Realism

President Obama is, yet again, distancing himself from the policies that the former President set in place. Without going into too much detail, the President is creating a team of people to enforce interrogation techniques (that abide by the law). What this is doing is basically taking away power from the CIA, which leads me into this question: Does the CIA, along with its policies, help or hurt this country? While some may say that the CIA helps this country's 'dirty work' and keep its power in place, others might add that by doing so, it compromises this country's core principles, and sinks the country down to the level of its enemies. Instead of arguing both of these points I'd rather look at the realistic point of view. One of the biggest "stations" of the CIA is in the middle east. Its huge influence in this area helps shapes the politics of the region. But how helpful have they been in this area? Look at the biggest problems the United States has encountered in this region in the past couple of years: The war in Afghanistan, the taking down of Saddam Hussein, and tension with Iran. When looking back further in history, one can see that all of these problems were caused by the CIA. In order to take down a regime, the CIA helped Saddam Hussein rise to power, which created the first problem. By teaming up with terrorist organizations to help kick the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan, the CIA empowered our current enemy in that country. And last, but definitely not least, is their involvement in Iran. The U.S. over the past couple of years, has supplied two terrorist organizations (the MEK, and Jundallah) in order to topple to current Iranian government. While this is more recent than the other two actions, it is already causing tensions with Iran. It's just interesting to note that the CIA's actions sometimes look like they are beneficial, but actually come back to haunt this country with a bigger problem. Just something to think about....