Until this symbol:
is as widely reviled as this one:
We will be at war with mohammedanism.
Posted on 01/15/2015 7:18:15 AM PST by DJ Taylor
The United States has the most potent military in terms of firepower and operational capacity in history. Our military overthrew Saddam Hussein and crushed the Taliban in a matter of weeks. Our forces can direct a rocket from Nevada through a window in Kandahar, Afghanistan, and nimbly set up nearly 20 Ebola treatment centers in Liberia.
Yet this same military, as writer James Fallows recently pointed out in the Atlantic, has not won its wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya or anywhere else in the last 20 years — if winning means creating a stable, capable and ideally democratic governing structure that is able and willing to police its own territory. After the United States poured billions of dollars into the Iraqi army, it fell apart in the face of a few thousand initially lightly armed Islamic State fighters.
(Excerpt) Read more at theintell.com ...
I don't want to speak for Krasner but I will say that many critics of the 2003 Iraq War (myself included) don't say we "should have left Hussein alone".
I think we should have maintained the status quo of 2002, which I think was a good one, that had Hussein pinned down but allowed him to repress the worst of the islamic hordes within his borders.
Before 2003, the Christian community in Iraq was basically alive and well (by ME standards), and the status of women in society was far above the status of women in the rest of the ME. And Iraq was a huge counterweight to Iran. While at the same time our control of the Iraqi skies put definite limits on any Iraqi expansionist plans. You can't really say "best of all possible worlds" because everything in the ME sucks, but the best we could hope for.
Now... well, I don't have time... but to sum it up: FIASCO++
I may be over-simplifying but I think the answer to why we are not winning wars is:
To win a war you need to be RUTHLESS.
I offer up the bombing of Germany and Japan in WW2. We won that war against two very formidable enemies who, like us, were RUTHLESS. But we had bigger guns and we won.
We now fight wars according the PC requirements of the New York Times and the like. As a result, wars are no longer WON, they are ABANDONED. I offer up Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan as examples.
What wars? There hasn’t been a “war” since WWII. There have been numerous armed conflicts labeled “police action” or some such - and which have been carried out as such - but no wars (a la “kill the enemy and destroy his wealth until survivors surrender”). We’re not winning wars because there aren’t any.
You’ve got to be willing to eliminate the underlying ideology. We managed that with the Nazis and the Japanese militarists. Islam? Not so much.
“Why we aren’t winning wars”
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Just possibly we aren’t winning wars because we aren’t fighting wars. We are instead playing politically correct games with rules of engagement designed to not hurt anyone besides our own troops.
I agree. When a people become too civilized to do what's necessary to survive in an uncivilized world, they won't survive.
In WWII ,as a veteran of such, the US had a pool of hardy young men and some good military leaders. Once we realized that the Germans and the Japs were actually going to kill us in any barbaric way the men and women of the age took things seriously and showed the Japs and Germans we could and would fight too. I believe this factor of character was something neither the Nazis or Japs realized. By the way I don’t recall Mexico being a big help if any for our efforts in WWII.
Answer ......phony ROE.
Until we can de-Islamize the Arab and Persian world, we will be at war with them.
We aren’t fighting any wars, so it’s not surprising we aren’t winning any wars.
What we are doing is getting involved in local, tribal and centuries old conflicts/feuds. We’re taking sides when there is no side to take, they are all against (the West in general and the USA in particular) in the end.
They should not be here and we should not be there.
Bringing democracy and freedom my @ass. Nation building my @ass. All this has been simply stupid. Sorry, there is nothing else that it can be called.
No we didn’t. There are still plenty of Nazis in Europe. They just haven’t gotten themselves well organized again.
It has to cease being the mohammedan world.
That simple.
We're at peace with Germany. We're not at peace with National Socialism. We annihilated National Socialism.
We're at peace with Japan. We're not at peace with the 1930s Japanese Emperor worshiping militarist ideology (whatever you call it). We annihilated that.
We must annihilate mohammedanism. We cannot make peace with it, because it REFUSES to make peace with us.
Radical Islamism is much different. Every country engaged since 911 has a border through which terrorist support can flow in fro other nations. Through in the Shia/Sunni split and sense of being part of a 1200 year old struggle and you've got a real problem on your hands.
I believe our current situation is more like the Indian Wars than WWII. Apologies for any mistreatment of native tribes but it took decades to pacify the western united States and it's going to take even longer to stop the threat of radical Islam.
The biggest problems we face are two fold. First, we don't have the stomach for it. Second, a large swath of opinion makers in this country, most notably the university, doesn't believe in the righteousness of our cause.
There has been no broadbased and sustained national resolve supporting any involvement since WWII.
To compound that, politicians posture based on perceptions of how a war is progressing, they are for it before they are against it. Extended logic there indicates most would have quit WWII by 1943 because we were not winning it on any front.
The public is mis-led by the MSM with concentration of graphics of casualties and civilian/colateral damage rather than reporting that along with succeses in a balanced light.
The general public is grossly uninformed about military capabilities and weapons capabilities/effects mostly by distortions championed by the entertainment industry. Only 1% of the US population is actively involved in the military now. During WWII the number was something like 25%.
We have been conditioned for three generations now that the US is immoral when fighing any enemy regardless of the merits of the fight. Small opposition groups like CAIR are given disproportionate influence in arguing merits of a war.
The problem is Nazism and Japanese Militarism were Nationalist-based, which means the cancer was relatively isolated.
Islam has metastasized across the globe, it is not simply contained within borders or even within governments.
Maybe not a big help, but they were allies:
“Mexico declared war on the Axis Powers in support of the Allies on May 22, 1942, following losses of oil ships in the Gulf, most notably the Potrero del Llano and the Faja de Oro, to German submarine attacks. Although most American countries eventually entered the war on the Allies’ side, Mexico and Brazil were the only Latin American nations that sent troops to fight overseas during World War II.
Perhaps the most famous fighting unit in the Mexican military was the Escuadrón 201, also known as the Aztec Eagles. This group consisted of more than 300 volunteers, who trained in the United States to fight against Japan. It was the first Mexican military unit trained for overseas combat.
In the civil arena, the Bracero Program gave the opportunity for many thousands of Mexicans to work in the USA in support of the war effort. This also granted them an opportunity to gain US citizenship by enlisting in the military.”
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_history_of_Mexico#World_War_II
We now define winning a war much differently than we used to. We now look at consequences and don’t call a war over until they’re known, we used to just look at the treaty. By the modern view we lost WWI because the mess we left behind gave us WWII. Heck given the way WWII put the pieces in place for the Cold War, Korea, and Viet Nam by the modern view we lost that one too.
We won the wars, but lost the peace.
Until this symbol:
is as widely reviled as this one:
We will be at war with mohammedanism.
Yup. Which in some ways is inevitable. There’s always going to be a new set of enemies. And the most common source of enemies is the bitterness of the previous war.
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