Posted on 03/05/2018 9:45:54 PM PST by SunkenCiv
Adam Weinstein is a senior editor for Task & Purpose. A Navy veteran and career journalist, he worked previously at the Village Voice, The Wall Street Journal, Mother Jones, and Gawker,
Always check the source.
If you call Gulf War 2 winning, then why is the US military still fighting there FIFTEEN years after ‘winning‘ ?
know the truth and it will set you free
What ever happened to the Northern Alliance? They weren’t big fans of the taliban, as I recall...
That's because weak kneed politicians...and Communist sympathizers...wouldn't allow it.
Korea? One or two small,well placed,nukes just south of the N Korea/China border...and then a promise of "and there are more where they came from" from Truman...would have won it.
Vietnam? Kerry,Fonda,BillyBob Blythe,ILLary,Bill Ayers,etc.
I see you are a realist about Afghanistan.
We should have left after the punitive expedition phase and never started the meals on wheels phase. We should have been out by, say, 2004.
The least conservative idea in existence today is the idea that invading other countries can help either them or us.
Utter utter idiocy.
Talking with nationstates is one thing but you cannot talk/negotiate with terrorists nor Islamic extremist groups.
Their end goals will always remain the same.....
I have been on the fence for some time about our continued long slog in Afghanistan, yet I can’t think of anything about the U.S. efforts, militarily or diplomatically (other than not acting WWII - total war style in order to win) that puts the blame for conditions there on the U.S.
Paksitan’s losses are from the Pakistan political class attempting to militarily get control of those parts of Pakistan it has seldom had control. Yes kith and kin of the Taliban are also in that fight. However, the Pakistan state is a duplicitous one and has never operated forcefully and directly against the Taliban interests in Pakistan that are directly assisting, and part of, the Taliban in Afghanistan. That was the same duplicity of theirs that let them claim they were with us in fighting the terrorists, while they helped Osama Bin Laden hide out near to their main military school.
Internally, in spite of being a nuclear state, Pakistan is a dysfunctional and politically fractured state, with different forces, different agendas operating at cross purposes to each other. The main thing that is sustained is that the military-industrial (tons of Pakistan industry owned and run by the military) and intelligence complexes continue to call most of the shots. And they do so with Islamist-centric nationalism with an inferiority complex toward India.
The least conservative idea in existence today is the idea that invading other countries can help either them or us.
I will spare myself the time of deconstructing that simplistic fallacy and simply note that you are de facto conceding the point that these wars don’t help us - Americans - at all.
I will spare myself the time of deconstructing that simplistic fallacy and simply note that you are de facto conceding the point that these wars don’t help us - Americans - at all.
As to being simplistic, reality is fairly simple. Kurds and Shiites, who could have returned to the good old days under Saddam by electing Sunni Arabs to power, chose otherwise. They certainly did very little against US troops the whole time our guys were there.
So your argument is essentially the US military can‘t win it’s wars fighting like soldiers so therefore the military should be encouraged to mass murder tens of millions indiscriminately.
really ?
“So your argument is essentially the US military can‘t win it’s wars fighting like soldiers so therefore the military should be encouraged to mass murder tens of millions indiscriminately.”
Oh yeah, because ‘soldiers’ hamper themselves with restrictions and more restrictions until the war is a stale mate. To be all fair and stuff.
Screw that. SOLDIERS (airmen) blew the hell out of Japanese and WON.
“They helped us by killing off Muslims with the guts to do jihad rather than merely preach it. And the ensuing intra-Muslim slaughter is giving Muslims second thoughts about Islam, which isn’t such a bad thing.”
Well if the goal is to hang our troops out there as terrorist fly paper from now until forever... then yeah I guess it is going great. That is only sort of sarcasm. I mean really... if that IS the goal then the war is going just fine.
Well if the goal is to hang our troops out there as terrorist fly paper from now until forever... then yeah I guess it is going great. That is only sort of sarcasm. I mean really... if that IS the goal then the war is going just fine.
Re: “If you call Gulf War 2 winning, then why is the US military still fighting there FIFTEEN years after ‘winning‘ ?
Same geography, but new enemies, every five years.
By the way - I haven’t supported any USA intervention since Vietnam, which began at the highpoint of the Cold War, and which clearly demonstrated USA resolve during a period when every continent on Earth was threatened by radical Communist regimes.
“You’ll have to kill everyone. Then return every 5 years to do it again.”
IIRC, the Russians were a lot harder on the Afghanis than we were. They had no reservations about carpet-bombing a village that they thought they were fired upon from.
But in the great scheme of things, it didn’t work. The Afghanis just hardened their resolve. It was like “What the hell do we care if we die?”
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