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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: greenspirit who wrote (281160)	6/20/2014 1:11:07 PM
From: Sun Tzu	2 Recommendations Recommended By Arran Yuan SARMAN Respond to of 281500

Obama is the kind of threat that the constitution was designed to circumvent against. That said, anyone with even cursory familiarity with history of Iraq and its composition would have predicted the situation they are in now. So no, Obama's mistakes are not an excuse for the blunder of the century.

To: greenspirit who wrote (281160)	6/21/2014 9:39:52 PM
From: Bilow	1 Recommendation Recommended By SARMAN Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi greenspirit; Re: "Hey moron, quit posting to me behind the curtain of your liberal censor loving board. "; ??? Clearly you've lost connection with reality. Re: "BTW, when your hero was elected ..."; I'm a dyed in the wool Republican and vote a straight ticket. You're a moron. Re: "... he pulled every troop at of Iraq."; Obama is a complete loser. If someone else had been elected and they'd have chosen to continue the fight in Iraq (by maintaining a large and active US troop presence) they'd be fighting. Would the country ever be pacified? Not by the presence of US forces. The Israelis have proved it. And eventually, after even more pointless US deaths, someone would be elected who would pull US forces out and the locals would fall into the same brutal civil war that the other Arab countries have done when their dictators have been pushed over. Re: "Now Syria ISIS Obama supporters are tearing the country apart."; It's true that Obama supported ISIS. I think that Assad should be left alone for the same reason that we should have left Sadam alone. They're secular and they have an address. They're convenient to drop bombs on, if they get too much out of line, and they keep the nutcase religious freaks under control. But no, Obama had to support the revolution not only in Syria; he did the same error in Libya. And the whole damn place is going religious dictatorship. Soon enough the population of northern Iraq will be tired of the new dictatorship, I wonder what they'll think of US occupation then. Re: "Apparently, we can leave a hundred thousand troops in Germany for decades, but we can't leave a dozen in Iraq to preserve victory."; The neocons were quite stupid in comparing the Iraq occupation with that of Germany. Before the war, I told you that there would never be a pacification in Iraq. The differences with the case of Germany are immense. Let's go over them: During the war, the United States applied every fiber of its industrial might towards the problem of killing everyone in Germany and Japan for 4 years. Our scientists developed cool new weapons to use on their packed cities. Our targeting didn't give a damn about their thousand-year-old cultural buildings. Instead, our scientists worked out more efficient techniques to turn their ancient cities into fire storms. We did everything we could to kill every mother, child, infant, pet and house plant in their countries. And their citizens knew all this. Everyone in Germany and Japan personally knew many people who we had killed because we killed about 5 to 10% of their populations. When we finally arrived to occupy Germany and Japan, the locals knew that they had been completely beaten. They knew for a fact that we could care less how many of them we would kill. They knew that their lives meant absolutely nothing to us. They knew that they had been forced to surrender by a power that thought nothing of killing them. And they surrendered completely and utterly. We were able to keep Germany and Japan occupied because they were fully and completely beaten. Our problem with the Arabs in Iraq is the same as the Israeli's problem with the Arabs in Palestine. We never beat the Arabs. We killed 10% of the population of Germany. We've killed zero percent of the population of Iraq. Hell, they make babies there faster than we killed them in the best month of the war, same with Israel. We defeated their military forces, sure, but we never defeated their civilian populations. And in total war, it is the civilian populations that have to be defeated. And it gets worse! Iraq is only a fragment of the Arab nation. They speak the same language from there west to Morroco. You can't defeat a tiny part of that nation without defeating the rest of it. To put it in comparison with the German situation, suppose we'd defeated the same proportion of Germany that the Iraqis are of the Arabs. Do you think that the populations of the other German states would think that they were defeated? Do you think that if Hitler had defeated the British the United States, Canada and Australia would have quit fighting? Of course not, we'd have nuked his ass. You cannot defeat a nation (a group of people with the same language) by defeating a country that is only a portion of that nation. Nations have to be defeated in total, no matter where the country borders are drawn. So no, the German occupation is not a reasonable comparison with that of Iraq. They are world's apart. The US (and Israel too) cannot defeat the Arabs because we will not fight total war against them. If this were Nazi Germany instead of the United States, sure, then we could beat them easily; just start killing and continue until they beg for us to accept their total surrender across 5000 miles of territory. But we're not Nazi Germany. And because of this fact we can't defeat them. And pretending that we can resulted in the deaths of thousands of our military, hundreds of thousands of their people, destroyed US prestige world-wide for a decade or two, and got a left-wing ideologue elected to the US presidency. You idiots think that war is like a game of chess. You follow the rules and at the end you get a checkmate and your opponent agrees that he's been defeated. War is not like that and it never has been like that. War is about the utter destruction of not only your opponent, but also all his friends and allies. War is just not as easy as you think it is. And now, even though the real world has provide you with a decade of very expensive education, you're still a complete idiot dedicated to sending the US into hopeless asian land wars. But the only thing your stupidity can do is to keep the Republicans out of power for another decade. Certainly you're not going to convince the American public to support a Republican candidate for presidency who wants to reopen the war in Iraq (or who failed to learn from the previous one). You're basically a poster-child for why the public voted for Obama. (But of course Obama is stupider than any Bush and could easily get us involved in another stupid war. So I'll be still voting Republican pretty much no matter who the Democrats come up with. Hillary? Give me a break.) -- Carl