Afghanistan

[BrokenPaw]

If you become a monster to destroy a monster, what have you accomplished?

More people die in car accidents each month than died on 9/11.  Considering all of the other things that people here die from every day, terrorism is so statistically minimal that it can, for all intents and purposes, be ignored as a threat.  The only reason it registers on our collective radar at all is because it's high-profile (People are safer in planes than in cars, too, but more people fear flying than driving.  Why? Because only one two of the many accidents that happen every day makes it onto the local news.  But when a plane crashes, the news of it is everywhere.  Same thing with terrorism).  So how much of why we're over there is simply because they gave us a very public black eye?

Are we stopping them by being over there?  No; if anything the reason no other attacks have succeeded over here has more to do with intel and prevention.  Will we ever be able to burn out their ideology?  No, and especially not if we take the actions to become the Great Satan they accuse us of being.  

Turn a village to glass, and see whether it causes more of them to become peaceful out of fear than it causes to become belligerents out of rage.

If we pull out, let them go back to stone-age squabbling amongst themselves, and put the effort that we're wasting over there into real security measures here (rather than the TSA security theatre), we could be as safe as we are today, or safer, and not have to become indiscriminate mass murderers to do it.

Let them sit in their desert and eat their natural resources until they figure out that they're better off shutting up, making nice, and selling them.

[mtnbkr]

If we pull out, let them go back to stone-age squabbling amongst themselves, and put the effort that we're wasting over there into real security measures here (rather than the TSA security theatre), we could be as safe as we are today, or safer, and not have to become indiscriminate mass murderers to do it.

This.

Chris

[TommyGunn]

The problem is these people don't have ties to any one nation.  Destroying a nation does nothing to stop them, but will contribute towards having more Jihadis to fight.  To an extent, we're causing our own problems.  

Chris

I am not advocating destroying them, but ....
I occasionally ...no, often, find these types of debates either incoherent or circular, defeatist,  or just plain frustrating.
"Destroying a nation does nothing to stop them, but will contribute towards having more Jihadis to fight.  To an extent, we're causing our own problems."  Okay, without trying to read too much into this (which may be impossible from my position) my thoughts on reading this become; "OK.  What do we do.  We can kill them....and that stops them, but apparantly it only creates more of them.  So do we stop?  I don't think they're going to stop then, I think they'll continue their jihad very happily.  Someone has to oppose them & stop them because they aren't going STOP by themselves."
I am struck by the fact that we have a lot of people on our side who keep saying that we shouldn't do A, B. C, or --whatever-- because it will only be used by the Jihadis to encourage others into the fight on their side.
You NEVER of any argument being made on the other side (or if it is I am blissfully ignorant of it) that goes; "we better not send terrorists to America and better not commandeer four aircraft and better NOT kill 2973 human beings because it will only swell the ranks of the 101st airborne, create more U.S. Navy Seal Teams, create a larger Infantry, cause the Americans to build more bombers, cause American citizens to buy guns and ammo and other supplies for responding to local attacks ...."
Why?
Are we caught in some nightmare where winning is impossible?  What gives?

During WW2 many thought the Wehrmacht were ten feet tall.  They weren't.  The Germans were scary.  They initially had more experience than we did, had better equipment.  But we outfought and outproduced them.  We marched toward Berlin; and as the Nazis faced obliteration they forcibly recruited children and old men and hand them a rifle and told them to "kill an American" or a panzerfaust and told them "blow upo an American tank."  We  didn't whine and yell "we're only creating more nazis!!!!"  we just killed them, blew them up, and marched on toward Berlin again.  And we won.
What the $%$%^#%^#))(#&#%# HAS HAPPENED TO US!!!!!!!!!!

Or have I lost my mind?  Or am I missing something?   I don't know; I don't think so as I haven't really seen it articulated well.
Do we throw in the towel, or fight?  
Maybe I should be concerned about what Obama thinks is going on.  We're now down to "man-caused disasters."  They're not "terrorist attacks" anymore.  
 
If we hadn't fought the war in such a dastardly PC way, we might have been through by now, and maybe half the civil rights abridgements would never have had time to be implemented.  But no, we accidently bomb an Afghani wedding and wring our wrists and apologize and whine....some scumbag soldiers do **** at Abu Ghraib and we whine about civil rights, and Julien Assange publishes his maniacal diatribe and we find out how many innocent Iraqis actually were killed .... or so we're supposed to believe .....

Yet we bombed the TURKEY GIZZARDS out of Dresden Germany and Curtis LeMay bombed Tokyo into a cinder and thousands of "innocent civilians" died....and yet that was part of war.
 
