Those US troops were under NATO command as a part of peacekeeping efforts. All of the listed casualties in your links “died in a non-hostile incident in Bosnia and Herzegovina.” We can still mourn their loss, but they were not combat casualties.
Whether they were acting under NATO has no real bearing on the conversation. The US operated in cooperation with allies toward a common goal. And 7 of the deaths were combat related.
This conversation goes back to a pointless challenge to a statement I made that the United States stepped up and dealt with the conflict in that area. Which it did.
There was no “pointless challenge.” You made a claim that was not accurate and I asked a rather mild question regarding your claim.
The U.S. certainly played a significant role in ending the bloodshed. However, that role was not one of “sending in troops”; claiming that the U.S. “sorted them out” is absurd.
I hear ya, dude! That’s not anywhere nearly enough! 
Comparing executing serial killers via lethal injection stoning women to death for sexual offenses it utterly ludicrous and anyone who does so either has an absurdly manichean view of the world.
Have you any idea what a stoning is like. It’s not like the movie the Life of Brian.
They take the woman and bury her nearly up to her head in the ground, then carefully measure the stones before throwing them to make sure that A) the stones aren’t so light that they won’t cause injury and B) that they’re not too heavy for fear that they kill the woman right away.
The goal of the stoning is for it to take an extremely long time bore she finally dies minutes by which time she is usually not even recognizable as a woman and sometimes not even as a human being before she dies. On occasions the women get lucky and the men fuck up and kill her too early or she winds up biting off her tongue and mercifully choking to death before succumbing to her other injuries.
Sorry, but putting those two in the same category is like comparing Mahatma Ghandi to Adolph Hitler because of Ghandi’s actions while he was a soldier.
So then, to be clear, you object to the WWII paratroopers of the 101st Airborne being referred to as heroes and are outraged at the way they are lionized in our current culture?
Once again, you don’t seem to understand what nationalism is.
I dunno. I was born in the Middle East and it’s vastly worse for Christians than Muslims in every country in the region except for Lebanon(where it’s equally shitty) and Israel(where the Jews are slightly harsher to the Muslims than the Christians).
And it’s equally silly to try and minimize the persecution of Christians as so many on this thread have done.
Considering how few American Christians have ever given two shits about the persecutions in the Third World it’s impossible to take such a comment like this seriously.
Americans cared vastly, vastly more about the butchering of Muslims in Bosnia and Darfur than they did a the far worse slaughter of Christians in the South Sudan.
I’m not aware of too many Western Christians who expressed any apprehension about the ethnic cleansing of the Chaldeans from Iraq. In fact I’d be astonished if even 3% of all Americans could answer the question “What is a Chaldean?”.
And how many Americans have you ever heard complain about the treatment of Palestinian Christians at the hands of either the Palestinian Muslims or the Israeli Jews.
Please.
I think the argument could be made that when one compares the numbers of Christians who face persecution for their beliefs versus the numbers who can practice their religion freely, that Christians in general may be one of the least persecuted groups.
That said, its not a silly pointless argument; I don’t see any point in arguments over which group is more or less oppressed.
I’m dubious about your Nazi parallel - Boko Haram seems more focused on Westernization than on Christians - but I agree it’s fair to say that Christians are targeted. The 150,000 figure really is BS though: Boko Haram has an annual body count of about 320 and somebody upthread cited a double digit Pakistani bombing. Even if you ascribe all of that to anti-Christian sentiment -which is demonstrably not the case- you are still less that one half of a percentage point on the way to 150,000. This is simple false witness.
True, but based on this logic, since the Nazis were focused on “non-Aryans” or “Untermenschen” which included gypsies, Jews, and others, so it’s silly to suggest that the gypsies were targeted because they were gypsies and the Jews were targeted because they were Jews. Instead they were both targeted because they weren’t Aryans.
Obviously, you don’t believe this, but it is logically consistent with the above statement.
For that matter, you could argue Robert Mugabe isn’t really a homophobe because the persecution of gays in Zimbabwe goes hand in hand with anti-Western sentiment as it does in many Middle Eastern countries.
Mugabe? Unusual choice for this analogy.
