First of all, get over your junvenile idea that Chomsky's politics is something deeply intellectual. If you can grow up, then you can see that Chomsky is nothing more than garden variety anti-US anarchist. Secondly, that statement is intellectually vacuous and impractical for so many reasons, but the fact that it impresses you says a lot about your level of sophistication and need for leadership.
Here is a partial list of nations that have gotten rich by trading with us: Japan, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Germany. We paid dearly in blood and treasure to defeat 2 of them, then generously rebuilt them so they could become economic rivals. China is currently eating our economic lunch, and scores of other nations demand access to our markets. Wage compression, destruction of the american middle class from foreign competition, and protecting the west so they could prosper... From a logical perspective then, the only thing one can conclude is that for people like Chomsky is that their politics is their religion because the facts don't match the definition. They have have an emotional need for leftist hate. As for people like you, I am not sure why you would think his crap is anything but.
Yes, those trustworthy and cooperative ME dictators and that bad, bad, United States. It's all so simple.
And that's Saddam Hussein's fault for being uncooperative and noncompliant. So I'd add those deaths to the one million+ body count he racked up before we kicked him out of Kuwait. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Saddam_Hussein's_Iraq I won't shed any tears for Qaddafi because when you compare his final hours to the suffering he caused, it's such an imperceptively tiny fraction that I'd consider him fortunate. Extremely so. Why would anybody trust us? Have you noticed we only have problems with bad regimes that do bad things like invade Kuwait or order the bombing of a 747 (not to mention what they do to their own people)? If I were one of those regimes I'd recognize the pattern and NOT trust us. I do regard the embargo as an act of war BTW. I also regard Iran's IED support to kill our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan as an act of war. And we're not the only ones who have a problem with Iran as I pointed out before with the list of sanctions. So I'm not about to blame America, nor will I be so naive to think we can trust Iran with nukes or that appeasement and non-intervention will work. Look at how well that worked out for us in the events leading up to our involvement in World War I or Neville Chamberlain's Munich Agreement.
And this is the real problem. We have started a fight that we have to finish. We can't just take our ball and go home. That said, there is book called The 48 Laws of Power. One of the laws states..."Crush Your Enemy Totally". We, because of our imperialism, will always have the Middle East gunning for us. It's them or us at this point, I fear. If we get into it with Iran, we should destroy them. It is the only real way to send a message. Right now, the Middle East believes, just wait em out. They will get tired of war. And they have been right. This time, if it becomes a hot war, if we going to be imperialists, we should act like imperialists and take a page out of Rome and Athens. Bow to us, and it's all good. Fight, and we will eradicate your war machine and anyone who is able to build another one.
All Saddam had to do to avoid the war was to leave the country. He could be living high somewhere in the world today if he had any sense.
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Why_was_Japan's_oil_supply_cut_off_in_World_War_2_and_why_was_this_such_a_threat_to_them Btw: Anyone ever read Red Storm Rising?
You miss the point. The GOP are imperialists. No question. Now, if you were true to your philosophy. If Saddam refuses to leave, then we should crush him, and take their oil. They are now a province to the Imerperium of the United States of America. But we try to play it both ways. It will never work. Either, accept those states who do not believe as we do a Sovereign nation, or take them and their resources. That is why you sir, are a chickenhawk.
You're right about waiting us out. They're very patient and I doubt the right people in our government have an adequate understanding of how they think. We're way too ethnocentric and I've always said we should employ enough cultural anthropologists to fix this. This is one of the reasons I think our diplomacy sucks and not nearly enough of that has been done. If we take military action against Iran, my guess is it will be targeted and limited and in no way resemble Iraq although we may also facilitate regime change. The only way I see us crushing them totally would be if they were somehow responsible for a nuclear detonation or a series of dirty bombs in the United States. It's been opined they'd never do that but I disagree and believe the most likely scenario would be passing something off to one of their fringe puppets. They're smart enough to know we can trace it back to them so if they ever get nuclear weapons and claim they've "lost control" of them and it wasn't their fault, watch out.
Khadaffy could have made an escape as well. Italy would probably have given him asylum, they need the money.