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Do you still feel the same now about our middle east involvement...

Do you still feel the same now about our middle east involvement


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radcen

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Do you still feel the same now about our middle east involvement, given the recent events with ISIS and current status of Afghanistan, that you did before?

Think back to your opinion when Bush II first invaded Iraq and Afghanistan. Think back to when Obama withdrew from Iraq. Think about the current alleged wind down in Afghanistan. Doesn't really matter what your opinion was, just ask yourself if you feel the same now as you did then. And why do you feel the same or differently.

Please elaborate.
 
Me:

Afghanistan: It was a losing proposition from the beginning. Let's face reality, NOBODY wins in Afghanistan. It was a fool's errand. But, due to circumstances we had to go. I supported us going, and I still feel that we had to, but I also feel we should have withdrawn several years ago. And to be honest, I feel we owe them nothing regarding political stability. Once we were done, we should have left... period.

Iraq: I was against us invading from the start, and still feel it was dumb. I support(ed) our withdrawal, and still do. Does ISIS change that? That's a tough one. I haven't changed my opinion (regarding withdrawal), but if anything could, this could be it. We'll have to see how it unfolds.
 
I still am adamant that no matter how many international coalitions and targeted strikes we have we will not solve this problem. This problem is fueled by anti-american feelings in the region along with traditional religious divides. Neither one will be solved with drone and air strikes. We might have killed 50 terrorists last night, but we also killed 10 civilians. What about their families that were innocent? Those 50 fighters are replaced with 50 more from the families of US collateral damage. Combating aggression with aggression is like combating the national debt by adding more debt (which is the logic of this administration, so what more can I expect in this scenario)
 
We can't go back in time and change what has already been done.

So for right now we're stuck with the current situation.
 
i was not nearly as anti war when the US first went into Iraq, so i didn't question it as much. plus, 9/11 had just happened. i didn't like that we were doing it, and thought that the WMD angle was a bit shaky, but i can't say that i actively opposed it. i guess the best way i can put it is that i wanted to support it because opposing it felt like not being behind the troops. i definitely respect those who serve in our military.

now i understand that the more we do over there, the more these idiots are going to recruit and the more things will get unstable. it is impossible to impose a democracy there. and if we cut one snake in half, two even more terrible snakes grow from its corpse. i also have come to understand that we are doing Saudi Arabia's job for them, and we are doing it for free. also, we can't afford it, and we are unwilling to raise taxes to pay for it. not to mention that ****head Assad is actually benefiting from our involvement. there is no good side to take here.

i support ending foreverwar immediately, bringing all troops home as fast as we can get them out of there, and closing every embassy in a hostile region. enough.
 
Do you still feel the same now about our middle east involvement, given the recent events with ISIS and current status of Afghanistan, that you did before?

Think back to your opinion when Bush II first invaded Iraq and Afghanistan. Think back to when Obama withdrew from Iraq. Think about the current alleged wind down in Afghanistan. Doesn't really matter what your opinion was, just ask yourself if you feel the same now as you did then. And why do you feel the same or differently.

Please elaborate.

It's still pretty much the same. I was against our interventionism before and against it now. It only makes matters worse.
 
Let's see...we bombed a group no one has ever heard of (seems they a were about to attack the US) and our secondary target was ISIS command and control centers that seem to still be mostly standing.

Paint my ass confused.
 
We can't go back in time and change what has already been done.

So for right now we're stuck with the current situation.

So that means it actually is Obama's war now...not Bush?
 
I was not happy about Bush going to Iraq, but we all knew he was going to do it. This is just plain stupid.
 
Me:

Afghanistan: It was a losing proposition from the beginning. Let's face reality, NOBODY wins in Afghanistan. It was a fool's errand. But, due to circumstances we had to go. I supported us going, and I still feel that we had to, but I also feel we should have withdrawn several years ago. And to be honest, I feel we owe them nothing regarding political stability. Once we were done, we should have left... period.

