Okay, maybe I'm missing something.

Say we never fought the first Gulf War.

So we get a general war between Iraq/Kuwait, the Saudis, maybe Iran and Israel, with Saddam and Israel, at the least, having nuclear weapons in the field.

Is this supposed to be okay, just because American troops aren't in the mix? Is the idea that somehow the U.S. would be able to sit this all out while the Middle East, including Israel, burns? What would the rest of the world be doing? Where is the oil coming from?

And what would the eventual winner do after that?

We learned that "leave them fight it out and we'll stay out of it" didn't work with Hitler. Had Hitler not declared war on the U.S. after Japan had, and we had stayed out of Europe, (after all, Hitler never attacked the U.S. directly), what would that hemisphere look like today? What would the eventual winner of the war between the Third Reich and the Soviets have done?

BTW, tally up ALL the civilian deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq due to American military action. Would this number be greater or less than the results of a hypothetical Pan-Arabic War?

At some point, evil has to be confronted. And by more than condemning letters from the U.N.