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I'm pretty confident that 90% of Americans agree that we need to be out of there. Even the haters on this forum screeching about "boots on the grounds" are just blowing hot air...they don't want it anymore than I do, but since Obama has expressed reluctance to do so, then of course the hate hamsters have to say just the opposite, otherwise they would have no reason for living.


If we use a few airstrikes just to remind folks we're still around there, that's fine by me. For the rest of the time, let them kill each other: every extremist killed by another extremist is one less we have to worry about.

I really did laugh out loud.  No one actually laughs out loud when they merely type "lol".

This is also why they dare not offer any solutions, lest Obama choose one and destroy their existence with written or spoken evidence that they had actually agreed with him on anything.  Much easier to simply say everything he does is the worst EVER, without offering a scintilla of a plan of what should be done.

It's about an American general, billed as a "Colin Powell type" lolol, who is trapped in Afghanistan with a few SF men who were serving as his escort and he and they have to fight their way out. Very relevant to our own day. Very well written. Very much enjoyed.

Which brings me to the theme of this thread. I tend to agree that boots on the ground are stupid. We need to listen to Clausewitz. "War is an extension of politics by other means.".

Well, we're not really engaged in politics in these countries, as they all hate us, there's no real give and take between the US and our ME enemies. We don't really have a strategic goal, other than protecting our access to oil.

So, it is idiotic for us be involved in their internecine squabbles--if they want to kill each other rather than rebuilding their nation, that's fine by me. I regret the Smirking Chimp's dragging us to war there to make himself feel like a man (apparently, even that wasn't enough since he had to pad his flight suit...something tells that he needs a pair of tweezers to pee).

Lessons learned: We were safer under bush because he really did have al qaida on the run and without money to finance their terrorism. That leaving Iraq created a void that terrorist filled just like bush warned and the military predicted. And that IED's in the ME are preferable to IED's in America. BTW if you take the subways in NYC, they're the planned target for terrorist IED's.

I always appreciate your sense of humor, like the post above.

 "Safer under Bush". Wowee Skipper. Um, just to remind you it was Bush ignoring warnings that bought us 9/11 the greatest act of terrorism in our history. And it has been under Obama that zero acts of terrorism have happened on our soil. And safer under bush got hundreds of thousand of Iraqi's killed, millions displaced and nearly 5,000 of our young men and women dead.

Bush had what warnings of 9/11?  The FBI could not trace those that were  listed by the CIA.  So those that occurred in Bostow on 9/11 were not during the time this adminstration?  Shallow thoughts are obvious.  You do manage to keep the lies aout Araq. You do sound like one under the Sharia law.

As some other guy said once  in other thread  "they said it would be airplane attacks, but they did not say where" (paraphrase)

Yea, how silly of the enemy to not provide the flight numbers.

    HH: And on that point, Dexter Filkins, you’re a very wide open critic of the Bush war, the never ending war, your first book. But buried in this article, not buried but in the middle of it, is a conversation with Mohammed Ghafar, a 28 year old soldier who said the army never functioned as well as he had hoped, and it grew much worse after 2011. He had respected the professionalism of the Americans, the training they offered, but, “Everything changed after the Americans left. The commanders steal everything, they sell it in the local market. It is true the absentee rate soared, the rations went bad.” In other words, America leaving in 2011 may have been the worst strategic decision of many bad strategic decisions over the last ten years.

