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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

  • Total voters
    54
OrphanSlug said:
Only made worse by Bush 43 being asinine enough to go to two wars on the back of tax breaks. Does not help the required deficit financing when you intentionally make poor fiscal decisions based on votes.
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Except that the Bush 43 tax cuts led to an increase in tax revenue....at least until the democrat party caused mortgage market collapse hit.
 
Montecresto said:
George Bush claimed that they were on the run and not a problem anymore in May of 2003 already, long before most people even knew who Barack Obama was. But, Al Qaeda went on to kill another 4,000 US soldiers. In fact, George Bush never did destroy Al Qaeda, they are still alive and well. What a partisan empty shirt.
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They were on the run. And Bush never claimed to have destroyed Al Queda. Bush honestly told America and the world that the fight against terrorism was not going to be a quick victory, it would be fought for years.

Bush, May 5, 2003: Al Qaeda is on the run. That group of terrorists who attacked our country is slowly, but surely being decimated. Right now, about half of all the top al Qaeda operatives are either jailed or dead. In either case, they’re not a problem anymore.
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About half or more of the top Al Qaeda leadership was either dead or captured before "Hussein" took office. And it is hard to come up with words that quite cover your goofy claim that AL Qaeda is not a problem anymore. That kind of asinine thinking by Obama after OBL was killed is why we are now fighting two extremely dangerous offshoots of Al Qaeda as well as Al Qaeda itself.
 
iacardsfan said:
There is a difference between a country and a terrorist group. You cannot declare war on an ideology.
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Sure we can. We declared was on Hitler's Nazi ideology and eventually defeated it.

To
your last point. we can still monitor and intel share. We can improve our defense here at home without killing innocent civilians and creating new enemies.
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The one thing that most wise adults learned from the History of WW2 is that if you isolate yourself from the rest of the world's battles, those battles eventually make it to your shores. I would rather fight terrorism abroad then on the streets in US cities.
 
ObamacareFail said:
The Germans and Japanese were not excited at the end of WW2 either. What's your point? When we spill that much blood to liberate a nation, we have a right to stick around long enough to be sure it remains liberated.
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Entirely an apples and oranges comparison. The Iraq War and WWII were not started for the same reasons, were not fought the same way, did not end the same way, nor was the concept of occupation and control of defeated nation's resources the same.

My point is we were not in a political position at the time under Bush 43 or Obama to completely dictate terms of our occupation of Iraq, that is another sounds nice but absent of reality comment you have made. Typical handling of nations where a government is removed then and now is not the same, in some ways that is a problem but is reality.
 
ObamacareFail said:
Except that the Bush 43 tax cuts led to an increase in tax revenue....at least until the democrat party caused mortgage market collapse hit.
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Except that those tax cuts did not generate enough revenue to eclipse spending, going to a couple of wars on those tax breaks did not help the math. In turn Bush 43 (and associated Congresses) ended up making a colossal mistake in fiscal judgement on how to fund going to war.
 
iacardsfan said:
There is a difference between a country and a terrorist group. You cannot declare war on an ideology.

To your last point. we can still monitor and intel share. We can improve our defense here at home without killing innocent civilians and creating new enemies.
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That I disagree with, technically speaking we can declare war on just about anything. Even most recent versions of War Powers Act state use of US Armed Forces in actions abroad, but does not stipulate the action has to be against a "recognized nation" specifically. I do not see much in the Act(s) or the Constitution that suggests war cannot be declared on an ideology, or even a group within a nation.
 
OrphanSlug said:
Entirely an apples and oranges comparison. The Iraq War and WWII were not started for the same reasons, were not fought the same way, did not end the same way, nor was the concept of occupation and control of defeated nation's resources the same.
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War is war. If we spill blood in a nation to liberate it from a tyrannical dictatorship....we have a right to stick around long enough to guarantee the peace.

My point is we were not in a political position at the time under Bush 43 or Obama to completely dictate terms of our occupation of Iraq, that is another sounds nice but absent of reality comment you have made.
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Then we need to get in a political position to treat war as war rather then a police action.

