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U.S. Military Begins Moving THAAD Missile Defense to South Korea Site: media

Kim Jong-un is not a rational person. China was right to tell Trump to shut his pie hole and stop provoking NK.

So, allow the the irrational dictator to continue developing missiles that could carry nukes into Seoul, Japan or even eventually the West coast ?? Trump could just do what Bill Clinton did. Help Kim build a light water reactor....that was rational :roll:
 
Then what did you want?

This is probably what irks me the most when it comes to dealing with anybody with strong philosophies and beliefs. They seem to only want what they want, and nothing else.

Myself, I held 2 clear goals for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In Afghanistan, it was ending the rule of a pseudo-government which led it's region by terror. Public stoning for any transgression (real or imagined) was the rule, and assassination and terror were their main means of enforcing and expanding the area they controlled. There was no law other than what the leaders said it was. And that was subject to change at a whim. And in addition, they harbored, supported, and worked with an International Terrorist Organization, which had been carrying out attacks in multiple nations for over a decade.

In Iraq, it was simply to see the genocidal butcher who had not only killed hundreds of thousands, but had deposited at least half a million into mass graves all over his nation. A leader who had started 2 different wars of conquest, violated UN sanction after UN sanction, and even fired upon UN coalition aircraft monitoring a "No Fly Zone" that had been set up to protect his own people from his actions. A leader who openly bragged about using the families of diplomats as human shields. A man who purposefully starved huge areas of his nation so he could live in scores of different palaces with gold toilets.

Now what came afterwards, that is completely and utterly besides the point. Those were the goals of the 2 wars, and I supported both primarily for humanitarian reasons. Now establishing the peace afterwards is not a military job, that is for the diplomats and politicians to work out. But to be honest I think both were blown from day 1.

This is what irks me the most about people who assume military action exists in a vacuum.

I have no issue whatsoever with the removal of Saddam and the Taliban. None whatsoever. But something I've noticed with you is you seem to routinely fail to grasp why wars are fought and how they affect things far beyond the battlefield.

Wars are fought for political reasons, or sometimes ethnic, racial, religious, territorial, or ideological reasons. But never purely for military reasons, which is why it's stupid to try to separate the politics from the war. You don't win wars just by winning battles and killing people. That's a very effective way to do, but even if you kill a lot of people and win a lot of battles you can still win wars, because the greater strategic situation hasn't changed to your advantage. Our armed forces exist as an extension of the civilian political leadership. We went into both Afghanistan and Iraq for reasons that were as political as humanitarian; they both were obstacles in the accomplishment of our strategic goals. Our military exists to enforce our strategic goals once diplomatic efforts have been exhausted, or sometimes on conjunction with diplomacy. To pretend that the military is not a tool of politics is to deny reality. This has been a truth since the dawn of human civilization.

You can't just remove the military from the equation after the cessation of official combat operations. That's not how insurgencies work, and you sure as hell can't do that when you just removed the only previous source of power in the country.
 
I'll meet you half way on that one. We are certainly winning the military victories, however like Vietnam, we are simply not following through and cutting off supplies and reinforcements to the enemy. As long as we allow the Taliban and al queda their safe havens in Pakistan, they will keep flowing in and we will just continue playing a grand game of "whack a mole" indefinitely. And Obama made the rules of engagement so restrictive that American troops have died because of those restrictions.

No actually, that's not it. We are inflicting more casualties on the enemy then we are suffering, but that is not the whole story at all. If casualties were the sole determinant of the outcome of war, the USSR lost to Nazi Germany.

The US isn't able to destroy the Taliban in part because they have proven incredibly resilient despite out massive amount of superiority in firepower and technology. They have repeatedly avoided ISAF attempts at encirclement and search and destroy operations. Part of that is Pakistan, but it would be foolish to assume that's the only thing stopping us from wiping the floor with the Taliban. The fact is they are a veteran and capable force, led by leaders who have decades of experience fighting off foreign powers.

And the rules of engagement aren't really important in the big picture. They may help in certain tactical situations, but when your goal is to win hearts and minds, blasting apart a family with a drone strike because an insurgent was in the same village is a terrible way to go about your business.
 
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