You are correct with the war in Afghanistan but I guess you could point at Iraq and say that was a conventional war. I was for the war at the time for various reasons in thousands of threads here but I no longer think the US military is responsible for propping up the UN and that is for starters. If the Iraq war happened today I would be against it but I would support the troops and the country. Back to Afghanistan, I think we have already been as successful as we are going to be, I don't know what is successful or winning from this point on and that is another reason why I have called for months for us to get out of Afghanistan yesterday. I don't see a problem with questioning judgments or actions. The problem that I see is when politicians who are against the action say things detrimental to the country for personal gain. Such as Jack Murtha calling the Marines killers or Seabees being arrested for giving a known terrorist and killer a fat lip. Jack Murtha was wrong and never apologized for his actions that I know of.
listen here, morons. money has never been spent for a better purpose. the value of turning rogue states into productive and free trading partners is immeasurable. it may take forever and cost a virtually infinite amount of money, but the value is there, not only for us, but for everyone on earth. there has never been a more noble goal than the bush doctrine. and i am serious, never in history has a country been so good and so right as we are right now.
martin, while I am tempted to agree with you I question the value of "staying forever and spending an infinate amount of money." My fear is that once there is no US military presence those ragheads will somehow either put another nutjob dictator in power of else put a radical muslim ayatollah in power. How long will a democracy exist in Iraq once we leave? Is the elected goivenment strong enough militarily to defend their country against the radical element and preserve the security of their citizens? Even as we are winding down our involvement you still hear about a bunch of people being killed by suicide bombers nearly every day. As far as the situation in Afghanistan goes no foreign power has ever actually won a war there and pacified the nation. The Russians were there for years with no results. The Soviet Union's involvement was their own Vietnam and had a large part in bringing about the downfall of the Soviet Union. The only way to eliminate the Taliban would be to carpet bomb their mountain strongholds but that would result in an enormous number of civilian casualties so you know that that is not going to happen. Maybe it should. We used nukes against two Japanese cities and ended their involvemnt in WWII. Now the Japanese are a democracy with a strong economy and they are our friends. More civilians were killed in the German city of Dresden than died in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined when we firebombed the city. Now the Germans are a democracy with a strong economy and the Germans are our friends and allies. Maybe we should show the Middle East the same "tough love" so they will respect us enough to be our friends
I agree with your post and that is totally where I stand except the fact that I am not sure your idea of tough love would work. I think that would only turn the whole world against us. The world is hardly the same as it was back when we bombed Japan and Germany. I think this would only strengthen the resolve of the extremists and they would also point out that it is truly a war between Islam and the rest of the world.
Bengal. Are you advocating bombing an entire country to rid a small group of terrorists? Are you advocating spreading Democracy by the barrel of gun? What do you say to actions of the US overthrowing an elected official in Iran and installing the Shah?
ever take an evolutionary biology class in school? how many baby extremists do you think the extremists had before they die?
1. As long as they want it to. I can tell you from experience those fuggers went nuts when they were allowed to have some freedom. Saddam had them so under his thumb you can't even begin to imagine it. When you add to it that the country is shia by a large margin and saddam was a sunni you can see why years of oppression would cause somewhat of a revenge factor. 1a. While the shia may eventually learn to co-exist they will have a deep seeded woven into their fabric hatred for the sunni for at least a few generations and this could cause some problems. Of course it will also work inversely as well. 2. If they can weed out the corruption it will be. Imagine our political system but 100x worse. I think we have along with the few good ones in Iraq weeded out a lot of the thugs and riff raff from their system. 3. You do, once in a while, what you don't hear about is that usually and fairly recently the people responsible for doing these bombings are being ratted out by the other iraqis. Something that didn't happen earlier. The iraqis are tired of this crap because innocent people are being killed, (innocent iraqis, they don't care much about us either way). They may still be animals but even animals prefer some sort of stability vs chaos. All that said, it would not surprise me to see the shia go on a massive head lopping spree should we ever get out of there because after all, they are still in fact animals.
Baby extremists? Kids are raised. If Mom decides she'd rather have her kid with her than see him obliterated in a self-inflicted explosion, then the kid won't be raised as an extremist. The whole point of counter insurgency is to have the guts and the patience to make the bad guys reconsider the cost/benefit ratio of their insurgency. It takes a long time. But it works if you have guts/patience.