Typical handling of nations where a government is removed then and now is not the same, in some ways that is a problem but is reality.
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The reality is that the biggest problem besides politicizing wars as we do today is the United Nations. The left thinks we need a permission slip from the UN for anything war related. The UN is almost completely useless. It is a failed version of the previously failed League of Nations. The world had a chance to get it right but simply repeated the same mistakes.
 
ObamacareFail said:
But then nobody is asking for "foreverwar".
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our nation has been at war for thirteen years, sometimes on multiple fronts. now we've just signed up for another one. this is what perpetual war looks like.

it's way past time for that region to handle its own problems. the way we make that happen is to force them to by getting out of the region.
 
Helix said:
our nation has been at war for thirteen years, sometimes on multiple fronts. now we've just signed up for another one. this is what perpetual war looks like.

it's way past time for that region to handle its own problems. the way we make that happen is to force them to by getting out of the region.
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Already in 2002 smart officers had coined the term The Long War.
 
Helix said:
our nation has been at war for thirteen years, sometimes on multiple fronts. now we've just signed up for another one. this is what perpetual war looks like.

it's way past time for that region to handle its own problems. the way we make that happen is to force them to by getting out of the region.
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I am not for perpetual war either. I am not asking for that. However to suggest that Americans can avoid getting into wars altogether is unrealistic. There are some wars worth fighting.
My point is that if we go to war, it should be treated as a war and not a police action. If we go to war, we need to go all in and get the job done...like we did with Germany and Japan. We fought a world war on two fronts and were in and mostly out in roughly four years. Afghanistan is still going on because we limited the rules of engagement. Same thing happened in Vietnam and Korea. Iraq would have ended much sooner if we had taken the insurgency seriously to begin with and started the surge strategy much sooner. Americans generally support wars we get involved in....however when war drags on, we get war weary. We need to stop politicizing wars to the point where one side of congress wants to win and the other side wants to lose. And we need to be willing to play "whack a mole" against terrorists. That might actually prevent all out war. If we had done so in late 2012 in Syria, ISIS would not be in Iraq now.
 
ObamacareFail said:
I am not for perpetual war either. I am not asking for that. However to suggest that Americans can avoid getting into wars altogether is unrealistic. There are some wars worth fighting.
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as much of a peacenik as i am, i don't disagree with this statement.

ObamacareFail said:
My point is that if we go to war, it should be treated as a war and not a police action. If we go to war, we need to go all in and get the job done...like we did with Germany and Japan. We fought a world war on two fronts and were in and mostly out in roughly four years. Afghanistan is still going on because we limited the rules of engagement. Same thing happened in Vietnam and Korea. Iraq would have ended much sooner if we had taken the insurgency seriously to begin with and started the surge strategy much sooner. Americans generally support wars we get involved in....however when war drags on, we get war weary. We need to stop politicizing wars to the point where one side of congress wants to win and the other side wants to lose. And we need to be willing to play "whack a mole" against terrorists. That might actually prevent all out war. If we had done so in late 2012 in Syria, ISIS would not be in Iraq now.
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that area has been the graveyard of empires for eons now. the best we can really hope for is that Saudi Arabia and a couple other nations will step up and say "cut it out, ****ers. this is bad for business." the current strategy will not work, and it has potential to further destabilize the region.

plus, we're helping out that ****head Assad. now there's a ****er who needs to be droned. **** that asshole.

this war is a mistake. we need to get all of our people out of that region and let it stabilize. do you really think that even if we killed every member of Islamic State (which we won't) that something worse wouldn't rise from its ashes? because that's what we're looking at here.

get them out now. Saudi Arabia and Iran, this one's your ****ty situation to fix.
 
