Posted on 09/07/2021 9:07:37 AM PDT by ChicagoConservative27
The end of the Afghanistan War is a good time to look back and reflect on what we did wrong.
Republicans are trying to redirect blame toward President Joe Biden for what happened during the withdrawal. Better thinkers are looking further back. How much did Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Donald Trump contribute to the problem?
George W. Bush started the war but the nation demanded it after 9/11. Is there nothing that America did right?
Actually, there was. Being old gives me perspective. I personally saw a just war in the Middle East, fought for the right reasons, in the right way, and ending the right way. President George H.W. Bush gave us the example of how to fight a war in the Middle East. He did it right and the America did it right under his leadership.
President George W. Bush later created a mess that we still can’t get out of.
(Excerpt) Read more at sltrib.com ...
I disagree. W should never have invaded Iraq.
15/19 - 9/11 terrorists were Saudi, 0 were Iraqi.
The shithole countries need a dictator.
Same for Libya.
The author makes a good point. Biden made a mess of the Kabul evacuation. But the greater crime is how George W. Bush mishandled both Afghanistan and Iraq.
Woodrow Wilson was a bad foreign policy president. And W was even worse.
Where’s Powell these days? If this had been Trump, you would never have been able to shut him up.
Probably so. IIRC, after encouraging the Iraqi Shia to revolt at the tail end of Gulf War I, GHWB sat back & watched while the Republican Guard slaughtered them. Years later, when Sadam was finally deposed, that country likely would have benefited if all of those lives had not been wasted...
He knew how to start a war and sell his country to China.
The policy was not directed against either Saudi Arabia or Pakistan.
‘
The former where the religious leadership inspired the terrorist movement.
The latter of course the backer of Taliban rule in Afghanistan for the last 30 years.
It had to be against Iraq to protect the Saudis and ultimately go after Iran and other nations not in line with the Saudis or Gulf Arabs like Libya and Syria.
I am always Pro-Israel but not the kind of Pro-Israel that the Neoconservative policy makers in Washington are.
They ended up making Al Qaeda the organization an enemy and its leaders targets.
But they recruited the Al Qaeda followers to fight in Libya and Syria.
Those recruits morphed into Islamic State.
Policy makers in Washington post 9/11 are IMHO accessories to the atrocities of IS like the murder and rape of their captives.
GW Bush is a New World Order snake just like his CIA spook father GH Bush and they are the worst think to ever happen to America. There is a reason GH Bush lost to Clinton, he is a lying grifter who betrayed too many Republican voters so he was shitcanned. Ross Perot, who told Americans all about the coming horrors of NAFTA, didn’t help but at least Perot was telling the truth and it cost the Bush Crime Family the election.
Never vote for a Bushite or a Bush relative to office - ever.
Deflection from the issue at hand.
This has nothing to do with how we got there.
It has everything to do with how we left.
Any adventure into the MiddleEast was doomed to end in tears. Nothing could have changed the eventual outcome. The population there is too insane to ever be more than a barbaric disaster. A few predicted this all those years ago when Daddy CIA Bush started all this nonsense. No pleasure is taken in being right about this.
Step one: realize you are at war, not a military action. And George W Bush “misunderstood” “nation building” as badly as he “misunderstood” “amnesty” or Bill Clinton “misunderstood” “ending welfare as we know it.”
We do not go to war to win the hearts and minds of the people we intend to conquer. And if we intend to conquer a nation, we intend to conquer its people. So long as they see a choice between supporting their foreign conquerers or their home-grown despots, they will favor their despots, because they will blame us for the war. Only when they see we don’t give a rat’s ass whether they like us can they truly decide that their despots brought us upon them, and hate their despots for it. They cannot see their own citizens killed by improvised weapons as the product of our invasion, but solely as a product of their terrorist countrymen.
If we have not the resolve to make a nation seethe with hatred for us, we do not have the resolve to go to war. We can hope a future regime might respect us more, but no future regime can succeed while we occupy their territory and seek to be their friends.
Forget claims about how evil their regime is. If Russia banned abortion, and then invaded the U.S., would you take up arms against the U.S.? Even if you thought maybe you might, wouldn’t you expect the people in your subdivision to regard you as a traitor? If you would not side against America with Russia to save the lives of 60 million babies, why would you expect Afghanis to side with America because bin Laden bombed the World Trade Center? If you say, “That’s different! I’d be fighting for AMERICA!” are you so sure Afghanis feel so differently about their own nation?
You can’t just knock out enough military bases to hold an election and think you’ve won a war. You must conquer a nation. When we face up to that, our wars will be shorter, deadlier (at least in the short term), fewer, and more successful. If we can’t face up to that, don’t go to war.
Doing things half-assed is The Bush Way.
In one of his ramblings back in the Gulf War 1 days, Biden said that Iraq should be divided into three independent counties: one for the Shia, one for the Sunnis, and one for the Kurds. Biden was probably right.
(It hurt my fingers to have to type that last sentence.)
The Salt Lake Trib?
You’ve gotta be one of maybe a dozen people who actually read that rag.
By noon eastern time on 9/12/01, Mecca should have been a smoking, glassed-over, radioactive ruin. Islam would be dead along with it.
This is FR, I didn’t read the article...
Stay out of the Bushes.
-Jesse L. Jackson
No, you hit Median first. As a warning: Screw up and Mecca is next.
Medina
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