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2
Posted on 3/26/17 at 9:49 pm to Navytiger74
Are there specific, concrete goals for US military intervention in Yemen? I always wonder how some of these things foreign occurrences end up permanent.
Posted on 3/26/17 at 9:59 pm to LSUtoOmaha
quote:Our foreign policy doesn't make much sense, but the decisions still, paradoxically, are not difficult to decipher most of the time. You typically needn't look farther than some border (KSA in this case) or some common friend or enemy (KSA and Iran, respectively, in this case).
Are there specific, concrete goals for US military intervention in Yemen? I always wonder how some of these things foreign occurrences end up permanent.
Posted on 3/26/17 at 10:03 pm to WhiskeyPapa
quote:And as terrible as that is, it's only a part of the story. It's also the best way to shore-up the next generation of ISIS.
Putting regular Army or Marine Infantry in contact with ISIS is just a way to get a bunch of them killed for nothing just as happened in Iraq.
Posted on 3/26/17 at 10:03 pm to WhiskeyPapa
quote:
Putting regular Army or Marine Infantry in contact with ISIS is just a way to get a bunch of them killed for nothing just as happened in Iraq.
Look at you, talking out of your arse again.
Posted on 3/26/17 at 10:03 pm to RollTide1987
quote:
You can't defeat ISIS without putting boots on the ground.
You know,
because it worked so well in eliminating the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Posted on 3/26/17 at 10:11 pm to DisplacedBuckeye
And the Trumpkins say we always agree. 
We will likely never lose a major battle in a pitched fight against any other force in the world in our lifetime. But we'll never win the war against Jihadists over there unless we do it through regional partners (Arabs and other Muslims) or just go fricking nuclear.
I mean I wish we could mudstomp them into submission in a clean conflict in which we didn't kill a bunch of non-combatants and create a bunch more terrorists in the process. But we can't. We need our partners to win it. And we need them to sell the win the right way.
We will likely never lose a major battle in a pitched fight against any other force in the world in our lifetime. But we'll never win the war against Jihadists over there unless we do it through regional partners (Arabs and other Muslims) or just go fricking nuclear.
I mean I wish we could mudstomp them into submission in a clean conflict in which we didn't kill a bunch of non-combatants and create a bunch more terrorists in the process. But we can't. We need our partners to win it. And we need them to sell the win the right way.
Posted on 3/26/17 at 10:23 pm to Navytiger74
quote:
just go fricking nuclear
We wouldn't need to do that.
Let Mattis do his job, don't make war a fricking spectator sport, and stay out of the way. Stop wasting money on bureaucratic bullshite and spend it on things we need to win.
It's time we start fighting wars to win them, instead of trying to look like swell people.
Problem solved.
Posted on 3/26/17 at 10:30 pm to DisplacedBuckeye
quote:I think Mattis and the team he's put together are more or less of the same mind. The guys a killer, but a brilliant administrator to boot. And the salesmanship piece is as critical to war as any other in this day and age.
Let Mattis do his job, don't make war a fricking spectator sport, and stay out of the way. Stop wasting money on bureaucratic bullshite and spend it on things we need to win.
quote:I don't think we're worried about looking swell so much as we're worried about not giving Abu Dua, Zawahiri, their deputies and their (surprisingly sophisticated) media arms an opportunity to sell this as another American effort to subjugate the middle east--which is something that we, of course, have no interest in. The story needs to be about destroying ISIS and AQ and their false doctrine and all the innocent innocent women and children--Muslim, Christian, etc--they kill. Unless we're ready to commit to wiping out a few hundred million people. I mean that would terrify them and do the trick. Don't get me wrong. No one is that hard.
It's time we start fighting wars to win them, instead of trying to look like swell people.
But if we aren't prepared to do that (and I hope we aren't, to be honest) we need to make this a good Muslims fighting terrorist story. Not a Christian/Western/American fighting Muslims story. We killed something like 1/7th the population of Vietnam and still lost our strategic objectives. We don't need to do that here.
Posted on 3/26/17 at 10:37 pm to I B Freeman
I looked. You didn't care about obozo....why?
This post was edited on 3/26/17 at 10:38 pm
Posted on 3/26/17 at 10:44 pm to Navytiger74
quote:
The story
I'm not talking about the story or how to sell it. I'm talking about fighting a war and how to win it. The entire region is populated with ignorant and illiterate people. They'll sell whatever they want over there, and there's little we can do to stop that.
Letting Muslims fight Muslims sounds great, but I've fought beside the good ones and they aren't going to do it.
Saying "frick it" isn't the answer, either.
Posted on 3/26/17 at 10:46 pm to CptBengal
You must not have looked very hard if you can't find IB Freeman railing against ME intervention before Trump
Posted on 3/26/17 at 10:58 pm to DisplacedBuckeye
quote:And that's the problem. They're ignorant, illiterate, insular, religious, and deterministic. Those types are literally the last to give up in even a losing fight. It's insane. We have to strike the right balance of beating them on the field and making sure they're motivated to move on after the fight's over. You know as well as I do that there is no silver bullet there.
The entire region is populated with ignorant and illiterate people.