    DF: It’s hard to conclude otherwise, you know, because that little, that quote from that deserter that I talked to in Kirkuk, I mean, you can almost say the same thing for all of Iraq. We left, the United States left in 2011. We went to zero, and we left. I mean, we packed up and left. So when you drive around Baghdad now, there is not a trace that the United States was ever there, and I mean apart from the American weapons, but in terms of like American presence andprojects and guidance, gone. And I think that we spent almost a decade there. We paid with a lot of lives and a lot of blood, and building, essentially, rebuilding the Iraqi state that we destroyed. And I don’t think it was ready. I mean, it just wasn’t ready to function on its own. And it couldn’t function without us. And actually, Ambassador Crocker, who was on your show, had a really good description of it. He said you know, we build ourselves into the hard drive of the place, and so we, the United States, were the honest broker. We were the only people that could sort of bring all the Iraqi factions together, and then we left. You know, and so the thing doesn’t work without us. And you can see that in Iraq at a micro level, like when I talked to that deserter, who said as soon as the Americans left, the commanders started stealing all the money and everybody left, and everything fell apart. Or you can see it at the macro level. I mean, that’s what’s happened to the Iraqi state.

    “We used to restrain Maliki all the time,” Lieutenant General Michael Barbero, the deputy commander in Iraq until January, 2011, told me. “If Maliki was getting ready to send tanks to confront the Kurds, we would tell him and his officials, ‘We will physically block you from moving if you try to do that.’ ” Barbero was angry at the White House for not pushing harder for an agreement. “You just had this policy vacuum and this apathy,” he said. “Now we have no leverage in Iraq. Without any troops there, we’re just another group of guys.” There is no longer anyone who can serve as a referee, he said, adding, “Everything that has happened there was not just predictable—we predicted it.”

    Indeed, months before the election, American diplomats in Iraq sent a rare dissenting cable to Washington, complaining that the U.S., with its combination of support and indifference, was encouraging Maliki’s authoritarian tendencies. “We thought we were creating a dictator,” one person who signed the memo told me.

    Less than twenty-four hours after the last convoy of American fighters left, Maliki’s government ordered the arrest of Vice-President Tariq al-Hashemi, the highest-ranking Sunni Arab. Prosecutors accused Hashemi of having run a death squad that assassinated police officers and government officials. The practice was not uncommon at the time. “During the civil war, many political leaders in Iraq had death squads,” a former Western diplomat said. “Maliki started using the security forces to go after his rivals.” In moving against Hashemi, Maliki was signalling that he intended to depose his sectarian rivals.

    Hashemi flew to the Kurdish region, in northern Iraq, where officials offered to protect him. Seven of his bodyguards were arrested, the first of sixty. Only a few days earlier, in a press conference at the White House to mark the end of the American war, President Obama had praised Maliki as “the elected leader of a sovereign, self-reliant, and democratic Iraq.” When Hashemi fled, American officials did not publicly protest. Three months later, he was convicted in absentia and sentenced to death; he remains in exile.

    With the expulsion of Hashemi, Maliki began an aggressive campaign to crack down on dissent—especially Sunni dissent—and to centralize authority in his office. In the following months, he forced out a number of senior officials, notably Sinan al-Shabibi, the governor of the Central Bank, who had tried to stop him from diverting Iraq’s foreign reserves into the government’s operating budget. After the inconclusive 2010 election, the chairman of the Independent Election Commission was arrested. When the Integrity Commission uncovered a network in Maliki’s cabinet that was issuing government contracts to fake companies, he blocked the prosecutions; soon afterward, the commission’s director was replaced with a Maliki ally. In addition, Maliki created the Office of the Commander-in-Chief, which gave him personal control over the country’s million-man Army and police force, often requiring local commanders to report directly to him.

    As Maliki gathered power, he set out to banish every trace of Sunni influence from the bureaucracy. One of the places he began was the Iraqi National Intelligence Service. The director was an imposing former general named Mohammed Shawani, a Sunni whose three sons had been tortured to death by Saddam’s men. In August, 2009, Shawani told me, he went to Maliki with an intelligence report that detailed insurgents’ plans for attacks on several government offices. The Prime Minister brushed off his warnings, he said. (Maliki denied this, saying, “It is impossible to believe Shawani.”) Two days later, a wave of car bombs struck the Finance Ministry, the Foreign Ministry, and other government targets, killing a hundred Iraqis and wounding more than five hundred. Shawani fled to the United States. “I knew I had to leave,” he told me. “I thought I was next.” In the following several months, according to Shawani and former American officials, Maliki purged the service of nearly all its Sunni agents and analysts, some five hundred in total. “It’s essentially a Shiite organization now,” Shawani said.

