Posted on 05/09/2018 11:17:48 AM PDT by DIRTYSECRET
A trillion bucks and 4k troops later what have we gained? We didn't have fracking back then and the enviro-nuts wouldn't let us drill. We learned nothing from the Russian Afghanistan experience and we're still there. Is it too late to get out? I say take out Assad, establish a Kurdistan, build a safe zone Trump promised and get the hell out. Maybe give the Ayatollas a punch in the nose-we owe them. We got our own oil. Let them kill each other. The lefties had it right with the no blood for oil.
Frickin YEMEN needs nuked real bad! Right after Riyadh, Mecca, and Medina.
Re: “We got our own oil.”
Correction...
We import more than 40% of the oil we consume each day, most of it from Canada and Mexico.
That was military genius Colon Bowel’s doing.
OK Assad stays. Stlii-what did it get us? Refugees in Europe. We ended up doing most of the killing instead of the Moozlems. To them it doesn’t matter. All they know is that we killed a lot of people and there was a lot of money to be made. What’s Afghanistan worth to us? Pashtutans in Pakistan will go on killing somebody until MAYBE they get their own land-unlikely. Kurds, Pahutans, and Christian safe zone. Find a way Mr. Trump. Unfortunately it will take forever with the end result being more war without us.
Per the UN authorization we did finish the first gulf war. We did not have a mandate to invade Iraq.
After 911 it was appropriate to kick SOMEONE’S ass. Saddam? We ended up doing Iran’s dirty work. Reagan pulled out of Lebanon after the hotel bombing and the USS Stark had non functional defense weapons. Mistakes from overcommitment. It will get worse. All it takes is one pilot captured.
There were plenty who knew that direct involvement in the ME would be an quagmire without end. It has ever been thus.
Bush was no Patton/Macarthur. One wanted Russia and the other wanted China. Japan was easy. Just dropped the big one. 41’ would have done Iran’s dirty work earlier.
President Bush told general Schwarzkopf to stop for that very reason: eliminating the regime would create a bigger problem. So I am lead to believe but I don’t believe government or media anymore. I do have serious problems with the rationale of the second invasion. The left can FOAD with their anti-war idiocy and hypocrisy. Most American military interventions are due to serious mistakes of past administrations and misguided advisement.
I don’t know. But history teaches us you cannot negotiate with or appease mass-murdering dictators who are set on taking over other countries.
Quit whining about the past.
Yeah, I’ve about reached that opinion.
Or maybe let him keep Iraq.
Or replaced him with our own ‘Bastard.’
Bush lied, people died.
Actually, he was probably better than average.
You know a culture stinks on ice, when a fascist dictatorship is a step up...
Read some of Sadaam’s history. He thought he was Hitler, Stalin, Mao and all the rest of the recent despots combined. If the Norks can build the bomb, Sadaam was well capable of doing the same and developing long range missiles. Unless the Israelis had cleaned things up, we would be looking at Sadaam threatening much worse than 9-11. We would not be happy campers.
When I saw the cartoon drawings of the mobile chemical labs, I knew they had nothing in GW2.
At the time of GW1 I had just been discharged and was still quite young.
However, I was keen enough even at that time to see that GW1 was overwhelmingly an argument to facilitate a large military in the absence of a Soviet threat, an argument which even today sounds logical.
However, given the abuse of that deterrent in GW2, I am on the fence about arbitrarily sending troops for conflicts without a clear outcome. The sane approach of treating the military as both deterrent and an extension of politics resonates best when debating the validity of sacrificing blood & treasure.
I am deeply-troubled by the inability of our military to adapt to a post-Soviet world, coupled with our State Dept’s inability to properly frame our strategic foe(s).
As stated by others, with 20/20 hindsight, I would have preferred to let Saddam have his rule. However, we would thereupon be facing (or past-tense) a nuclear exchange in the ME either between Iraq/Iran or any other combination involving Israel. False flag certainly factors in here as well. Taking out Assad, as you assert, facilitates the ignorant.
I do not trust our bureaucracy. Nor do I trust the oversight which was supposed to keep the powers in-check.
Nor do I trust the current generation to remedy any of these problems.
Thus the logical conclusion is that conflict is inevitable and in the wake of that conflict it is prudent of all here to be prepared for the localized battles to come.
The punchline being that if there is no better lesson to be derived from the OP topic - particularly in the lesson of the fallout of 9/11 - it is that if we don’t start educating our children properly about history, we are doomed to repeat it.
(paging Dr. Obvious)
I like to call it Therapy.
What sort of idiot makes comments like you?
The Israelis took out Saddam’s nuclear reactor at Osirak in 1981. It was nearly completed before they obliterated it in an airstrike.
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