Posted on 08/26/2021 7:03:21 PM PDT by RandFan
@ColumbiaBugle
President Donald Trump On Hannity Tonight: "I wanted to get out. I wish we never went in. The biggest mistake we made in the history of our country was going into the Middle East."
(Excerpt) Read more at twitter.com ...
The Constitution, and the War of Northern Aggression
😊
Yep- his “VP” was a one termer who spent his entire 4 years undoing the Reagan internal policies and trajectories and then went idiot on “no new taxes” and “read my lips” BS lie of the century... and everyone reacted- money, wall street, small business, and then there’s the china deal (Tiananmen Square) that mr. china hand see eye eh man GHWB ignored and coddled when a true freedom movement could have been engineered.
The stretching out of the Iraq into longer and longer into GWB for part 2... all a feature of the money machine. Afghanistan- relative to bin Laden, we could have left after Taliban, shielding osama, was taken out (and many feel so was osama by Dec. 2002. But no- we had to “nation build” for some other money suckers in the Beltway with all kinds of “secret” crap reasons. And here we are 20 years later than 9-11 and joebama talking about being “out” by 9-11. total horsecrap that could only come from muslim brotherhood obama— it’s his gig and his ransom and iran deal payment. Outrageous but true.
You still partner with Mr. Toro Tanaka?
No. Alinisky it. Isolate and destroy Biden. Period. And the Democrat Congress too, which spent the past two weeks trying to get the personal records of the Trump family and paid zero attention to Kabul. 2022. 2024. Seek and destroy them all. Obama is ancient history, like Bush.
We are being tested and tempered, and so are they. He wants true believers with Him for eternity.
>> President Donald Trump On Hannity Tonight: “I wanted to get out [he had four years to try]. I wish we never went in. The biggest mistake we made in the history of our country was going into the Middle East.” <<
I supported Trump, for many reasons, but in my humble opinion this is BS, and so are most of the comments in this thread. People are trying to cover themselves for supporting withdrawal — in defeat. Yes, Biden is doing it in an especially incompetent way, but we were getting along much better just staying.
In a support role in Afghanistan since 2014 we’d had American deaths in the low double digits or even single digits (compared with 96 deaths to American roofers in 2018). The government was controlling the major population areas, with the Taliban forced to hide out in the more remote areas. As a high-tech country of over 328 million persons, we could have stayed there and denied our enemies a victory as long as it took — until the sun turned cold, if necessary, or longer than the Taliban could last, anyway.
It took American settlers a couple of hundred years “to win the West”. The Spanish “Reconquista” (reconquest of Spain from the Muslim invaders) took 781 years. With over a billion Muslims in the world it’s important that they not see their more radical elements attaining victories.
The 9/11 attacks killed in one day more Americans than at Pearl Harbor, and more than would be killed in 20 years of combat in Afghanistan (some of those years much more active than in recent ones). It’s absurd to think that the American people wouldn’t have demanded retaliation after that — against Al-Qaeda and against the the Taliban government that sheltered them. Of course we overthrew them, and we should have kept them overthrown.
Trump opened up a lot of our eyes. A lot of illusions were shattered.
I would put slavery as a worse mistake.
Should have picked our own damned cotton.
Way way too late for that
Re: 54 - Agree 100%, sadly.
Sadly because such a policy is not without risks, as has been demonstrated again and again,
Heck, there’s doctrines named after it - Eisenhower, Nixon, Carter, and it’s all centered on one primary fact - that the Middle East still provides a lot of oil for the world. And that production and movement of oil is a national interest of the US.
And all via a market that is distorted by Saudi Arabia and OPEC. The US would for itself be in a better position from a security standpoint if the world oil markets were more open. They are hobbled by restrictions and barriers enacted on the producer side by a few sellers that make it problematic for the US oil companies to compete.
Are We to Be the World’s Greatest Force for Good or Not?
https://dennisprager.com/column/are-we-to-be-the-worlds-greatest-force-for-good-or-not/
Dennis Prager
Tue, May 11, 2021
(Snip)
I remember the shame I felt as an American when I saw crowds of Vietnamese who had helped America begging to be taken out of Vietnam along with American troops when the last American helicopters left Vietnam. And who were simply abandoned to their fate.
Now America is poised to do in Afghanistan what it did then — abandon the people it defended to the Islamist sadists known as the Taliban. How many Afghan boys and women will be raped when we leave? How many Afghan men will be tortured to death? Only God knows. But you don’t have to be God to know that it will be a large number.
So, why would we do such a thing — again?
Three reasons are given.
One is, “We cannot stay in Afghanistan forever.”
That argument is offered as if it is so self-evident that it needs no explanation. Which is probably why no one seems to offer one. But why can’t we stay there “forever,” if doing so saves a country and tells the world that America sticks to its commitments and protects its allies?
We have stayed in Germany and South Korea “forever.” Is the world better or worse for it?
The second argument is, “We cannot nation-build.” That argument, too, is offered as if it is self-evidently valid. But it’s a phony argument. No one argued that we were in Afghanistan to “nation-build.” We were there because 9/11 was launched against us from there. And there is every reason to assume more terror will be directed from Afghanistan if we leave. And our presence there has kept Pakistan from falling into the control of Islamists.
We were not there, as Bret Stephens recently argued, “to kill Osama bin Laden, who was just one in a succession of terrorist masterminds. It was to prove Bin Laden wrong about America’s long-term commitments, especially overseas. In August 1996, Bin Laden issued his notorious fatwa declaring a war on the United States that he hoped would be long and bloody. He observed that, in one conflict after another, the Americans always cut and run.”
The third argument is that remaining in Afghanistan costs America blood and treasure. The blood argument is emotionally irrefutable. Every American killed in Afghanistan is an immeasurable tragedy. But in the last six years, the U.S. has lost fewer than 20 service members annually in hostile engagements in Afghanistan. Between 2006 and 2018, we lost twice as many service members to training accidents than to all overseas actions. As for treasure, we spend between $50 and $100 billion a year in Afghanistan. That is far more morally justifiable than the trillion or more dollars we have spent in the last year to bail out Democratic governors and mayors and the unions they serve.
For the record, I would have made the identical argument if Donald Trump were president and removed us from Afghanistan. But the actual withdrawal is being conducted in a different administration.
Moral arguments didn’t matter to one Democratic senator in 1975. As he put it in a Senate speech on April 23: “I do not believe the United States has an obligation, moral or otherwise, to evacuate foreign nationals … The United States has no obligation to evacuate one, or 100,001, South Vietnamese.” That senator was Joseph Biden of Delaware.
To Democrats and Republicans who support the retreat from Afghanistan, I have a question: If Afghanistan comes to resemble Cambodia’s killing fields, will you still think it was the right decision? Or, to put it another way: Is there any level of evil, any emboldening of America-hating Islamists, any effect of an American defeat on the world or on America that would make you regret your decision to withdraw?
Actually Its a Big L Libertarian statement.
We can’t turn the Middle East in to Missouri.
And yet as President, he's put Afghan Nationals, and not the ones who actually helped us, ahead of the line of Americans. Because, unlike the South Vietnamese, that were anti-Communist, and therefore prone to become "patriots", these Afghans are going to vote Rat, and secure the Rat Party's power in perpetuity.
and by cuddling the kings in sa doesnt help,, we have/had to do their bidding .. oil dollars
“And yet as President, he’s put Afghan Nationals, and not the ones who actually helped us, ahead of the line of Americans.”
Possibly the silliest statement I read in the last couple of days...and that’s saying something.
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