I'm Grateful it's July 4th 2014

and not July 4th 2002 right now.

We have learned a lot in the last 12 years since then. Mostly, I think the U.S. has learned we cannot solve the problems of the Middle East. Likely only Islamic peoples will solve those problems if they ever do. No one else will ever be able to solve their problems for them.

One need only to look seriously at the history of the last several thousand years there. By looking at past history one can also project future history by so doing.

Countries would have to have a similar history and traditions to wind up like or even emulate the U.S. or Europe but they don't. So, in the end looking at past history one can likely project future history too from that unfortunately.

Russia, Europe and the U.S. are partly to blame for the problems of the middle east as Colonial nations around the world. When bigger countries try to rule smaller ones it always changes the trajectories of those smaller nations ongoing.

In the long run what the U.S. has done in Iraq and Afghanistan likely has done more harm than good for the peoples there.

It wasn't that the intentions of the U.S. and Europe weren't good. It's just that was in in western interests is not necessarily in Islamic interests. Because even though we in the west are mostly secular Christian, Iraq and Afghanistan might never be. So, how can our needs for what those countries should be for us have anything at all to do with what those countries perceive their needs to be?

There is no direct co-relation.  Some people of both countries might become enamored of western ways but that is never going to be the majority of those nations.

So, in the end maybe those pro-western people might be better off coming to the western world to live rather than to be killed or maimed by local people who never are going to like anything western at all.

I'm grateful it is July 4th 2014 because the main lesson the U.S. has learned in the Middle East is that we cannot control anything really that happens there because it is beyond any way we normally think here in the west.

And maybe that's a good thing.

So, as the U.S. watches with it's drones thousands and likely millions of people die over there in the coming years what have we learned?

Islamic people's in the end are the only controllers of their own destiny past, present and future.

The western world might believe it can affect real change in the Middle East, but it can't in any lasting sense  unless we nuke the whole place completely out of existence which likely would mean the whole world and all life upon it would soon be gone then too.