That this even needs explaining…
[QUOTE=Der Trihs]
And what makes you think that killing 10 “terrorists” won’t create a hundred or a thousand?
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Serious question…what makes THEM think they can do it and it won’t do the same? I wanted to link to this CNN article (warning it launches a video, and some of the images are pretty bad) to show the sorts of things these guys have been up to. So, aren’t these guys worried about creating 10 terrorists for every kid they deliberately kill? We aren’t talking about collateral damage here…they deliberately targeted these kids. And this is but one of many such things that happened just this year, not just in Pakistan but throughout the region. ISIS, for instance, has lately said it’s cool to rape and sell into slavery girls and young women captured in the holy fight (they even codified this into their freaking doctrine), and regularly shoot any captured fighters and generally anyone else who doesn’t convert that they aren’t interested in fucking, be they men, women or even children.
ETA: I’m not as concerned about knocking off “sworn enemies”-- that is, folks we know are plotting attacks against the US. With the caveat that our “intelligence” is what it is, and a lot of things we know turn out to be not true. These would more or less fall in category #1 in my OP. It’s when we move to category 2 and especially category 3 that I think we are losing our way, giving way to fear over rationality, and becoming the thing we supposedly are fighting against.
And that’s the amazing thing. In the eyes of many locals, these people hold the moral high ground over us.
It shouldn’t be too difficult to win over the general population in places like this where we’re fighting organizations that are blowing up schools and raping little girls.
I don’t want to go on blaming the Bush administration for everything but I do feel the fault here is the lingering effect of their screw-ups. They grossly bungled the situation in Afghanistan and Iraq. But the lesson we seemed to have taken away from this is that we must avoid having any presence at all in Islamic countries. And that’s handicapping us because without people on the ground our only option is sending in drone strikes.
What we need is the military equivalent of putting cops back on the beat instead of SWAT team attacks. We need to have people present in these communities, working with the local people, and helping them to fight against terrorists.
[QUOTE=Little Nemo]
And that’s the amazing thing. In the eyes of many locals, these people hold the moral high ground over us.
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I doubt that most of the locals view any of this in terms of a ‘moral high ground’, one way or another, and those who even think about things like that are probably mixed. No, I think that it’s mostly folks in the west who arbitrarily and based on what they read, which focuses on things like what’s in the news put these folks on some sort of moral high ground and the US as the moral evil empire, while the reality is complicated.
But, you see, it IS more difficult to win over a general population, especially when the focus has always been on what America does as opposed to what these other groups are doing. Drone strikes that may and probably do kill some innocents are vastly more news worthy than the latest ISIS outrage or the deliberate targeting and killing of over a hundred school kids by AQ who is trying to man up to ISIS example. ISIS and groups like it have been committing atrocities such as the rape and murder examples for literally years in Syria, but who pays attention to that?
Totally agree, and I DO blame the Bush administration for getting us into the mess (I also blame crazy fucks like OBL who decided it was a good idea to poke the US in the nose and dare us to do something about it…how did that work out for all involved?). Unlike seemingly many on this board, I don’t blame Obama for things like the drone strikes, since it’s the hand he was dealt. He has to deal with the real world, not some liberal fantasy or conservative nightmare, and he has to do it in spite of the, to me, hypocritical tendencies of some to want him to fix things and get our troops out of there yet protect us and make sure the terrorist types are engaged and not allowed to run rampant or scot free to build back up and attack us again AND to at least mitigate these assholes and make them have to be at least marginally circumspect in their movements if they don’t want to eat a hellfire while tooling about and getting ready for the next atrocity against a school full of kids.
We have that already (a.k.a. our various special forces teams, and those of our allies), and I’m fairly sure we use that in conjunction with our drones to do the best we can.
If we’re fighting terrorism in the Middle East, then by necessity we must take the public opinion of Middle Easterners into account. I think everyone here in America, regardless of their other opinions on foreign policy, agrees that we don’t want to be the target of terrorists. So it’s the Middle East, where many of these terrorists are coming from, where we need to change the situation.
