Please get your facts straight. The Iraqi people made no such claim. The authoritarian Ba’athist regime and its dictatorial leader, Saddam Hussein denied having an active chemical weapon or uranium enrichment program, but then played the game of refusing to allow UN weapon inspectors to enter and inspect facilities (as it was required to do under the ceasefire terms from the 1991 Invasion of Kuwait), giving credence in the minds of some that it might have such a program despite a complete lack of evidence for any such effort.
I’m not going to get into this in detail, but China has been very aggressive. The NY Times guest opinion was a douche by cherry picking things positive to China and ignoring the flip side of the coin. For example, calling out Philippine President Marcos yet somehow failing to highlight China’s dubious historic and territorial claims to the S China sea and the manmade islands that China is constructing on sunken reefs.
@Paul_was_in_Saudi Sarcasm is very difficult to pull off in writing. How are we to know you are being sarcastic? I vaguely know your posting style, so I think it was a play on Trumpisms, but hard to know for sure. The failing NY Times would be less witty but more obvious that it was taking the piss.
I wonder how different our world would be if mass warfare was considered totally outre, and the accepted form of intergovernmental conflict was assassination of troublesome leaders.
Really don’t like Iraq’s behavior? Don’t invade, just whack Saddam himself. Don’t like how things develop there over the next few weeks? Whack his successor. Lather rinse repeat.
Probably be a much smaller death toll that way. Cheaper too.
Well, if you were an investor in the United Fruit Company like CIA Director Allen Dulles and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, it worked out just fine. Just fine.
China and Russia both have a history of pushing boundaries and essentially daring other nations to challenge what they’re doing, with an implicit threat of war if they don’t get their way.
Knuckling under and allowing that just emboldens them. Look at Ukraine- after all the business in Crimea, Donetsk, etc… they felt like they could invade the whole country with impunity- after all, we let them carve away chunks of Ukraine before, and didn’t do anything when they interfered, etc…
Better to confront China early and often; let them make the decision about war by showing that we’re willing to challenge and confront and not knuckle under.
From their perspective, it’s not that we’re causing trouble, it’s that we’re not putting up with their bullshit.
In terms of number of dead US military members, and number of locals killed or maimed by US military members, and number of US taxpayer dollars spent, it worked great.
In terms of achieving social or political justice for the locals, it worked as badly as the other ways of violent coercion our country has tried.
Consider if we could stop the war in Ukraine not by killing 100K Russian ordinary schmucks, and 100K Ukrainian ordinary schmucks, plus another 100K Ukrainian civilians, and instead killed exactly one particular Russian. Would be a different world, would it not?
Long article in a recent Atlantic (by a retired Navy Captain) arguing we are asking for trouble by not updating/expanding our navy and overall domestic shipbuilding capacity. Suggests Russia in the arctic or China in the China Sea could endanger unfettered commerce over the free seas. Like I said, the author is Navy, but I was surprised at the low #s of active USN ships he claimed.
Being of a certain age, I’ve been hearing people yelling “Nuclear War!” my entire life. I take it about as seriously as the people that scream “Current Government Scandal” will be the end of the US It’s fifty years of people screaming like chicken little, and has the same results every time.
I’m even willing to bet one US dollar that we don’t go to war with China, especially nuclear war.
I have a, um… friend who works for the Air Force, and is privy to information that is not available to those without a clearance. He says China is a very serious threat.
Do you mean outright assasination, as in the USA directs a drone strike/sniper/cruise missile targeted at the location of a foreign leader? Or do you mean an “an assaination” where we try to make it look plausibly like it might have been internal strife, etc.
Because one of those things opens us up to a very scary world where heads of state are basically constantly in fear of attack from other governments. I think there is an unspoken agreement that we just don’t do that sort of stuff because everyone is afraid of what the aftermath would look like, and there is no putting the genie back in the bottle – kinda like nuclear war.
Of course. It was more in the category of a Modest Proposal than a Serious one.
But the traditional way of warfare dates from a time when kings mattered and peons didn’t. So the way Kings settled their differences was to kill a hefty fraction of the other guy’s peons. Once enough peons were dead, that other King would alter his policy / behavior.
I say we cut out all the dead middlemen and go straight to the heart of the matter. Thinking of killing a bunch of the other King’s peons because that King has pissed you off? Clean his clock directly instead, not his peons’ clocks.
Like the various proposals that all politicians’ kids should be in the infantry, it might cause Kings to be a bit more circumspect in their international ambitions and behaviors.
Of course it is, I don’t beleive that anyone is saying that it isn’t. They have technolgy that Russia is lacking and they have shear numbers, so they must be taken seriously. Still, they don’t have the boots on the ground (or on the water) experiance that we do. We haven’t just palnned for war, we have actually done it on a large scale. And perfected it in numerous smaller conflicts. We are a beast, its they that should be worried about us.
How many large scale amphibious invasions has China done? Are they just going to practice on Taiwan and think we will just sit by?
China is undoubtedly quite dangerous as a foe. As is Russia. Recent events in Ukraine have shown up significant failures on all sides’ capabilities and have given the Chinese a monster-big pile of useful intel. But “danger” is not the topic of the OP.
The OP topic is the putative risk of an imminent inadvertent shooting war. Whether inadvertence stems from a small glitch with forces in the field, or from an escalating war of words from top leaders that develops an unstoppable momentum of its own.
It’s quite possible, and IMO correct, to roundly pooh-pooh the latter while fully respecting and agreeing with the former.
NY Times would be less witty but more obvious that it was taking the piss.
who works for the Air Force, and is privy to information that is not available to those without a clearance. He says China is a very serious threat.