Posted on 09/24/2014 7:15:45 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
(VIDEO-AT-LINK)
SEN. TED CRUZ: Now, the president has been advocating arming the so-called moderate Syrian rebels for some time. And throughout the course of the discussion, what I have endeavored to ask, repeatedly, both publicly and in classified situations, is how do you distinguish the good guys from the bad guys?
Last summer, when the president was urging a unilateral attack on Syria, at the time in June of last summer, out of the 9 major rebel groups, 7 of them had significant alliances or connections to al Qaeda or al Nusra or to other radical Islamic groups like ISIS.
Consistently the administration has not been able to give a satisfactory answer to how you distinguish the good guys from the bad guys. And my point is, trying to resolve the Syrian civil war should not be the objective, and in fact arming one side of rebels -- those rebels are fighting literally alongside ISIS on the same side against Assad. It doesn't make any sense.
What the objective should be, I believe, is not trying to resolve the Syrian civil war, nor should the objective be trying to achieve reconciliation between Sunnis and Shiites. Sunnis and Shiites have been engaged in a sectarian civil war since 632 AD.
DAN BALZ, WASHINGTON POST: But does the United States have no role in trying to help produce a functioning government in Iraq....
(Excerpt) Read more at realclearpolitics.com ...
We stayed too long in Iraq (nation building) and Afghanistan (nation building) too.
All that is necessary is to kill each and every one of your enemy and go home.
The decent indigenous population can usually take care of it from there.
Of course one must be willing to kill on a Dresden or Hiroshima scale.
It'll come to that eventually any way you go about it, so we should just gitter done.
Senator Cruz is right. Get the hell out. I could care less these basta^ds kill each other. There is no threat here if we close the borders and relocate these Wahhabi muslims to a place of control. If the Islamic State attacks us — Nuke them to glass and tell them early and often so the have fair warning. I don’t want to print anymore money for this. I want to close our borders!! We are committing suicide by this policy of denial that these muslims in our Christian nation are ok— They are NOT!! ok.
Don’t agree, at all. It was always going to be about establishing a base of operations in the Middle East, and expanding it until there was no safe haven for the radicals. If we had handed Japan and Germany back quickly after the war, things would very likely not have gone smoothly. It’s a legitimate argument that handing back a country like Iraq to those who can’t ensure ongoing control and suppression of extremism is irresponsible.
Anything less and the military shouldn’t be used.
Cruz is my man.
That said, I don’t know that I agree with him on this one. Having knocked over the government, we ought not leave a vacuum to be filled with people as bad or worse than the ones we ousted. My view was that the steady draw-down leaving a residual force was the right answer.
Too quick a draw-down in Afghanistan meant giving the country back to the Talibs. Too quick a draw-down in Iraq meant giving the country to the Baathists, or Al Qaeda, or the Iranians, or as ultimately occurred, ISIS.
Of course, when you have Muslim Brotherhood in the White House, nothing you do is likely to have a happy outcome.
The U.S. has no allies or friends in the hellhole of the middle east.
The one exception being Israel.
It is a place overrun by packs of wild dogs,
and the politicians believe they can side with one pack over another,
but the truth is, that every one of them wants to kill you and eat you.
We are going back in a major way.
In all of those cases, not enough was done to purge the elements that caused war; in Iraq, even less was done and they were allowed to institute yet another Islamic constitution to govern the land.
I’m not buying Cruz’s version of “cut and run” myself.
Nation building is a mistake.
Kill the enemy till there are none left to kill and occupy just long enough for them to restore civil society. (With the understanding that civil society is a relative thing in the mideast)
Germany and Japan in 1945 weren’t run by savages who hated each other’s sects of the same religion.
Usually Cruz has an inspirational note to what he’s proposing... this one isn’t so happy....crusades aren’t all that fun.
Let’s get it on. Better now than later.
Dang, dude, you’re talking about half the GOP here.
We are going back in a major way.
With Obama’s disasterous Rules of Engagement.
Our approach to the WWII countries was far different than our approach to the Islamic countries is. Germany’s deity committed suicide because his execution was imminent, and the Japanese had to be firebombed and atom-bombed into neutering their emperor into a ceremonial figure.
With the Germans and Japanese, we attacked them at the source of their extremism, and crippled it. If we wish to end Islamic terrorism, we need to destroy its source: Mecca. Our politically correct “leaders” and our cowardly media refuse to admit this, and would rather have us submit to the brutes than have the brutes exterminated,
Senator Cruz is our man. Why were we spending $1.5 trillion of printed money and letting 4500 soldiers die with 38,000 wounded and maimed? Weapons of mass destruction? I think not. I think twas NATION BUILDING. IT failed . All was for naught.
Get the heck OUT!! If they attack us — NUKE THEM. Close the damned borders!!
He’s mostly right.
“Whack-a-mole” and establish an intelligence network.
We’re in a war of attrition.
This one issue I do not agree with Ted on. Obama got out to soon and has been to timid in Afghanistan. We are now paying the price. Al Queada is back and he allowed ISIS to become a big cancer when it could have been nipped in the bud early on. Afghanistan is going to become another terrorist playground once we leave.
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