Iraq: I was against us invading from the start, and still feel it was dumb. I support(ed) our withdrawal, and still do. Does ISIS change that? That's a tough one. I haven't changed my opinion (regarding withdrawal), but if anything could, this could be it. We'll have to see how it unfolds.

Are you related to Neville Chamberlain?
 
i was not nearly as anti war when the US first went into Iraq, so i didn't question it as much. plus, 9/11 had just happened. i didn't like that we were doing it, and thought that the WMD angle was a bit shaky, but i can't say that i actively opposed it. i guess the best way i can put it is that i wanted to support it because opposing it felt like not being behind the troops. i definitely respect those who serve in our military.

now i understand that the more we do over there, the more these idiots are going to recruit and the more things will get unstable. it is impossible to impose a democracy there. and if we cut one snake in half, two even more terrible snakes grow from its corpse. i also have come to understand that we are doing Saudi Arabia's job for them, and we are doing it for free. also, we can't afford it, and we are unwilling to raise taxes to pay for it. not to mention that ****head Assad is actually benefiting from our involvement. there is no good side to take here.

i support ending foreverwar immediately, bringing all troops home as fast as we can get them out of there, and closing every embassy in a hostile region. enough.

The truth is that going into Afghananistan and Iraq was the right thing to do. I believe that history will eventually show justification. However we need to stop fighting wars in a half assed way. We need to go back to declaring wars rather then just giving presidents permission. And we need to give the military clear objectives and avoid hamstringing them with limited rules of engagement. The objective should be victory and a contingent of troops should remain behind long enough to guarantee the peace. We still have troops in both Germany and Japan. And Japanese fighters were every bit as fanatical as Islamic extremists. Google Japanese kamikazis. Japan is now settled and peaceful. Suggesting that we should not fight Islamic extremism because we are afraid they will use the fight to recruit more extremists is the same thing as burying our heads in the sand. ISIS could have been destroyed in Syria a year ago, and leaving a contingent of troops behind in Iraq would have prevented any such group from coming back and taking over half of Iraq before Obama admitted there is a problem. And the best recruiting goal he gave the extremists was when he telegraphed his punches by telling the Taliban exactly when we would be leaving Afghanistan.
 
I believe that history will eventually show justification.

Good luck with that. Cheney and Bush have made that claim since Day 1 but their pages in history are looking darker and darker.

However we need to stop fighting wars in a half assed way.

Ah, so the Bush Administration fought "half assed?" What are you expecting, total war?


And we need to give the military clear objectives and avoid hamstringing them with limited rules of engagement.

Sounds great. Now whats your master plan to end an ideology with drone strikes and tomahawk missiles?

The objective should be victory and a contingent of troops should remain behind long enough to guarantee the peace.

They will be there for a very very long time.

We still have troops in both Germany and Japan. And Japanese fighters were every bit as fanatical as Islamic extremists.

Until they realized their emperor was no God. How are you going to convince the radical Muslims their brand of religion is wrong?


Suggesting that we should not fight Islamic extremism because we are afraid they will use the fight to recruit more extremists is the same thing as burying our heads in the sand.

No, it is the neocons who bury their heads in the sand. Recognizing our current strategy creates more terrorists is acknowledging reality. We need to strike at the root of the problem to truly end this fundamentalism.


ISIS could have been destroyed in Syria a year ago,

And replaced by another terror group...
 
Good luck with that. Cheney and Bush have made that claim since Day 1 but their pages in history are looking darker and darker.

Historians generally judge based on considerably more time then has passed since 2001 and 2003.


Ah, so the Bush Administration fought "half assed?" What are you expecting, total war?

I am not talking about just on the battlefield or the white house. I am talking about congress as well. I don't like war anymore then you do...however if we do go to war, we should be all in and treat it as a war. Give the troops a clear objective of victory and support them in accomplishing it.

