Even this unlikely scenario (far more likely is that ISIS collapses because it’s just a rabble of murderous thugs that are incapable of governing a hostile populace larger than a few towns, plus the Saudi and Turkish militaries would get involved before this happened) is far, far better than the scenario of “fight ISIS on the ground, kill hundreds of thousands/millions of local people and lose thousands of American lives and waste hundreds of billions of dollars and eventually pull out because there’s no more political will to stay in for a century, leaving a gap for the next version of ISIS to create itself”.
There’s no real-world scenario with ground troops that is better for America than any scenario without ground troops.
The territory they control is not an “idea”. That’s like saying we couldn’t win WWII because you can’t defeat fascism, an idea.
Well first, if we can’t win, and we can’t lose, why are we fighting? And why do you support a President who kills people for no good reason?
I’m just trying to figure out what Plan B is. In Kosovo, we never had to go to Plan B, because Milosevic succumbed after 3 months of bombing. ISIS isn’t going to do that. So what’s Plan B? Are we going to just drop bombs for the next 15 years?
What sort of childish nonsense is this? Are you saying that we’d confine all of our military actions to Kurdish areas?
Complete nonsense. The Kurds were there in the 00s, and yet it was still a complete disaster, wasting trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives for nothing, and greatly weakening America and strengthening our enemies.
What I’m saying is that a) the Kurds are in trouble, b) they are actual allies who like us, and c) we can operate among them without causing hatred and getting our people killed by those who are supposed to be on our side.
Or we could just abandon them again, I suppose. What did being friends with the US ever get anyone?
You’re the one who’s talking about the U.S. winning or losing this war, so I’m trying to find out what you actually mean by that. Sometimes, for example, losing a war means unconditional surrender, dissolution of the government, etc. When the stakes are that high, your whole losing-is-not-an-option approach makes a certain amount of sense. This just doesn’t seem to be one of those cases to me.
In a sense, we’ve priced ourselves out of the competition. In a good, old-fashioned war (with uniforms, and tanks, and aircraft carriers), no one has a hope of beating us. That’s why no one will start that kind of war with us. They’ll use insurgencies, they’ll recruit on social media, when we try to contain them they’ll disperse, disappear, and regroup somewhere else. I know you’d like to use this devastating military that we’ve built up, but no one is picking that kind of fight with us.
When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When the only tool you have is the army, everything looks like a reason to send in ground troops.
Such attacks would hurt and weaken America far, far less than the costs of ground troops in Iraq. What you advocate for would damage and weaken America far, far more than even the worst potential terrorist attack.
The war in Iraq hurt America orders of magnitude more than the 9/11 attacks.
We have a massive multi-national mutual defense treaty with Estonia (and many other nations in the region) that has lasted for decades. The Kurds are not a nation and we have no such massive multi-national mutual defense treaty. So no, not comparable.
Please quote the posts you’re responding to. I know I rag on you for being perhaps the laziest poster on the Dope, but it really only takes about 2 extra seconds, and very often the posts you respond to are not immediately preceding.
Estonia? * Estonia?* What? How the fuck did we…??? What the hell does Estonia…???
No, wait, I’ve changed my mind, we must insist, we must demand to know! Just exactly what is Obama’s policy for Estonia! All we know for sure right now is that it is totally wrong! As details are revealed, then we will know exactly how his policy is wrong, but for now, we just know its wrong.
True, but he said it straight out, and with other NATO treaty members’ populaces not being too committed to the alliance, it’s important to say it explicitly. Saying it in Estonia was even better.
So no, I’m not mad at the President for everything.
Because we *can *contain, and degrade, and, with help from the locals most affected, eventually destroy.
No good reason? The reasons are pretty clear, if as messy as the real world often is. Besides, if he’d stayed out entirely, you’d be yelling a lot louder than that, wouldn’t you? :dubious:
When you do, please inform Boehner and McConnell, so they’ll know what to blame Obama for not doing, okay?
Sure did. We threw away a *lot *of things we used to stand for, even to the point where there are many who don’t even recognize that we ever did stand for them, or for anything else.