Quote:
Originally Posted by Combwork
That's an interesting thought. If I remember correctly, the Colt 45 was nicknamed "The Equalizer". Logical enough, it meant that physically weak people could defend themselves from the town bully but what happens if we give free weapons to a country that's already split up into factions that share nothing more than a common hatred of each other? Would the resulting civil war stay within its boundaries, or spread?
Lets take a more British example. If the UK government had supplied both the UDA and the IRA with weapons in equal number in the 1980's would the resulting carnage have stayed within Northern Ireland, or spilled over into London, Liverpool or anywhere with a mixed Irish population?
Unless Merrylander you're thinking of Fortress America; no imports, no exports (could the USA survive like this) how far would you go to protect your interests? Like it or not the USA has still got the largest highly trained armed forces in the world, and the pressure to use them to protect American interests such as oil would be intense.
Possible scenario. A terrorist group sees that the way to bring the West down is not to go head to head, but to shut off vital supplies. They plan to get hold of or make a crude nuclear weapon and detonate it upwind of a major oilfield. What do you do when your intelligence service gets vague but credible knowledge of this? Cross your fingers and hope or without warning land troops to protect the most productive oilfields?
Without oil imports from the middle east your country would quite literally grind to a halt.
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This is the part I never quite understood about the whole energy thing. If we had spent the same amount as we spent on Iraq and Afghanistan on setting up alternative energy we could thumb our nose at the middle east. I guess Big Oil has too strong a lobby.
I was not really thinking "Fortress America" so much as the fact that the taliban and such like treat their women like dogs so maybe if they had a .38 or 9mm caliber version of the Colt 911 they could defend themselves.
For the same reason we should have left a load of armaments for the Kurds. Gotta love the way the Turks call them terrorists, after they stole half of Kurdistan while the Iraquis took another big chunk. They left the few bits for Iran and Syria.