An Al-Qaeda affiliated group, Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) established control of the western Iraqi city of Fallujah at the beginning of 2014. I’m surprised there hasn’t been a thread concerning this.
[quote]Bismark wrote:
An Al-Qaeda affiliated group, Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) established control of the western Iraqi city of Fallujah at the beginning of 2014. I’m surprised there hasn’t been a thread concerning this.
I’m stunned. I knew we should have occupied Iraq forever. How dare those brownish-yellowish people, who speak another language, take back control from our puppet regime! I demand more war.
I share your surprise. I have heard exactly ONE conversation about this, and it lasted less than 2 minutes.
I’m not attached to the grunts, but there are plenty of Iraqi war veterans in my unit. And none of them seem to care. One of the most intense battles in the last 10 years, and it doesn’t bother anyone that it had no long-term effect.
I doubt my fellow man’s true understanding of their actions more and more by the day.
[quote]AceRock wrote:
I share your surprise. I have heard exactly ONE conversation about this, and it lasted less than 2 minutes.
I’m not attached to the grunts, but there are plenty of Iraqi war veterans in my unit. And none of them seem to care. One of the most intense battles in the last 10 years, and it doesn’t bother anyone that it had no long-term effect.
I doubt my fellow man’s true understanding of their actions more and more by the day.[/quote]
That’s one way to look at it, and not without some merit. The other one is that they are so damn tired of the same political bullshit over and over and over that they just got tired and sick of it. Cynicism and apathy set in then, not because they didn’t want a lasting effect but because they were sold on it being futile from the start (not believing the long term political mission would succeed based on their own field experiences)
I think even many early supporters (I was one) became disillusioned with the effort, while developing a sense of inevitability that something like this would happen. Militant Islam/Jihad is far more resilient than democracy and liberalization. You have to outnumber the crap out of them, outspend the crap out of, out kill the crap out of them, and out wait (generations) the crap out of them. And, yet, they’ll still be there ready to exploit the first opportunity to regrow their brand.
[quote]Aragorn wrote:
[quote]AceRock wrote:
I share your surprise. I have heard exactly ONE conversation about this, and it lasted less than 2 minutes.
I’m not attached to the grunts, but there are plenty of Iraqi war veterans in my unit. And none of them seem to care. One of the most intense battles in the last 10 years, and it doesn’t bother anyone that it had no long-term effect.
I doubt my fellow man’s true understanding of their actions more and more by the day.[/quote]
That’s one way to look at it, and not without some merit. The other one is that they are so damn tired of the same political bullshit over and over and over that they just got tired and sick of it. Cynicism and apathy set in then, not because they didn’t want a lasting effect but because they were sold on it being futile from the start (not believing the long term political mission would succeed based on their own field experiences)[/quote]
I’ve asked most of the men that I know that were there how they felt about the war going into it, and to my surprise, there were very few as apathetic as I’d expect. I would not have been surprised if they gave me callous answers like, “Who cares? I got to kill some hadjis!” But they didn’t. Most believed they were helping, in one form or another. Whether they had the faith to think it would last forever is a different story.