Update on Syria: Americas Latest Perpetual War

So the US is now locked into yet another drawn out conflict in which they'll eventually lose. My expectation is that the Kurds in Syria will eventually be abandoned by the Americans. Soon if Turkey has it's way and invades the Kurdish occupied areas despite US objections or eventually when ethnic tensions rise to point of open revolt and the area becomes ungovernable.

El Chup would have loved this thread! Glad I did my time in the sandbox when it was kinda(sorta) obvious who the bad guys were. If I just joined the military these days I'd never be able to figure out who the fuck is what over there. But they are about to "earn their money" sooner versus later.

You'd think at some point we (the west) would start learning some lessons and not pull this shit.

Vietnam, Northern Ireland, Iraq, Afghanistan....all intended to bolster national interests, be they strategic or economic, whilst shitting on the rest of the world and bogging down our military personnel in warzones where they (and the locals) pay the price.

I'd love to see a military doctrine that actually classified "defending the nation" as, well, defending the nation and not bullying the middle east out of switching trading currencies or "defeating communism" or otherwise maintaining our interests on foreign soil where we aren't welcome.

Sorry @oldfella1962, I know you're proud of your service and you should be, but we were the bad guys.

I do think it's very possible to still be the best military (which takes incessant training) and do it cheaper than we do and save US military lives in the long run. Will X amount of people in foreign lands still be hammered by their enemies if we are not there? Probably, but you can't solve everyone's problems. In a way "putting the U.S. first" would be better accomplished by training our asses off within our own borders (or borders of NATO nations) because all the money spent on the logistics of going to and operating in the sandbox could be spent on getting better & faster.

Granted if a sandbox deployment is absolutely essential to our interests that is a different story. But we need to reduce our sandbox footprint no doubt about it.

You are the bad guys.

whatever - blame the US taxpayers for enabling me all those years! That's how I chose to make my living.
Perhaps your job is guarding the gold at the end of the rainbow, I don't know.

I think his point is that during Iraq/Afghanistan the coalition forces were the aggressors. There was no threat, no justification and the purpose was not freedom, defending democracy or any other such noble sounding ideal. It was intimidation of regimes that would dare to consider trading in anything but the dollar. Saying you were the bad guys (I'd say we) is actually pretty accurate, those coalition had no right to be there and got away with it by virtue of knowing how far we could push things knowing the rest of the world would be wary of trying to hold us to account.

I've got a lot of sympathy for those who lost their lives but frankly I'd rate every single Iraqi life as being every bit as tragic as the US and the UK ones, because none of them deserved to die on either side. It was a purely economic and political decision to invade, not a moral or necessary one. Those "sandbox" people you were exchanging bullets with were doing no more or less than you'd have done if Russia and China had formed a coalition and occupied the US mainland, resisting the invader.

And yes, I do feel some pretty similar sentiments about Northern Ireland, a whole lot of lives could have been saved and a whole lot of hate not been entrenched if we'd tried a lot harder a lot sooner to find a peaceful solution to our ancestor's mistakes.

I've got no special love for the US military, but this entire thread reeks of hippy dippy anti-American bullshit.

FTFY

Yeah, Archer wasn't quite the same when the Feds raided the office and made the gang stooges of the CIA in season 5.


Oh, wait. The other ISIS.

Were they actually fighting a defensive war in Iraq all along?

I miss Isis too.

This one?

The whole war likely could have been avoided if April Glaspie, the US Ambassador to Iraq hadn't stated that the American government had no opinion on Arab-Arab conflicts in response to Iraqi complaints about Kuwait. Despite that and some laughable propaganda from the US about Iraqi soldiers tossing incubator babies into the streets I'd argue that the US and participating allies were in the moral right enforcing the sovereignty of Kuwait during the first gulf war.

Well yeah the entire country lost it's fucking mind after the world trade center attacks. Anyone not living under a rock would be opposed to the American empire at this point.

Yeah, the Taliban were a cool bunch of guys. ISIS and Saddam too. I bet if you asked all those Afghan and Syrian and Iraqi refugees, they'd tell you how much they miss getting gangraped and watching their families being executed or "disappeared." Malala probably wishes the Taliban had never been overtgrown, they'd have been able to shoot her in the head so much sooner.