DF: Well, yeah. I mean, I think the trick there, or the trouble is we’re not there. You know, we’re not on the ground. And so we’ve kind of seen this movie before. And you just alluded to it. And you know, during the Iraq war, the American war in Iraq, al Qaeda became the strongest insurgent group. And al Qaeda’s just a precursor to ISIS. And in fact, it’s the very same people. It’s basically the guys we didn’t kill. And you know, the Iraqis didn’t like them, and they rebelled against them, and they rebelled against the harsh kind of medieval religion that they’re imposing on everybody. They were offended by their brutality. And what did they do? They went to the Americans, and they said look, we’ll tell you where they live, let’s make a deal. And that was one of the great turning points of the war. And I think that there’s a pretty good chance that’s going to happen again, because I just don’t think the Iraqis are going to buy it. But the problem is that the United States isn’t there anymore, and so you don’t have that kind of firepower to take care of these guys. And what have you got? I mean, you’ve got the Iraqi Army, which you know, we’ve seen what they’re like. I mean, they’re a joke. And so I think, and if you couple that with the hatred that the Sunni Arabs have for the Maliki government, it’s tough. So the plan, I think, the White House plan is just to do it from the sky. And they can kill a lot of people from the air. But in the end, I mean, what’s the end stage?

    HH; Let me ask you, Dexter, you’ve spent a lot of time in Afghanistan as well. I had dinner last night with a Marine Corps major just back from Leatherneck, just finished his eight months there. He’s going home, he’s a reservist, and I don’t want to quote him. It’s just, I think we’re doing this again.

    DF: Yeah.

    HH: We’re going to see a replay of the collapse in Afghanistan of what we’ve seen in Iraq. Do you agree with that?

    DF: You know, I have spent a lot of time in Afghanistan. And I’m worried that you have essentially the same problem, which is a very fragile state in Afghanistan that basically we’ve built, and it doesn’t work that well, and it doesn’t work without us. And what that means, it doesn’t work without us, yes. You know, it’s just, and if we take the training wheels off, which is to say we leave, and we leave abruptly, I think we’re supposed to go to zero within a couple of years, yeah. I mean, I think there’s a great danger that you’re going to see something on the order of what’s happening now in Iraq.

Here is the disappointing part.Suggest that thought be given to the trends and methods.  But of course that does require thought.  With just the slightest war buzz the Americans people sign up yet once again. wtf?

I always appreciate your sense of humor, like the post above.

 "Safer under Bush". Wowee Skipper. Um, just to remind you it was Bush ignoring warnings that bought us 9/11 the greatest act of terrorism in our history. And it has been under Obama that zero acts of terrorism have happened on our soil. And safer under bush got hundreds of thousand of Iraqi's killed, millions displaced and nearly 5,000 of our young men and women dead.

One more comment......And then there is this which doesn't just give lie to "won the red line fight" but also discusses the elephant in the room which is Iran, who is also busy moving forward on nukes, thankful we removed the sanctions that were actually having an impact: 


Assad Reported to Have Used Chemical Weapons Again
http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/why-does-iranian-axis-get-pass_806123.html

I think the quote from Fallout 3 is very relevant.  "War. War never changes".

Bush had what warnings of 9/11?  The FBI could not trace those that were  listed by the CIA.  So those that occurred in Bostow on 9/11 were not during the time this adminstration?  Shallow thoughts are obvious.  You do manage to keep the lies aout Araq. You do sound like one under the Sharia law.

I always appreciate your sense of humor, like the post above.

 "Safer under Bush". Wowee Skipper. Um, just to remind you it was Bush ignoring warnings that bought us 9/11 the greatest act of terrorism in our history. And it has been under Obama that zero acts of terrorism have happened on our soil. And safer under bush got hundreds of thousand of Iraqi's killed, millions displaced and nearly 5,000 of our young men and women dead.

