Posted on 04/12/2022 7:19:13 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
War is one of the most consequential actions our government can take. The question is whether, looking back at America’s conflicts in the past hundred-plus years, we can discern lessons that should guide us going forward. David T. Pyne, a former U.S. Army combat arms and H.Q. staff officer with an M.A. in National Security has used his Substack account to write a concise essay analyzing which wars America should have avoided entirely and which were justified wars, whether conducted wisely or not. Trump understood much of this intuitively; Biden does not.
The post, entitled “How Modern Wars Have Harmed U.S. National Security,” begins with “Wars The U.S. Should Never Have Fought.” The first of those is the Spanish-American War in 1898. The justifications for entering that war were false (e.g., Spain did not sink the USS Maine), it turned America into a colonial imperialist, and it led to about 220,000 Filipino deaths in a war the U.S. eventually fought, not against the Spanish, but against the Filipino’s themselves. What Pyne doesn’t mention is that the media, especially the Hearst media empire, banged the drums, pushing America into the war.
I see echoes of the Spanish-American War in the disastrous decision to go into Iraq (false intelligence, a quagmire, and tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead) and in the media’s current drum-banging for America to engage in a hot war in Ukraine against Russia.
Another disastrous, unnecessary war was America’s involvement in WWI. Without America riding to the rescue, the war would have had a different outcome that might have avoided most of the ills of the 20th century, including the successful Russian Revolution, Nazi Germany, and even Communist China. It was not America’s war and she had no business being there.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
In before posters who like to write ‘in before...’
I see that many “thinkers” are converging to my policy of the emBASEee strategee
I have been advocating for several years a policy I call ‘embaseees’. Embassy + AirBase —> EmBASEeees. We go into a terrorist country, clear out their taliban equivalent, then withdraw to very large Embassies, perhaps 3 of them. Have them big enough to encompass a military airbase where we can use it for decades on end to conduct anti-terrorism operations. As long as the ‘host’ country aint killing Americans then we let them have self-sovereignty. Kind of like how we operated in the Phillipines for decades. We could even have an intermediate zone that we patrol but it would be autonomous. Let them have their taste of freedom. A referendum every 10 years to see how large the boundaries of the intermediate autonomous zone should be.
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/4043681/posts
The record of success of US Wars Post WWII has not been good.
One would think that alone would cause Americans to rethink the deep-state/neocon agenda - but we are easily manipulated by progressivism, statism, central-planning and their control of government and media.
He left out the Korean War and WWII
The U.S. needs to stay out of wars except for those that defend America
Too much money for MiC and Neocons to stop American wars no matter how much it costs tax payer.
RE: He left out the Korean War and WWII
What should the USA have done when we discovered the Taliban sheltering Osama Bin Ladin (the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks on our soil) in Afghanistan?
WWII? So, we just let the Japs attack Pearl Harbor and do nothing?
President Harry Truman should have approved his request to bomb the Yalu River bridges, Chinese rail stations and staging bases in Manchuria to drastically curtail the number of Chinese troops that were able to enter Korea to make sure that the war ended with a unified, democratic Korea and Communist North Korea ceased to exist.
Whats really bizarre is the Clintons & Bidens (among others) were in Russian oligarchs’ pockets up to their elbows, as well.
RE: The U.S. needs to stay out of wars except for those that defend America
We all agree with the statement. It’s determining “benefit” and “defending” that becomes the issue.
I don't know when this problem started. Certainly before WWII, possibly before WWI.
It's kind of like what's portrayed in many of the Bond movies. The President want to test his/her powers. Some foreign leader calls him up on the phone. Maybe they've met before when they were younger, maybe not. This foreign leader is — among his other talents — one hell of a good salesman, and determined to solve whatever his problem is by any means necessary.
So the President says "sure Alexi, I can put my people on that, if you do X for me." That's how things are done in this world, the President has learned. He figures "hey, I'm the President of the United States, I can handle that problem for old Alexi." Kind of like one of the Bond villains, in the huge office with the huge button-covered desk and the gigantic shark tank behind him.
Only problem is, American kids have to go die in order for the President to be such a hero to one of his fellow President club big-shots.
The only guy in recent years who said "no" to this dynamic was Donald Trump, and he was kicked out before you could say Jiminy Cricket.
Apparently, it takes a great deal of discipline to stay out of the problems throughout the world when you have a great deal of power. The consequences seem to be of no apparent concern.
“The U.S. needs to stay out of wars except for those that benefit America”
I thought this was the “B”.
The U.S. needs to stay out of wars unless we are ATTACKED!
My friends he covers all wars we’ve been in since 1998. . Think of us as a good dragon. Destroy the bad guys but unaware of the large tail that messes things up. Could Pearl Harbor/Ukraine have been prevented with skilled diplomacy? There are nuts out there. Once we’re in we can’t back out. This is where the media isn’t doing it’s job and we’re all sheep. Blame the Jooz? The were led to the gallows too.
>>What should the USA have done when we discovered the Taliban sheltering Osama Bin Ladin (the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks on our soil) in Afghanistan?
We should have mounted a punitive expedition that would have looked much like our first year or two there, and decamped with the warning “do it again and we’ll come back and bounce the rubble.” We should have never entered the so-called “Nation Building” phase. There was no raw material with which to create a modern nation with elected government, and trying to do so was a fool’s errand.
I meant to ping you to my previous.
We should have never entered the so-called “Nation Building” phase. There was no raw material with which to create a modern nation with elected government, and trying to do so was a fool’s errand.
***I’ve been saying the same thing, for several months.
I call it the emBASEee strategee. I even put it up on my home page, posted it as a separate thread when challenged by a FReeper to explain my views, and then that freeper ran away. I continued to refer to it, just as I did upthread here.
Now I have come to find out the thread is pulled.
FR sure has changed.
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/4043681/posts
What did the U.S. do when we discovered Osama Bin Laden being sheltered in PAKISTAN … by the Pakistani government’s intelligence service?
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