Nitpick: it is true that the Coca Cola plant continued in Germany, but the home office stopped dealing with it when the war started, the local German owner (never a member of the Nazi party) did not cross his arms and then created Fanta, (but not the Fantanas (uh hu!)) When the war ended, the Fanta formula became one of the many war patents that the allies (and their business owners) got (some reports say that many German patents were actually stolen, but the losers had no power to complain)
I agree with this.
Now I have to agree that this is getting into insulting territory mswas.
Yes, they are ignorant, I may add willfully ignorant, but I will not call them stupid, what is clear to me is that the Iraq war is profitable for some of them.
Here there is naivete in some of the administration’s supporters in ignoring that while now there is no profit for Bush or Cheney, their connections will mean that they will roll in dough after their White House residency, thanks to the “mistakes” they are committing now.
The fact that the Iraq war is a drain for the country is something that they don’t give a damn IMO.
Speaking of insults, stop insulting our intelligence: many of those quotes happened before the evidence was challenged by the last inspections, and the intelligence from the rest the world then concluded there could be something there, but it was not enough to go to war for.
The latest information is that the USA and British intelligence was corrupted, the latest we have is that the powers that be are not investigating who and how it was corrupted; IIRC there was an official inquiry that was going to be made as a followup to the 9/11 report, but somehow it was not done, you should wonder why.
To add on to xtisme:
I don’t think that 1.7 Mil consumption rate includes the Navy: for every nuclear carrier there are dozens of ships that guzzle diesel. I don’t know the burn rates of those big boats, but on the ship I drive, 110 ft 217 ton, we can burn 9k gals of diesel in 24 hours. So consider how much a 5000 ton ship can burn, 180 days a year.
Then you have to consider all the logistics of just getting soldiers and equipment over there, all the resources it takes: to train a pilot (18 months of flight school, a flight every other day per pilot), to keep that pilot qualified and to maintain the operations that are still going on around the world and would be going on if there wasn’t a war right now. Oh yeah, the Army has more boats then the Navy, so I’m sure they are going through the deisel as well.
The usage is staggering and won’t stop till we run out.
I knew americans like gas guzzling vehicles… but becoming tied down by a massive need of fuel supply seems by far the greatest achilles heel of the US army. How were they going to operate in a non nuclear WW III ? The soviets just had to somehow hit the supply chain and see those M1s run out of gas… ?
A question for you: are you an opponent of the war against terrorism, the war against Saddam or an opponent of the continued occupation of Iraq?
Count me as for the first two but against the last. That Saddam may have been the CIA’s creature is not relevant: he was but a pawn in the great game and pawns are often sacrificed. We need to let the Iraqis sort out their own future.
IMHO after bagging Saddam, we should have left with the stern warning to other countries that should they interfere they would feel our wrath.
I believe that the current setup is beyond what we normally conceive of. It’s a factional thing. I don’t believe that the Bush family is part of my faction, or the faction of the average American. I don’t think my life means more to them than an Iraqis, nor do I think it should be valued as such, only that I think the lies that are permeating the political culture dupe a lot of people into believing that somehow the Bush administration is out to benefit them.
In the modern era, I think massive military campaigns are pointless. I think the way we are going about it is a complete waste of resources. I think that we should be organizing our system in the way the Israelis do. Not that I think we need mandatory service, but that we focus on elite intelligence and targetted strikes. I mostly disagree tactically. I think that our big military industrial complex needs war to justify it’s existance, and it’s only perpetuating a cycle that feeds into it’s own existance, it has to create a market for itself so to speak.
I am basically against the way we wage war. I am against trying to force our culture on anyone. Colonialism failed Europe, but for some reason America thought it would work for us. We can’t force our culture, and I am dubious that Western culture is superior. I don’t think Tanks are useful, for the price of one tank we could train 4 super soldiers and have a much more precise way of executing foreign policy. Without the tanks rolling through the middle east, I don’t think we’d be inspiring people to hate America. I think we should rely more on our economic clout to get what we want.
In short, I think this war is bad for business for the country as a whole, if not for a small cadre of wealthy power elites. I think that violence is alienating the world who would be much more receptive to our ideals if we showed that we were practicing what we preach. I think that with the budget spent on the war in Iraq we could have tooled up alternative fuels like biodiesel. I don’t think the war is winnable, I find the war on terrorism as laughable as the war on drugs, it’s an unwinnable abstract concept.
