Hyperbole. We should never had gone into Syria in the first place. Not into Afghanistan before that. We have other methods of finding and eliminating small groups without going to war for YEARS over their actions.
Not at all. Those are the hard facts that people in the foreign policy and security sphere's are having to deal with right now. Trashing the U.S. security guarantee
does make us less safe. Convincing partners not to work with us
does make us less safe. Releasing thousands of ISIS members
does make us less safe. Having a POTUS so inept that he gets rolled in a phone call by a tin-pot dictator from Turkey and accidentally ****s over months of negotiation and a steady-state that met our interests' and Turkey's, forcing his administration to scramble madly just to get back to point zero and stop the losses, is also really embarrassing, and also makes us less safe.
We won a bigger war against ISIS than we ever did against AQI, and we did it with a bare fraction of the troops and a bare fraction of the casualties - because we were able to leverage local partners, particularly the Kurds, who did our fighting and dying for us. Trump just decided to **** all over that foreign policy option, meaning that, in the future, we will have to deploy more U.S. troops to destroy VEO's who launch attacks in the West.
Additionally,
A) We do not have the ability to project CT power or eliminate those groups without ground forces, so the presumption on which your argument is hinged is inaccurate. If you don't have a significant enough physical presence in Afghanistan, you don't have a CT program. :shrug:
B) The Taliban were the hosts of, protectors of, and enablers of, AQ. They chose their lot.
C) We didn't choose to go to war - they did. Wars
start when
one side decides to start it, and they
end when
both sides agree to end it... or one side is completely eradicated. In the meantime, you not being interested in War, will not stop War from being interested in you - and it doesn't end simply because one side gets bored.
Whose actions created ISIS in the first place?
Abu Omar al-Baghdadi decided to establish the Caliphate by splitting off from AQ major and declaring himself the Leader of the Faithful. The organization had previously been AQ in Iraq (AQI), having rebuilt from the shattered networks we left when we pulled out of Iraq the first time.
Seems like OUR ongoing interference in the ME is the root of all the problems we see today.
:lol: sure. Everything in the Middle East is America's fault because not only is that region naturally so stable, but it's well known that no one else in all the world ever makes their own decisions, for their own reasons, in their own context, because we - we, America - are
so the center of the universe that
the only possible reason anyone has for doing anything, ever, is "America". :mrgreen:
As for 9/11? We went to war because a group of terrorists
because a group of terrorists..... what?
launched the largest foreign attack on U.S. soil in almost two centuries? Declared war on us and murdered thousands of Americans?
How would you like it if say, some nutter-fanatic Americans went to Russia and blew up the Kremlin.
Would Russia have a valid reason to declare war on the USA?
If we were providing them shelter, enablement, and protection, if the "nutter-fanatic Americans" happened to all be "members of the U.S. Special Operations Community", well, yeah, absolutely they would.