Why is the United States at war with various countries in the Middle East? What triggered the conflict and what are we doing about the situation? I'm almost entirely ignorant on the subject, so if anyone could clear it up for me, that'd be great.
Originally the conflict stemmed from tensions between Islam and Christianity. That's a lot of history your asking for.
It's a very strategically-important place. It connects a bunch of shipping routes, it sits on top of very important (militarily applicable) resources, there's that whole 'cradle of civilization' archaeological thing, and then there's the small matter that a large part of the world's population thinks it's where you go to talk to God.
And it has so much oil. Like it or not, oil is the lifeblood of America and if they were to lose access to much of this supply it would be devastating to our economy and way of life.
What is the official (what the newspapers would say) reason behind us and other Western countries being in the Middle East? Are we endangered or warding off a potential threat?
The main reason was the threat of weapons of mass destruction. There was enough intelligence, verified by other countries and the majority of the democrats, that this was a solid threat. Given Saddams history of using chemical weapons to wipe out thousands of people the decision was made to force him to allow inspectors in. Sanctions were tried first, which he refused, followed by dire warnings of what would happen if he didn't follow the international will. He thought he could call the bluff of the world and was proved wrong. There are many underlying reasons but that is how it officially went down.
In a roundabout way, this is actually one of the reasons why the US "preemptively" attacked Iraq. The former POTUS (he who shall not be named) and his entourage basically "lumped them all together". They played their war drums and fear-mongered the nation into believing that Saddam was an imminent threat to Americans with his non-existent WMD's, and that he was somehow connected to the 9/11 attacks on the US. Of course we can go back a bit further in time to when Saddam was an ally of the United States and was aided militarily to fight the Iranians, who BTW also received arms from the US during the Iran vs. Iraq war in the 1980's, but that's a different story. Speaking of which... I personally don't buy what any doomsday-prophet is selling, but if I had to guess I would say that at some point (hopefully soonish) the Arab Spring will have reached Iran as well. We already know that there is quite a large movement in Iran that wants nothing more than to reform the country, at least based on the protests following the reelection of Ahmadinejad. So... as long as reform, mass-protests, a revolution, or perhaps even a non-violent change in leadership (through elections), will happen in Iran before something dramatic happens (for example: a serious attack on a vessel in the Persian Gulf, or a successful nuclear weapons test), I don't see why a military conflict can't be avoided.
I think the unofficial reason of the middle-eastern wars is to maintain global economic and military supremacy for NATO nations. These geo-political Great Games aren't really as important as they pretend to be - but they always have the potential to get a lot of people killed.
The short and honest answer (albeit you really have to find this out yourself), is due in main to the Zionist infiltration of the US political arena, and media, in order to persuade America to keep on supporting the lunatic state of Israel, finanically, as well as supporting Israel's routine acts of criminality. Any time there is an US action somewhere in the ME, or in a predominantly Muslim nation, you can be assured that it is one that will be of benefit to the Zionists. A large part of that is about literally stealing resources of other nation states. Yup, just like another nation raining war down on the US, never mind 911, imagine all major cities being bombed daily in the US, just so that another nation could steal the natural resource of the US, whatever it happened to be. When you steal the resources of others, then it tends to cause upset. For all of this theft and criminality, it is never the American people that benefit. If they did, then they would all be going around buying petrol at a cent a gallon, aside from anything else. It benefits the elites. They are like mafia. With the same amount of morals - which is none. When you start to see it that way, it begins to make sense. Hope that helps Jack
