I asked a liberal acquaintance that what was it that Obama who is supposed to get the world to like us, who is supposed to be such a great uniter, could only get a handful of countries to support him when President Bush was able to assemble a coalition of 40 nations.
crickets...
BFD. Yet another manifestation of Bush weakness.
You don't become strong because you beg people to join you.
People beg to join you because you are strong.
Bush wasted almost a year (once he decided to leave the main enemy alone) screwing around with the UN and with our "allies", while failing to arrange passage through Turkey for the Fourth Armored division.
Bush's "coalition" was a fraud from the beginning - the "40 nations" were of no military help (except of course the UK) while the whole political side of the enterprise reeked of weakness.
The day after those towers fell the United States had every right to form an expeditionary force to conquer Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, to root out Wahabism/Deobandism once and for all. If the American flag flew over Islamabad and Riyadh by the Fall of 2004, there would be no "Obama" and there would be no ISIS.
Oderint dum metuant. Let them hate, as long as they fear.
It worked in 1941, for the SS and for Japan, every bit as much as it worked in 1941 BC. It's working right now for ISIS.
And the reason the Red Army beat Germany, and we beat Japan, is because we brought them catastrophic damage and filled them with fear.
It makes me laugh when people talk about ISIS's methods as "the worst in history", or some such nonsense. They don't hold a candle to the Japs at Nanking, Hong Kong, or Singapore, and they certainly don't stack up against the Einsatzgruppen filling every ditch in the Ukraine with slaughtered women and babies.
And when what went around, came around? How many German farmers were slaughtered in 1944-45? How many women were raped and mutilated? How many children died as the Red Army rolled West?
And although our technology spared most of our ground forces from inflicting similar atrocities on Japanese civilians, we sure made up for it with two buckets of sunshine from 40 000 feet.
THE BAD GUYS ARE WINNING THIS WAR. They're winning because they unleash hell as they roll forward. That's what war IS.
We're losing because we don't. We don't, even with a "coalition of 40 nations".
/Rant
I saw that figure on Fox the other day in a news report. 38 Coaltion members for HW Bush to free Kwait and 48 coalition members for W to take out Saddam Hussein. Plus W also got big majority of congress to authorize the military action and majority of the Senate to vote YES some are the leaders of the D party today, like Kerry and Hillary.