The Classic "if your only tool is a hammer..

[G_j]

every problem looks like a nail." syndrome.

Our tool is violence.
We desperately need a Department of Peace, dedicated to continually exploring nonviolent solutions to world conflicts.

[Scuba]

1. Compare our diplomacy and defense budgets a you'll get a good idea of how we value tools.

Defense - around a trillion, we don't know for sure because part is secret and part is so fucked up it can't be audited.

State - about 50 billion.

[MicaelS]

2. Peace will never happen in the ME.

Too many there want and thrive on conflict. If the US and Israel did not exist, then the various Arab / Islamic / Persian factions would simply attack each other. As is happening there right now.

[leftstreet]

3. How much of that instability is caused by Western interests?

When was the last time the area was without the influence of private-profit seeking monarchies, colonialists, or multinational corporations?

[Harmony Blue]

4. True

the African continent is rife with conflict as well because the colonial powers carved up that region too.

[MicaelS]

5. So the Sunni - Shia conflict is the fault of the West?

Or is everything the fault of Western Interests? Other Human beings can't fuck things up on their own with Western interference?

I'm sick and tired of the whole world's emphasis on the ME. I wish we had a replacement for ME oil. That way we could pull the hell completely out of the ME, and leave them alone to settle their problems.

[leftstreet]

7. You could argue that, yes

Western interests have had a dramatic effect on many people

The myth of the 1,400 year Sunni-Shia war

The 'Sunni-Shia conflict' narrative is misguided at best and disingenuous at worst, suggests author.

...

The conflict which some claim exists today between Sunni and Shia Muslims is a product of very recent global events; blowback from the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the petro-dollar fuelled global rise of Wahhabi reactionaries. It is decidedly not the continuation of any "1,400 year war" between Sunnis and Shias but is driven instead by the very modern phenomena of identity politics. Factions on both sides have created false histories for their own political benefit and have manufactured symbols and rituals which draw upon ancient history but are in fact entirely modern creations. Furthermore, Western military powers have sought to amplify these divisions to generate internecine conflicts within Muslim societies and engineer a bloodbath which will be to their own benefit.

While neoconservatives practically salivate in anticipation of Muslims committing mass-fratricide against one another, away from the political sphere ordinary people continue to live with the deeply engrained sense of tolerance that has traditionally characterised the once-global civilisation of Islam. For every sectarian terrorist group or militia, there are countless ordinary Shia and Sunni Muslims around the world who have risked their lives to protect their co-religionists as well as the religious minorities within their societies. For every story which discards the nuances of todays' conflicts and casts them as part of a narrative of spiralling sectarian violence, there are others which point resolutely in the opposite direction. In the words of an 80-year old Pakistani farmer, a man older than his own country: "I've witnessed this Shia-Sunni brotherhood from my childhood, you can say from the day I was born."

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/07/2013719220768151.html

[G_j]

8. we distribute hammers across the globe

not at all helpful..

[Octafish]

6. What D.H. Lawrence said.

“The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer.”

FTR: My family through my dad's side fought in the Revolution -- for the United States.

[KittyWampus]

9. If you're only reference is Iraq, every sort of intervention looks like Iraq.

[G_j]

10. I suppose

however, this 'syndrome' is the same as it was in Vietnam.