Because the GOP fights, and the Democrats think “smart” diplomacy is letting other countries kill our citizens with impunity.
No, you’ve got it backwards.
Osama bin Laden was responsible for the deaths of 3,000 Americans on 9/11/2001. George W. Bush, six months later, said “I don’t know where he is. I really just don’t spend that much time on him, to be honest with you,” instead choosing to pursue a war with Iraq for no apparent reason.
Who devoted the resources to ensure that ObL slept with the fishes? President Obama, that’s who.
Bush let him get away with “kill[ing] our citizens with impunity,” and Obama made him pay. You’ve got it precisely backwards.
ETA: The only thing the GOP does better is chest-thumping. Oh, they’ll make a lot of noise, and they’ll throw some random punchs, but whatever they do is likely to be worse than doing nothing at all. When it comes to making us safer, the Democrats quietly get the job done. Then a Republican gets elected, and fucks everything up again.
“Fighting back”, as you call it, just puts more Americans (and others) at risk. What you argue will result in more American deaths. Iran is no threat to us as a country. They’re only a threat to our interests when we decide that our interests include a bunch of little things going on next to (or inside) Iran. And inevitably, if we put Americans in those places next to Iran doing things that conflict with Iranian interests, there’s going to be a high risk of conflict. But putting American forces in those places just makes things worse and gets Americans (and others) killed for nothing.
We should open up diplomacy and even trade. More western media and internet getting into Iran will be a million times more effective in changing Iran than a few thousand soldiers in Iraq, Yemen, or wherever.
Why do you not argue this passionately when thousands of Americans die from inadequate health care?
17 Americans… SEVENTEEN… died in Iraq in 2018, yet you are willing to spend trillions of dollars and thousands of lives avenging a number you mistated by not one, but two orders of magnitude.
The GOP “fights” in the sense that beating one’s head against the wall is fighting the wall. The GOP right now is led by a wholly incompetent, irrational, dishonest, and dishonorable person, who has wholly incompetent, dishonest, and dishonorable allies and officials. There’s no rational, smart, and capable person left anywhere close to the decision makers. These are all dishonest, dishonorable idiots. The idea that they’re just going to happen to stumble across some sort of military action that actually makes things better is so ludicrous that it’s amazing to me that any rational person could consider it as a possibility.
Let’s say a member of a street gang is messing with your family. Do you just go up and punch a gangster, in the name of fighting back? Or do you do something with a little more strategy involved, so you don’t just escalate their harassment of you?
I realize that war is just politics by other means- that’s what I was trying to get at! When it was stated upthread that the US Military hasn’t won a war in 75 years in some sort of attempt to imply that they’re incompetent or something along those lines, I was trying to point out that when they were used for what they’re meant to do, and used correctly, they were extremely competent. However, more often than not, they’re used in capacities that they’re not trained for, or for trying to solve nearly intractable problems. And it’s not fair to take what is a political failure, and then pin that failure on the military because they’re the ones implementing it.
In your example above, if the military won every engagement, but that didn’t further our political goals and we lost the war, is that some sort of reflection on the military’s competence that we didn’t win the war? That’s the point I’m trying to get across- they WON the engagements- that’s what they’re supposed to do. If they weren’t supposed to even be fighting in the first place, that’s the politicians’ fault.
In other words:
“Of COURSE I attacked a hornets nest with a baseball bat. Did you expect me to do nothing???”
Whoever obtained intelligence about OBL’s location and a SEAL team are responsible for his sleeping with the fishes.
Somebody had to prioritize it - to allocate finite resources to the hunt rather than to other priorities. Bush took intel resources away from the hunt for ObL in early 2002 so they could start scouting out Iraq for a potential invasion. That’s why your intel folks and SEAL team didn’t have ObL sleeping with the fishes in 2002. Despite the fact that, by 2009, the trail was cold, Obama was willing to devote the resources to the hunt for ObL that Bush hadn’t been.
Definitely all props to our intel folks and the SEAL team that did their parts, but they only got to play those parts because of Obama’s decision to devote plenty of resources to the hunt. Their actions didn’t just spring out of nowhere.
Maybe it’s a coincidence that Bush famously said he didn’t care about OBL any more, and Obama said it was a high priority for him, and Bush didn’t get it done and Obama did… but I’m skeptical. I think there’s a very good chance that Obama directed intel and military leadership to make this a high priority, and this resulted in a higher chance of locating OBL and executing the mission that killed him.
I’m somewhat amused by the blatantly doublethinkery behind crediting Trump for the death of Soleimani but not Obama for the death of bin Laden.
Not only did Bush take Special Forces people off the hunt for bin Laden in Afghanistan in early 2002 and send them on secret missions in Iraq - and these were people who’d learned Afghan languages to facilitate that hunt - but IIRC, he shut down the bin Laden team entirely ca. 2006. Obama had to have it reorganized from scratch.
So it very much wasn’t like the hunt for bin Laden was going on continuously from late 2001 until 2010, and it just happened to hit pay dirt in 2010. Quite the opposite.
Sorry for an absence of cites here, but it’s been a long time since I needed the links to all this. But once upon a time, I had MSM links for both of those assertions.
If that’s the case, then I would suggest that discussions of the military’s competence are just a distraction here. We’re now talking about throwing the military into yet ANOTHER war in which it’s likely not the best tool to achieve the underlying geopolitical goals. I don’t see what point it serves to pound the table about “actually our military is very good”.
I concur.
A pair of pliers makes a terrible screwdriver, etc.
U.S. oil production has been hitting a high in recent years. America is now the No. 1 domestic oil producing nation in the world. There is no reason the United States needs a war with Iran for oil, or needs to provoke Iran for oil (how would that even work?)
Then some other theory needs to be proposed to explain our excessive interest with this part of the world, which certainly from 1973 on, we’ve paid way more attention to than South America and sub-Saharan Africa combined.
ETA: Just to make myself clear, I don’t think we fought any particular war over there for a specific petroleum-related objective, but our overall involvement has to do with the presence of oil there.
The Pentagon’s Chief of Staff just quit:
Sorry for quoting myself, got distracted. Eric Chewning is also caught up in Trump’s selling out American elections in Ukraine as well:
Oil is a fungible commodity. When any global supply is threatened, prices go up for everyone. When gas prices start going up in the US, everyone starts yelling at the President (rightly or wrongly). Therefore a non-trivial part of US foreign policy revolves around the President avoiding getting yelled at by keeping global oil supply as predictable (and ideally as low) as possible.
It seems like Trump’s entire understanding of the economy is interest rates that help him, job numbers that flatter him, and oil prices that keep consumers happy. This is probably why he tweeted"PLENTY OF OIL" on 9/15/2019 after the Saudi tanker attacks.
Edited: The market doesn’t worry much about Iranian oil supply in particular. It’s because Iran is uniquely positioned to destabilize oil shipping and production in neighboring countries.