Helix said:
as much of a peacenik as i am, i don't disagree with this statement.


that area has been the graveyard of empires for eons now.
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So has Europe...however it has been relatively peaceful since WW2. Can't always judge strictly based on the past.

the best we can really hope for is that Saudi Arabia and a couple other nations will step up and say "cut it out, ****ers. this is bad for business."
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Considering the brutality of ISIS, I think that is beginning to happen.

the current strategy will not work, and it has potential to further destabilize the region.
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That's because we have a commander in chief who has a nasty habit of telegraphing his punches or lack of them. When he outright and publicly takes US ground troops off the table....ISIS gets the impression that all they will have to do is survive some air strikes and wait us out. I don't think we need to mobilize a hundred thousand ground troops, however there may come a point where ISIS may not be defeated without at least some ground troops. Hopefully not ours, but we should not take that off the table.

plus, we're helping out that ****head Assad. now there's a ****er who needs to be droned. **** that asshole.
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Assad is an asshole...however ISIS at this point is a much more dangerous gaggle of bloody murderous assholes.

this war is a mistake. we need to get all of our people out of that region and let it stabilize. do you really think that even if we killed every member of Islamic State (which we won't) that something worse wouldn't rise from its ashes? because that's what we're looking at here.
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That is the attitude that many European nations and for a while the USA had when Hitler and the Third Reich started their conquest of Europe. Everyone figured it would stop somewhere and if they remained neutral the Nazis would bypass them. The fanatics in the middle east do not have a stopping point in mind.

get them out now. Saudi Arabia and Iran, this one's your ****ty situation to fix.
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And then what happens if ISIS wins?
 
ObamacareFail said:
So has Europe...however it has been relatively peaceful since WW2. Can't always judge strictly based on the past.
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Europe is not analogous to the Middle East. the analogy may work in eight hundred years or so, but the Middle East is a completely different situation right now. it cannot be stabilized externally, and especially through external military force.

ObamacareFail said:
Considering the brutality of ISIS, I think that is beginning to happen.
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then perhaps the region should do more about it.

ObamacareFail said:
That's because we have a commander in chief who has a nasty habit of telegraphing his punches or lack of them. When he outright and publicly takes US ground troops off the table....ISIS gets the impression that all they will have to do is survive some air strikes and wait us out. I don't think we need to mobilize a hundred thousand ground troops, however there may come a point where ISIS may not be defeated without at least some ground troops. Hopefully not ours, but we should not take that off the table.
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i don't support sending ground troops or even manned airplanes. we need to exit the conflict and let the region take care of it.

ObamacareFail said:
Assad is an asshole...however ISIS at this point is a much more dangerous gaggle of bloody murderous assholes.
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i don't support helping Assad in any way. when i think about my taxes going to fund that, it makes me want to vomit.

ObamacareFail said:
That is the attitude that many European nations and for a while the USA had when Hitler and the Third Reich started their conquest of Europe. Everyone figured it would stop somewhere and if they remained neutral the Nazis would bypass them. The fanatics in the middle east do not have a stopping point in mind.
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then i suppose that the more rational countries there should do something about it.


ObamacareFail said:
And then what happens if ISIS wins?
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we'll probably find that out regardless of what we do. this strategy will not work, and will likely make the problem worse.

but let's say theoretically that it does work, and we kill most of Islamic State. another will pop up, just like with Al Qaeda. then we'll be expected to do it again. and again. and again.

no thanks.
 
Montecresto said:
George Bush claimed that they were on the run and not a problem anymore in May of 2003 already, long before most people even knew who Barack Obama was. But, Al Qaeda went on to kill another 4,000 US soldiers. In fact, George Bush never did destroy Al Qaeda, they are still alive and well. What a partisan empty shirt.

Bush, May 5, 2003: Al Qaeda is on the run. That group of terrorists who attacked our country is slowly, but surely being decimated. Right now, about half of all the top al Qaeda operatives are either jailed or dead. In either case, they’re not a problem anymore.
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Coo. Bush was wrong. And the Islamofascist supporter on the golf course? Was he right to give back the Bush victory in Iraq to appease his supporters?
 
Helix said:
Europe is not analogous to the Middle East. the analogy may work in eight hundred years or so, but the Middle East is a completely different situation right now. it cannot be stabilized externally, and especially through external military force.

then perhaps the region should do more about it.

i don't support sending ground troops or even manned airplanes. we need to exit the conflict and let the region take care of it.

i don't support helping Assad in any way. when i think about my taxes going to fund that, it makes me want to vomit.

then i suppose that the more rational countries there should do something about it.

we'll probably find that out regardless of what we do. this strategy will not work, and will likely make the problem worse.

but let's say theoretically that it does work, and we kill most of Islamic State. another will pop up, just like with Al Qaeda. then we'll be expected to do it again. and again. and again.

no thanks.
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I love appeasement as much as the next guy. Are you related to Neville Chamberlain?
 
