[quote]Facepalm_Death wrote:
[quote]Dr. Pangloss wrote:
[quote]Facepalm_Death wrote:
Germany, no perhaps. But Japan definitely surrendered because of civilian casualties. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not 2 isolated incidents either, before that we were routinely firebombing major Japanese cities.
Even though Germany surrendered probably more because of military defeats, Allied forces still firebombed major cities and other non military targets.
The point is, this is how war used to be fought and everyone forgets that. We used to fight with the FULL INTENTION OF KILLING CIVILIANS and it worked. It’s war, it sucks, there’s never gonna be a war where no one gets hurt except the bad guys.
[/quote]
We were at war with the governments of Germany and Japan. We were not at war with the government of Afghanistan. It’s the War IN Afghanistan. Afghanistan, the country, was simply the arena for the conflict.
You can’t draw similarities between the two.
[/quote]
The Taliban was the government of afghanistan. We were sort of there to overthrow them. I suppose the official reason was to hunt Al-Qaeda and I suppose Al-Qaeda and the Taliban are distinct organizations, but anyway the Taliban fled into the mountains and to Pakistan and organized an insurgncy from there.
But I am not trying to draw similarities between Afghanistan and WWII. I’m just saying its war. War has had large numbers of casualties and collateral damage in the past. So when media reactions to our own losses in afghanistan and accidental collateral damgage undermine the public support of what we were doing in Afghanistan, it became more difficult to actually get the job done because politics surrounding the conflict became more cautious.
Look at what happened in Vietnam after the Tet Offensive. Even though we countered the Tet Offensive and incurred massive casualties, media coverage made the public lose support of the war, diminished the Pentagon’s credibility, Robert McNamara stepped down and less resources were being committed to the war. With better public support in the states we could have actually committed enough resources to the war in afghanistan without politicians being afraid for their careers
[/quote]
You got it right. Fuck, somebody got it right.
We were pissed, and we decided to go to war with an abstract thing. At first we wanted to target the, “Axis of Evil.” Then, like the abstract war on Drugs we decided to go after another abstract war on Terrorism.
What we need to understand is these wars against ideas seem to create different spaces for them. These things we deem evil are often things we have somehow had a hand in.
The war on Drugs simply shifted the drug war to one where the trafficker and traffic highway became various entities as well as routes in Mexico for example. Reason being, we consume the most drugs on the planet, and Mexico is the highway to the U.S.
The war on Terror is going to keep shifting locations though. There is no clear, “route” to hurting the U.S. And our involvement in other nations is always going to be spun in an imperialistic way.
And yes, of course politicians are going to use politics and war to get elected, re-elected regardless of the good or bad impact of their politics. They are all the same. Sorts of people who will do the things others wont, because it takes the lack of a spine to become a politician in the first place.