Let me go back to an earlier situation than my previous example: our involvement in Vietnam. In that situation we essentially faced two problems: the short-term problem of defending South Vietnam against attacks from North Vietnam and the long-term problem of developing South Vietnam into a viable country. We generally succeeded in the addressing the first problem but we failed in the second problem and as a result we lost the war.
We have an analogous situation now in the Middle East. We have a short-term problem of defending the United States from terrorist attacks and the long-term problem of changing the Middle East so that it doesn’t keep producing new terrorists. And we can’t win this war if we don’t address the second problem.
I think the Obama administration is taking the easy path (probably with the attitude that in two years it’ll be somebody else’s problem). They’re using the drone attacks to keep the short-term problem under control and it’s generally working for that purpose. But there’s evidence these drone attacks are making the long-term problem worse.
I agree, although at least that seems to be making things worse at a lower rate than the Bush Doctrine.
I disagree it’s making things worse, in so far as local public opinion goes. I think we got far, far more bad feelings when our troops were heavily in those areas because not only were they targets that drew fire on all around (and provided easy excuses for terrorist civilian atrocities) but they caused a lot more harm incidentally than drone strikes ever could. Personally, I think Obama took the only way out people left him…his real world choices were to withdraw or draw down on the troops, which he promised to do, and use drones to make up the difference and keep the pressure on, or leave the troops there. Nothing else, realistic, was in the cards. While perhaps in a perfect world we could withdraw all troops, drones, support and everything else and rely on the locals to keep things in check, in the real world this was never a possibility, so you have to ask yourself, which option does the least harm both to us and to the locals? IMHO, as flawed as they are, drones are the only real choice, short of complete withdrawal and total and complete disengagement from the region, which I don’t believe would be politically possible for ANY US president, let alone for Obama who is hounded constantly not only by the conservatives/Republicans/right (which sort of makes sense) but by his own freaking party and people who should be on his side (which doesn’t, IMHO).
Can, but won’t necessarily.
Your logic also implies an infinite number of potential terrorists. It’s far more likely that there’s a specific, minority subset of the population who can even be bothered to care about politics/religion/etc. enough to support the cause, let alone being so free on time and willing to camp out in the middle of nowhere and be shot at as to run off and join. Specifically, you probably only need to really care about dumb-ass teenager and college-age males.
The notable thing about this specific group of people is that they’re impressionable and want to feel good about themselves. If you want them to not join the fight, putting out a large advertising initiative in their home countries to explain to them why what they’re doing makes them look like idiots is likely sufficient to dissuade them from joining.
In the case of the locals who hate them they have little reason to care, because they’re perfectly willing to engage in a reign of terror until everyone submits or is dead. Brutality and ruthlessness can work; but they only work if you’re willing to go all out with them. We on the other hand persistently indulge in just enough brutality and ruthlessness to create huge numbers of enemies, but not enough to accomplish anything else; we’re too addicted to our heroic false self image to just openly go all Genghis Khan and depopulate our conquests. So we buy ourselves the worst of both worlds; the enemies that ruthlessness creates, without the goodwill that genuine benevolence creates.
As for them against us, they aren’t up against terrorists/insurgents/guerrillas in the first place there. They are up against a foreign government that isn’t dependent on its forces on recruiting the angry and vengeful; nothing they do will make the US military more powerful. On the other hand, the US has a history of reacting to terrorism in ways that hurt itself, hurt the enemies of terrorists, and provide good recruiting materials for terrorism; this all encourages terrorism. Every drone strike is a victory for them.
Actually I recall a poll from during the Iraq occupation that showed anti-American fighters having about 90% support. I think you hugely underestimate just how hated our behavior makes us, and how many people care when you torture & kill their friends and relatives. It’s not just “politics” to our victims, it’s death and grief and suffering.
And we blow buildings and people up too - some places have stopped sending children to school, because they fear we’d just blow up the bus with a drone. And we rape and torture too, and in general make the life of the people there hell.