Jack Hays said:
GWB's 5 May 2003 statement was a generally accurate summary of the tactical situation, and well in bounds for a POTUS leading a war effort. As for your 4,000 figure, it's nonsense unless you want to claim the US was fighting AQ in Iraq.
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Bull crap, you'll carry George Bush's **** till the cows come home, I realize that. Nevertheless, Al Qaeda continued to be fought throughout the war with attacks going up significantly after that comment of his and peaking in 2006. So he was wrong.
 
Misterveritis said:
I love appeasement as much as the next guy. Are you related to Neville Chamberlain?
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i'm someone who recognizes what has not worked and what will not work, and i'm not going to support this same strategy again.

if we remove ourselves from the region, regional powers will eventually be forced to do their jobs and maintain stability. Saudi Arabia and Iran give us zero help in fighting Mexican drug gangs and narco states. this is their backyard, and it's their responsibility to solve the problem. the US has no role in a Middle Eastern holy war.
 
Montecresto said:
Bull crap, you'll carry George Bush's **** till the cows come home, I realize that. Nevertheless, Al Qaeda continued to be fought throughout the war with attacks going up significantly after that comment of his and peaking in 2006. So he was wrong.
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In Afghanistan we fought mostly Taliban after 2002, AQ being mostly dead or hiding in Pakistan. Are you claiming we were fighting AQ in Iraq from 2003 onward? Having been to both countries, I have you at a disadvantage. Your figure of 4,000 KIA inflicted by AQ remains nonsense.
 
Helix said:
Europe is not analogous to the Middle East. the analogy may work in eight hundred years or so, but the Middle East is a completely different situation right now. it cannot be stabilized externally, and especially through external military force..
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I don't totally agree with that. Europe started two world wars in the 20th century. And the Bosnia conflict was not all that long ago. And the present uprising of fanatical islam is relatively recent.

then perhaps the region should do more about it.
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They should and hopefully they will. However at this point they cannot get it done without our help. At this pong we are the only force preventing a holocaust.



i don't support sending ground troops or even manned airplanes. we need to exit the conflict and let the region take care of it.
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I ultimately support whatever it takes to end the threat that will eventually end up on our shores as it did on 9/11/01.

i don't support helping Assad in any way. when i think about my taxes going to fund that, it makes me want to vomit.
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You will just have to keep an air sickness bad handy for now. In the long run I believe Assad is going down. The uprising had a reason.

we'll probably find that out regardless of what we do. this strategy will not work, and will likely make the problem worse.
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How do you know that. Do you have a military background?

but let's say theoretically that it does work, and we kill most of Islamic State. another will pop up, just like with Al Qaeda. then we'll be expected to do it again. and again. and again.

no thanks.
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Perhaps, however it is not quite that simple. Most terrorism including with ISIS is financed by oil profits. That is why the present strategy might work in Syria as we are bombing their portable refineries...of which they are making profits of 2 million dollars a day on the black market. Cull their operating funds and you limit their capabilities. Part of the problem longterm is our addiction to Mideast oil. If the environmentalists in the US would get off our backs...the US could completely wean itself from Mideast oil and stop financing terrorism.
 
Helix said:
so you're not willing to pay more in taxes to fund this new war?

i don't support putting any more wars on the credit card. if it's worth fighting, it's worth funding. wartime tax rates should go into effect every time there is a military action, and these increases should be significant. perhaps then the public would be less complacent about endless war.
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Let's send the homeless and the hungry. This will kill two birds with a single stone.
 
Helix said:
i'm someone who recognizes what has not worked and what will not work, and i'm not going to support this same strategy again.

if we remove ourselves from the region, regional powers will eventually be forced to do their jobs and maintain stability. Saudi Arabia and Iran give us zero help in fighting Mexican drug gangs and narco states. this is their backyard, and it's their responsibility to solve the problem. the US has no role in a Middle Eastern holy war.
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I know. And Germany had no designs on Great Britain and France...

Cowardice seldom saves one.
 
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