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ISIS Boasts Air Strikes are not Effective

Before the SOFA we occupied Iraq under the U.N. mandate that was renewed yearly since 2003. In 2008, the Iraqi Govt. petitioned the U.N. to end the mandate and our "right" to occupy Iraq with it. Without the SOFA agreement signed by Bush in 2008 we would have been in violation of International law to remain in Iraq after 2009.

UN Resolution 1483 Occupational Mandate and Limitations to the Obligations of US Forces in Iraq | IOSR Journals - Academia.edu

HAve you actually read the link you submitted? It seems you don't understand SOFAs either.
 
Before the SOFA we occupied Iraq under the U.N. mandate that was renewed yearly since 2003. In 2008, the Iraqi Govt. petitioned the U.N. to end the mandate and our "right" to occupy Iraq with it. Without the SOFA agreement signed by Bush in 2008 we would have been in violation of International law to remain in Iraq after 2009.

UN Resolution 1483 Occupational Mandate and Limitations to the Obligations of US Forces in Iraq | IOSR Journals - Academia.edu

I know this is hard for you to understand but we won the war in Iraq, negotiated the status of forces agreement and left it open for Obama to negotiate a peace keeping force there including our air bases, but according to Obama we left a stable Iraq. so how do you explain the disconnect?
 
As is usual for right wing neocons you forget that actions often have unforeseen consequences.

On the contrary - that is one of the chief conservative critiques of those who place trust in government to solve our problems for us.

It was the turmoil of the Russian invasion of Afghanistan that drove 1000's of child refugees to Pakistan where they were "trained" in Saudi backed extremist Muslim schools. Those refugees became the Taliban.

:shrug: that is simply not accurate - you are overgeneralizing an entire generation. It would be as if I were to say "Black people were abused for multiple centuries, so black people became the Black Panthers and began to murder cops".

No invasion, no refugees and no Taliban. See how that works?

Hm. And no Taliban, no al-Qa'ida refuge in Afghanistan. No al-Qa'ida refuge in Afghanistan, likely no 9/11. No 9/11 no invasion of Afghanistan or Iraq. Hey - ISIL is the Russians fault!

:lol:
 
On the contrary - that is one of the chief conservative critiques of those who place trust in government to solve our problems for us.



:shrug: that is simply not accurate - you are overgeneralizing an entire generation. It would be as if I were to say "Black people were abused for multiple centuries, so black people became the Black Panthers and began to murder cops".



Hm. And no Taliban, no al-Qa'ida refuge in Afghanistan. No al-Qa'ida refuge in Afghanistan, likely no 9/11. No 9/11 no invasion of Afghanistan or Iraq. Hey - ISIL is the Russians fault!

:lol:

The history of the rise of the Taliban is fact not racism. Perhaps you should check a book or 2.
An you forget the GW Bush still would have tried to invade Iraq from the day he took office. 911 or not . Whether he would have succeeded without 911 is uncertain but still very possible. So no it still is Bush who is to blame for ISIS.
 
I know this is hard for you to understand but we won the war in Iraq, negotiated the status of forces agreement and left it open for Obama to negotiate a peace keeping force there including our air bases, but according to Obama we left a stable Iraq. so how do you explain the disconnect?

It is amusing to see you desperately trying to get me to say Obama lied about Iraq being stable when it is the same lie GW made. GW's lie was actually worse because he was more involved in what made it a lie. It was his screw-up that put a megalomaniac terrorist with close ties to Iran in power in Iraq and Obama was left to deal with him.
 
In fact I've done a fair bit of research and have often posted it here. What do you want to know?

Why you would say that the people that make up ISIS did not exist before American troops withdrew in 2011? That would make them all only 3 years old.
 
It is amusing to see you desperately trying to get me to say Obama lied about Iraq being stable when it is the same lie GW made. GW's lie was actually worse because he was more involved in what made it a lie. It was his screw-up that put a megalomaniac terrorist with close ties to Iran in power in Iraq and Obama was left to deal with him.

