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 ...
The purpose and function of the military is to kill people and break things. We can do that. Anything much beyond that is asking too much of our government, be it 90 years ago or 90 years from now.
Yes, and I agree we should have.
It comes down to politics. You can’t win a war in 4 years nor can you count on reelection or your predecessor continuing what you started. Just look at the mess of Iraq. Bush may have started and had some success but any ground gained was botched with the change of leadership. Same goes for Afghanistan. Our troops died or nothing.... NOTHING. Iraq is worse off and Afghanistan will likely fall into the same trap as soon as our remaining forces withdraw. Islamic terror is worse than it was before all of this mess started, mainly because Western nations fail to attack the hornets hive.
IF we want to end Islamic terror, we need to go back to counter value warfare and start hitting the heart of the islamic state, both Saudi and Iran. It doesn’t matter how many good muslims there are. There were plenty of good peace loving germans and Japanese yet we bombed them to hell. Japan got firebombed and nuked with entire civilian populations wiped off the earth. Now we play wackamole, constantly on the defensive, while Islamic terror groups use both our success and failure as recruitment tools. We will not win until we destroy the hive, Mecca.
I agree. The article’s premise that winning requires creating a stable, democratic state behind you is false. That is a scheme to keep a peace, not winning the war. Our dilemma is that we are not exhausting our foes capacity for action against us. By trying to prop up a “stable, democratic state” before exhaustion, we give terrorists a sufficient base to continue operations.
Our foes are amorphous and the “countries” we are fighting against are disunited themselves. They choose terrorism as a mode because it requires no united national backing or infrastructure, and because they know they would lose drastically in a conventional forces war. Fighting terrorism is grossly inefficient, so the terrorists’ strategy is to wear us down, destroy civil liberties, and ruin our quality of life in the meanwhile. Only by eliminating civilized values could we become ruthless enough to deal with them (i.e., systematic genocide against Muslims would work, but we would become uncivilized beasts in the process). We lack the political will for that.
Not sure what the solution is, but what we are doing isn’t it.
To win a war against a civilization means killing so many of them they can no longer continue. Then you kill some more until they beg you to stop. Asl Germany and Japan. They were not just defeated on the battle ground. They were ground into the earth from whence they sprang.
Correct. That makes the problem much more difficult.
A further difficulty is that we cannot replace something with nothing. Christians, on the whole, have lost confidence in their beliefs. Mohammedanism cannot be replaced with mindless mush like "democracy". Democracy is just a way of picking rulers. Set up a democracy in a land of mohammedans, and they'll pick mohammedan totalitarians as rulers; they'll impose sharia as the law of the land. If we wish for them to pick better rulers, they have to not be mohammedans. We Christians need the confidence to say "MOHAMMEDANISM IS WRONG. CHRISTIANITY IS RIGHT. JESUS CHRIST IS LORD." Until then ... SSDD.
Ideology can’t be made ‘illegal’.
Thought/belief can’t be made illegal.
You can certainly try and think you have done it, but it is not possible.
Thought/belief can’t be made illegal.
You might want to inform the Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Its lawmakers disagree with you ... and in fact, have proven you wrong. You have confused outlawing something and making it impossible. These are two separate things. Outlawing something presupposes its possibility, and prescribes a penalty should the thing occur. If a thing is truly impossible, no law regarding it is necessary.
Essentially Washington has lost the will to win due to PC.
We agree and all comments have merit. We do not have the political will to defeat terrorism on the battle field. And we don’t have the tools to beat them through infiltration and starvation (cut off resources). We certainly do not have the leadership to get all rational western nations together on a united strategy that would require both approaches. But here is how I believe it could, and someday must, work.
The “battle” will need to be ruthless and acknowledge the fact that there will be a great number of collateral damage casualties of war. (This actually works in favor of the approach to some degree). We need not be afradi to target mosques and whole neighborhoods for fear of killing the innocent. The message needs to be clear: 1) There is no safe place to hide and 2) Any intentionally or accidentally in proximity to even suspected enemies of the USA is in mortal, immediate and iminent danger. The policy MUST be announced and executed in this manner. “US Militay will carry out the mission of exterminating all percieved enemies of the US, so called Muslim Extremists where ever they are. We will not be asking permission or giving warnings. And the most important directives are to kill the bad guys by whatever means determined most efficient on the battle field, wherever that may be, and 2nd, to protect AMERICAN lives.” If this means firebombing a neighborhood because intel has determined that 5 terrorists are there, so be it. They hide in a mosque, create a hole there in the earth. This policy and the execution of it will be ugly and upsetting. Women, children and babies are gonna be killed. But all will soon realize, they don’t want any part of what is bringing the hell to their house. The bad guys will be ostrasized out of fear.
The second part of the strategy is to infiltrate radical groups all over the world. This too would require some sanctioned actions that we would not want to speak of. Covert agents might be required to participate in murderous events to get deep under cover. We don’t want to know about what it will take. This strategy too would cripple the enemy as they would be reluctant to trust any recruit and could turn on their own, making recruitment a bit more challenging.
But alas, we all agree, America doesn’t have the guts to take this approach to win THIS war.
Because the political class refuses to go medieval on our enemies.
5.56mm
Forget targeted measured response. We take a piece of a city and a week later the bad guys have it back. Before we walk away we need to leave them with nothing more than smoking ash and weeping widows, to the extent we are nice enough to leave many widows. We didn’t worry much about that at Dreasden or Hiroshima.
Too nasty for your taste? Bring all our people home. Now. Sure we will see terrorist arracks from the region. Read the papers lately? We see them now.
In the future, trace any attack to its source and remove from the Earth any trace of that place. Probably want to avoid nukes, thoigh they would be cheaper, but we are very good at killing people and breaking things if the policy people take the cuffs off.
What it takes to keep he Muzzies in their sandbox:
732 AD—Battle of Tours—Charles “The Hammer” Martel
1100’s to 1300’s: Nine Crusades to the Holy Land
1571-Battle of Lepanto (at sea)
1673-the Breaking of the Siege of Vienna by Jan Sobieski,Poland
Each of these events was marked by the wholesale slaughter of Muslims.
The last one kept them quiet until the time of Yassir Arafat, 300 years later.
Islam is incompatible with Western civilization, and we are now engaged in a one winner battle of ideologies, whether we like it or not, and whether we believe it or not.
One will prevail.
Imagine a world without Islam. It is easy if you try.
As I said, politicians can THINK that they’ve outlawed thought. But they really haven’t.
Thanks for the reply. I had very good Mexican friends when I was inducted into service. I was given a big send off party by mostly Mexican co-workers and money for a trip to say adios to my mother in Iowa. At that time I had very good relationships with Mexicans perhaps because my dark skin blended in.
“. . . enemies who have hard scrabble lives in some of the most inhospitable places on earth.”
And then when captured they live a life of unbelievable comfort and safety with excellent food, medical care, exercise facilities, etc. . .what’s the downside of fighting the US?
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