Maybe. Are they going to stay put? Are they going to play to our strengths, make themselves ready targets for our military might? If we wipe out the Taliban, does that mean that no one in Hamburg, Ankara, or Indonesia will hatch plots against us?
Not all problems have a military solution. Indeed, not all problems have any solution at all.
True, but that doesn’t mean we should do nothing. Or at least try.
He served in Iraq first, saw what a clusterfuck the whole operation was, came to the same conclusion regarding Afghanistan and then refused to ship out. So, y’know, he had more of an inside perspective than either you or I have. If he’s got a background to show he knows what he’s talking about, does he still rate your low opinion?
I guess that’s fair enough then.
And thereby perpetuate the cycle? These organizations and attacks didn’t come out of a vacuum, nor are they simply the result of conservative Islamic thinking. The US has gone into the Middle East and actively interfered in countries’ domestic affairs enough to piss them off royally and lead arch-conservative Muslims to create their own versions of survivalist militias.
Osama bin Laden hasn’t always been a problem to the United States. Back in the 1980s his Maktab al-Khidimat (MAK) organization, set up to recruit fighters for the Afghan resistance to the Soviet invasion, had offices in Detroit and Brooklyn, among other places. It also had close connections with Pakistan’s ISI, which seems to have funneled CIA money to the mujahediin. And, it seems, MAK later developed into al-Qaeda. So the US either directly or indirectly supported groups fighting the Russian army only to have them turn around and bite the hands that fed them, bringing them back to the region in order to establish regime change in their favor, meanwhile bombing the country back to before the Stone Age and probably supporting the next wave of fundamentalist terrorists under the cover of fighting the last wave of fundamentalist terrorists they supported thirty years ago.
He was a photographer. He heard horror stories from American soldiers, then he wilted when called upon to go into the theater of the one war that actually makes some semblance of sense.
I suspect that his orders to Afghanistan weren’t as peachy as the ones he enjoyed in Iraq as an Army journalist. They may have actually asked him to, you know, pick up a weapon like he was trained to do in basic training and fight against the enemy.
And the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, Osama, and the rest of their ilk ARE our enemy, and are in need of eradication. It doesn’t matter if it was eight years ago, or if they are on the run to another country, or whatever…
…we should pursue them and eliminate them and their resources wherever we find them, even to the ends of the Earth.
And if the US hadn’t supported them the Soviets would have slaughtered them and colonized Afghanistan. You’re oversimplifying.
Isn’t this the place where you boast of your valiant military career to put us all in our places?
I’m all ears!
ETA: I’m still waiting for Longhair-Hating Starving Artist to let us know about his trip to Southeast Asia. Or his heroic resistance. Or just that he managed to stay in school & got a low draft #.
Go ahead, boys. Wrap yourselves in the flag!
The term is “genocidaire” — to be fair, though, I’ve only ever seen it in the book that Wiktionary cites (and, given that the book is about Rwanda, it’s probably more or less stolen from the French.)
Cof Back to the prescheduled hijack.
I won’t boast of my military career, nor that of my immediate family’s, but I will mention it. What’s your point, here?
Wow. I thought this thread had already achieved the pinnacle of imbecility, but then you come along and prove me wrong.
Here are the reasons that you are an example of all that is wrong with the political discourse in this country today:
1: This country was built with the idea of civilian control of the military, and we have a political system in place that tries to express the ideals of the majority of the citizens without infringing upon the rights of the minority.
2: The military, like the police, the D.A., the president, and every other appendage of the state have specific areas of responsibility. We don’t let the president make laws, and we don’t let congress decide cases or even get rid of judges they don’t like.
3: The military’s job is to enforce foreign policy, not to make it. When some fucking douchebag, no matter what their political stance, pulls tricks like this to get out of a job that they knowingly volunteered for, including the restrictions on their political activity, they are either a coward, an asshole, or both.
4: It doesn’t fucking matter if I am a hardcore republican or a liberal democrat, or an anarchist or a communist – the fucking system of checks and balances is a good idea no matter what party affiliation you have (though I guess maybe not for anarchists).