I’d say I am against all three, but it’s not as simple as all that.
I’d say that you simply have no conception of - or fundamentally misunderstand - the military (and now you’ll tell me you’re a vet :D). You simply can’t assemble a huge military force out of thin air. It takes decades. Look how long it takes to build an aircraft carrier. Look how long the Eurofighter Typhoon has been in development. Just because there is no threat now doesn’t mean that there won’t be one in 10 or 20 or even 50 years. America needs to be prepared for the next big dust-up - China or India sooner, or perhaps even S Africa or S America later. And when you have a military force, it makes sense to use it when you need it. You can’t tell an enemy, “Hang on 5 years while I build my carrier fleet.” Those super-soldiers need a huge tactical support structure - carriers from which to operate, helicopters or landing-craft or submarines from which to deploy, and those carriers need protection - aircraft and support ships and supplies etc.
On a smaller scale, consider Britain’s RIF up to the early 80s, culminating in the withdrawal of HMS Endurance, and Argentina’s subsequent attempt to conquer the Falklands in 1982. (Paging Casdave)
The military campaign in Iraq was the work of genius; the occupation was not. We’ve had many successes during the occupation but they’re overshadowed by our failure to maintain peace which has been aided by a press corps in search of newsworthy events - and Al Qaeda et al have obliged. Note that the press corps aren’t necessarily anti-American, it’s just that pictures of and stories about bombings are more newsworthy than schools being built. This is a lesson of Vietnam that has not been learned.
America is also hampered by its self-restraint. How easy would it have been for Bush to say, “Y’all say the Eye-rak-ees have Double-U Emm Dee? Ah’m not risking mah boys aginst that: we’ll nuke’m 'till they glow!”
IMHO our job was to remove Saddam and once we’d bagged him - dead, not alive - we should have withdrawn, and everyone would now be celebrating a great success, and the other ME countries would have been warned.
Thank you for explaining to me what I already understand. I am not saying we shouldn’t have a military, I am just saying it should be different. I think the new kind of war should be how we fight it. We should be organizing our military in the same way terrorist cells organize. I’m not against choppers so much, I’m against carpet bombing and M1 tanks. Having some carriers is cool, but we don’t need a military force that dwarfs any other 20 countries in the world. The world is a different place, that 20th century warfare style is outmoded IMO. Israel does it pretty well, we should be emulating them. Basically I think Al Qaeda is doing a lot more with a lot less than we are doing, our military is bloated and largely exists only so it won’t collapse the US economy as military bases, and military base support is a huge factor in our economy.
I mean, if I wanted to bomb someone, I could take an off the shelf radio control airplane, turn the entire fuselage into a fueltank and bomb, put a cellular PDA with a GPS in there and fly it 30 miles into someone’s front door and blow up their house if I had the inclination. It’s a new type of war, and we need to truly embrace that IMO.
mswas, you really don’t think that the U. S military has thought of these things? You don’t think that there have been drastic changes since the end of the cold war? A few points:
I don’t remember the last time the military carpeted bombed anything. Precision guided munitions are the norm now. This allows us to hit the target as efficiently, and cut collateral damage as much as possible.
-The Israeli’s have a great military. But model them, I don’t think so. How much time do you think they worry about China? Korea? Keeping sea line of communication open around the world? Keep the flow of oil safe around the entire world, for themselves and their allies? Not much I guess. The United States has global responsibilities. Israel doesn’t.
-The Marine Corps is structured in a very similar fashion to the terror cells, in the way that they have small, semi-autonomous groups. Maybe a better way to but it would be that the terrorist have structured themselves similar to the way that Marine Corps and other Special Operations units have been structured since WWII.
Glad to know that you can kill your next door neighbor with your kid’s toy. But what if your target isn’t 30 miles away, but 300, or 3,000? What if you need more that your one pound warhead? What if they have complex defense in depth? What if you have to do more than just bomb their front door? What if they have a real Navy, Army or Air Force? Those missions will require state of the art weapons.
The U. S. military did a fantastic job of fighting and winning this war. The military is vastly different that it was even in the first gulf war. Fighting insurgencies is very hard. Harder if you are determined not to indiscriminately kill innocent civilians.
