[Hubris Boy]

Dammit, Jag. You made me choke and splurt tea out of my nose.

Lets go thougha bit of history and a few naffacts.

Yes. Let's do that.

a: HT emiddle east was warved up into artifiucal states by the allies after WW2.

Actually, the map of the Middle East as we know it today was carved up into artificial states after WW1. It was done in a half-assed attempt to clean up the wreckage of what had been the Ottoman Empire. (The utterly corrupt and hopelessly silly Ottoman Empire having foolishly backed the losing team in the recent hostilities.) Most of the carving, by the way, was done by the Europeans, especially the British and the French, not by the United States.

Sure, there were some minor changes to the map after WW2. Iran's borders got shoved around some to keep Stalin happy, and I've NEVER understood where the hell Kuwait came from. But most of the changes were changes of government, not territory. (With the enormous and unfortunate exception of Israel, but that wasn't our fault either.)

b: THese often didn't work with tribes, as in africa.

True enough. Again, you can thank the Europeans for that.

c: THere is alot of tribal fighting in afghanistan.(which is why half of afghastian hate the other half but get on with the pakistanies)

Yeah... but it's always been that way. Afghanistan has been the monkey house of southern Asia for over 2,000 years. You aren't trying to suggest that this is a recent development, are you? Or somehow attributable to anything the US has done?

d: the us gave weapsona nd moeny to the talibanand other to fight thier ideological war.

Well... yeah, that's true, as far as it goes. We gave weapons and money to the mujahideen so the mujahideen could fight their ideological war. We were busy trying to bankrupt the Soviet economy by forcing them to compete in an insane arms race that they couldn't afford, and this seemed like a "buy-one-get-one-free" deal for us. And I'm sure that, at some level in the US government, people were REALLY enjoying the irony of watching the Soviets use conventional troops to fight a guerrilla war. (Jesus! Didn't those dumb bastards learn anything from watching the US wallow around in Vietnam a decade earlier?)

e: then they just let them rot

I wouldn't go THAT far, Jag. The US has been the largest contributor of foreign aid to Afghanistan since they gave the Soviets the boot in '91. And that aid continued to flow even after the Taliban took over most of the country. As far as I know, most of our aid to Afghanistan has had very few strings attached... why should it? There's really nothing there worth having. We're just trying to feed people, and maybe proselytize a little western-style consumerism while we're at it.

suprised, combined with other results of ameican actions on the arab world, including keeping very ugly leaders in pwoer for thier own political benifit that they hate the us???

As opposed to what? Replacing them with a different set of very ugly leaders? We've never dabbled in Syrian politics, for example, and the result was Hafez Assad. In Saudi Arabia, the western-supported House of Saud is surely as unsavory a group of thugs and scumbags as you're likely to find anywhere, but what would you replace them with? Some things just won't fix, Jag, and it's a little unfair to blame the US for the native inability of certain regions of the world to build themselves a civil society.