re: Incredible article by The Atlantic.

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In the real world, the battle to defend liberal democracy is sometimes a real battle,

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However, with the severely limiting “rules of engagement” we waste people and resources pretending that these shitholes will quickly evolve to twenty first century democracies.

“War is hell.” Sherman said it best. When you are in a war, you’ve got to make the other combatants quit. War is not prosecuted to build schools. It’s purpose is not to ensure transgender rights in that territory. War is about defeating the enemy.

If we go to war, we should kill everyone who raise a finger against us. If fire comes from a Mosque, bomb it. If bullets fly from a daycare center, light it up.

We go places and get shot at because the enemy knows our rules of engagement are stupid. “You win the war by making the other poor, dumb, bastard die for his country.”

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the battle to defend liberal democracy is sometimes a real battle

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WTF is liberal democracy exactly? If democracy is labeled liberal or conservative that kind of waters down the definition of democracy doesn't it?

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Yeah we should just allow people to get nuclear weapons and we should just allow atrocities to spread around the globe without even batting an eye because clearly international travel does not exist so these problems of course will never reach us.

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I have $5 that you were against us invading Iraq under Bush (if you were old enough to even form an opinion about it).

Applebaum's book on the gulags is great. She's wrong here, while also being banal. I mean, does she think this is an incredibly meaningful point?

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In many conflicts, probably Syria and certainly Afghanistan, there is a military solution: The war ends because one side wins. One side has better weapons, better morale, more outside support. One side has better generals, better soldiers, more stamina. Or, sometimes, one side is more willing to use violence, cruelty, and terror, and is more prepared to die in order to inflict violence, cruelty, and terror on other people.

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She describes 'military solutions' without actually describing anything. Further she goes on to say:

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Peace negotiators, experts in conflict prevention, UN officials, European Union officials, and myriad American and international diplomats don’t want to believe that this is true, because it doesn’t reflect the values of the world that they inhabit. They don’t know any Taliban fighters, Hezbollah militants, or Russian mercenaries and can’t imagine what the world looks like from their point of view. But violent extremists, contrary to the popular image, can be quite rational: They can calculate exactly what they need to do to win a battle, or a war, which is precisely what the Taliban has just done in Afghanistan. There was a military solution, and the group has been waiting for a long time to achieve it. Now it will convert the violent extremism of its movement into a violent, autocratic, tyrannical state.

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Again, she isn't saying anything, but pretends it is meaningful by hiding behind the 'peace negotiators' line, as though the status quo of people in that line of work is idealism. Is it even a line of work? Who are these people anyway? Is there an example of their supposed 'idealism' at work? She doesn't even really give time to work out the idea Western policy makers can't envision the world from someone else's point of view, which may or may not be a salient argument depending on how it is employed.

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The need to prevent this from happening in other places—to prevent violent extremists from invading places where people would prefer to live in peace and in accordance with the rule of law—is precisely why we have armies, weapons, intelligence agencies, and spies of various kinds, despite all of the mistakes they make and the ugly things they sometimes do. The need to prevent violent extremists from creating structures like al-Qaeda or rogue, nuclear-armed regimes is precisely why North Americans and Europeans get involved in distant and difficult conflicts. That’s why the U.S. has military bases in Germany, South Korea, and Kuwait, among other places. That’s why even the Dutch were persuaded to set up a base in Afghanistan, which I visited in 2008 (and which even then seemed pretty precarious).

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This is an intensely naïve view of politics and the use of force. It is also hilarious given the history of certain terrorist groups. Israel's intervention in south Lebanon led directly to the formation of Hezbollah. The association with Iran came about through diplomatic work actually done by the Shah before the revolution. In this case, the intervention, not done to protect 'liberal democracy' but rather done to form a security belt to ensure the PLO could not launch attacks into Israel from Lebanon, created a far more complicated security situation.

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Afghanistan provides a useful reminder that while we and our European allies might be tired of “forever wars,” the Taliban are not tired of wars at all. The Pakistanis who helped them are not tired of wars, either. Nor are the Russian, Chinese, and Iranian regimes that hope to benefit from the change of power in Afghanistan; nor are al-Qaeda and the other groups who may make Afghanistan their home again in future. More to the point, even if we are not interested in any of these nations and their brutal politics, they are interested in us. They see the wealthy societies of America and Europe as obstacles to be cleared out of their way. To them, liberal democracy is not an abstraction; it is a potent, dangerous ideology that threatens their power and needs to be defeated wherever it exists, and they will deploy corruption, propaganda, and even violence to do so. They will do it in Syria and Ukraine, and they will do it within the borders of the U.S., the U.K., and the EU.

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Again, this is utter drivel. Just nonsense.

There's no time given to the insane side effects of US FP, or the conundrums that it creates. Why did the US give so much leeway to Pakistan in terms of how they approached organizing Soviet resistance? Pakistan was attempting to intervene in Afghan politics due to their own demographic concerns, and they organized that resistance to alleviate those concerns. It was a place where US and Pakistani policy happened to overlap for a period of time. After the Soviet's were defeated, Pakistan continued pursuing that policy, as their interest in the region predated the US's involvement, and would outlast the US's, because it is based on the insecurity of the state itself, and specifically the people who make up the security apparatus. Expecting people to give up their own, narrow interests without good reason is a terrible way of executing politics.

The US has interests, but no one seems to define those interests honestly, and no one can seem to admit that what might be beneficial for the US ruling class might not be beneficial for all its citizens. Why instead we get this drivel instead of some reckoning with our own insane foreign policy is depressing.

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why military intervention is needed around the world.

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Nah.

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WTF is liberal democracy exactly?

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Liberalism =/= bat shite crazy progressivism, which is what the Democrat party is. It was meant to be freedom of the individual, but the label "liberal" got hijacked.