I cited that troops were used. I cited those killed in action. They were used for the express purpose of ending the war. I don’t even begin to understand why you are challenging what happened. It’s not like you couldn’t google this before making such a statement.
Bosnia War - Wiki- NATO intervened in 1995 with Operation Deliberate Force targeting the positions of the Army of the Republika Srpska, which proved key in ending the war.
Operation Deliberate Force - Wiki - Operation Deliberate Force was a sustained air campaign conducted by NATO, in concert with UNPROFOR ground operations, to undermine the military capability of the Army of the Republika Srpska (VRS), which had threatened and attacked UN-designated “safe areas” in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the Bosnian War. The operation was carried out between 30 August and 20 September 1995, involving 400 aircraft and 5,000 personnel from 15 nations.
Lots of handwaving that fails to support the original contention that “we” “sorted them out.”
I will also note that the figures for “combat” deaths are not rock solid. For example, this site lists fifteen casualties instead of twelve, names each one, and identifies each death with the statement “. . . he died in a non-hostile incident. . .”
If you choose to pretend that an air campaign is the same as going “in with troops,” then I will leave you to your fantasy. (U.S. troops did go into the area–as peacekeepers after the truce, not as combat troops suppressing an active war. There were “military casualties”–generally from encountering mines after the fighting had ended, not from hostile fire while “sorting them out.”)
Seem to me “we” “sorted them out.”
there isn’t anything remotely handwaved about what happened. They would still be killing each other if NATO and the UN had not intervened.
I CITED that troops were used in concert with the air campaign. Not after the fact, in concert with.
Whether you like it or not, we stopped that war. And your attempt to trivialize this historical fact by arguing over the use of troops or the number of troops used makes no sense at all.
Who’s “We” kemosabe?
We would be the western nations that form NATO.
Belgium
Canada
Denmark
France
Germany
Italy
Luxembourg
Netherlands
Norway
Portugal
Spain
Turkey
United Kingdom
United States
Do those soldiers not count either? Are the 100,000+ casualties in the war prior to our intervention just talking points to you or is it the fact we didn’t suffer the same level of casualties necessary for you to think stopping the war counted.
As for your snide “kemosabe” comment that’s just the last desperate act of a lost debate. You don’t have a point and you never did. We the members of NATO stepped in and ended that war. Not that it mattered but that involved troops on the ground before and after the peace accord. That is a fact.
This is you trying to cover your ass after making a dumb comment and being called on it. The 100,000+ casualties were among the people who were involved, not the outsiders who “sorted it out” to use your arrogant phrase. Similarly, NATO did not go into the country until the truce had been agreed upon.
Your claim was that “we” (possibly a reference to NATO; more likely a reference to the U.S.), sent troops in and “sorted them out.” However, the fighting did not include any of the “we” to which you referred and the claim that we “sorted them out” implies a senior authority telling children or criminals to behave.
The reality is that the fighting was done by the Bosnians and other peoples of the former Yugoslavia without any outside troops, the truce was negotiated without any Western power putting “troops” into the country, and the “sorting” was agreed upon by the actual combatants.
The air interdiction did help bring the Serbs to the table, but that was not the result of “sending in troops.”
My initial comment should have been simply a gentle nudge for you to get your facts straight, but you have chosen to make a big deal defending your arrogance and erroneous comment. ::: shrug :::
I never said they were American casualties. I assumed you had some tiny amount of knowledge about the war.
It doesn’t imply anything beyond the obvious. Again sorry I thought you were aware of the world around you.
The reality is that we went in and stopped the war. Ended. Done.
My facts were straight. You’re the one who couldn’t be bothered to google anything before posting your comments which were wrong. Even after citing that we had troops on the ground during the air strike you STILL had to run your mouth. shrug squared.
The United States along with the nations of NATO stopped the war and that is a fact. It was done with boots on the ground during and after the conflict. There aren’t going to be any great monuments to it but I just watched a travel show about the area. Something that would never have happened had it not been for our intervention. Sadly you’re too bullheaded to admit you’re wrong.
whatever
Such a truly eloquent response!
How long did it take you to come up with that?