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Originally Posted by swiss
It's quite refreshing to see the US government still doesn't.
Afghanistan is another success story...
How tf did they think they win? If you're not fighting an army it's going to be though to win - they hide all over the planet.
Btw, do you know "The Sorcerer's Apprentice"? No the movie, the poem by Goethe?
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The Shah went out of power somewhere around 1978 if I remember correctly. I think the US started backing him in the 50's because they saw him as a secular leader as opposed to a religious extremist. Good thought...really bad dude though lol. What dictator is not?
By the time the Iran-Iraq war kicked up, it was the Ayatollah vs. Saddam though and we backed Iraq. Reagan (or Carter for that matter) actually COULD have bombed Iran and gotten away with it domestically....the people were that angry. And I am not talking about taking out a few buildings, I am talking about wave upon wave of B-52's carpet bombing Tehran. A popular song at the time was "Bomb Iran" to the tune of the Beach Boy's "Barbara Anne" lol.
There is a way to win in Afghanistan, just not the one we are pursuing. "Eliminating" the poppy crops and sealing off the country would work as far as eliminating it as a resource for the terrorists. The key in Afghanistan is that the people are not willing to fight for their freedom. It's a cultural thing in that they change sides on a whim.
Of course, if we cut the country off the people would suffer. So we won't. We won't throw enough troops in to seal off the borders either because that would further erode the US President's support amongst his own party. Like Johnson, Obama is fighting the war from the middle. He can't cut and run because it would ruin him in the eyes of the people and he can't fight to win because it would ruin him within his party. Earlier this year the military requested 70K additional troops, they got 40K I think. So there ya go.
Our bombs are better now
. But some still miss. Worse yet, sometimes the intel used to choose targets is faulty. Civilians still die, just not in anywhere near the numbers they have in the past. Now, though, cameras are everywhere. One death gets publicity. People hate seeing dead civilians on the evening news (ok, on Youtube because no one watches the news anymore lol). We are even less tolerant of collateral damage (dead civilians) than we have been in the past.
I only remember the Sorcerer's Apprentice from school and I probably just skimmed it then
. I just remember the moral being something like "don't bite off more than you can chew"...but hey, I was probably more worried about cheerleaders than literature so I could have gotten it all wrong
. If I am remembering it correctly it does pertain to world politics and war. Don't mess around when you don't know what you are doing and be careful that your "fixes" don't cause even more damage. Close?
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