Exactly – nobody’s against the war in Afghanistan. The objection is that Bush keeps withdrawing troops from a region where they are badly needed against a government that was actually connected to al Qaeda and supported bin Laden, where I believe last we heard he was still hiding. Oh, that’s right, bin Laden is “no longer a concern”. Or maybe his capture is “a success that hasn’t happened yet”.
Speaking purely from a technical standpoint, I don’t understand why this would mean anything. Virtually every country in the world with an armed forces has the “delivery systems” to use WMDs. Anyone who has an airplane, a howitzer, or a missile - which is to say the vast majority of the world’s soveriegn nations - has a delivery system.
It’s not PC any more, but for 40 years the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939 was referred to as La Cruzada. Half the people fighting on Franco’s side were doing so for religious reasons.
Ain’t been that long, eh?
Last night I saw a brief segment of a news special that had some reporter (Andersen Cooper, maybe?) on patrol with some American soldiers in Afghanistan. One of the soldiers made the comment that they were, “Fighting ‘them’ here, so we don’t have to fight ‘them’ at home.” (paraphrased). Maybe I’m a dick, but I immediately thought, “Yea, because we all know the huge threat of invasion that the Afghan Navy and Air Force pose.”
Now, I’ve heard this particular line of reasoning proffered many times by Bush and Cheney, et. al. and used as a type of justification for much of this war. I know the soldiers have it tough and probably need some reason or justification to believe. They need to stay gung ho, and tough this whole clusterfuck out. But for the life of me, I cannot seem to do the mental gymnastics that are required to reach the conclusion that we are or ever were under threat of invasion in the US by any of the nations that we preemptively invaded. Do a lot of Soldiers really believe that they are preventing some kind of ground war or invasion of America?
If, at one point, the majority of US citizens thought that Iraq was involved in September 11, I see no reason to doubt that a similair percent of the military didn’t also. I just expected B-2 pilots to be exposed to different viewpoints and believe differently.
Who mentioned invasion? We did get attacked without there being an invasion. The thinking is that fighting terrorists in their backyard prevents them from taking the fight here. Not in the form of an invasion but future acts of terrorism. Afganistan was a base of operations where they could train and plan with the help of a friendly government. I’m sure you could find a dozen threads about the effectiveness of this theory in GD so lets not start one here.
There were protests against the war in Afghanistan.
Going in mob handed to Iraq and Afghanistan has mostly resulted in the bad guys having plenty of human targets to fire at and for us to guard everything in those countries that we consider worthwhile .
Plus we’ve made ourselves a fair amount of enemies amongst populations that at grass roots level held no real antagonism against the Western nations.
What we should have done was to have allowed the regimes to stay in power but selectively attack military targets leadership ,power plants ,roads ,oil storage facilities and infrastructure generally; using airpower,spec.forces and native based regime opposition forces.
Not as a spectacular “this is a major opperation and we’re nailing our prestige to the mast”
type mission but casually and apparently sporadically eroding national facilities and causing disaffection amongst the populations and causing the regimes troops to try and defend everything instead of vice versa.
By not making a big deal out of it we prevent the hostile govs.from rousing its populations into a national crusade(also a face saver if we have to slow down,put on hold or even cancel the project) and also it erodes the national will to resist a lot more quickly if they think that we consider it a minor league affair while its discomfitting the hell out of them and their economy.
Hindsight is easy but with Iran looming on the "things to do list"its not necessarly hindsight,
Iraq should not have been invaded at all.
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