What the hell are you talking about? Damn near every country on the planet has business in the ME.

Iran, among others, has made good on its threats against America and Israel. Sounds like serious business to me.

Over the years, the United States has built a formidable intelligence network in the ME - CIA field offices and agents, military intelligence assets, indigenous operatives (Muslims), and cooperation with foreign intelligence agencies. These dedicated people have been keeping their fingers on the pulse of affairs in the ME. They are keeping president Trump, the DOD, and military commanders well informed about what's going on over there.

If the United States pulls our military forces out of the ME, particularly Iraq and Syria, and brings the troops home - all of them, air, land and sea - then our intelligence networks in the region will be seriously hamstrung. Intelligence stations will shut down, field agents will be pulled out or sent to embassies for wh**ever protections they might provide, indigenous operatives will be cut loose and on their own, and we will be blind, we won't have a clue what's going on over there.

Iranian Islamists have been chanting "Death to America" and k*****g Americans for four decades, seems prudent to keep a close eye on those bastards and to maintain a military presence capable of smoking them immediately if they finally decide to walk the walk.

In 2003, a 25 year veteran CIA case officer wrote a book called "See No Evil". He operated in every middle eastern s**thole imaginable. He wrote the book to document how the Clinton administration did exactly what I just described. Clinton despised the idea of exposing CIA agents and their operatives to constant danger, he and his advisors felt that technological surveillance such as satellite imagery and electronic intercepts with analyses by the map reading brainiacs at Langley was far superior to boots on the ground. When this happened, actionable intelligence dwindled to a drip. CIA stations were closed, agents withdrawn, operatives cut loose - some to pay the price. He describes how the CIA steadily degenerated from a potent human-intelligence resource that often saved or spared lives, to a people-shy, satellite-obsessed, and politically oriented branch of a centralized government.

He discussed the extent to which the Iranian Revolutionary Guard has been involved in anti-American terrorist activity, most publicly in the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing, but also in a far more diverse range of terrorist operations.

From The Preface
This book is a memoir of one foot soldier’s career in the other cold war, the one against terrorist networks. It’s a story about places most Americans will never travel to, about people many Americans would prefer to think we don’t need to do business with.

This memoir, I hope, will show the reader how spying is supposed to work, where the CIA lost its way, and how we can bring it back again. But I hope this book will accomplish one more purpose as well: I hope it will show why I am angry about what happened to the CIA. And I want to show why every American and everyone who cares about the preservation of this country should be angry and alarmed, too.

The CIA was systematically destroyed by political correctness, by petty Beltway wars, by careerism, and much more. At a time when terrorist threats were compounding globally, the agency that should have been monitoring them was being scrubbed clean instead. Americans were making too much money to bother. Life was good. The White House and the National Security Council became cathedrals of commerce where the interests of big business outweighed the interests of protecting American citizens at home and abroad. Defanged and dispirited, the CIA went along for the ride. And then on September 11, 2001, the reckoning for such vast carelessness was presented for all the world to see.