Breaking Up (in the Middle East) is very hard to do

We were told several times that our missions in Iraq and Afghanistan are almost their complete and that our presence and commitment in each of these countries will soon be complete and cut. A page of history will tell us that permanently breaking missions and commitments is easier said than done.

History should tell us how inextricably we are caught in Middle East, a region whose values, such that they are, we do not understand and which certainly ignores us. We were in Iraq and Afghanistan for eight years, nine current. The only thing that we agree is that they want us and we want to leave. Despite withdrawal of our forces, in Iraq and the Afghanistan promised withdrawal we will not find easy to put these countries out of the spirit and our responsibility.

Of course, we had historical precedent of Western countries mired in the middle is political, decided to leave and unable to do so. The British in 1882, intervened "temporarily" in Egypt to protect their citizens against certain local riots in Alexandria a key seaport guarding the Suez Canal. As the cost and difficulty of this intervention began to increase, the British were determined to leave as soon as possible. In fact, it is recorded that they announced their departure more than 50 times in the 1940s before 1922 - but never a departure. When the British finally left in 1957, 75 years after their intervention, it is a disgrace and involuntary retirement in the hands of Colonel Nasser instead voluntary exit that they have long sought.

Although separated by a century and a half, the British and American dilemmas are essentially the same. Different religious, cultural and political opposing values are steeped in centuries of opposing beliefs. The only American now believe to be a stable, efficient and fair Government - linked to a market economy - Western-style democracy has never been the purpose or the experience of the Middle East in which political progress is primarily, sometimes exclusively measured by compliance with religious standards organized on the authoritarian principles. The "common man" of a Middle Eastern or North African countries will Muslim tell you, as me, "" my policy is my religion and my religion is my policy!""

Thus, Great Britain in the 1930s, following his intervention in Egypt, in World War I, the stability of the Suez Canal and regional domination by the Ottoman Empire, but, despite these common concerns, could establish a ground with the Egypt even though that country has become more Western. And the US in Iraq, trying to balance the interests Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds to resolve an Islamic split that began in the seventh century, seems powerless to find common ground with Islam will allow us to finally and gracefully leave the Iraq or, in Afghanistan, to find a formula to cooperate with Pakistani and Afghan leaders to resolve the Afghan policy to justify our initial intervention in Afghanistan.

Brother rabbit and the tar baby, Britain and America's hardest hit their Middle Eastern targets, the more difficult it became clear Western commitments permanently and courtesy of a medium with which East nor Great Britain in the 19th century or America in the 21st shares all of the fundamental common values with which justify these commitments. Jack e. Bronston