Sorry about the rant.   But sometimes I wonder what people think war is.  I sometimes wonder if anyone really believes we can lose this war.  Lose against a bunch of terrorists?  Hey, the Vietnamese weren't a world power in the 1960s-70s and we lost against them, BECAUSE WE LOST THE WAR HERE, AT HOME.
Yes, history can repeat itself.
But, it will be more expensive the next time.......................................

[cassandra and sara's daddy]

Or am I missing something?


yes

[TommyGunn]

Or am I missing something?


yes

Oh friggin' please elaborate, I'm not smart (like you are) and I cannot divine it out of your short witticisms.

[AZRedhawk44]

What the $%$%^#%^#))(#&#%# HAS HAPPENED TO US!!!!!!!!!!

^^This.

War is war.

Or else it ain't war.

[mtnbkr]

Oh friggin' please elaborate, I'm not smart (like you are) and I cannot divine it out of your short witticisms.

You're comparing the actions of peoples united by a common homeland or nationality to those spread, more or less, over the entire planet.  You can't just bomb a city or nation and expect them to capitulate. 

I'm not saying we should roll over and give into them, but maybe the strategy of occupying entire nations and/or destroying those nations (ie nuking them) might not be too bright. 

Chris

[TommyGunn]

You're comparing the actions of peoples united by a common homeland or nationality to those spread, more or less, over the entire planet.  You can't just bomb a city or nation and expect them to capitulate. 

I'm not saying we should roll over and give into them, but maybe the strategy of occupying entire nations and/or destroying those nations (ie nuking them) might not be too bright. 

Chris

Certainly not; as I said I am not advocating deleting an entire nation off the globe.  Even that isn't as easy as it sounds if you take the idea literally.  In terms of occupying A'stan, yea.  What do you do?  Kill a few bad guys, remove the Taliban, and leave?  Leaving behind a power vacuum which will inevitably be filled by  -- guess who?
The bad guys.  All we did was to shove the Taliban into Pakistan.  But we "can't go there" because they have "nukes" and "it's complicated-- you know."
Now obviously as a general strategy we can't occupy everywhere the Taliban & their followers would go. 
But we tie up our own hands with this garbage (and frankly at this point Iraq was a BIG dumbass blunder even if remoiving Saddam was a good thing; it only drained our resources) and we're so "timid" we're beginning to fight our own shadow. 
I am all in favour of doing things surgically.  NOT using nukes.  But even a surgeon has to cut into a body and do some damage when he removes the tumor.  We Whine and we shrink when it comes to it.
And we're not even doing that!
It's not happening.
Predator  strikes in Pakistan (sounds like the title to a rock video) are great.  But it isn't enough to be effective!
And what the ** is going on in Indonesia; the Jihadis are there.  Are we doing anything?
Blame it on Iraq again, I guess. 

[cassandra and sara's daddy]

Oh friggin' please elaborate, I'm not smart (like you are) and I cannot divine it out of your short witticisms.

its been elaborated on several times by several folks

"its the internet facts don't matter" apparently

[AZRedhawk44]

You're comparing the actions of peoples united by a common homeland or nationality to those spread, more or less, over the entire planet.  You can't just bomb a city or nation and expect them to capitulate.  

I'm not saying we should roll over and give into them, but maybe the strategy of occupying entire nations and/or destroying those nations (ie nuking them) might not be too bright.  

Chris

And you're trying to insinuate something along the lines of:

"If there's a rapist in New York, your argument is we should nuke all of New York."

A deliberate attempt at reductio ad absurdum.

New York is a city with police, and overwhelmingly sympathetic population.  Or Jakarta.  Or Baghdad.

I agree that nuking any city/country with "a terrorist" in it is a bad solution.  Especially if that city/country is working to root out the terrorist cells.

A-stan is a place with an actively hostile organized militia on par with Viet Cong efficiency and a significant portion of its population in sympathy with that militia.  Furthermore, the enemy-sympathetic population is highly concentrated into tribalized and regionalized centers.

A-stan doesn't have "a terrorist."  They have self-replicating cells of terrorists that are fed by the tribes of sympathizers, and recruit from the tribes of sympathizers.  Walling them into a US-created 12th century lifestyle where they are cut off from the rest of the world is exactly the same as nuking them out of existence, IMO.  They'll never assimilate after being sequestered for an entire generation.

Especially if we capitulate to Islamofascist demands to be allowed to participate in The Hajj or other major pilgrimages.

There's just no point to it.

All that will happen is the US will lose thousands (10's of thousands) of soldiers trying to do this for 10-20-30 years, we'll end up exactly where we started, we'll lose/expend hardware on it that make the cost of a couple dozen nukes into chump-change.  Our soldiers will kill 100's of thousands of insurgents over that generation with bullets, whereas if we killed about 10-25k with a week's worth of nuke strikes the core of the insurgency would be decimated and the training grounds and caves they hide in would be so radioactive and uninhabitable that this last mountainous refuge for evil will be completely useless.