What is it about liberals that they cannot admit when they are wrong? You don't even know the timeline nor have any concept of history. You want badly to believe what the left tells you that you ignore reality. Bush won the war and Obama lost the peace. You want to believe Bush lied but ignore the Iraq Liberation Act under Clinton, all the Democrat quotes, and the vote authorizing the war from a Democrat Senate. What is really sad is the left wing rhetoric and ignorance of history that continues to spew hatred of GW Bush to divert from the failures of Obama. Obama is incompetent which apparently is a reality you don't want to admit.
 
Why you would say that the people that make up ISIS did not exist before American troops withdrew in 2011? That would make them all only 3 years old.

Why won't you admit Obama incompetence and the fact that radical Islamists were run out of Iraq and went to Syria. Obama's failure to address that issue as well as withdrawal of all American forces led to the mess we are in today. You will always blame Bush because that is what liberals do.
 
I think the US public will support a war against ISIS- so long as the US combatants are limited to a small number of special forces (magnify effects of air strikes). Not only would casualties be low, but career Special Forces are voluntarily on a different social contract. As such, they are able to be to be used, and even expect to be used in pursuit of these types of national interests.

Thats great if you want to get our small highly trained operators killed

There is only so much a few men can do. Send a brigade from the 101 or 3ID or 1 mardiv, give them the assets and roe that is called forr and isis will be eliminated.

Let slip the dogs of war
 
The history of the rise of the Taliban is fact not racism. Perhaps you should check a book or 2.

:lol: the history of the Taliban is indeed a series of facts. Facts you seem generally to have a very hazy grasp on. If I were to say that they were a neo-Deobandi blend of Wahhabism, would you even know what that means without looking it up? Could you even point to Miram Shah on a map?

How about if I were to say that MMO will likely re-don the cloak? That's a bit less obscure.

An you forget the GW Bush still would have tried to invade Iraq from the day he took office. 911 or not.

That is incorrect. 9/11 changed the Bush administration from one whose approach was to avoid nation-building and adventurism abroad into one that was unwilling to sustain the threat of a Saddam Hussein. No 9/11, no invasion of Iraq, or even desire to do so.

However, I find it entertaining that for you, causality goes back in history until you find someone you don't like and stops there, rather than actions simply being the fault of those who take them.
 
Thats great if you want to get our small highly trained operators killed

There is only so much a few men can do

Well, 5th Group basically conquered half of Afghanistan.
 
:lol: the history of the Taliban is indeed a series of facts. Facts you seem generally to have a very hazy grasp on. If I were to say that they were a neo-Deobandi blend of Wahhabism, would you even know what that means without looking it up? Could you even point to Miram Shah on a map?

How about if I were to say that MMO will likely re-don the cloak? That's a bit less obscure.



That is incorrect. 9/11 changed the Bush administration from one whose approach was to avoid nation-building and adventurism abroad into one that was unwilling to sustain the threat of a Saddam Hussein. No 9/11, no invasion of Iraq, or even desire to do so.

However, I find it entertaining that for you, causality goes back in history until you find someone you don't like and stops there, rather than actions simply being the fault of those who take them.

It is even worse when you actually try and understand something and then refuse to face the facts because it conflicts with you narrow minded world view. It sucks to be wrong but it sucks even more when you know you are wrong but are powerless to admit it. I will leave you to your suffering.
As the Russians withdrew from Afghanistan in early 1989, American policymakers celebrated with champagne, while the country itself collapsed into virtual anarchy. Almost a quarter of the population was living in refugee camps and most of the country was in ruins. Different factions of the mujahideen struggled for power in the countryside, while the government of Muhammed Najibullah, the last Soviet-installed president controlled Kabul. Eventually, in April 1992, Kabul fell to some of the mujahideen factions and Burhannudin Rabbani was de dared president, but civil war continued unabated. Hekmatyar in particular was dissatisfied with the new distribution 0 power. With his huge stock of U.S.-supplied weapons, h began an artillery and rocket assault on Kabul that lasted for almost three years, even after he was appointed prime minister in 1993. "The barrage...killed more than 10,000 Afghans [drove] hundreds of thousands into squalid refugee camps, created political chaos, and blocked millions of exiles from returning." The rest of the country disintegrated into isolated fiefdoms dominated by local warlords.

