Maybe the penny is finally dropping?Originally Posted by J Wolfsberger
Is there anyone other than USians who think the US political system of any value?
Maybe the penny is finally dropping?
Is there anyone other than USians who think the US political system of any value?
Despite of its shortfalls, I do. Good old Albert would say all is relative and Winston might have a talk about democracy....
... "We need officers capable of following systematically the path of logical argument to its conclusion, with disciplined intellect, strong in character and nerve to execute what the intellect dictates"
General Ludwig Beck (1880-1944);
Speech at the Kriegsakademie, 1935
Compared to who? The enlightened denizens of this board? The people running the UK, the EU, Australia? Really?Is there anyone other than USians who think the US political system of any value?
Not going to judge evil - I'll leave that to all those stellar moral exemplars out there. But in terms of pure folly - are you seriously arguing that the invasion and occupation of Iraq had the same costs or benefits as the operation that removed Qaddafi? That they represented the same risks or scale of investment on the part of the U.S.?I'd love to hear someone explain why kicking out Saddam was the height of evil and folly, but not kicking out Assad or Qaddafi is/would have been the height of evil and folly. The only apparent criteria seems to have been the party controlling the Whitehouse, which is politically stupid and morally bankrupt. Until there's a satisfactory explanation of that distinction, then I'll stay opposed to any future intervention. The lives of US and allied troops are worth more than that.
Last edited by tequila; 04-28-2012 at 07:54 PM.
I think this is the wrong thread for your question (see davidbfpo's post above). Do you want to post it here?
John Wolfsberger, Jr.
An unruffled person with some useful skills.
Posted by Ken,
Your statement pretty much captures my view on the situation for Afghanistan, but of course we needed GPF to topple Saddam and the GPF performed superbly at this task.I believe the original decision to commit was correct. The performance of the CIA and SF was more than satisfactory. However, the decision to commit the GPF was ill advised and the later decisions to stay and to attempt to rebuild Afghanistan were very bad errors with entirely predictable consequences.
I agree we don't do these things well and acknowledge the world has changed, but I submit we have changed also, and in many ways for the worse. As the sole superpower we embraced a hubris that was not founded on reality. Somewhere in time we made the mistake of accepting political correctness as reality. I'm not referring to the small percentage of our nauseating left wing Nazis that love to people what they can and can't think, but our strategic level political correctness largely promoted by the so called neo-cons who desire to "impose" our political and economic systems upon others, and they remain perplexed on why the world is not conforming to our politically correct views.We do not do these things well and have not since World War II -- the world changed and we did not; our Euro-centric focus has not served us at all well.
While the world has changed, some things haven't changed, and I think we have carelessly dismissed many hard lessons about war and warfare and replaced them with unfounded concepts on how to force social and political change (transform the world to fit our vision) on other nations with 2 bits of military coercion, 4 bits of throwing money at the problem, and 3 bits of applying our political and economic models to societies where they are foreign and not welcomed, and somehow we're shocked when this approach doesn't work.
Agree, and would add we need to dismiss former SECSTATE Powell's view that if you break it you own it. We also need to dismiss the false belief that we did not abandon Afghanistan after the USSR left. First off the political reality is that there was still a USSR sponsored government in place with the USSR pulled out. Second, the global Islamist movement was already alive after their years of jihad against the USSR, we just didn't realize what that portended for the world after the war, anymore than we can know where the movement will go in the future. We can't deny safehaven for terrorists globally through nation building, even if we had the money and the world was receptive to it the terrorists would adapt and find other ways to continue their war. We can make the world a more dangerous place for them to operate, we can pursue and kill them, and over time the majority of the Muslim world can erode moral support for the extremist view. This can all be done more effectively by not occupying other countries and providing more material for their propaganda, while simultaneously draining our economic resources.Nor are we now capable of being mean enough; neither can we maintain focus due to our governmental processes. We should avoid such efforts in the future. Just go in, break things, leave quickly and let the locals and the UN fix it with our support -- from a distance...
