Iraq

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Originally Posted by Diff-chan

Fuck, Dick has an op-ed in the WSJ (of course) with his daughter on Iraq and how Obummer has screwed up everything up in Iraq. Think about that. Dick Cheney lecturing everyone on Iraq.

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Megyn Kelly of all people even does a double take.
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/megyn-kel...m_medium=email

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Originally Posted by Drewbacca

This is a very white-guy thing to say. You're coming from the perspective that any of these people have the privilege to fight back in some meaningful way.

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LOL. Really? You telling me I'm wrong with my observation? I read the news and see what goes on over there. Using your rationale, then there's no way the insurgents could be successful against a very powerful US military. History has taught us that where there's a will there's a way. That simple. That's been the foundation of any significant revolution that lead to change (see the founding of the US, the removal of a monarchy in France, etc.)

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Originally Posted by Type Ryan

LOL. Really? You telling me I'm wrong with my observation? I read the news and see what goes on over there. Using your rationale, then there's no way the insurgents could be successful against a very powerful US military. History has taught us that where there's a will there's a way. That simple. That's been the foundation of any significant revolution that lead to change (see the founding of the US, the removal of a monarchy in France, etc.)

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I agree with you for the most part though I don't know how successful you really could consider the insurgency against the US military. We play by rules for the most part so that allowed the insurgency to exist and be able to make strikes against US forces but they paid a heavy price for doing it. When things got too out of hand the US wasn't above kicking some serious ass (look at Fallujah). You can even go back to Vietnam (a similar war in the fact that a lot of opposition wasn't true uniformed military) and say the same thing. The Communist forces took a heavy toll for their success and rarely if ever achieved true significant military victories. Had the US stayed in Vietnam for a little while longer, the communists probably would've ran out of men of fighting age to throw into the fight (I read something like 1 in 5 people lost their lives during the war). I'm not saying that would've been the right thing for us to do but if push came to shove, no force in the world is going to top the US military, at least since the Soviet Union fell.

I honestly believe that if the US wanted to "fix" Iraq, the only option that would've worked in the long term would be to conquer the country and annex it as a US territory. This would've been wrong for so many reasons but our other approach clearly didn't work. The only true way to fight ideas with bullets is if you kill everyone who holds the ideas you're trying to combat. We obviously can't do this.

Iraq may still work out to be a better country than what we left it but there will probably be a lot of bloodshed in the process. DiffX is right in pointing out that a group like ISIS can only exist and gain success is because the government they're fighting against breeds this opposition in itself. Radical Islam is able to take hold in these regions because of the thousands of years of history that has shaped the culture there and because of a lack of better alternatives.

A lot of people died in the American Civil War and the after effects took decades to be resolved (as much as they could be anyhow). For the most part, the rest of the world stayed out of it. Why should the United States, the Western World, and The United Nations be allowed to say what direction other country's civil wars should go?

Some serious cherry picking in this thread.

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Originally Posted by sleeve

#StoneLives

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Tweet that to him.

So what's the real deal with the chemical weapons plant?

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Originally Posted by Rumpy

Megyn Kelly of all people even does a double take.
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/megyn-kel...m_medium=email

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Anyone who gives any fucks about what Dick Cheney says is an ass. The man is as big a shitbag of filth as American politics has ever produced. He's also one of its biggest hypocrites.

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Originally Posted by Douchebag Dick at the Soref Symposium in 1991

I think that the proposition of going to Baghdad is also fallacious. I think if we were going to remove Saddam Hussein we would have had to go all the way to Baghdad, we would have to commit a lot of force because I do not believe he would wait in the Presidential Palace for us to arrive. I think we'd have had to hunt him down. And once we'd done that and we'd gotten rid of Saddam Hussein and his government, then we'd have had to put another government in its place.What kind of government? Should it be a Sunni government or Shi'i government or a Kurdish government or Ba'athist regime? Or maybe we want to bring in some of the Islamic fundamentalists? How long would we have had to stay in Baghdad to keep that government in place? What would happen to the government once U.S. forces withdrew? How many casualties should the United States accept in that effort to try to create clarity and stability in a situation that is inherently unstable?

I think it is vitally important for a President to know when to use military force. I think it is also very important for him to know when not to commit U.S. military force. And it's my view that the President got it right both times, that it would have been a mistake for us to get bogged down in the quagmire inside Iraq.

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Sometimes I think that maybe the reason there are still so many piss-ant dictatorships and failed states is precisely because the stronger nations of the world have stopped conquering them.
It just isn't natural for a weak and corrupt country to survive.

We all decided that was evil after the nazis.

Or, we changed the approach and branding of said activities.

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Originally Posted by kedawa

Sometimes I think that maybe the reason there are still so many piss-ant dictatorships and failed states is precisely because the stronger nations of the world have stopped conquering them.
It just isn't natural for a weak and corrupt country to survive.

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The US has supported dozens of those pissant dictatorships since WW2. Dozens of them.

Well you don't want them getting cozy with the reds, do you?