So if by “wrapping myself in the flag” you mean “adhere to the principles of government that prevent any single person or group from imposing their will regardless of the citizenry”, then sure, go ahead. But if you are the kind of ignorant jackass who thinks that refusing orders of genocide and war crimes is equivalent to not wanting to be shipped out to Iraq because it’s an “illegal war”, after you volunteered to join the military, then I find you a disgusting and disturbed human being.
For you even to conflate the two concepts is an insult to the millions of people who have been killed in this century alone while wastes of oxygen like yourself were debating about if it’s right to get involved. What were you doing when millions of people were being murdered in Rwanda during Clinton’s presidency? How did you try to help the people in Darfur? Bosnia? Kosovo?
Oh that’s right, the people in this picture, or this picture, or this are just part of the price we have to pay for not getting involved.
So fuck you, and fuck your shitty little jibes about wrapping myself in the flag. Yes, the war in Iraq isn’t the best thing ever, but the death toll is a lot less than not stopping a fucking genocide. And we didn’t stop them because of assholes like yourself who see the world in black and white, and where the dead people in those pictures don’t matter as much as the next-door neighbor’s kid who volunteered to join the military and was killed in the line of duty, because you don’t know those anonymous millions, but the kid used to mow your lawn.
So yeah, I’ll wrap myself in the constitution and call out the cowards and publicity whores who desert, and maybe while I am doing that you can wash the blood off of your hands. Or more likely, you can sit there all smug in the confidence that you’re saving the world by ending violence, at least for Americans. And in those moments where your fierce concentration on staying willfully blind lapses, you will keep your eyes squeezed tightly shut so you don’t see the millions of dead people who could have been saved.
You’re a twit, Bridget Burke. Go take your smarmy, smug asides and fuck off.
I DON’T FUCKING HATE LONG H…
Ahem, a thousand pardons.
Have you actually read the OP that claims I hate (or more precisely, “have issues with”) long hair?
If so, you may have noticed that the comment that triggered it had nothing to do with what Knorf, in an astoundingly poor example of reading comprehension, attributed to me. I merely made the comment that much of the counter-culture revolution was due to a large part of the baby-boom generation (my own, btw) wanting to “dress like scuzzbugs, do drugs, fuck in the mud at rock festivals, and still find jobs and not get shit about their long hair, clothes and drugs from the rest of society”.
That’s it! That’s all I said with regard to long hair.
Oh, wait…No. I also said this:
*"Starving Artist has no issues with long hair. Some of his best friends have had long hair, as has he himself at one time (relatively speaking, that is, I still had some standards). Many people during the late sixties had lots of issues with it, on both sides, and it was the conflict over that that my statement refers to.
For such an allegedly smart board, it’s amazing how often people read into posts things that are simply not there.
Oh, wait…no, it’s not! That’s how to fight issues you can’t debate honestly."*
So, as you can see, you, in an example either of the same sort of problems that Knorf suffers with regard to reading comprehension or sheer ignorance, are quite in error.
Que?
You’re still waiting?
When did that ever come up?
Looks like your problem is reading comprehension, after all. 
And therefore what? The only ones who have a grip on the truth are the ones who actually had their fingers on triggers? One could not possibly comprehend it at all if he hadn’t been there when the bullets were flying? You’ve mentioned your own military service; I’m asking you flat out - did you serve in Iraq or Afghanistan, and if so, in what capacity?
Or was Matthis Chiroux lied to by those soldiers? These same ones who are so honorably serving in Iraq and Afghanistan?
Your assertion that Sgt. Chiroux, by not actively firing a weapon in Iraq, cannot have a handle on the truth of the wars has serious implications either for your own arguments (if you did not serve in Iraq and/or Afghanistan) or for the statements of the soliders who saw combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Explain, then, the aid and comfort given to these same enemies when they were fighting someone else the US wasn’t exactly fond of.
