The UN stepping in is basically saying the US military steps in. We've become their attack dog, and whenever there needs to be intervention, guess who gets to go in first, lose the most lives, and leave last, if at all. Essentially the US military provides the defense that Europe won't provide for itself.
I'm actually going to start by agreeing with you. The complete inability of the EU to project military power is very telling about its ability to help maintain order.
Ron Paul is an idiot. He's an amalgam of extreme positions and the only one he'll be able to actually do is unilateral surrender from everywhere. Paul is an irresponsible moron backed by racists and neonazis (the fans of his newsletter), whose essential domestic policy is anarchy and foreign policy is isolationism.
You're... not really right, though you're right on principle. Ron Paul's positions are mostly untenable but your rhetoric greatly exaggerates the problems with them.
The problem with the middle east is it's run entirely by oil-renting theocratic thugs who complement you in English while they plot to murder you in Arabic. Every week Armageddonjad starts his radio address by calling to wipe out Israel. Sure, he's just the mouthpiece for Khameni, but Khameni has no interest in realing in the Jew hatred or the acceleration of the end-times bit.
Ahmadinejad has about the same popularity in Iran that Bush does in the USA - i.e., in the cellar. I'd be very surprised if he gets re-elected, and if he does it will be through basically rigging the election via his allies. In that case, I doubt anyone will really listen to him anyway.
Khamenei is complicated, he's a lot more pragmatic than Ahmadinejad but he is definitely no reformist - but from what I can tell, the pragmatic wing of the conservatives have his ear (via Rafsanjani), which leads me to believe that Iran isn't a threat to anyone, especially not the United States. A new supreme leader could change that, but right now the pragmatics have a majority in the Assembly of Experts (and given what I said earlier about the electorate, I see no reason for that to change), so regardless of what happens, I think things with respect to Iran will get better, not worse - assuming we don't do anything stupid.
No real comment on Saddam.
The War for Oil bit is tiresome old lefty trash. If we were really there purely for oil and Bush is the evil imperialist fascist the left makes him out to be, we would have just taken over the oil fields for ourselves and let the social structure in Iraq rot. Instead we've been reviving the area, and Anbar province, formerly a terrorist haven, has been completely turned around. It is now safe to move around Baghdad again, and aside from a few trouble spots being churned by Iran's puppet strings, Iraq is mostly under the control of Iraqis. Is the work done? No. But to say we lost just means you're in good company with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, whose invested his entire political future in Iraq's failure.
I have to agree that oil was probably just a sweetener (as evidenced by Rumsfeld's claim that the war would "pay for itself with oil"), and there was a lot of other issues at stake (especially the idealist neoconservative agenda).
Speaking of the oil fields, they are now exceeding the capacity they were under Saddam. Damn you Boosh!
Ahem:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/5117170.stm
Before the war, output was around 3 million bpd, peaking at a record of 3.5 million bpd.
http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/prnewswire/NYTU09515012008-1.htm
Iraqi production was estimated at 2.3 million b/d
I will agree the "War on Terror" is a misnomer. Our enemy is really radical jihadists who believe in blowing themselves up in the name of Allah in the hopes of establishing a worldwide Muslim theocracy (commonly referred to as the caliphate.) They believe women are second class citizens, Western civilization is an affront to Allah, and basically that your options are to be a Muslim, a slave, or a dead body.
The question is - are we really fighting THOSE people? That's obviously al-Qaeda's goal, but from what I can tell, all we've done on that front is throw money at Musharraf and hope for the best. The Taliban had no interest in going anywhere beyond Afghanistan and maybe Pakistan. The Iraqi insurgency (minus the al-Qaeda proxy, which admittedly we ARE fighting - but it's our own fault they're there in the first place) just wants its country back.
Most Muslims aren't terrorists, but nearly all terrorists are Muslim.
I'd estimate that, of the billion or so Muslims on Earth, maybe 20-30,000 are terrorists who harbor real willingness to go after the US, Israel, or some government that they dislike (Algeria, etc) - and 99% of them are in Pakistan or on the Afghan border with Pakistan. The question is - does this really say anything about Islam, or just the people who happened to pervert it? Remember, you could easily trace this movement back to the Soviet-Afghan war, which WE funded.
