Geopolitical lesson

Okay. It is September 15, 2001. You are in the administration of the United States, and 4 days ago your nation was attacked and thousands of your private citizens were gruesomely murdered. You look at a world map, but particularly at the map below. What conclusions do you come to? I will tell you right now what conclusions the Bush adminsitration came to.

1. The most troublesome nations for the security of the United States, because of their outward expressions of aggression, are Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, and North Korea (not pictured).
2. Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt, Pakistan, and Sudan are also problematic, but despite their roles in radical Islam, they are all influenceable through soft power.
3. Unless we decide to mobilize for complete and total war, we need to maintain stability in portions of the Middle East while we take care of business in others.
4. We have the international will to eliminate the threat in Afghanistan.
5. We have justification under U.N. resolutions violated by Iraq to eliminate that threat.
6. We also have the ability to stage the military for war with Iraq.
7. As of this date hypthetical date, military action with Iran is undesireable because we cannot effectively stage the military, even though Iran may be the heart of the threats to this nation.
8. If we make Afghanistan and Iraq our number one and number two priorities, though, we can place a pincher on Iran that will further our ability contain them, and, if necessary, wage war with them.
9. North Korea is a completely undesireable place to wage war because it can rain destruction upon Seoul before we can do a thing about it. They are also secondary to the events of 9/11-the threat from them is their ability to arm our Islamist enemies with terrifying weapons of destruction.

The above would be a reasonable analysis of the situation on September 15, 2001. Now, looking at those 9 points and the map below, can you begin to understand why we've done the things we've done over the past 5 years? It is true that the first two stages of the war on terror have not completely eliminated the threat of terror, but then again, they never could. They were designed to both disrupt our terrorist enemies and also to give us a base strength in the Middle East from which we could use soft or hard power to further set back Islamism in the next stages of this war. Unfortunately, too many are already looking to wrap up our war on terror, as they do not understand that we are truely only at the end of the beginning of this conflict.