In 1994, a new group, the Taliban (Pashtun for "students"), emerged on the scene. Its members came from madrassas set up by the Pakistani government along the border and funded by the U.S., Britain, and the Saudis, where they had received theological indoctrination and military training. Thousands of young men-refugees and orphans from the war in Afghanistan-became the foot soldiers of this movement:
These boys were from a generation who had never seen their country at peace-an Afghanistan not at war with invaders and itself. They had no memories of their tribes, their elders, their neighbors nor the complex ethnic mix of peoples that made up their villages and their homeland. These boys were what the war had thrown up like the sea's surrender on the beach of history ...
Afghanistan, the CIA, bin Laden, and the Taliban
 
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Not well fought? Pardon me in my myopia, but where it concerned South Vietnam Tic-tac-toe probably would have been the better choice, because we sacrificed 58,286 pawns in a gambit to keep the place from going communist. If the locus of our resistance to communist expansion is measured in body count then our brilliant leadership inside the Beltway failed miserably. And it was "communist," not just "Soviet" expansion we were presumably resisting, so we shouldn't exclude the PRC. It hasn't collapsed yet either, even though it, like the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, has had somewhat of a change of heart where it concerns capitalism. (Recall that in respect to Vietnam, China, not the Soviet Union, was our main concern regarding any possible invasion of North Vietnam, lest we repeat our quagmire in Korea when we crossed the 38th Parallel and China entered the war. The Brain Trust didn't figure out North Vietnam and China were not on the best of terms until well after we threw in the towel.)

I love it when anti-war crazies start standing on the bodies of those who fought in those wars and pretend to speak for them. This tactic is not new. To use body count as a protest to war is such an old and worn out, but surprisingly effective, means to a rhetorical argument. I believe the reason it is so effective is because its easier to not actually research the underlying causes of a conflict and determine the right or wrong of it. It's so much easier to spout nonsensical rhetoric so that one can be lazy and say... "See, its just that easy to understand"! Rhetorical propaganda of the likes of which you spout, is the reason Americans are as deep as the gold on the fake plated jewelry they wear. They don't need to be educated when they think they can understand such things with blanket one line rhetorical statements that really say nothing and have no educational value at all.

How can I miss it? Or Cambodia? Or Bosnia? Or Kosovo? Or Kurdistan? Or DR Congo? Or Sudan? Or Somalia? Or Rwanda? Or any of the several score genocides or humanitarian crises that have occurred around the globe over the past few decades? Where it concerns warfare as an extension of foreign policy, I take the Eisenhower/Ron Paul approach: choose your fights carefully, making sure that vital U.S. interests are at stake, but if you do decide to wield a stick make sure it's the biggest mother****er on the block and don't be afraid to crack heads. You see, the problem with so many of our so-called leaders is they've never been to war, but they think the Army is the solution to everything, at least until they miscalculate and then cut their losses as Johnson/Nixon did in Vietnam, Reagan did in Lebanon, Clinton did in Somalia, and Bush/Obama did in Iraq. (Johnson and Bush did the miscalculation in Vietnam and Iraq, respectively, while Nixon and Obama cut the losses.)

The failings of every conflict you listed is the result of the rhetoric you spouted in the first paragraph you wrote. Why has America been so lousy at war since WW2. Because the uneducated populace are easily influenced by nonsensical rhetoric. If our enemies during WW2 knew it would be this easy to defeat the US in war, they would have used it. All it took to defeat the US in every conflict since WW2, despite the US's overwhelming advantage in each conflict, was a few lines of rhetorical propaganda.

So my concern is that the Nuclear Warheads sitting in the beltway plotting strategy have already concluded that the only way to defeat ISIS will be to put Western (i.e., mostly American) boots on the ground and that they will, once again, forget to enter some critical thing into their models, at which point we'll find ourselves in another cluster****, with mothers and wives weeping over lost sons and husbands well past the day the policy wonks have moved on to the next crisis in some other unstable part of the world. Only in retrospect do the people left holding the bag realize that a little myopia on the part of their leaders might have been a useful thing.