"How dare those Americans occupy part of Syria! Why don't they let Assad take over that area? Or ISIS? Those American monsters! "

You've gotta be fucking kidding me.

HA! I'm imagine Frank Reynolds saying that over his loudspeaker in your avatar! Frank is awesome!

day-um!

Oh please, seriously?

You seriously believe that's why the coalition attacked, because Saddam was a nasty man and they wanted to make the middle east a nicer place? If they did it was a bit of a spectacular failure considering how much more dangerous it became as a consequence.

ISIS only exist because of the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan destabilising the region, Saddam and OBL only existed because of previous US interventions, they were both funded by US money and were happily tolerated as long as they towed the line. Saddam had stopped being useful and was cooperating with the OPEC deal to transition oil transactions into gold. Bin Laden had stopped being useful when he branched out on his own after the Russians he was paid to harass had left.

Let's not go playing the silly game of pretending we actually believe this was about anything other then furthering our own interests at the expense of the people of those countries.

I didn't go to the first "blink and miss it" Iraq/Kuwait war. Our unit was on the list to go, but the weekend/war was over before you knew it! Always a bridesmaid, never a bride!
Years later (just before retirement) I went to Iraq 2.0 in 2003 which was...... for a lot of people all the way around. But I did get to stay in a Holiday Inn Express!

Sorry but this post completely ignores the undeniable fact that there are elements of Islam that are actively looking to oppress, imprison, murder and rape others. That tribalist mentality they have has existed for longer than you and i have been around

It isn’t westerners that ISIS and other Muslim factions are killing by the boatload, it’s other muslims

American militarism may be necessary to keep the armed forces ready for bigger conflicts with China and Russia. Sorry, that’s just how it is.

I totally agree experience counts! Practice, training, testing tactics & equipment, etc. is extremely important. That said is it possible to do it right here at home? Can we make it as realistic as possible while doing it cheaper and more effectively? The US has a tremendous variety of terrain and climates and so on. I have no doubt it can be done.

As have Christians for just as long if not longer (after all the British Empire which was essentially ended by the 14 - 18 war was arguably every bit as bad as Saddam's regime), but that's a strawman response and I expect better from you.

I didn't say the middle east would be problem free if it weren't for western interventions, I said ISIS wouldn't exist if it weren't for the Iraq/Afghanistan invasions, you're generalising my point far further than I intended or typed.

Those invasions were illegal, they were immoral and they were self motivated. The coalition wasn't there saving the populations from oppression, we were furthering our own interests. The Taliban may have been awful but to generalise Muslims as being degenerate is to completely ignore the massive cultural and intellectual contributions Islam has made to our societies and how much Christianity has at times held us back, but again that's outside the remit of my point here.

Let's not pretend the US and UK forces had any legitimate cause to be on Iraqi soil, the whole WMD's debacle only happened because the case for the war wasn't strong enough to pass muster in the court of public opinion without creating an imaginary threat - much less in an actual court of law.

Let's not pretend that the US has been giving any priority to opposing ISIS.
They have been allied with those who help ISIS (Saudi Arabia, Turkey) and opposed to those who are fighting them (PKK, Iran, Assad). This is - as usual - about geostrategic ambition.

Sorry, are you suggesting America (or anyone) should be aligned with Assad? The child gassing optometrist?

Of course not. But if the only way that you can come up with for not aligning with Assad is to align with those that are just as bad, best just stay the fuck out of it.

I'm sure the civilians being murdered by violent muslim groups in 2018 fully appreciate that Christians used to be violent too. It's probably a great relief to them.

You're not talking to Dinner here. No one is generalizing all Muslims. It's not unfair to point out that the Taliban, IS, and all sorts of other violent groups claim to be inspired by Islam, especially while pointing out that their primary victims are other muslims.

Whats especially patronizing is to claim that the only reason violent muslim groups exist is because of Western interference, as though Muslims are simply passive victims acting out what they've been taught by evil foreigners. You're treating them like children.

So your great solution is to watch Assad gas children while doing nothing? To watch the Yazidis get raped and murdered out of existence while doing absolutely nothing?