US=good, USSR=bad. Who’s oversimplifying here? Not that I supported the Russian invasion of Afghanistan (when I finally got old enough to become aware of world events and develop a set of politics in the mid- to late '80s), but the US wasn’t there to bring freedom to Afghanistan. Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote in 1980 that the US now had the opportunity to give the USSR “its own Vietnam”. Obviously it didn’t matter to the US who beat the Russians back as long as they got beaten back, hence the aid and comfort I briefly touched on upthread. Osama bin Laden’s MAK was among those supported, and it didn’t matter to the US that he was a right-wing nutjob - who might get pissed off at the later US military presence in Saudi Arabia and do something about it - as long as he was an anti-Soviet right-wing nutjob.
But we’re not really discussing decisions under fire - we’re discussing the decision to agree to deploy in the first place.
Exactly.
I’m going to try to approach this carefully. You have some very strong feelings here, and I could inadvertently punch your buttons. Furthest thing from my mind.
You sometimes remind me of guys from another war, guys I knew, guys I still know. Now, most of them were anti-war vets, that’s how I met them, mostly. But it met others, who would argue for “winning”. And if you listen long enough, you would hear the central argument: if we lose, if we leave, then my buddy bought it for nothing.
The instinct for a brotherhood bond with your buddies is ancient, its probably instinctual, like tribal bonding. Military leaders have exploited it forever, from Sargon of Akkad to Shaka Zulu to the present.
Its a worthy emotion, all forms of love are.
But that’s what it is, an emotion. And we are talking ugly truths here.
That makes a good point if you can win. But what if you can’t? Who answers John Kerry’s question about the last guy to die for a mistake? I think we’re running about 70/30 against, and I would pull the plug.
Not because I want America to lose, I don’t. But to throw away young lives for a unwinnable war, or even for a noble emotion, is wrong. If you can win, and its worth it, then those lives are a sacrifice. If not, they are squandered, thrown away.
And that’s obscene.
The US soldiers volunteered for the war, sure.
The Iraqi civilians didn’t.
And a soldier doesn’t have the right to volunteer someone else for a war, nor to hold someone else responsible for an oath they took.
Breaking your word is bad, sure. Killing someone unjustly is worse. And no oath you take can absolve you of your responsibility to act ethically: you can’t sign away that duty.
I believe that one’s responsibility not to kill someone unnecessarily is among the highest moral obligations one has, if not the highest. Certainly it is far higher than keeping one’s word.
If you manage to get yourself into a situation in which you must either unnecessarily risk an innocent person’s life, or violate your oath, then all things being equal, you should violate your oath.
If war were only being fought between volunteers, and if the lives of non-volunteers were not at stake, I’d find the “but they volunteered!” argument very compelling.
I already addressed that point upthread. This guy being pitted is a dumbass, and apparently a grandstander trying to set up a hokey lawsuit.
I agree with your post, but apparently many of the higher ups in the civilian and military leadership arenas believe it’s a winnable conflict, inasmuch as an operation like this is winnable. I would like to see what the plan is in terms of what will constitute winning in the eyes of these leaders, and cause the war to draw down or end.
We’re talking about the Afghanistan War (unless you’re talking about Chiroux, who’s refusal to go to Afghanistan is colored by his Iraq experiences, which I find strange. They aren’t really the same.), not Iraq.
And I also generally agree with your sentiment, but sometimes war creates moral quandries in addition to death and destruction, a fact that gets compunded when you are fighting against a non-uniformed enemy that often place themselves purposely amongst civilians to their advantage.
Still you, because that’s not even remotely what I said.
No it wasn’t, but the Mujahideen and ISI literally begged for our support.
Yes, and whether or not the US was good is open to interpretation, but the USSR was certainly evil.
Yes, and that was one of our failures. In fact the guy, McWilliams, who blew the whistle on that idea when Hekmatyar with the backing of the ISI was shoring up his support and eliminating rivals had a campaign waged against him in Langley by the people who had a vested interest in continuing support for the Mujahideen. I’d love to have a conversation with Bearden about what he thinks of his post-Jihad perceptions now twenty years later after all that has happened.
And so correcting that failure is achieved by going in and bombing the bejesus out of the country?