Sounds great. Now whats your master plan to end an ideology with drone strikes and tomahawk missiles?

I am not the idiot who telegraphed his punches to the enemy by publicly ruling out ground troops.

They will be there for a very very long time.

Perhaps, however that's better then leaving too soon and having to come back. We still have a contingent of troops in Germany and Japan.

Until they realized their emperor was no God. How are you going to convince the radical Muslims their brand of religion is wrong?

We had similar difficulty convincing Japanese troops that the emperor was not a god. Eventually ISIS will fall due to it's own brutality, however in the meantime we cannot let them run amok. If we do.....they will show up in New York or Los Angeles next.

No, it is the neocons who bury their heads in the sand. Recognizing our current strategy creates more terrorists is acknowledging reality.

Ahh...the ole "we should not fight them because we might piss them off" anology.

We need to strike at the root of the problem to truly end this fundamentalism.

That will be up to the more moderate Islamic world. Eventually they are going to have to stand up against fanatics taking over their religion. In the meantime, we cannot just sit idly by and allow them to create terrorist states.

And replaced by another terror group...

I have my doubts that another group as nasty as ISIS will come along.
 
There are times that military action is justified. Reagan gave fair warning to Gaddafy to leave America and Americans alone. So when Lybian terrorist's fire bombed a peaceful bar occupied by Americans, Reagan immediately sent our fighters to bomb the hell out of one of his strongholds in Lybia. This was pure, simple retaliation with no goal in mind other than swift, terrible, and very expensive/destructive retaliation. And it worked. We didn't hear a peep out of Gaddafy for decades after that.

It was necessary for us to react swiftly, terribly, and destructively to the attack on 9/11. We picked the right target and were extremely effective in taking out most of the enemy. Then with mission accomplished, we should have returned home. It would have been seen as just and appropriate retaliation by the rest of the world and would unlikely have encouraged other such attacks.

It was necessary for us to get rid of the albatross hung around our neck that Iraq had become. Ten years of sanctions had not only enormously enriched, emboldened, and made Saddam Hussein more vile and cruel, but it was funding his export of terrorist activities. Meanwhile most of the Iraqi people were suffering terribly. But we should have gone in with overwhelming force, done the inspections that Saddam had not allowed, destroyed all the chemical warfare making plants and war making machine, confiscated the weapons from Saddam's Republican Guard, taken out Hussein, and left.

If the attack on Lybia is a serious and deadly retaliation for capturing and murdering our people, so be it. If they know it will happen again if they do it again, it definitely could be a deterrence for that sort of thing. But if it is a wag the dog kind of thing in advance of the November election or is supposed to be seen as some kind of brave, noble thing with no idea of what victory will look like, then that's a bad thing.

I'm withholding my opinion about it until I know more about what they are actually doing.
 
Do you still feel the same now about our middle east involvement, given the recent events with ISIS and current status of Afghanistan, that you did before?

Think back to your opinion when Bush II first invaded Iraq and Afghanistan. Think back to when Obama withdrew from Iraq. Think about the current alleged wind down in Afghanistan. Doesn't really matter what your opinion was, just ask yourself if you feel the same now as you did then. And why do you feel the same or differently.

Please elaborate.

I had to answer it's complicated. As far as Afghanistan, I supported in that it was what had to be done. Honestly, the idea of just getting out wasn't, IMO a good idea. I don't like nation building necessarily, but we did what had to be done. I think in many respects we've done everything that we could do for them. In the end, democracy isn't going to last if they don't want it there. I'm not sure that they want it enough, but it's not our country.

Iraq I wasn't thrilled about, mostly because of Afghanistan. Going on two nation building exercises at the same time seemed to me at the time to be just a bad idea. Still does. Saddam was a bad guy, and eventually needed to go. Unfortunately, it really doesn't seem like that one was thought through - we created a power vacuum, and then let it degenerate into a ****storm. I don't know if the thinking was that they were ready with a democracy just in case, but it really seems like it was.

