That’s because there aren’t large numbers of Christians getting the short end of the geopolitical stick around the world. If we had the Christian equivalent of Palestine?kashmir/Chechnya etc. going on for the last few decades then we’d have Christian fundamentalist terrorist groups now.
Muslim civilians haven’t been on the end of military repression around the world on an ongoing basis for decades now?
Desert Nomad gets it right. Try and fix Kashmir, the Pushtuni question too. And in general do what that nice Mr. Gore has been suggesting for over a decade now and use the money we would have spent on energy wars on investment in American alternative energy projects. That and a bit of commonsense financial regulation would have made our current situation a little different to how it is now.
Bush did not bomb anyone out of religious fanaticism (Iraq War happened because President Bush GENUINELY thought there were WMDs).
They’re fanatics,they’re like those folks at say Waco but with RPGs and IEDs.
There’s about as much evidence for this as there is for the WMDs in the first place.
I see no reason to buy that he actually believed there were any such things. That’s why our troops bypassed the armories and just about everything else in order to get to the Oil Ministry as fast as possible. That’s why we had to attack as soon as possible and not let the UN finish checking. We knew that Saddam had no such weapons. And everything Bush did was shaped by his religious lunacy.
And? That doesn’t make them any more of a national army.
Then why didn’t the US government seize all the oil fields and appropriate all the profits to oil companies? Why does the Iraq government still control the oil fields? I actually wish the US had seized the oil fields-at least we’d have lower gas prices.
We must judge enemy groups by their capability not by formatlities. The Al-Qaeda and Taliban are no different then say the Vietcong or Contras or Qunatrill’s Raiders.
Because the Iraqis kept blowing things up, and weren’t as tractable as we thought they’d be. Looting the oil WAS part of the original plan; remember how the conquest was going to pay for itself? We didn’t want to admit that what we were doing was no better than mugging on a grand scale, so the Iraqis called our bluff and refused to cooperate with our attempt to loot them.
Exactly; and they don’t have the power or fixed territory of nation-states.
What if time travel is an integral part of my military strategy?
Then why didn’t the US abandon Iraq or at least just guard the oil fields and leave the rest of the country?
That doesn’t matter, what matters is what’s happening. If they’re launching military attacks then will rain down a few thousand PATRIOT missiles on them.
We didn’t leave because that would be admitting failure. And guarding the oil fields wouldn’t work, because it was the oil pipelines they concentrated on; we didn’t have nearly enough people to guard them from the people who live there. And they also refused to just hand it over they way we expected it to, despite us trying to write it into their laws.
Patriot is an anti air system, so that’s rather unlikely. And slaughtering thousands of innocents to get the one enemy who may be hiding among them is neither moral nor effective.
Not really. In 2005-06 the US was virtually demanding for the US to get out of Iraq. Had Bush done so his popularity would have increased dramatically.
I was using it as a figure of speech. Also what about an area with fifty terrorists and five civilians?
I doubt that. And at any rate, it would be an admission of failure of the part of Bush, personally.
Move in, order them to surrender. What are they going to do, eat rocks? And that is hardly the normal situation anyway.
The Patriots did not work. It was military propaganda. They run dog and pony shows all the time. That was a bad one.
I assume we can’t be certain until the papers of the Bush Administration are released.
They’re fanatics. They can’t be rationally delt with.
Well, yes and no. They DID work as designed - except they were being used for a purpose for which they weren’t designed. They were designed as point defence weapons; to do enough damage to prevent an aimed missile from hitting a relatively small target like a base. They weren’t designed to completely destroy nearly unaimed missiles like SCUDs aimed at a city sized target. It didn’t do any good to knock a missile aside when it would just hit another part of the city, and wasn’t aimed at any specific spot anyway.
Nonsense; we can and have taken fanatics alive in the past, without indiscriminate slaughter. And what makes you think they are all fanatics? Hatred for America is hardly an irrational position for our victims; we SHOULD be hated by much of humanity.
Taliban runs at least 85 percent of the country. What do you plan to do about that? To accomplish the goal of eliminating the Taliban would require a war bigger that Iraq. Then if you managed to do it, which is doubtful. you still have to deal with Al Queada which is not in Afghanistan but Pakistan. So now do you just go ahead and attack Pakistan, the Al Queada stronghold who actually has nukes? You just blew trillions of dollars and killed a hell of a lot of people.
How about we install George W. Bush and Dick Cheney as the new President of Iraq and Afghanistan? Quietly remove the US presence after they “take office” and maybe leave the gates to the Presidential palace unlocked so the locals can express their joy and gratitude as they welcome their new liberators.
We can run a nice big US flag up the building’s flagpole too as a gesture of US goodwill towards the Afghans.