It is by far the best tank in the world. The only tanks that are its equal belong to Germany and the UK…both allies. Nothing else even comes close (though the French have a very good tank too…but again, they are allies so its moot). What more justification do you require? How about ‘its there already’ since we needed it for the initial invasion (unless you are seriously questioning whether or not the US should have used its best hardware in the invasion…please don’t get into whether we SHOULD have invaded or not, lets keep this out of that can of worms)? We actually do have lighter and more fuel efficient armored vehicles (well, relatively) in the Striker…but the M1A1/2’s are in theater. Why go to the expense of bringing in a bunch of new vehicles en mass and taking out the big dogs?
Xtisme: Well I am having a hard time believing this war is anything more than a justification for maintaining a Military Industrial Complex. I have yet to hear any arguments that show me a different light.
What “lost” would mean to me in this case is, we have failed to “Win the Hearts and Minds”. I think we burned too much of our international clout to get this war up and running. I think that gas is three times more expensive than it was 4 years ago. I think we’ve killed people for no good reason. I think we built this situation from the ground up, then fought a war justifying it by appealing to people’s lack of knowledge of recent history.
Basically, I see the war as being pointless. I think we could have probably worked much more peacefully with Iraq. I think we could have dissuaded Iraq from invading Kuwait in 1991. I think that a loss of civil liberties in America is too high a price to pay for some pretense of nation building. I think this war was predicated on a lot of cold war beliefs. Basically I think that America was required to sell it’s soul in order to fight the war on terror.
In short, we’ve lost, because we’ve decreased freedom.
Perhaps had you asked that question someone would have responded with arguements against. Personally I see little to indicate that this war was a ‘justification for maintaining a Military Industrial Complex’…mostly because we didn’t need a justification. We were already maintaining it. This war was about power projection…the US projecting power in a region that is of vital interest to us (and incidentally the rest of the world). We wanted to show our strength, and we wanted bases that would allow us to more easily overwatch the region in the future. It didn’t quite work out as planned, but I’d say that had more to do with it than maintaining something we were already maintaining (and had no desire to stop maintaining). Do you have some concrete evidence that the US was getting ready to radically alter our support of the military in the near future but for the Iraq war??
Well, a case can be made certainly that we failed to ‘win the hearts and minds’ of the folks in that region. Personally I don’t think they were ever ours to win, but thats another story. And if you rate our success or failure based solely on that, then I conceed that to you we have indeed lost. Myself, I won’t call it a loss unless Iraq (and the rest of the region) degenerates into all out civil war. If a stable Iraqi government emerges (even if its NOT ‘democratic’), then I will count the war as a partial success. I won’t, however, say the war was worth it from America’s perspective, reguardless of the outcome.
As to your assertion that gas is 3 times more expensive, I don’t really see how that can be layed solely at the feet of the Iraq war. Gas prices were rising before the war, and will continue to rise reguardless as oil becomes more scarce. In addition, a certain hurricane had more to do with the huge short term rise in prices of gas than the Iraq war did. Oh…and where I live, gas is back down to under $2.50/gallon (in fact, I bought it for $2.42 this morning)…and was at around $1.60-$1.80/gallon before the Iraq war. Thats hardly ‘3 times’.
I doubt we could have worked more peacefully with Iraq, though I think we could have just continued with the status quo and kept them under our thumb for a few more years before the rising tide of public opinion (especially in Europe) finally did away with the sanctions. I do agree that the war, launched when and how it was launched, was pretty pointless. but I disagree that it was completely pointless…at least until history proves it so. Jury is still out on that one.
As for the civil liberties thing…that really had more to do with 9/11 than Iraq so I don’t see where you are going there. In addition, all that gloom and doom about the Patriot Act (and version II) hasn’t really come to pass for the most part. What exact liberties have we lost in real world terms? However, even if we HAVE lost a few, again that has more to do with the WoT than the Iraq invasion/occupation so I’m not sure where you are going with that…unless you are tieing the two together somehow.
In real world terms…have we? Are the Iraqi’s less free today than under Saddam? Perhaps in some cases…but not in others. Hard to say. The Afghani’s? Again, its a mixed bag, but over all I’d say they certainly have more ‘freedom’ (depending on one’s definition of that term) than they did pre-invasion. In the US? I can’t say that I’ve noticed a huge lessening of my personal freedoms (mostly just when I fly), nor have I see much real world evidence that our freedom has taken a major hit. In Europe? Well, maybe you don’t go that far, but Europe is essentially unchanged except in the UK…and I doubt in real world terms they have lost that much personal freedom.