My mistake for misinterpreting you. I don't think any amount of time would have had Iraq become what we imagined it to be. I am just mad that we destabilized an entire country and worked against our own efforts for literally nothing. Nothing that can be done at this point but let Iraq fragment and see if we can work with the Kurds and Shia's.
We do not have what it takes to be a Great Power.
We need to vacate the field for the real contestants: China and Russia.
Go back to the Monroe Doctrine and spend a couple of decades building real relationships with the rest of the New World.
The Old World will get along just fine without our boorish efforts.
"The only way that has ever been discovered to have a lot of people cooperate together voluntarily is through the free market. And that's why it's so essential to preserving individual freedom.” -- Milton Friedman
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." -- H. L. Mencken
It only gets worse.
The US arms sent to Syria that helped arm these guys and this http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...years-ago.html
We are Imperialistic. It is all about the money of course and making a safe business environment for the banks and corporations funding our politicians and directing policy.
Education: that which reveals to the wise,
and conceals from the stupid,
the vast limits of their knowledge.
Mark Twain
A decent take from today:
I’d say eight years of blood and treasure and failure in Iraq is enough. Unless, like Wieseltier, you see the entire planet as a patient and America as the only nurse. [...]
So let me put this as kindly as I can. We lost 5,000 young Americans trying to keep this centrifugal country in one piece. After eight years, and huge expenses in training and equipping the Iraqi army, we bear no blame and never have for the pathological sectarianism of so many Arab countries, culturally or politically. And it’s time to have enough self-respect to say so. The sanest, wisest way to wriggle out of this trap is precisely to do nothing – again and again – until the pathology of dependence is finished.
"That rifle hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or labourer's cottage is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there."
-Eric "George Orwell" Blair
"If the policy of the government, upon vital questions affecting the whole people, is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court...the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned the government into the hands of that eminent tribunal."
(Lincoln's First Inaugural Address, 1861).
ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ
Translation: Filthy WOGs.
Let's be clear, America, along with the UK and France, is directly responsible for every stage of this mess. The partitioning after WWI, the establishment of Israel after WWII, the toppling of the relatively progressive monarchs in favour of Tyrants during the Cold War, and then the post-Cold War invasions, along with the Soviet-Afghan War which has created not one but two generations of Jihadist fighters, and the failure to support Israel even when it tries it's best to emulate Nazi Germany.
Before you disagree with the last, remember the Israelis state was sterilising "Black Jews" to keep the race pure.
Now, let me quote the bit right before the bit you quoted:
I love this formulation: hegemony means inaction is action, so there’s no difference between the two!
Yes, that is what it means. If you have the power to act and choose not to, then you have chosen and becomes responsible. What the writer is saying is that Iraq is not worth dead Americans, implicit in this is that Americans are, as individuals, worth more than Iraqis. If he had said, "intervening will not help" then that would be one thing, but what he said was "we have already expended enough blood."
Oh, and Vietnam was winnable, had the NVA been crushed in the North.
"If it wears trousers generally I don't pay attention."
[IMG]https://img197.imageshack.us/img197/4917/logoromans23pd.jpg[/IMG]
Ja-mata TosaInu
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