In fact:

I advocate that we change the intended storage location of US nuclear waste from Yucca Mountain to all the armpits in A-stan that we find terrorists hiding in.  Just dump the crap in there, no cannisters, no lead reinforced concrete.  Puddles of glowing ooze in the back of the caves.  Collapse the cave and then have satellite monitoring of the hillsides around there to make sure no one ever digs it back up.

I don't want to see this next generation of kids get tied up into building a fence with rifles/mortars/etc to cage some Islamic hillbillies up that will never reconcile with a modern world.  Especially since our "allies" won't cage them from the East (Pakistan).

[TommyGunn]

its been elaborated on several times by several folks

They don't speak for you, though, do they?  Or do they?  

"its the internet facts don't matter" apparently

Let's keep the barbs firmly attached to their respective threads, please.

[Jamisjockey]

Don't make me break out the lock.

[roo_ster]

I am not a fan of occupying all hte smelly orifices of hte Earth, of which Astan is one.

I am much more a "Rain hell down on them, kill a bunch of them, knock over their venerated sites, make an example, and move on.  Repeat as necessary."  This does not necessarily mean "nuke them till they glow," but it surely means we don't forgo servicing targets because they are located in a holy place and then stick around trying to teach them not to urinate in the stream from which they get their drinking water.

But, America and hte West has "developed" to the point it can not bring itself to ruthlessly deal with folks to whom "nuance" and "measured response" are synonyms for "lack of will."  IOW, we are no longer willing to do what it takes to survive in a world where the law of he jungle prevails.

Instead we richard around in these bung holes and impose restrictions on liberties and erect a surveillance state at home...because we are not willing to inspire fear in our enemies and stop them at the borders.

Let me be clear:
I'd rather see 10,000 dead in Farawayistan than 1 dead in the USA.
I'd rather see 100,000 dead in Farawayistan than lose some liberty in the USA.

We all get the government we deserve, they no less than we.  Let the consequences of their choices be on their heads.  We will be hated either way.  It is our choice to be hated and feared or hated and despised.

Also, the moral equivalence card is frayed with overuse and false, to boot.  AQ & the Taliban plotted in Astan, a country we hadn't bothered with except to send them aid in fighting a totalitarian regime.  Then, we helped their brother muslims in Yugoslavia avert the just anger of ethnicities they had lorded over and persecuted for hundreds of years.  Real appreciative, aren't they?

Posing moral equivalence is akin to saying the burglar/rapist who breaks into your home with a .38spl ought not be shot with a 12ga shotgun, lest you become a murderous monster like him.

[BrokenPaw]

Let the consequences of their choices be on their heads.

And if we could do it in such a manner that only those who made those choices were the ones affected by them, I would be right there pulling the trigger.

But what some are espousing in this thread is more along the lines of "Let the consequences of the choices of a few be upon the heads of the innocent people of an entire region."

Different.

By the standards some have proposed here, England should have nuked Ireland to eradicate the IRA.

[cassandra and sara's daddy]

and it should be observed that what england did was what fired many a republican sympathizer in both ireland and the usa

[AZRedhawk44]

The IRA fought for independence.

AQ and Taliban fight for the eradication of The West and creation of the Caliphate.  Those goals equal enslavement of you and me.

The IRA did not fight to create a Papal State of the world, subject to the Vatican.

The comparison doesn't hold water.

[roo_ster]

And if we could do it in such a manner that only those who made those choices were the ones affected by them, I would be right there pulling the trigger.

But what some are espousing in this thread is more along the lines of "Let the consequences of the choices of a few be upon the heads of the innocent people of an entire region."

Different.

By the standards some have proposed here, England should have nuked Ireland to eradicate the IRA.

Yeah, loose nuke talk is not my bag.

OTOH, my point in that little bit is that, yes, they are culpable. 
* Our ancestors threw off hte yoke of the Old World and we live with those happy consequences, despite only ~1/3 of the population being pro-revolution.  That generation deserved liberty.
* We ALL get to take it in the jimmy WRT Obamacare, despite a minority of the country voting for him (majority of voters & electoral college, but minority of total electorate and citizenry).  Our generation deserves statism, for a while at least.
* Only a minority of Germans were members of the Nazi Party.  Still, they deserved what I quoted from Orwell--pretty much everything LeMay could toss at them.
* Astan's population was willing to rally and fight off the Russians, but not the Taliban & AQ, who had lesser capabilities.  One would think they didn't much mind being ruled by savages, as long as those savages were muslims.  They deserve the consequences of those choices.

