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The US spent two years arming these morons in Syria and only started crying foul about them a few months ago. They kept blaming Assad for the deaths in Syria until it became crystal clear that the killers were the rebels.
You reap what you sow.
The world is going to be thanking and honoring Bashar al-Assad in five years for eradicating these terrorists. Hilarious how the world and geopolitics work.
Assad and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah both gave speeches recently in which they described the rebels as threats to the world and humanity. No one believed them. Look for yourself. And look at all the jihadists coming in from Europe, the US, and the Arab World to join them. Eventually they will come home and cause trouble for us!
Curious. Its long been a standard that if a war be fought, it must be won. One particular war in US history that many who profess to be anti war, still praise for its scorched earth policy is the US Civil War. The destruction that Sherman rained down , destroying the Confederate ability to wage war, is still praised as having been nessecary, even by leftist historians.
These same people, have decried every US desicive stroke since. I.e. the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Since WW2 , the US has not fought a true war, because of catering to these "humanitarian" sentiments, yet Sherman remains a hero. It seems the last enemy that the US fought that needed to be totally crushed, was the Confederacy. Our own people. Since then, mercy and compassion are the governing tenates of war.
Indeed, war IS a politicians tool. I agree. However, if we are going to fight regardless, shouldn't we , at least, win?
Taking the last point first, the answer is no. If we are the aggressors, as we normally are, then hell no. Why would I want an aggressor nation to win?
I don't think General Sherman has quite as much prestige on the anti-war left as you believe he does; and his tactics only shortened the war, they did not decide it. Moreover, he concentrated on the destruction of property and the killing of enemy combatants. I seriously doubt he would've dropped white phosphorus on civilian neighborhoods even if he had been able to.
Location: By the sea, by the sea, by the beautiful sea
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Originally Posted by other99
JIHADISTS have overrun Iraq's second city of Mosul and a string of Sunni Arab northern towns in a spectacular blow against the Shiite-led government that Washington warned threatens the entire region.
Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki asked parliament to declare a state of emergency and announced the government would arm citizens to fight the jihadists and their allies.
“All of Nineveh province fell into the hands of militants,” parliament speaker Osama al-Nujaifi told journalists in Baghdad, adding the gunmen were heading south towards neighbouring Salaheddin province.Cookies must be enabled. | The Australian
So is history repeating itself with the implications of the US withdraw, as demonstrated in Vietnam in the 1970s?
History repeated itself when the US entered yet another war where it had no business being, both Vietnam and Iraq were never threats to the US.
Let me say something, though, about the Vietnam war:
It did achieve the real geopolitical goals of the US government.
The Vietnam war was never about Vietnam itself. It was all about the Soviet Union and the intent of the US to halt the USSR's successes in the Third World. Vietnam is where the line was drawn.
The USSR was nearly as involved in Vietnam as the US was, and could stand the drain of its capital much less. The war pretty much put a stop to the ability of the USSR to become involved in a major way anywhere else. For instance, it ended their direct support of North Korea (it had always been the USSR--not China--that supported the DPRK). Their invasion of Afghanistan was really the final stroke for them...documents recovered in the 90s reveal that Yuri Andropov knew by 1980 that the US had won the Cold War.
So the war did what it was intended to do. It's certainly debatable, though, whether it was worth the cost and whether the same goal couldn't have been achieved some other way.
Let me say something, though, about the Vietnam war:
It did achieve the real geopolitical goals of the US government.
The Vietnam war was never about Vietnam itself. It was all about the Soviet Union and the intent of the US to halt the USSR's successes in the Third World. Vietnam is where the line was drawn.
The USSR was nearly as involved in Vietnam as the US was, and could stand the drain of its capital much less. The war pretty much put a stop to the ability of the USSR to become involved in a major way anywhere else. For instance, it ended their direct support of North Korea (it had always been the USSR--not China--that supported the DPRK). Their invasion of Afghanistan was really the final stroke for them...documents recovered in the 90s reveal that Yuri Andropov knew by 1980 that the US had won the Cold War.
So the war did what it was intended to do. It's certainly debatable, though, whether it was worth the cost and whether the same goal couldn't have been achieved some other way.
Pyrrhic victory IMO.
Actually, I've read in more than a few books that the Soviets knew they were beat by the early 60's.
My recall is failing me, but in one book that I read, the author recounts an incident in which the Soviets got ahold of a very important American Intel estimate (it had a nomenclature, but I can't remember what it was called) of their strength that had been passed around our government and was accepted as the gospel...sometime around 1970, and the Soviet officials were LITERALLY in out of control fits of laughter at the report. They couldn't believe that they'd been overestimated to that length and figured that the Americans knew better.
In the book The War State, the author makes it abundantly clear that the CIA, NSC, and the Pentagon in cahoots with the Defense Industry had a perpetual scheme concocted to purposely inflate Soviet military strength in an effort to keep military budgets ridiculously high. Ike, Truman,and Kennedy had always suspected as much, but found out that the bureaucracy had too much power in Congress for them to cut military spending to its proper proportions.
Kennedy in particular had bitter arguments with the Pentagon. The book outlines a meeting in which Curtis Lemay got pretty far out of line.
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