The fact is, while we can tell ourselves all we like that we are the good guys, our victims aren’t required to buy into it. And we’ve spent decades doing a really good job of making ourselves look pretty much outright demonic to much of the world. It’s quite easy for pretty much anyone in much of the world to be regarded as having the moral high ground over us, given how deep we’ve dug ourselves into the moral low ground there.
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That there were people around to answer a poll rather indicates that most people weren’t out hiding in caves.
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I’m rather doubtful that Saddham Hussein refrained from torturing and killing his subjects. Americans were probably far more benevolent in all aspects than the previous regime had been, so it’s unlikely that American hatred (among the people who actually lived in Iraq) had much to do with how moral we behaved. The fact that (under Bush) we were acting like a bunch of dumbasses, causing chaos everywhere we went, and that the people had been trained to think that Americans were trying to destroy their way of life both probably had more to do with the lack of popularity.
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People can be pretty willing to accept that a friend or relative was acting like an idiot and got what was coming to them, when that really is the truth of the situation. It doesn’t prevent them from being grieved at the loss, but they are willing to write off the results of the fallen’s actions. Of course, that only works if the people understand that the victim was an idiot.
There were groups that Hussein treated abominably, and groups he treated well – he wouldn’t have been able to stay in power so long if there weren’t significant groups that were on his side. Some groups actually suffered when he lost power, and experienced much more hardship under the US fumblefucking than before – and there were even some who didn’t have it so great under Hussein that had it even worse under us.
Certainly…and the converse is also true. Ask the Kurds, or even several of the Shia groups in the country which they preferred. SH definitely treated the minority population that happened to be Sunni AND were part of his clan or faction a lot better than they were treated when the US tossed him out…that’s kind of why they were so pissed off and threw the country through years and years of bloody civil war. Note that even after we left these things really got no better, and in fact got worse. The difference is we weren’t there anymore, so it mostly left the news.
My opinion is that we should have tried replacing a bad occupation with a good occupation rather then replacing a bad occupation with no occupation. I think it would have been possible for us to have built a stable country out of Iraq and Afghanistan if that had been our goals. Instead, the occupation was used as a political football and a looting opportunity.
I will concede that the situation had already gotten pretty far out of hand by the time Obama took office. But I feel he did have a window of opportunity when he first became President. He had a tremendous store of good will he could have used to push through some real changes. Instead, he played it safe and saw that good will just fritter away.
Really? Rape and torture? I had no idea drone technology had gotten this sophisticated. I thought their only two settings were taking pictures and blowing things up.
Previous generations might have gone apeshit. Such “social conscience” has been substantially bred out of even our “Christian” politicians.
If Russia were doing this in South America and we weren’t, the CIA would be insisting that we need to be doing it too. If Russia start doing it now, the CIA will whine that they’re infringing on our hunting ground. That’s the extent of such apeshittery as would appear. And Latin Americans aren’t “real Americans” anyway.
You clearly hold to an archaic morality, and like most conservative and moderate voters, you probably assume that moral boundaries are generally enduring. But societies can be reprogrammed. Your society is now a gamer society. And we get points for killing darkies.
You can rail against it all you want, but in the next half-century, we’ll start handing out medals to drone pilots for the number of kills they make.
Video games inculcated two generations of young men with a body-count theory of war, and that shows no signs of letting up. I think we’re already past the tipping point. Any institution that opposes this new way of being will simply make itself passé.
I mean–
I hope that’s just pessimistic hyperbole. But it kind of fits. 
So this is basically “stop and frisk” with Hellfire missiles.
Yeah. More like stop and shoot, without the frisk.
The running joke in Albuquerque is that standard procedure is: bang bang bang!
‘Freeze! Hands on your…’ bang bang! ‘…head! Now, don’t move…’
Of course, none of our shootings ever seem to get national attention, even when it’s women being shot. I won’t speculate why that might be.