War makes for strange bed fellows. Afghan warlords and fighters will switch sides on a whim. It’s fucking infuriating and frustrating.
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I was thinking the same thing, but as we see Trump isn’t above lying about casualties so it’s hard to trust anyone. For a guy who said he was going to get troops out of foreign war zones and then turn around and change his mind (like refusing to get out of Iraq despite their government asking them to leave) it would look way worse for there to be a bunch of casualties on top of that.
It’s a shame, people dying for nothing. Wars that never end and nothing good is accomplished.
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Disagree there. We accomplished a lot of good. Often it takes years to finally see the results.
Are you talking about Iraq or Afghanistan? In your opinion, what did the US and allies really accomplish, in either?
To me it looks like they basically just destroyed both countries and killed a lot of people. Saddam Hussein wasn’t such a nice guy but there was no ISIS when he was around, and all the talk about WMDs and links to 9/11 is bullshit as far as I’m concerned. In Afghanistan the Taliban is still there doing what they do and the US is negotiating with them plus more heroin is coming out of there than ever. Sure they got rid of Bin Laden, but again he might not even actually have anything to do with 9/11. And ISIS is in Afghanistan now too.
I’m not trying to debate the 9/11 stuff, I don’t claim to know what really happened but it looks like some sort of inside job as far as I can tell.
The other thing is that Saddam and Bin Laden were both US allies in the past. The US looks to me like a country you just want to steer clear of altogether, you don’t want to be their enemy because you won’t end up well but even if you’re their ally they could turn against you.
Like what?
Seriously…
Honestly, I’m tired of explaining to people that were never there what we accomplished.
Unless you think things like building schools, hospitals, infrastructure, wells, roads, bringing medicines, killing terrorists, allowing democracy to take hold are not good things.
War is difficult. Has unintended consequences. Costs civilian lives which haunts us that deployed. But to think no good came of it is so fucking stupid and laughably inaccurate I shouldn’t even bother responding.
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Old enemies are now allies. And vice versa. To think only America is guilty of this is utterly naive.
Times change. Allies change. Enemies become friends. Politics evolve. Etc… Are we supposed to just let religious fanatics attack us without consequences ??
You seem to genuinely hate America.
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Of course it’s not only America, Hitler did the same thing to Stalin and the USSR and its probably been done a million times. America just has a track record of doing it over and over though.
No, but the Taliban didn’t attack the US, it was supposed to be Al-Qaeda. Bin Laden is dead and Al-Qaeda appears to be non-existant, but the US is still fighting the Taliban for 2 decades.
I don’t like the people who run the country. I don’t have anything against the average American citizen.
There are a lot of other countries that are up to a lot of bad stuff, America just has more influence around the world so more reasons to single them out. I don’t trust Russia for a second, and Putin was the head of the KGB to top it off. China is a terrible country, I would rather live in the US than China any day.
Didn’t they blow up a whole lot of stuff though? Iraq is supposed to be in the process of rebuilding, one thing that Trump said was that if Iraq orders US troops to leave then they won’t help with that, plus it turns out most of Iraq’s gold reserves are being held in the US too.
I think that an argument can be made that there was a good reason to go into Afghanistan, even if the reason is actually a lie and things didn’t work out as planned. But Iraq looks like a huge mistake.
Fwiw, you should look into UN sanctions and WMD inspection compliance in Iraq pre 2004. There were a lot of good reasons to go in there. Turns out, Saddam was just fronting, but he was doing his damnedest to look like he was doing nefarious things.
The fact we went in with no plan plan for when the official war ended is possibly unforgivable, and that is what led to 99% of the problems.
A lot of good was done by America in Iraq and Afghanistan. Is it outweighed by the shit show that ensued? IMO, likely.
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You make some good points. Perhaps if things had been handled better then nobody would be complaining. A lot of stuff that has happened in recent years did no good for anyone, like what happened in Libya. That seems way worse than Iraq or Afghanistan, and there was no good reason to go after Gaddafi in the first place. Now the country is a Jihadist disaster area.
There are even better reasons to go into places that we don’t end up going into. Rwanda during the genocide, for example. Unless it’s about money, then yes, Iraq was a better place to go into. But let’s not pretend we went into Iraq for humanitarian reasons. It was hard enough for us to send help to New Orleans after Katrina or Puerto Rico after Maria and those were Americans.
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Hell no it wasn’t altruistic.
Look, we have limited resources and limited appetite for bloodshed so we only intervene if it benefits us as a country… In the case of Iraq it was/is oil. I personally am very hawkish and think we should use our extreme military might to intervene all over the place… But that’s fairly unpopular.
Absolutely. I’d go to Africa in a heart beat.
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Weren’t you in St. Louis?
Still am. It’s home for now. Just at the lake a lot.
So it’s just like Africa only more violent.
Ha. You said it. Not me. Truth is St Louis is consistently the most violent city in the nation. 61 homicides per 100,000. Baltimore is second with 51.
It’s a shit show and isn’t slowing down anytime soon. Our circuit attorney’s conviction rate is below 20%. It’s disgraceful.
Btw, I owe you an apology for being a dick. I don’t know you and spoke out of line. We can disagree and still be cordial.
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I’m surprised it’s that much worse than Detroit honestly
Sure is. Shit… I was on a triple murder with 2 more shot 30 minutes into the new year.
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