Thanks kcar for making me aware of that version of events. I simply was not aware. And I do understand the potential for the other version to be wrong. For similar kinds of things that happens far too often.
As for the hindsight is 20/20, etc., remarks, if you were alive and aware back when the US invaded Afghanistan, there were plenty of pundits in elite media reminding us of the legacy of failed imperial initiatives in Afghanistan. The potential for Afghanies, including civilians, to die to in a protracted war funded by the USA should have been well known given the experience for other similar conflicts.
Perhaps it is ultimately all about aesthetics but I did and still do not support the proxy wars that the USA and the communist regimes of the Soviet Union and China fought in poor developing countries. Decisions to commit wholeheartedly to those kinds of wars are risky and from my reading of post-war are more likely to be big disasters than anything else.
The USA lost the Vietnam War, for example, and in the process of doing sacrificed 50,000 citizens, sacrificed trillions of dollars of wealth, eroded US social cohesion and solidarity, actually weakening the USA relative to its Cold War rivals.
In Afghanistan, it did not take long before SU soldiers became demoralized due to the nature of protacted guerrilla warfare, and many got hooked on smack.
Large numbers of Afghani and Vietnamese civilians died in these conflicts. Similarly, the USA took a partisan side in the Syrian civil war and has accomplished nothing except prolong the misery and suffering in Syria.
"Perhaps it is ultimately all about aesthetics but I did and still do not support the proxy wars that the USA and the communist regimes of the Soviet Union and China fought in poor developing countries. Decisions to commit wholeheartedly to those kinds of wars are risky and from my reading of post-war are more likely to be big disasters than anything else."
I think the US and Russia/USSR TODAY would likely agree with you about the fruitlessness of those proxy wars and the unexpected loss of national prestige that resulted from those wars. But just as most people playing pool can't predict the consequences of shoot the cue into the group of racked balls to start a game, the superpowers likely couldn't predict the long-term effects of their international interventions. The superpowers had to deal with conditions and crises in the present. They were trying to salvage desperate situations and prop up regimes that its citizens did not support.
If you get a chance, watch Ken Burns' documentary on the Vietnam War or the mid-80s PBS documentary centered on Stanley Karnow's book. Both series had eye-opening, jaw-dropping moments where you could see why the US felt it HAD to dramatically increase American troop strength in Vietnam, and why even that massive increase was bound to fail. For instance, Burns' documentary discusses how American sergeants in country agreed with each other that the South Vietnamese regime was within weeks of collapsing shortly before the US under LBJ started sending US troops over to control the countryside.
Yet in the Karnow documentary, Undersecretary of State George Ball recounted how he and his colleagues applied statistical analysis used during WWII to supply the French resistance to understand how much the US military would have to suppress the supplies sent via the Ho Chi Minh Trail to the Viet Cong resistance in South Vietnam. Ball concluded that the US couldn't cut off the flow of supplies sufficiently to stop the Viet Cong. The South Vietnamese government struggled to control its own rural territory, even with a massive US military presence.
Many people don't realize the US was heavily committed to fighting Communism in Vietnam starting in the 50s. IIRC, the Burns series recounts how President Charles de Gaulle of France told the US that France would lose Vietnam without American support and that the French economy might collapse as a result. de Gaulle also suggested that France might consequently have to turn to becoming an ally of the USSR. So Vietnam quickly became a crisis with serious international implications that the US could not ignore. The US was paying for about 70% of France's presence in Vietnam by the end of its occupation.
The US effort to prop up the French turned into propping up the French-speaking Catholic elite of the South Vietnamese people. America decided it could fight Vietnamese Communism by reneging on its pledge to honor national elections and installing a puppet, Ngo Dinh Diem. But the US was building a sandcastle on quicksand: Diem was no puppet and alienated the people of his own country. The South Vietnamese government struggled to function effectively after Diem's assassination and never held the loyalty of its people for very long.
Once the US committed to multiplying its troop presence in country by a factor of eight from 1964 to '65, it could not disengage and abandon South Vietnam. Its national prestige was at stake and its declaration of fighting the fall of dominoes in SE Asia was on the line. The US as I see it failed in the Vietnam for two reasons: it failed to understand the extent of support for Ho Chi Minh throughout the country (even in the South) and the fight for national liberation from foreign occupiers. It also failed to estimate the difficulties of fighting asymmetric warfare against highly motivated guerillas who could blend into the non-combatant population in a country 8500+ miles away from its shores.
