Let me give some examples quick (cause I need some rest)
Saudi’s asked for our aid. That is what pissed off Bin laden.
We naturally sent aid. Bin Laden declared war on us.
Were we to say no to the Saudis, then our oil supply would have gone down the tubes. Iraq was all over them. Bin Laden wanted to protect Arabia with the mujahadeen.
meanwhile, the real reason that islam has attacked us, has nothing .. REPEAT NOTHING to do with us being attacked is simply because it is all about their religion to do so. They are looking for a new caliphate to ensure world domination. That includes us. Taking oil supplies would certainly be part of it.
Sharia law would be part of it.
Having their ‘religion’ treated as a religion is all part of it, yet t is not a religion because it comes with it’s own laws that are above the constitution and they are not in line with the constitution because they infringe upon the rights of others unlike other religions. These are things that Ron Paul does not understand or does not want to understand.
As far as keeping boots on the ground, Special Forces soldiers have been used for years as insurgents - in small numbers, building churches schools, hospitals, small villages, whatever the locals needed. Helped train militias and then made them friends that could help keep them on our side rather than be easily turned against us.
That is why Russia was defeated in Afghanistan. We used this successfully against them. Unfortunately - we left too much in place and pulled out again (much like what Paul is saying we should do now) left on their own, they ended up being turned and used against us.
This would happen again. But people do not want to look at that and just see what history has taught us.
When I hear people tell me that Paul says that we are attacked because we occupied their lands I can’t help but wonder what lands we occupied in 1786 when Muslims attacked us the first time. It is BS. They attack us and hold our people for ransom and kill our people because that is =what they are commanded to do by the prophet and the prophet was told to do it by their god allah.
That is what it is. There is no peace except for 10 year false peace with them while they gather strength. It is called a tactical peace. Paul understands NOTHING about Islam and that is a big threat now. Especially now that Obama has tossed the middle east to the muslims.
Time to wake up. We need a strong presence anywhere we can get it, we need allies anywhere we can get them. We need to lock our boarders down and we need to secure our interests worldwide.
Obama has to go and the last thing we need is to have a guy in the white house who is telling the world that 9/11 was our fault!
In essence what you've tacitly admitted is that we kowtowed to foreign entities because we do not have the wherewithal to explore and make use of our own resources. Saudi Arabia asked for our aid? Why did we give it? It was not just our presence in Saudi Arabia that tweaked Bin Laden. Now he not only got our attention, but he also got us to expend billions and blood, chasing and building in sand lands like chickens with our heads cut off.
Our desire for vengeance has trumped our faculty for deliberation over the bigger picture. "Not to worry. A few extended zots will fix this." Our forefathers would be turning over in their graves if they saw our lack of sense, foresight, and tact when it comes to dealing with foreign powers, let alone our willingness to give up personal liberty for the sake of security.
If we had our act together domestically we could have told Saudi Arabia to go ahead and set their price for oil. If we feel so inclined we'll buy it. If they wanted to charge a steeper price than we cared to pay, we could have told them to pound sand. If we had the right eyes and ears on the ground over there we could have castrated the bastards who seek our demise before they could say "camel."
While that is widely accepted as fact due to the media's lack of interest in using history as a guide in their reporting, it's not really true. It's just one of the bogus after-the-fact rationalizations for why al Qaeda's activities were "justified." Bin Laden, years before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and subsequent massing on the Saudi border compelled the Saudis to ask for our help, had already established himself as an America-hating SOB. Al Qaeda, "the worldwide jihad" after all, was born not after the Saudis asked for our help in the early 1990s but even earlier, in 1988.
OBL's mentor, Azzam, with whom he cofounded MAK even before al Qaeda, was already known for his prolific rants against the U.S. and for his assertions that the U.S. undermined the Mujahadeen in the war in Afghanistan against the USSR.
In the late 1980s before al Qaeda was born and just as things were looking bad for the Soviets in Afghanistan, Azzam and Osama bin Laden got in a big dispute over MAK's goal. OBL wanted to wage jihad simultaneously against the United States and the various insufficiently islamic Governments that ruled over muslim lands from which he had recruited dissidents- a multi-front war. Azzam in contrast, planned to focus more narrowly on completing the war in Afghanistan, which he viewed as a training ground for his ultimate goal. He intended to gather these veteran mujahadeen together for an assault not on the United States or other Arab governments, but against Israel, upon whose ruins Palestine could be formed.
Their disagreement was sufficiently bitter that OBL left MAK and took the more radical members with him, forming, with Jalaidan, "Al Qaeda." This was in 1988, so he was preparing for war with the United States years BEFORE Iraq started the Gulf War, before this well-publicized 1991 gripe about US toops in Saudi Arabia ever came to be.
It wasn't long after the break, about a year, that Azzam was killed in a bombing.
After Azzam's death, the opportunistic OBL immediately moved back in and took over MAK's global operations, absorbing most of Azzam's followers.
The way was now clear, in 1989, for OBL to begin planning his multifronted jihad against the United States and the unpious rulers of countries from whence his jihadists came. Azzam's goal of Palestine went on the back burner- the jihad bin Laden had in mind was far broader than that, and OBL's big "base" , al Qaeda, eventually became the umbrella under which allied terrorist groups would join, their leaders becoming voting members of al Qaeda's shurra councils of operations and financing.