**sailor **was only calling John Mace’s spelling of *Nobel *terrorism. Perfect content for the Pit.
And I’ll tell you what real terrorism is: Obamacare!
And in not one election-cycle since 2008 has any party or candidate seriously run against it, AFAICR. (Greens, maybe, but they never win anyway.)
You know who else hated Obamacare?
Language professors?
55,000 dead Americans in Vietnam is evidence to the contrary. If we didn’t have drones, it wouldn’t mean that our adventures in the Mideast and Central Asia wouldn’t be happening - it just means that they’d be a lot bloodier and there’d be a lot more young men and women coming home in flag-draped coffins.
I’m not particularly concerned about whether our means of making war are fair to the other guy or not. If we can leverage our force without putting our soldiers and sailors and Marines and airmen in harm’s way, I’m all for it.
Look, this is essentially a political war. Success depends ultimately on getting the civilians on our side. Hearts and minds, y’know?
A difference in nomenclature and a difference in taking the time to make sure who we are killing and a difference in making our country safer or in greater danger in the long run. However, if there are never any legal charges for making these mistakes, whether it is murder or manslaughter really doesn’t matter.
I don’t think so. Time was, pre-9/11, when the deaths of only 18 servicemen were sufficient to compel the US to withdraw entirely from Somalia. This current Islamic terrorist paranoia that justified much higher body counts in Iraq and Afghanistan will eventually recede from the electorate’s consciousness.
How about being concerned about whether your means of making war are fair to those unfortunate people in the other guy’s vicinity? To not do so makes you kind of a foolish asshole who may eventually reap what he has sowed.
I certainly agree that to the folks on the ground, this sure looks like terrorism. I don’t blame them for perceiving it that way. And to the extent that perception is reality, that’s all that matters. To them, anyway.
We Americans seem to be so used to us just going in and doing whatever we want that we don’t understand we are essentially the only country in the world that does that. We think our good intentions are all that matters. I’d call it arrogance, but that doesn’t seem to quite capture the wrongness of it all.
after Culoden Moor the English went through the Highlands, raising every male’s kilt with their bayonets. If they saw pubic hair they’d thrust. I guess we should at least praise them for making the effort to do their atrocities retail.
The US wasn’t at war in Somalia, it was there as part of a UN nation building operation, and the deaths of ‘only’ 18 servicemen in the hunt for warlords made the US public wonder what the hell we were doing over there in the first place. The US didn’t leave Somalia until 5 months later when UNSCOM II withdrew. One of the first reactions to the Battle of Mogadishu was the deployment of the Ready Battalion of the 24th Infantry Division, 1–64 Armor, from Fort Stewart, Georgia, to Mogadishu to provide heavy armored support for U.S. forces, and the stepping down of Les Aspin as Secretary of Defense who shouldered the blame for failing to deploy armor to Somalia despite requests from commanders on the ground on the basis that deploying tanks would look too provocative to the US public. It wasn’t so much the deaths of ‘only’ 18 servicemen that led to the US withdrawal, it was the questioning of why any US servicemen were dying in a country that the US had no vested interest in conducting an extremely ill-defined mission in a country that seemed to not want to be nation-built but preferred to remain run by warlords in a state of anarchy.
And for promoting good grooming.
Is “bayonet” a euphemism here?
if history is any teacher, never.
Nobody sane does.
No, it’s supposed to strike terror into the hearts and minds of the evil people.
Of course. In fact, it might even be creating an entire world of people that might be willing to die in order to return the favor.
I support Obama in signing off on drone strikes against suspected Taliban or al Qaeda leaders specifically in the lawless region of Pakistan like the Swat Valley and other parts of Africa where there is no government in control. I also support Bush when he did it. So I don’t know the issue there. However I did not support one particular type of drone or manned air strike that was used in Iraq. That is those strikes where drone surveillance caught an IED being planted and then the planters were tracked to a dwelling and the dwelling was targeted and hit. It seemed to me at the time that once the location of the IED was fixed we could have detonated it if the suspected planter could not be killed or captured. Hitting a dwelling they entered after planting IED’s seemed to me to be targeting without regard to civilians.
True 'dat.
Although seven years of protests did exactly jack and shit, so it’s mostly academic.
I think we have “learned” to some extent. Our taste for war as a nation has been declining throughout our history. Even in recent times, the war in Iraq was markedly less violent than the war in Vietnam. And Obama’s drone strikes are thousands of times less violent than Bush’s anti-terrorism policy. Yeah, it is still evil, and yeah, it is still self-defeating, but it’s much better than invading and occupying a country for no reason. Maybe in another ten or twenty years, the general public will be more aware of how evil these drone strikes are, and there will be zero tolerance for this type of violence. But in general, things are trending in the right direction.
Do you not recognize the vast distinction between Obama finishing what Bush started in the needless unjustified war in Iraq; plus the distinction of Obama finishing the justified war in Afghsnustan that Bush started but could not finish because of Iraq?
There was not a dimes worth of protest against Bush’s military action in Afghanistan. But there was billions worth of protest against Bush’s decision to invade Iraq. Most Anericans who protested invading Iraq did not protest Afghanistan. So your search for sanitized uniform protest is quite an errant quest on your part. You are not squaring your request with any kind of reality.
He who plants and runs away,
Lives to plant another day.
And you may not catch him next time.
But your daughter’s Humvee may harvest his crop the hard way.
What is the next step after they adopt countermeasures: the al Qaeda intended target quickly puts on a chicken mask, and while the drone is wondering what to do, he writes “Obama” at the end of the dial and re-sets it?