"Similarly, the USA took a partisan side in the Syrian civil war and has accomplished nothing except prolong the misery and suffering in Syria."
With all due respect I think you're quite wrong on this. The US under President Obama was not heavily involved in the Syrian War. The Obama administration did try to create a force of Syrians and Kurds to fight the Assad regime but it quickly fell apart. The US supply of military material was slight compared to supplies from other countries such as Russia. The story of the Syrian civil war is a sign of the consequence of the US superpower NOT intervening. Obama did not want to get the US involved in another war in the Middle East while he tried to get the US out of Iraq. While the Obama administration was against the Assad regime it did not move strongly against Bashar Assad. The US was not significantly involved in the miseries of the Syrian people.
Under CIA's Operation Cyclone from 1979 to 1989, the United States and Saudi Arabia provided $40 billion worth of financial aid and weapons to almost 100,000 Mujahideen and Afghan Arabs from forty Muslim countries through Pakistan's ISI. British journalist Jason Burke wrote that "He did not receive any direct funding or training from the US during the 1980s. Nor did his followers. The Afghan mujahideen, via Pakistan's ISI intelligence agency, received large amounts of both. Some bled to the Arabs fighting the Soviets but nothing significant." Bin Laden met and built relations with Hamid Gul, who was a three-stargeneral in the Pakistani army and head of the ISI agency. Although the United States provided the money and weapons, the training of militant groups was entirely done by the Pakistani Armed Forces and the ISI. According to some CIA officers, beginning in early 1980, bin Laden acted as a liaison between the Saudi General Intelligence Presidency (GIP) and Afghan warlords, but no evidence of contact between the CIA and Bin Laden exists in the CIA archives.
"The smart, cost-effective strategy would have been to let the Soviets do their thing in Afghanistan."
Hindsight is 20/20. It's easy to play armchair quarterback to military action taking place 40+ years ago. There was no guarantee that the Soviets would have tired of occupying Afghanistan or changed their strategy in the region to relinquish Afghanistan. The US did make the mistake of ignoring Afghanistan after the USSR left but as I think we can both agree, even a non-military American presence in that country might not have prevented it from becoming a safe haven for ObL.
Thanks kcar for making me aware of that version of events. I simply was not aware. And I do understand the potential for the other version to be wrong. For similar kinds of things that happens far too often.
As for the hindsight is 20/20, etc., remarks, if you were alive and aware back when the US invaded Afghanistan, there were plenty of pundits in elite media reminding us of the legacy of failed imperial initiatives in Afghanistan. The potential for Afghanies, including civilians, to die to in a protracted war funded by the USA should have been well known given the experience for other similar conflicts.
Perhaps it is ultimately all about aesthetics but I did and still do not support the proxy wars that the USA and the communist regimes of the Soviet Union and China fought in poor developing countries. Decisions to commit wholeheartedly to those kinds of wars are risky and from my reading of post-war are more likely to be big disasters than anything else.
The USA lost the Vietnam War, for example, and in the process of doing sacrificed 50,000 citizens, sacrificed trillions of dollars of wealth, eroded US social cohesion and solidarity, actually weakening the USA relative to its Cold War rivals.
In Afghanistan, it did not take long before SU soldiers became demoralized due to the nature of protacted guerrilla warfare, and many got hooked on smack.
Large numbers of Afghani and Vietnamese civilians died in these conflicts. Similarly, the USA took a partisan side in the Syrian civil war and has accomplished nothing except prolong the misery and suffering in Syria.
Dumbfounded, I canât think of anything more reprehensible than this.
Then yesterday, Joe Manchin shares his "compromise" on voting rights, which includes the Republican favorite "Voter ID" clause. Stacey Abrahams comes out in support of it, followed immediately by Mitch spreading fear by saying he won't let "computers determine districting" and that having federal rules eliminates the federal government's unbiased stance in elections.
The only thing the Republican Party stands for is not doing anything and blaming the Dems for it. There are more and more cracks in the party foundation every day, and if they don't take a lot of seats next year, the party will implode. You can't pander to one-third of the country and expect to hold power much longer...but that appears to be the strategy.
House Republican leaders would like everyone to know that the nation is in crisis.
There is an economic crisis, they say, with rising prices and overly generous unemployment benefits; a national security crisis; a border security crisis, with its attendant homeland security crisis, humanitarian crisis, and public health crisis; and a separate energy crisis.
