudi and Whatever regimes and the US manages to work with them or around them or even through them.
7. "Friends" may not be the first step, but a lot can be done before that stage is reached. irrational enmity is not a good policy.

and so on....we can agree to disagree.

**Ray** · 11-01-2011

**Steve the Planner** · 11-01-2011

Ray:

Great maps.

Steve

**Dayuhan** · 11-02-2011

Have to wonder, though, about all those points in Afghanistan labeled "production, trading, mining". What, if anything, is actually being produced, traded, and mined in those locations?