My criticism of both of these wars, not to mention the situation in Ukraine is that we didn't really teach anyone how a democratically elected government works. Afghanistan had two men claiming to be the "rightful" winner of the election, and neither was willing to accept that they lost. In Iraq, we didn't really teach them that you have to treat minorities with a little respect and share power. In Ukraine, we're backing the people who "want" democracy as long as the other guy doesn't win.

If we want democratic experiments to work, we have to teach them somehow that it doesn't mean always getting your way. But it's even emblematic in how our government is run now - nobody here seems to want to share power without having a temper tantrum (left or right).
 
I think it perfectly acceptable to be continuously challenged when considering foreign policy engagements. That's why I selected, "It's complicated." I, myself, had curiously moved back and forth between support and skepticism in engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan. I've settled on being inherently uninterested in democratic nation building, but not against destroying terrorist cells. Whilst I'm continuing to be skeptical of the need for a significant war presently and am concerned with its lasting impact on America's bottom line, I am nevertheless torn on whether or not such sacrifices may be inherently necessary to prevent attacks on our soil or those of our choicest allies.
 
The truth is that going into Afghananistan and Iraq was the right thing to do. I believe that history will eventually show justification. However we need to stop fighting wars in a half assed way. We need to go back to declaring wars rather then just giving presidents permission. And we need to give the military clear objectives and avoid hamstringing them with limited rules of engagement. The objective should be victory and a contingent of troops should remain behind long enough to guarantee the peace. We still have troops in both Germany and Japan. And Japanese fighters were every bit as fanatical as Islamic extremists. Google Japanese kamikazis. Japan is now settled and peaceful. Suggesting that we should not fight Islamic extremism because we are afraid they will use the fight to recruit more extremists is the same thing as burying our heads in the sand. ISIS could have been destroyed in Syria a year ago, and leaving a contingent of troops behind in Iraq would have prevented any such group from coming back and taking over half of Iraq before Obama admitted there is a problem. And the best recruiting goal he gave the extremists was when he telegraphed his punches by telling the Taliban exactly when we would be leaving Afghanistan.

Afghanistan seemed more justifiable at the time unless you had studied history. staying there for thirteen years is just ridiculous, though. get them out of there now.

i don't support leaving even one soldier in Iraq, nor should we have an embassy there, as we can't secure it. we should not be participating in a holy war between two sects of Islam. not to mention that most of the idiot hijackers on 9/11 came from Saudi Arabia, and the US responded by letting Saudi Arabia abdicate its responsibilities as regional hegemon. meanwhile, they don't lift a finger to help us with Mexican drug gangs, nor do they offer their aid in dealing with narco states in Central America. nope. their region, their responsibility.

politicians feel pressure to look like they're doing something, though, and that's what's happening here. the public is going to have to make it crystal clear that we do not support an endless state of war.
 
Most of our warmongering in the middle east has made the situation worse. This goes as far back to the 1970s, when we started this whole "arm various groups to fight the other groups we don't like" stuff started. And since then, nearly every time, the new powerful group starts with the violence and attacking US interests. The middle east will never be peaceful until it build peace itself.

That said, ISIS is killing a lot of innocent people like the Yazidi and protecting people from violence is one of the few reasons that I would support our military intervention. But we must have a realistic understanding that groups like ISIS are not a threat to us here at home, and no matter who we kill in the middle east, it won't bring about peace.
 
Most of our warmongering in the middle east has made the situation worse. This goes as far back to the 1970s, when we started this whole "arm various groups to fight the other groups we don't like" stuff started. And since then, nearly every time, the new powerful group starts with the violence and attacking US interests. The middle east will never be peaceful until it build peace itself.