Pressed Tuesday on whether the nation is really so beleaguered, the No. 2 Republican in the House, Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, thought of still more crises: anti-Semitism in the Democratic ranks, âyet another crisis,â he asserted, and a labor shortage crisis. (...)
âLook, our main crisis is weâre not the majority â thatâs our top crisis,â said Representative Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma.
Seems to be a case of seeing what you want to see. I didn't see any responses that talked about wanting any dead republicans, much less all republicans. It appears you just want to feel persecuted.
The overall point of this thread is to discuss the republican party, their policies, and actions. Some people, maybe most people will post about the things that they feel are screwed up about the party. You are welcome to post about things you think aren't screwed up. That's kind of the way these things work.
It's a metaphor ... for useless. Just blunt and gets right to the point.
At least you picked up on that. Everyone else just went right by that and confirmed the actual point that I was inferring.
What I should have said is :
... it seems me that the overall point of this thread is to illustrate or portray that the only good republican is a dead one.
Seems to be a case of seeing what you want to see. I didn't see any responses that talked about wanting any dead republicans, much less all republicans. It appears you just want to feel persecuted.
The overall point of this thread is to discuss the republican party, their policies, and actions. Some people, maybe most people will post about the things that they feel are screwed up about the party. You are welcome to post about things you think aren't screwed up. That's kind of the way these things work.
At least you picked up on that. Everyone else just went right by that and confirmed the actual point that I was inferring.
What I should have said is :
... it seems me that the overall point of this thread is to illustrate or portray that the only good republican is a dead one.
What's up with the fixation on death?
I see a lot of condemnation of the actual party in the posts here and not of the supporters of the party. Although the Republican supporters who are as divorced from reality as the GOP politicians are catching flak too.
There are some prominent Republicans like Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney who aren't swilling the Kool-Aid. It's just a damned shame that there aren't more of them.
So: live Republicans are ok, especially if they're not Trump-bots. Dead Republicans don't do anyone much good.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong ... it seems me that the overall tone of this thread is the only good republican is a dead one.
I have thought this for a long time. Finally decided to say it out loud ...
I'm not remembering where the Democrats took weapons to the Capitol building and wanted to hang the Vice President, rape/kill a Congressional Representative, and kidnap or kill the Speaker of the House. So I'm not sure where you're creating the "dead one" idea. That seems primarily a party platform of the GOP.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong ... it seems me that the overall tone of this thread is the only good republican is a dead one.
I have thought this for a long time. Finally decided to say it out loud ...
Google translation of the above: "Please talk me off the ledge!"
Kurt, what are we supposed to like or admire about the GOP and its politicians? The world-class denial of reality about the 2020 elections? The slavish devotion to Drumpf? The nationwide attempt to suppress voter turnout amongst Blacks, Browns and the poor? The general lack of effort to revive the economy? The decades-long refusal to do anything about global warming?
The GOP is a flaming paper bag of poo right now. Sorry.
from wiki/ According to the 2010 census reports, Owsley County has the second-highest level of child poverty of any county in the United States.<4> In terms of income per household, the county is the poorest in the nation.<5> Between 1980 and 2014, the rate of death from cancer in the county increased by 45.6 percent, the largest such increase of any county in the United States.<6>
I mean, are you bored? What? Garbage like this? It's pointless. Empty self perpetrating calories of hate, burning holes in a vacuous and smelly corner of the internet. Oh look! Over there is Twitter! Must be an entertainment bomb. Kind of like a stink bomb without a point...
i spent a fair amount of time next door in perry county the poverty is/was mind bobbling every other person was either a doyle or a carl it is the only name they could afford
The only good Republican is the one in opposition to a Republican initiative this week.
Next week that Republican will go back to being a bad Republican.
Wait, which initiative are we talking about?
Voter suppression? Yeah, still wrong. Closed borders (selectively) and isolationism? Wrong. Blocking judges everything now that the other party is in power? Wrong. Conservatism : —fiscal? Right, but show me that guy (either party). —social? Fine, but only when applied equally to all people... show me that guy... —ecological? I know the R team has never really identified with that one, but it does flow logically for what that's worth.
The problem with only two parties is that the opposition portion gets too much power/support, while the necessary for proper governance bits of seeking balance and responsible policy making go to the back of the line. Still, I'm having a lot of trouble seeing what the policies of the post Trump Republicans really are. I'm having trouble finding many post trump republicans so far.