This is also why I am completely against putting US boots on the ground. Because we will be entering a battle that we don't have the resolve to fight. The minute a casket containing a US soldier arrives on our shorelines, we will be itching for a date to pack up and retreat. So why even go, if we will only defeat ourselves in the end. Inevitably, the war is lost no matter what the military does and the self prophecy of a cost to great to bear based on dead americans will suffice as a measure of that loss.
 
It is even worse when you actually try and understand something and then refuse to face the facts because it conflicts with you narrow minded world view. It sucks to be wrong but it sucks even more when you know you are wrong but are powerless to admit it. I will leave you to your suffering.
Afghanistan, the CIA, bin Laden, and the Taliban

:lamo I find it deeply entertaining that you insist that I am incorrect and then cite a source agreeing with me :).


However, as long as you are willing to advocate a logic that blames ISIL on Russia.... hey, I can get behind that :) Blaming people you don't like for bad things that happen is easier than thinking, after all ;)
 
:lamo I find it deeply entertaining that you insist that I am incorrect and then cite a source agreeing with me :).


However, as long as you are willing to advocate a logic that blames ISIL on Russia.... hey, I can get behind that :) Blaming people you don't like for bad things that happen is easier than thinking, after all ;)

So now you finally agree that the Taliban was caused by the Russian invasion just like ISIL was caused by the U.S invasion, now we are getting somewhere. Invading countries is a tricky business we can agree on that at least
You know all about blaming people you don't like I'll give you that. It just not that simple though. Repeating the same things expecting different results is insane. Obama will not repeat Bush's mistakes in the M.E. and that is what you want I'm afraid.
 
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Liberals are the blame game champs. They've become masters at it since Obama was sworn in.

So you don't blame anyone for Benghazi or Iraq? LOL. Conservatives have NOTHING but blame for all the wrong people.
 
Well, 5th Group basically conquered half of Afghanistan.

And let Bin Laden go. Don't forget that. We also had allies in Afghanistan, our "allies" in Iraq will be the Iranian guard and a Shiite army that won't fight in Sunnis areas. We will no doubt have heavy casualties and extreme civilian ones. This is exactly what ISIS wants. It will bring flocks of recruits running toward Iraq to fight "Crusade", the sequel to.....

MAD-Magazine-Gulf-Wars-2-Poster.jpg
 
So now you finally agree that the Taliban was caused by the Russian invasion just like ISIL was caused by the U.S invasion, now we are getting somewhere. Invading countries is a tricky business we can agree on that at least
You know all about blaming people you don't like I'll give you that. It just not that simple though. Repeating the same things expecting different results is insane. Obama will not repeat Bush's mistakes in the M.E. and that is what you want I'm afraid.

Since when do liberals learn from mistakes? Our military wins wars and Democrats lose them. Too many people like you who don't understand the world at all as you try to judge everyone else by your own standards. Our Military won the war in Iraq, Obama lost the peace. Now our incompetent President is playing a lot of golf and attending a lot of fund raisers carry less about our economy and foreign policies. You people live in an alternative universe and are incapable of admitting when wrong
 
So now you finally agree that the Taliban was caused by the Russian invasion just like ISIL was caused by the U.S invasion, now we are getting somewhere.

No. I am making fun of your stupid contention that the causality of history has a stopping point beyond "the decision to engage in the act".

You know, really, the Russians wouldn't be so paranoid about their Near Abroad (and thus, wouldn't have invaded Afghanistan) if the Mongols' hadn't swept through and demonstrated the strategic necessity of doing so lo those many centuries ago... so really this ISIL organization is probably Ghenghis Khan's fault.

Invading countries is a tricky business we can agree on that at least

True enough.

You know all about blaming people you don't like I'll give you that. It just not that simple though. Repeating the same things expecting different results is insane. Obama will not repeat Bush's mistakes in the M.E. and that is what you want I'm afraid.

