When it comes to the MIddle-East, it is hard to believe what you hear. It seems to me that what we get from the MIddle-East is what the players there think we want to hear. Time and time again we jump into a crisis there just to wind up making a big mistake. And one has to wonder when you are watching CNN over the Egyptian crisis; why are all those signs in english? At first I didn't think much about it. After all english is what I am use to.

But is that the default language of Egypt? Is that the language of the common person on the street? I don't think so. If you were a political movement in Egypt and you wanted to rally the people to support your cause, wouldn't your signs be in arabic? Is it more likely that the intended audience for all of those signs is America? Are we being told what we want to hear in order to support some groups agenda? Is that group like maybe the Muslim Brotherhood really who we want to help into power?

Our track record in the Middle-East is pretty poor. I don't think we understand the culture of the region so we keep falling into well planned traps. Remember Iran? President Carter withdrew is support for the brutal Shah of Iran in favor of a democratic movement. That brought the brutal Ayatollahs into power.

Are the people of Iran better off under the Ayatollahs than the Shah? Is the U.S. and the Middle-East better off? From our perspective I would say no. It is the Ayatollahs of Iran that fund and control Hezbollah and Hamas. It is Iran that helped fund the Mahdi Army and provided weapons for Shiite guerillas that were used to kill U.S. troops. Iran has also provided some support to the Taliban in Western Afghanistan.

How about Somalia? Remember that was under a U.N. charter. The Liberals were all so proud that at last the U.S. military was being used for good. Why were we there? To bring a stable democratic government to a country that had descended into anarchy ruled by various warlords. So what happened? We arrived with much fanfare. Then we got bogged down in piecemeal battles with the warlords. In the famous battle of Mogadishu U.S. military units and some U.N. forces engaged the warlords militia and other civilians in battle. The U.S. forces lost about 19 men with another 83 wounded. The militia lost somewhere between 300 and thousands more wounded. But President Clinton ordered a halt to offensive activities and soon withdrew from Somalia.

Iraq was more of the same. We relied a lot on Iraqi expatriates who assured us that the people of Iraq would welcome us with open arms as liberators. We soon found out that there were other political groups that were just waiting for the power vacuum for them to assert control. And what of the Iraqis that we relied on for our decisions; well it turned out they had their own agendas that they were working on.

Lebanon? Well a few years back we were celebrating democracy in Lebanon. At last it looked like a place where we were able to help a Middle-East country achieve a stable, peaceful democratic government. Today we see how Hezbollah has manipulated the process and used the threat of their military might to force their chosen Prime Minister on the people of Lebanon.

No the U.S. doesn’t seem to have had much luck in the Middle-East. Our innate belief in democracy and our feeling that we should help the people of the Earth to achieve a stable, free society has led us into nothing but trouble. Could it be that be that our own cultural beliefs make us easy prey for people who only believe in obtaining power at any cost? Does our desire to be seen as the “good guys” prevent us from doing what needs to be done in a cold and ruthless world?

Is Egypt going to be the next country to fall under the control of Radical Islam with the help of the U.S.?

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