system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
CMV:The United States should immediately remove armed forces from the Middle East and leave the region to handle its own problems.
gpt
>We are spending, and have spent, ungodly amounts of money, time, energy, resources, and unfortunately, human lives to fight groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS for decades, and have almost nothing to show for it. The people in the Middle East have been fighting each other for centuries, with no end in sight, and the US seems to only be making it worse.

That's not true at all.

Here's a few sobering facts:

* Life expectancy of Afghans in 2001 - 45
* Life expectancy of Afghans today - 64+

* % of children who died before age 5 in 2001 - 25%
* % of children who died before age 5 today - <10%

* Children enrolled in schools in 2001 - < 1,000,000 (males only)
* Children enrolled in schools today - > 8,000,000 (including women)

>>Every time we drop a bomb, invade a country, kill a terrorist, what have you, it just makes the enemy hate us that much more. The damage we have done is probably irreparable at this point, so we should cut our losses and just leave, while still offering aid to countries who ask for it.

This is said all the time, and yet terrorism against the US existed long before we ever dropped bombs in the region. Whether it was the Barbary Pirates in the early 1800s or siding against the Arabs in the Arab-Israeli conflict, countries and organizations have found ways to generate hate towards the US - or really any country for that matter.

>We can devote some of the resources used overseas to protect ourselves at home rather than fighting anything that moves in other countries.

The resources we devote overseas directly affects us at home. Our naval base in Bahrain supports patrolling the Persian Gulf - and thus helps maintain the Straits of Hormuz from being closed off, as it was nearly was in the 1980s.

We don't fight "anything that moves" - after all, we have a base in Djibouti. Do you know what a lot of the people there do? They build houses and stuff for the locals, like the Seabees.

Does having a base in Japan mean we fight everything that moves? No, of course not - those bases are directed at helping Japan and South Korea in case North Korea starts a war. But they were also used for Tsunami relief in 2011 and also Typhoon relief in the Philippines this past year. Had we not been based out there, we wouldn't have had the ability or the quickness to fly in relief.