Even I won't pretend that MENA can't be pacified by hard force. But it would require a shocking display of--either something non-conventional or probably 750K to a couple of million troops deployed throughout key areas. If we aren't prepared to do that, we have to figure out what else might work.
quote:Maybe they can slow it down. Control it. Saying we're going to "stop" or "end" terrorism is like saying we're going to stop or end crime. It's a tactic. A behavior. It's not a concrete thing. It's persistent and it will be with us in perpetuity. We have to defeat those who harbor it and do our best to mitigate the conditions and safe-havens which nourish its growth.
they aren't going to do it.
quote:That's for damned sure. We need to work with reasonable people who have a proven track record of controlling it and mitigating its spread. This is not without controversial, but our last two administrations forcing or sanctioning the fall of the secular monsters who kept order in key parts of MENA for decades has been a net bad for US interests--and I include among them Bin Ali, Mubarak, Qaddafi, hell even Saddam and (attempts on) Assad.
Saying "frick it" isn't the answer, either.
It's just a tangle.
Posted on 3/26/17 at 11:07 pm to Navytiger74
What did we have to do with Ben Ali? As far as I know Tunisia was the only country to have a revolution free from Western help (and not coincidentally the only one that ended up as a stable democracy).
Posted on 3/26/17 at 11:10 pm to Navytiger74
quote:
You know as well as I do that there is no silver bullet there.
Yep, and that's why I'm only concerned with what we can control. If someone a lot smarter than me wants to play around with propaganda, have at it.
quote:
Even I won't pretend that MENA can't be pacified by hard force. But it would require a shocking display of--either something non-conventional or probably 750K to a couple of million troops deployed throughout key areas. If we aren't prepared to do that, we have to figure out what else might work.
Every area is different. One piece of commonality is denying them strongholds. We need to destroy those and stop worrying about building infrastructure when we're done. We don't need to replace bunkers and training camps with hospitals and schools.
quote:
Maybe they can slow it down. Control it. Saying we're going to "stop" or "end" terrorism is like saying we're going to stop or end crime. It's a tactic. A behavior. It's not a concrete thing. It's persistent and it will be with us in perpetuity. We have to defeat those who harbor it and do our best to mitigate the conditions and safe-havens which nourish its growth.
Of course, but that isn't a reason to allow shite like this:
It's a lot more manageable when their best weapons are ineffective explosives.
quote:
Bin Ali, Mubarak, Qaddafi, hell even Saddam and (attempts on) Assad
Regardless of where we are now, I'm glad to see these people go.
Posted on 3/26/17 at 11:15 pm to I B Freeman
so, kids sign up for combat roles in the all volunteer military hoping to never see action? more americans die in traffic accidents every 1 year than the entire 16 year war on terror. frick off.
Posted on 3/26/17 at 11:15 pm to Iosh
quote:We tacitly sanctioned it after the fact, and that encouraged the spread of the Arab Spring in early 2011--including into places where it was largely contained but remains a source of instability.
What did we have to do with Ben Ali? As far as I know Tunisia was the only country to have a revolution free from Western help (and not coincidentally the only one that ended up as a stable democracy).
Posted on 3/26/17 at 11:24 pm to DisplacedBuckeye
FWIW, they won't have that in a matter of months. They're finished as a proto-state.
quote:They were some motherfrickers. But the people who replaced/want to replace them are motherfrickers, too. And they're generally less effective than the old crew at keeping their problems within their borders.
Bin Ali, Mubarak, Qaddafi, hell even Saddam and (attempts on) Assad
Regardless of where we are now, I'm glad to see these people go.
Posted on 3/26/17 at 11:29 pm to Navytiger74
Yep, so we kill them, too. Eventually, we'll get a motherfricker in there that likes his position and is willing to play ball. Keeping shite inside his borders was not a good enough reason to turn a blind eye to the shite Saddam pulled. If anything, we should have hooked his arse up sooner.
I'm not saying my way is absolute, but it beats what we're doing now, and doing nothing hasn't been an option for nearly half a century.
I'm not saying my way is absolute, but it beats what we're doing now, and doing nothing hasn't been an option for nearly half a century.
Posted on 3/27/17 at 4:30 am to DisplacedBuckeye
quote:
Putting regular Army or Marine Infantry in contact with ISIS is just a way to get a bunch of them killed for nothing just as happened in Iraq.
Look at you, talking out of your arse again.
Look at you adding nothing to the conversation again.
What exactly did we get for our 4,500 dead, 32,000 wounded and 5 trillion dollars down the toilet in Iraq?
Why do you think the Bushies invaded Iraq with half the troops posited by the CENTCOM plan and then deviated from what plan there was by disbanding the Iraqi Army - when the rank and file soldiers of that army provided the only means to secure all the ammo dumps in the country and help preserve order?
The duck that quacks to me is that the Bushies WANTED to fragment Iraq and create ISIS. They wanted that to spill over into Syria and wreck Syria for Israeli ends, including allowing large numbers of unvetted Syrians into the United States and making them no danger to the Jewish State.
That duck is quacking more loudly all the time.
This post was edited on 3/27/17 at 4:31 am
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