Posted by bad_luck on 9/4/2014 12:59:00 PM (view original):
Posted by tecwrg on 9/4/2014 12:52:00 PM (view original):
Posted by bad_luck on 9/4/2014 12:43:00 PM (view original):
Posted by tecwrg on 9/4/2014 12:42:00 PM (view original):
Posted by bad_luck on 9/4/2014 12:24:00 PM (view original):
How would you suggest we kill the terrorists?
Boots on the ground. We go in after them.
Because that worked out so well before?
I don't think anyone wants a ground war.
And which ground war are you referring to? Afghanistan (al-Qaeda) or Iraq?
How about all of them since, say, 1955?
We basically land, stir up ****, kill a bunch of people, get a bunch of our people killed, and then leave, failing to make any real change.
Do you really believe that we could go into the middle east and sort out the tribal and religious battles that have been going on for 4000 years in a reasonable amount of time and miraculously void the area of the sentiment that leads to terror groups?
I mean, ****, that's an incredibly naive way of thinking.
And for what it's worth, there have basically been four ground wars since 1955 that the U.S. has been involved in:
1) Viet-Nam - we had no plan, and we were unprepared to fight a guerrilla war. That was a total cluster ****, with no goal and no exit strategy.
2) Desert Storm - highly effective, well planned and well executed. The only problem was that we were stopped by our allies from finishing the job, which would have been the removal of Saddam Hussein.
3) Afghanistan - we took out the Taliban effectively enough, but then got sidetracked by Iraq and lost focus. We needed to eradicate al-Qaeda and Bin Laden. But GWB and company decided that Iraq needed to be taken care of (it didn't), so we pretty much diverted our attention from Afghanistan and never finished the job properly.
4) Iraq - another cluster **** from the beginning. We should never had gone in there to begin with. But once we did, and removed Saddam Hussein and his regime, we had a moral obligation to stay there until the country and the government was stabilized. But them came Obama and his pandering to his constituency and public opinion about Iraq, and we pulled out before the country was stable. And so, here we are now.