Posted on 09/03/2009 9:36:13 AM PDT by JWR_Editor
The advisers are to leave by the end of 2011, by which time the final two years of the U.S. military presence will have achieved … what?
(Excerpt) Read more at jewishworldreview.com ...
Get the US out of Germany, Japan and the UN first!
Sounds like a plan.
“If there is worse use of the U.S. military than “nation-building,” it is adult supervision and behavior modification of other peoples’ politicians.”
Aren’t we out already?
Wasn’t that Hussein’s campaign promise?
Hard truth is you're not going to get rid of terrorism altogether no matter how long we stay over there. I'd just as soon have them come home, secure the borders, and ban Muslims from emigrating here.
To heck with him...George Will can't tell me what to do.
;-)
Where there’s a Will, there’s a waffle. He’s as bad as Andrew Sullivan, who boosted the war in Iraq like crazy until he didn’t.
The US military has historically done rather well with this actually, both nation-building and politician-supervision. There are ways and there are ways of doing this, but on the whole Will’s argument is not historically supoportable.
Since the Philippines and Panama early last century, to Japan in the 1940’s (run by McArthur as de-facto proconsul), arguably most of Western Europe in thw 1940’s-50’s, South Korea to this day, and even to Bosnia/Serbia just a while ago, the US military has served as the backstop of political stability and a reality check on local politicians.
In the case of Iraq, US forces are the central governments ultimate resource and guarantee against both external and internal aggression, just like it was in South Korea in the later 1950’s.
And tomorrow? Universal health care with no private insurance allowed.
But free baseball tickets for everyone! Because baseball is important because he loves it.
Where’s that shark he just jumped?
Posted this on a similar thread as well...
Whether we should stay in Afghanistan should ultimately come down to whether the cost in American lives is justified by the increased level of security we experience as a result of our presence there. As I understood it, our original intent was to kill the terrorists who attacked us and prevent them from continuing to use Afghanistan as their home base of operations from which future attacks could be planned and put into motion. So far we havent killed bin Laden, but we have seriously disrupted al Qaedas ability to launch future attacks and we do have them on the run.
Assuming that nation building in Afghanistan is an exercise in futility, then the question becomes for me whether our departure would allow al Qaeda to not only re-establish bases in Afghanistan but whether such an occurrence would appreciably increase the liklihood that the U.S. could be succesfully attacked again. If we determined that al Qaedas re-emergence in Afghanistan would not increase the probability of another successful attack against the U.S., then let them have it. If it would increase the liklihood of a successful attack in the U.S. but we are able to utilize offshore operations and special ops to prevent al Qaeda from effectively utilizing an Afghanistan presence, then get rid of the ground troops. These are the issues that need to be resolved before deciding on a course of action. The other issue is whether al Qaeda has the ability to establish permanent bases elsewhere that effectively substitute for potential Afghanistan bases - so far I dont think they been able to do this, with the possible exception of Pakistan.
The bottom line is that the focus needs to be not on whether we win or not, but whether our strategy is accomplishing the objective of keeping U.S. citizens safe. If it can be shown that we can eliminate ground troops in Afghanistan such that it will not have a detrimental effect on our ability to keep the U.S. safe, then we should get the hell out.
Is this the same George Will who supported Clinton’s Bombing of Serbia?
I like that sentence, I wonder how our elected officials would respond to it?
If that was an objective of the Military, then we would have a militarized Southern Border, simply because more Americans have been killed by foreign nationals than AQ.
No matter good or well meaning our intentations, the reality is the ME in general is always gonna be a cup in the trembling hand and never peaceful. Not all cultures and societies are equal.
Either you end it in good order or everything you’ve fought for is lost.
You don’t really have an option to just declare victory and leave. You don’t really have the option to just nuke’em and leave either. Our fathers and grandfathers knew that. If you’ve gone in to depose a bad regime, you’ve got to stick around and put down the insurgency or that very regime will be back in power before you’ve hit the suburbs on your way back out of town.
You don’t like “nation building”? Doesn’t matter. Putting a regime into power that will preserve your gains is part and parcel of fighting the war from the beginning. Defending that new regime until it has the ability to defend itself is part of the war. Al Qaeda relies on geographical vacuums to operate; so eliminating geographical vacuums is part of the job of eliminating Al Qaeda.
Good post.
yeap, we can not 'fix' those countries. All we can do is kill those that killed us and then leave.
I think you are missing the point. If we leave with an official sharia government we lost anyway and that is our plan.
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