Yep, Dubya had plenty of warnings about a potential 911 attack by OBL.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=91651

"U.S. intelligence officials warned President Bush weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks that Osama bin Laden's terrorist network might hijack American planes".

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/11/opinion/the-bush-white-house-was-deaf-to-9-11-warnings.html?_r=0

"On Aug. 6, 2001, President George W. Bush received a classified review of the threats posed by Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network, Al Qaeda. That morning’s “presidential daily brief” — the top-secret document prepared by America’s intelligence agencies — featured the now-infamous heading: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” A few weeks later, on 9/11, Al Qaeda accomplished that goal".

War that never ends

The lessons of war in the Middle East seem all too far outside the grasp of American policymakers, pundits and elected officials.

From Iraq and Afghanistan, two wars most Americans now regret, there were potential truths to be discovered, lesson to be appreciated.

First, “boots on the ground,” in a geography where they enemy stands within the general population while hiding in plain sight, poses insolvable problems and dangers. This resulted in IED’s planted nightly and discovered daily by US forces, all too often a discovery by explosion. It also resulted in the “friendly fire” of those trained to serve in the local military turning on their American counterparts to kill from within.

Ultimately, in Iraq the successful policy was developed under General Petraeus, who fueled the Surge by hiring the militias who were fighting the US, many of whom were displaced veterans the US had disposed from their careers upon arriving in Iraq.

When US forces left, unable to secure immunity from Iraqi prosecutions by a security agreement, the payments ended, and the Iraqi army collapsed. Prime Minister Maliki caused that disintegration by replacing trained leaders with his loyalists and by alienating Sunni’s in the country with his actions to discriminate in all possible fashions.

Ultimately Iraq fell back into disarray, its present state. And today ISIS, created within Iraq initially as a local branch of al Qaeda by the US occupation, rose to represent the rejected Sunni’s in Iraq and the region.

And now the US re-engages to stem the flow of Muslim radicalism by organizing a coalition of partners to fight against ISIS. Already critics of the new policy argue that only boots on the ground will bring success.

But the facts are boots on the ground never worked in Iraq for many reasons.

For most of the stay of the American military Iraqi citizens disliked the American presence. Literally millions of Iraqi citizens were displaced, thousands killed in the war. The economy was destroyed, corruption was rampant, and the secular state constructed under Saddam Hussein was divided into religious camps, Sunni vs. Shiite.

The US left because Iraqi’s did not want us there.

The second lesson that could have been learned in Iraq is that Muslim religious division has existed for hundreds of years, and in its violent, primitive form of hatred, it shows no sign of abating. And nothing the US can or will do, boots or no boots, will change that hatred and create peaceful resolution.

Finally, the lesson Americans never seems to learn is that in the ginning up to war our leaders and our media do whatever it takes to excite Americans for war.

George Bush used the potential mushroom cloud; Barack Obama, the fear that ISIS will come to America and kill us here. Therefore, they must be destroyed forever.

But destroying ISIS will not destroy terrorism in the least, for like a Wack a Mole carnival game, wherever we crush terrorists they simply re-appear in other forms.

When we decimated al Qaeda’s leadership and killed Bin Laden, the terrorist threat hardly ended, it just re-shaped. If we destroy ISIS terrorism will again re-shape.

And terrorists will always target the US, always.

The only solution is from those within the Middle East, those nations affected directly by the brutality of radical Muslimism, to fight their own fight to preserve and protect their people and nations.

As Thomas Friedman recently wrote, what if the US just said NO?

I think the quote from Fallout 3 is very relevant.  "War. War never changes".

Most of the Wars badly affect only the innocent civilians, they live in poor conditions before the war and eventually bear the worst conditions after the war too. During the Thirty Years' War in Europe, the population of the Holy Roman Empire was reduced by 15 to 40 percent. Civilians in war zones may also be subject to war atrocities such as genocide.