Precisely, we need clear and feasible objectives/goals before we cross line of departure. We need to accept that any military solution may well be temporary and we'll have to revisit some locations repeatedly with punative military expeditions.We do short, sharp and anywhere, anytime pretty well -- we do not have the patience for long hauls. Not to mention that going in somewhere we are not wanted (or, often, needed...) and setting up fire bases or FOBs with large sandbag or Hesco RPG magnets from which we foray briefly (and ineptly, more often than not...) and throw money about with little focused thought is just dumb -- and wasteful. Going is often necessary , staying -- or, more correctly, overstaying -- is almost never even desirable, much less necessary.
A lot of what we do isn't war, which is why the "war is war mantra" isn't helpful. The problem now is we don't know how we're going to get out of the hole we dug. We defaulted to simple answers like: build up their security forces (attempting to transform a political problem into one that can be solved militarily), throw more money at the problem (knowing there is huge tax on that money that feeds political corruption and helps fund the enemy), and keep generating statistics that support these efforts. It sometimes seems to me our biggest challenge is a lack of honestly among ourselves. It really doesn't matter if we effectively build Afghan's security forces if the government isn't accepted by the people does it?As my son said on his fourth or fifth trip to the 'Stan -- I lost count -- "I don't know what this is but it isn't war..."
We are where we're at, we can't re-create history, and there are no easy answers for the way forward. However, looking beyond the current situation, if we take the right lessons from our efforts over the past decade, and in the future we are more careful not to get ourselves involved in a way that we can't extract ourselves with honor, then not all is lost.
I'm not an isolationist, I do think there are times (many times) we will need to provide assistance, to include stopping mass atrocities (if we desire to remain a global leader), but doing so in a way where we don't own the problem, and setting realistic and limited objectives, and if the people we're assisting fail to address their own problems we leave (Somalia, Lebanon, etc.) as painful as that can be, we need to cut our losses sooner rather than later.
As most have said, we can't "measure" whether our effort to date was worth the cost in lives, yet if we learn from our missteps and become a better nation and military because of it then not all is lost.
Predicable knee jerk reaction... sad really.
Besides this being a comment only revealing your inner ####bag, The US FEDERALIST system would have done quite well in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, the DoS scum we sent there to "help" the Afghans were typical US bureaucrat Eastern liberal "old school tie" proto-communists who crammed an overcentralized and unworkable government down the Afghans' collective throat. Making anything anyone did after that irrelevant toward the success of the rest of the conflict. So no, the cost has not been worth it.
Yes, your scatalogical comment, including your typical non American ignorant judgementalism, despite the paradise of a polity your own government is, was pretty sad.
Angry young men are only of value during wartime if they can focus their anger productively on getting the job done. Random shotgun style vents of anger indicate a level of frustration probably caused by a low success factor.
That said I would suggest that virtually nothing out of the US system is exportable to Afghanistan. To try to do so is pure insanity. What ever happened to the right to self-determination?
As a non USian I merely ask questions which the average USian never ask themselves and repeat comments on observations that outsiders make of the US.
For a nation that behaves in a manner that obviously cares less what the world thinks and in a manner serving only the narrow interests of the US there are an astonishing number of very thin skinned people.
The age of US hegemony will be characterized as one lost opportunities. Probably the weakest empire ever.
Yes my government is corrupt and incompetent as are the majority around the world... but I am not deluding myself that we have a system worth exporting and foisting onto an unsuspecting world nor does the criminal incompetence of the President and government of my country detract one iota from the merits of my personal views.Yes, your scatalogical comment, including your typical non American ignorant judgementalism, despite the paradise of a polity your own government is, was pretty sad.
I don’t think you’re being fair.
Surely a few of them went to Stanford.
If you don’t read the newspaper, you are uninformed; if you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed. – Mark Twain (attributed)
Probably. But I'm with 120mm. My bet is that most went to Harvard, Yale or Georgetown.
John Wolfsberger, Jr.
An unruffled person with some useful skills.
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