Monday, May 25, 2015

At What Cost? For Whose Benefit?


Boots at Fort Hood represent lives lost in Afghanistan and Iraq.

They should add a colostomy bag, wheel chair, prosthetic, or pill bottle for all those wounded.  

And pictures of all the schools not built and roads and bridges not repaired in this country because of cash we wasted overseas.

And for what?

People who are not grateful, will not fight for themselves, and who embrace the 7th Century and all it has to offer.

What leadership got us here?

11 comments:

Ruth Hansell said...

Thanks for this post, I love it.

Jeff T. said...

Are you naive? Our job in Afghanistan (and it will continue) is to secure the Pakistani nukes- period. This is the will of our neocon masters... as is the chaos wrought by our various wars over there and our future war with Iran. The United States is their golem...

Dog Man said...

Long story short the WORLD ( ie. UNITED NATIONS )
Should have bombed the taliban back to the stone age when they started to use tank artillery to destroy world heritage sites ( as Isis is doing).
Since Clinton and the UN
Chose NOT to destroy the Taliban THEN, we have the current malaise.
Make no mistake, after 911 we SHOULD have invaded afgan territory, but we should have just destroyed the place and left it. THEY ARE. NOT WORTH ONE AMERICAN SOLDIER, sorry, but they need to be wiped out. TOUGH to say that, but true.
The ash heap of history has plenty of room left for the Taliban, Isis, and Afgan politics.What are we waiting for?

PBurns said...

Pretty hard to bomb people "back to the stone age" when they already live in caves and ARE in the stone age. As for "world heritage" sites, they are not our heritage and if they want to destroy them, they can go ahead. We have pictures, casts, movies, measurements. They will have nothing; no past and no future. They will bomb themselves back into the stone age -- or the people themselves can rise up and intervene. Not our job.

Jeff T. said...

Thank you for that Pat- well put! As far as us invading Afghanistan as the other Jeff fantasizes- WE DID! WE got our asses handed back to us! By 20,000 rag-a-tag Stone Age farmers with AKs! Bombing has NEVER won a war- and bombing along with the kind of fake fighting we do has never won a war since WW2- well- except for Grenada, Panama and Iraq One kind of. We are not the Germans, we are not the Russians or the Vietnamese and we are nothing like suicidal Islamic crazies- we are not as hardcore as we think! If we ever fight an actual opponent with actual weapons we will run squealing from the battlefield- we can't actually take casualties- not in the DNA!

Jeff T. said...

BTW- I mean no disrespect to the little people in our military- they are as brave and self-sacrificing as anyone else- I despise however our military industrial war complex and its leaders- they are the cowards...

Dan said...

Somewhere right now, very likely in a lab in China, someone will be working on a solution to the Middle East problem. That solution is a simple, effective and very cheap way of letting people determine the sex of their offspring ahead of time.

Large parts of the middle east use a dowry-based arranged marriage system. Girls come with a dowry, and move from their home family to another one (this is also why this same culture is so fond of marrying remote cousins to each other; keeps the dowry in the same extended family). Thus, on purely financial grounds, boys are valued over girls.

Give them the means to choose the sex of their children, and they'll mostly choose boys. Were it the other way around and the society would survive, but when most of one generation is male a society is doomed. Believe me here, this biotech poisoned chalice is being researched right now as we speak.

Dog Man said...

Seem to forget the concepts of retribution, revenge or whatever you would call wiping out,as we did, the Taliban for their role in 911. What I SAID was we did the job and should have just left them to their fate.
Yes Mr. Burns it is our history, the history of the human race, and belongs to us, not to a bunch of rabble that uses rocks as personal tools.I am fairly comfortable with whatever I opine on, generally , while open to information of relevance.
It is my opinion if we had destroyed the Taliban earlier we would have been better off , but since it never happened it has to remain an opinion or conjecture. JUST so Mr. Thurston understands the difference between conjecture and fantasy.

Jeff T. said...

Wiping out a native insurgency has been a Western fantasy since WW2. Killing lots of natives simply doesn't work as we proved in Vietnam- killing more becomes self- defeating and obviously criminal. Even that doesn't work- witness the Germans in the USSR in WW2. The only thing that has worked (sort of) has been to buy off a large segment of the population and "reform" the insurgents. Hence the British successes (kind of) in Kenya and Malaysia. Hubris and criminal stupidity have prevented the USA from pulling this off- and in real life the low level war actually helps those who profit- the military, politicians, Israel, and war profiteers.

PBurns said...

My neighbor worked for a friendly foreign intelligence service. Wonderful guy and I liked him a lot. He was, ostensibly, the "economics officer" at his embassy. Whatever. We had a nice conversation about an older group of terrorists that used to do harm and create turmoil in his civilized European country. They seemed to have disappeared. What happened to them? "Oh, we brought them inside the government and gave them responsibility for the problems... and the solutions." Bingo. Did I tell you this guy was brilliant and charming? True! My best neighbors ever!

Spanky69 said...

Patrick,

The British solution to the IRA (which I am assuming your economics neighbour was talking about) has limited application in the Middle East/Afghanistan, due to the fanatical nature of the players.

In addition, there are still plenty for whom 'The Troubles' are not over.