AQ & the Taliban will hide in the population and that population will hide them and act as a shield.  If we are willing to pull the trigger on only those 100% identified as goblins and insist that not a one of the folks who allow them to swim amongst them are harmed, we might as well surrender now, go home, and make our decision to convert, live as dhimmi (Jews and Christian), or be killed (pagans unwilling to convert).  No conflict will every be that clean cut.

WRT the IRA:
* Most post-1960 IRA-types were Marxists who wanted a united marxist Ireland
* They fought against the Brits, who could be counted on to capitulate (more or less) after a time, as they did in all their colonies post-1945. 
* If the IRA were fighting against someone like the Nazis or Stalinists, they would not have fared so well.

[BrokenPaw]

The IRA fought for independence.
AQ and Taliban fight for the eradication of The West and creation of the Caliphate.  Those goals equal enslavement of you and me.
The IRA did not fight to create a Papal State of the world, subject to the Vatican.
The comparison doesn't hold water.

Regardless of what the IRA fought for, they were a terrorist organization whose active members were a relatively small percentage of an otherwise innocent regional population, so the comparison does hold water.

Heck, nuking Ireland might have been more justifiable than nuking someplace like Afghanistan, because at least if you turned Eire into an island of emerald glass, everyone with a vested interest in the fight would be dead, and the war would be over, innocent casualties and all.

This simply cannot be done with radical muslim terror.  There is no one place where all of them are, that could be targeted, even if such a thing were possible to do without killing the innocent.

So what would be the point, again?  We cannot eradicate muslim terrorists from the world.  So going over there and rearranging the rubble in their stone-age world does nothing more than give them targets to shoot at and propaganda to use.

What's the upside of poking that hornets' nest?

[cassandra and sara's daddy]

WRT the IRA:
* Most post-1960 IRA-types were Marxists who wanted a united marxist Ireland
* They fought against the Brits, who could be counted on to capitulate (more or less) after a time, as they did in all their colonies post-1945.
* If the IRA were fighting against someone like the Nazis or Stalinists, they would not have fared so well.



yes  at least at the leadership level
they fought for 400 years before they folded
the ira allied itself with those forces  along with the plo

[grampster]

In some ways, I'm sorry I started this thread.  The frustration of hearing about American kids being continually murdered by stone age scum dressed up like A'stan military or police has got my dander up.

Politicians and historians tell us isolationism is bad.  Well, maybe so, or maybe only under the circumstances that existed at the time that pardigm was coined.  The circumstances today are markedly different.  Maybe we ought to begin divorcing ourselves from the part of the globe that embraces A'stan and the peoples of the entire region.

 Mods, my bad in starting this thing.  I shoulda known better.  As the OPer, I request you shut it down.

[AZRedhawk44]

I wholeheartedly agree that the better solution is to embargo the entire ME until they get their own heads out of their azzes and enter the global community in a peaceful manner.

That goes for Saudi Arabia, included.



But that solution isn't on the table any more than nukes are, unfortunately.

Even if it were on America's table, it wouldn't matter because the Chinese would just buy oil from the ME.  And Europe probably would, too.  And other countries would, too.

[cassandra and sara's daddy]

The IRA fought for independence.

AQ and Taliban fight for the eradication of The West and creation of the Caliphate.  Those goals equal enslavement of you and me.


the taliban was started to help kick the ruskies out   they were freedom fighters then  we helped them

  and then there is this
http://www.speroforum.com/a/44123/Indonesia---Young-Indonesians-mission-to-spread-the-catechism

as a catholic and someone 1/2 irish i see real parallels between my indoctrination about the "one true faith" and some of what the hardline muslims peddle.

and the goal in ireland was to unify and spread what is indeed a form of papal law .

[Jamisjockey]

There's not need to shut it down, as its been mostly civil.  I was just giving a warning to keep it so.

[longeyes]

The problem is these people don't have ties to any one nation.  Destroying a nation does nothing to stop them, but will contribute towards having more Jihadis to fight.  To an extent, we're causing our own problems. 

Damned if we fight 'em, damned if we don't, eh?  Revolting predicament we've gotten ourselves into. 

I don't counsel destroying nations, I counsel demoralizing them by a) making the price of continuing the war higher than even they, allegedly suicidal as they are, will be willing to pay.  They are men, not demons, angels, or insects; there are things they don't want to lose; b) attacking the font of their spiritual energy, which last time I checked resided in Mecca...

[Tallpine]

Curtis LeMay bombed Tokyo into a cinder and thousands of "innocent civilians" died

My understanding is that LeMay also wanted to launch a nuclear first strike against the USSR.