Let me cite a well known figure here: "Don't do stupid **** is not an organizing principle". ;)
 
And let Bin Laden go. Don't forget that.

....No. Not really. That was Rumsfelds' fault. Directly.

We also had allies in Afghanistan, our "allies" in Iraq will be the Iranian guard and a Shiite army that won't fight in Sunnis areas.

And the Kurds. And not a few of the Sunni, frankly.

We will no doubt have heavy casualties and extreme civilian ones.

The battle in Iraq currently features heavy extreme civilian casualties because we are allowing ISIL to capture vast swathes of territory. If you want to reduce civilian casualties, you have to drive them back.

This is exactly what ISIS wants. It will bring flocks of recruits running toward Iraq to fight "Crusade", the sequel to.....

http://media.dcentertainment.com/sites/default/files/MAD-Magazine-Gulf-Wars-2-Poster.jpg[IMG][/QUOTE]

This is actually incorrect. Mind you, I wouldn't expect you to be familiar with ISIL strategic messaging. Their imagery is that this is the Battle of Dabiq, not Gulf War III.
 
No. I am making fun of your stupid contention that the causality of history has a stopping point beyond "the decision to engage in the act".

You know, really, the Russians wouldn't be so paranoid about their Near Abroad (and thus, wouldn't have invaded Afghanistan) if the Mongols' hadn't swept through and demonstrated the strategic necessity of doing so lo those many centuries ago... so really this ISIL organization is probably Ghenghis Khan's fault.


True enough.



Let me cite a well known figure here: "Don't do stupid **** is not an organizing principle". ;)

I am talking about modern history of the M.E. and you bring up Genghis Khan? Could you be anymore off topic?

Quoting Hillary? Could this mean you will be treating our next President with respect? Do you even know how anymore? You are just full of surprises.
 
Obama lacks the leadership skills that require him to listen to others. His arrogance of full display and yet millions still support him. He certainly didn't listen to his military or civilian leaders, did he?

He is waging war all over the globe, with no debate about it in Congress. He has not met a military action or war that he does not like.

It seems to me he is doing everything he is told to do by the MIC. He and Holder do as they are instructed by Wall Street. What's to complain about? He violates the Constitution as he pleases, just as his predecessor did.

What's to complain about?
 
He is waging war all over the globe, with no debate about it in Congress. He has not met a military action or war that he does not like.

It seems to me he is doing everything he is told to do by the MIC. He and Holder do as they are instructed by Wall Street. What's to complain about? He violates the Constitution as he pleases, just as his predecessor did.

What's to complain about?

The results and results matter. You wage a war to win it, not to just keep the status quo. There isn't a golf course or fund raiser that he doesn't like and therein lies part of the problem. He lacks leadership skills and even after 6 years experience to handle the job
 
I love it when anti-war crazies start standing on the bodies of those who fought in those wars and pretend to speak for them. This tactic is not new. To use body count as a protest to war is such an old and worn out, but surprisingly effective, means to a rhetorical argument. I believe the reason it is so effective is because its easier to not actually research the underlying causes of a conflict and determine the right or wrong of it. It's so much easier to spout nonsensical rhetoric so that one can be lazy and say... "See, its just that easy to understand"!

So I'm an "anti-war crazy" because I question whether the sacrifice of so many Americans was worth the price? I "stand on the bodies of those who fought in those wars and pretend to speak for them"? I'm standing on one set of bodies--those in Vietnam--and questioning whether their sacrifice was worth it, but I don't claim to speak for them. Neither should anyone else, because I imagine more than a few of the people who died there were draftees who just wanted to get back home alive and cursed that war and Lyndon Johnson, too. I'm also standing on the bodies of all the Vietnamese civilians we killed and questioning whether their deaths were worth it as well.

And what's to research? We lost--period. I've read all of the arguments about why we did what we did, going back to George Kennan's "containment" argument to Eisenhower's "domino theory." Where it concerns Vietnam, we didn't contain anything and the domino fell almost as if on cue, so the end result was a lot of people--Americans and Vietnamese--died for nothing. At least, that's what my gut tells me. What does your research say?
 
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