That said, ISIS is killing a lot of innocent people like the Yazidi and protecting people from violence is one of the few reasons that I would support our military intervention. But we must have a realistic understanding that groups like ISIS are not a threat to us here at home, and no matter who we kill in the middle east, it won't bring about peace.

I imagine some prior to 9/11 said groups like al Qaida are not a threat to us here at home.
 
I had to answer it's complicated. As far as Afghanistan, I supported in that it was what had to be done. Honestly, the idea of just getting out wasn't, IMO a good idea. I don't like nation building necessarily, but we did what had to be done. I think in many respects we've done everything that we could do for them. In the end, democracy isn't going to last if they don't want it there. I'm not sure that they want it enough, but it's not our country.

Iraq I wasn't thrilled about, mostly because of Afghanistan. Going on two nation building exercises at the same time seemed to me at the time to be just a bad idea. Still does. Saddam was a bad guy, and eventually needed to go. Unfortunately, it really doesn't seem like that one was thought through - we created a power vacuum, and then let it degenerate into a ****storm. I don't know if the thinking was that they were ready with a democracy just in case, but it really seems like it was.

My criticism of both of these wars, not to mention the situation in Ukraine is that we didn't really teach anyone how a democratically elected government works. Afghanistan had two men claiming to be the "rightful" winner of the election, and neither was willing to accept that they lost. In Iraq, we didn't really teach them that you have to treat minorities with a little respect and share power. In Ukraine, we're backing the people who "want" democracy as long as the other guy doesn't win.

If we want democratic experiments to work, we have to teach them somehow that it doesn't mean always getting your way. But it's even emblematic in how our government is run now - nobody here seems to want to share power without having a temper tantrum (left or right).

In fairness, in regards to Afghanistan.......our biggest mistake was blowing off the country after the Soviets were kicked out. We did not give it another thought until 2001. In my opinion, Reagan was the greatest president in my lifetime..however, he should have made sure we stayed involved in Afghanistan and helped them in the rebuilding process. It may have prevented it would becoming a safe haven for terrorists. And his predecessor Jimmy Carter's weak will led the image that America was a paper tiger. If he had handled the embassy hostage situation swiftly forcefully, Iran might not have become the terrorist state they are today.
 
Iraq: I'm always against forced regime change which was the case with Iraq. Regardless of what you believe was the reason why we went over there - oil, revenge (threat on Bush I's life), WMD, terrorism - removing Iraq's leader no matter how we felt about it and disbanding him military are two decisions I think many people will look back on and regret. A Saddam-less Iraq left a power vacuum. The only stabilizer was the U.S. military...stabilizer, not neutralizer. Our military presence did nothing to stop the violence. Why? Because our presence was part of the problem. Damned if you stay, damned if you go. We couldn't win in Iraq. It's like Coleen Powell said, "You break it, you own it!"

Bottom Line: I didn't support going into Iraq then and I'm not in full support of going back over there now. It's a three-pronged civil war with widespread insurgency run amok! Unless the more moderate Muslim countries get involved with the recognition that their nationAL sovereignty is threatened by this ISIS/ISIL Caliphate-wanna-be Islamist group that's running wild over there, I fear America will get drawn into a fight it really does not want. The threat is real; I'm just not sure if our military needs to get any more involved in this fight than it already is considering we have enemies AND potential back-stabbers all around us. If this thing goes sideways, I can see WW3 ringing out w/the ME as the prize and the U.S.A. caught in the cross-hairs.

Afghanistan: The longer we stay, the harder it gets. We should've killed OBL in the hills of Tora Bora when we had him trapped, packed our tents and left soon after. Instead, we let him slip into Pakistan and that made the warring situation in Afghanistan worse.

Bottom Line: Bring our boys home and let the newly elected Afghan government take control of their own country.

Has my mind changed about either the War in Iraq or the War on Terror in Afghanistan?

We needed to go after AQ and OBL after 9/11, but once we cut off the head of the snake, we should have left.

Iraq...we should have left well enough alone.
 
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