Nuklear bomb

[AndyJWest]

Given your endless analysis of politics as war, or potential war, between nations over finite resources, I'm beginning to wonder whether my earlier rejection on your parallels with the 1930s was unjustified. Nothing in your analysis even contemplates that US foreign policy could have been wrong. The 'sleeping giant' (that incidentally had been awake enough to impose sanctions on Japan) once aroused can stomp around the Pacific putting the world to order, without any need to consider the consequences. This reminds me of nothing so much as a Godzilla movie, where abstract monsters engage in physically-implausible combat, and a victor emerges by throwing his enemies to a painful death, or by frying them with some unlikely death-ray. Sadly, this denial of the humanity of ones opponents, and assertion that oneself possesses superhuman powers, is all too familiar to students of 20th century history. Are you actually incapable of believing, even as an abstract proposition, that US foreign policy might be mistaken?

[Splitter]

Originally Posted by AndyJWest

Given your endless analysis of politics as war, or potential war, between nations over finite resources, I'm beginning to wonder whether my earlier rejection on your parallels with the 1930s was unjustified. Nothing in your analysis even contemplates that US foreign policy could have been wrong. The 'sleeping giant' (that incidentally had been awake enough to impose sanctions on Japan) once aroused can stomp around the Pacific putting the world to order, without any need to consider the consequences. This reminds me of nothing so much as a Godzilla movie, where abstract monsters engage in physically-implausible combat, and a victor emerges by throwing his enemies to a painful death, or by frying them with some unlikely death-ray. Sadly, this denial of the humanity of ones opponents, and assertion that oneself possesses superhuman powers, is all too familiar to students of 20th century history. Are you actually incapable of believing, even as an abstract proposition, that US foreign policy might be mistaken?

Ok, so you tell me, how did the big bad US start WWII?

It would be nice if everyone in the world was peaceful and reasonable and there were no wars. Since we have been keeping track, and it's been a few thousand years, it hasn't worked out that way.

As for foreign policy, I will say that I do not think our motives have been sinister in the last half of the previous century and the first part of this one. If opposing communism was wrong in your eyes, well then I don't know what to tell you. Were poor decisions ever made? Sure. Vietnam is a good example of a questionable war, fought for the right reasons without the will to win.

If taking out a dictator that gasses his own people (using WMD's btw, just sayin'), threatens his neighbors, and gives money to terrorists, then we're guilty. A poor decision to stick around and rebuild the country? Yep, in my opinion. An even poorer decision to get involved in a ground war in Afghanistan to try to deny terrorists a base of operations? I would say yes and a bunch of former citizens of the Soviet Union would probably agree.

Don't confuse poor decisions with sinister motives.

Of course one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, right? lol

In WWII when we stomped (slogged is more like it), we didn't slog alone. We were but one part of a much larger effort.

Are you incapable, even in the abstract, of believing that the US is not the bad guy at every junction in recent history?

The real difference between our viewpoints is that you think war is avoidable while I think some wars are unavoidable and still others need to be fought to prevent worse evils. I also think that when a nation decides to go to war, it needs to do so with the intent and will to win. Anything short of that risks defeat, and worse, prolonging the conflict which causes even higher casualties.

So yes, war is a part of politics. Or at least it has been to this point in human history.

Splitter

[AndyJWest]

Ok, so you tell me, how did the big bad US start WWII?

It didn't. It was started by people who saw history exclisively as conflict between nations, and saw themselves as the sole arbiters of what was 'evil'. I'm arguing against the ideology, not the colours of the flag.

Incidentally, I'd be a little wary of making comments about 'giving money to terrorists' given the US involvement in the origins of the Taliban (when they were supposedly 'freedom fighters' opposing Soviet occupation).

So far, you've done nothing to answer my questions. All you've done is insinuate that anyone whe disagrees with you is either (a) morally weak, or (b) just plain evil. A familiar tactic...

[Igo kyu]

A disappointing discussion.

If it's all about keeping the USA in cheap oil (already much cheaper than it is elsewhere), how much oil is it that Israel exports to the USA?

Nuclear power is available now, as is wind power. These can be as cheap as oil, just not delivered in quite such a piecemeal fashion.

[Splitter]

Andy, I think I have tried to answer your questions. Probably in too much detail lol. But if I missed something let me know.

I will admit that I do find it troubling that nations do not learn from history. It gets a lot of people killed

Splitter

[AndyJWest]

Originally Posted by Splitter

Andy, I think I have tried to answer your questions. Probably in too much detail lol. But if I missed something let me know.

I will admit that I do find it troubling that nations do not learn from history. It gets a lot of people killed

Splitter

Actually, it is people that need to learn from history. And one of the lessons that need to be learned is that nationalism is one of the things that gets people killed.

[Blackdog_kt]

Actually, i think i'm in the sad position to say that US and Israel policies pose a much bigger risk to my country than the Arab world and have been so for a few decades. In a recent visit by the Israeli PM to Athens, among the issues discussed was a possible attack against Iran. Our "genius" of a PM is supposedly sympathetic to the proposed plan. So, 6 months from now 100 IAF aircraft will stage through Greece and Bulgaria to Georgia, where from they will strike against Iran.

What does this accomplish for the debt-ridden state of Greece? It cuts us off from states like France who have been the most supportive towards our troubles (financial and territorial), severes any and all ties with Russia and China which have at times served valuably as a counter-balance against our allies screwing us over, leaves us to the mercy of the US since this will probably be an operation that's not officially sanctioned by them and most of all, it infuriates the entire of the Arab world into backing Turkey in its territorial claims against Greece.

Israel gets what it wants, which is nuclear monopoly in the middle east, the US gets someone else to look bad by doing the dirty work and we get royally shafted every which way imaginable. So, since we're deep in debt and can't support military expenses for defensive posturing to prevent a war, our government starts negotiating and cedes half of our mineral wealth in the Aegean sea to neighboring states, wealth that could have been used to gradually pull us out and away from the financial crisis. Not to mention the influx of mulsim immigrants from the middle east who get trapped in Greece while waiting for political asylum applications to get approved, living in squalor in the streets of the capital or in detention centers in various islands. That's a prime pool for an islamic militant group to recruit from and thank God, we have many in the Balkans thanks to the NATO interventions in Yugoslavia (more on this later).

Essentially, going into this leaves us with all the baggage of a war that's not our business to wage and none of the benefits. Excuse me for saying so, but it feels like i'm being dragged in to clean someone else's dirty poop

I think Iran wants nukes mostly for posturing and it's an iron-grip state. I'm more concerned with Pakistan's nukes, a supposedly US-friendly state where the local secret service actively plays taliban and US agencies against each other at their whim. It's easier for a Pakistani nuke to fall at the hands of a loon than it would be for an Iranian one. It's just that if Iran gets nukes, Isreal won't be able to unilateraly bomb whoever they want anymore, or violate already agreed-upon points of peace negotiations by sending settlers to occupy arab settlements, or blockade the civilians of Gaza until they have no food and water, etc etc. That's what all the fuss is about really, nuclear monopoly equals impunity.

Someone mentioned the Kosovo war a few pages back. Well, the Kosovo war was not a case of "A invades B, let's go help B", but a case of "breakaway province in a state we consider Russia's lapdog in the soft spot of Europe, let's help it break away and weaken Russia's friends, mess up the possibility of an EU-Russia fuel deal for a few years and show those weaklings in Europe how it's done and why they need us, by flying 2/3 of the sorties ourselves in a show of force".
The US parallel would be the hispanic population of Texas taking up arms and asking for independence, the US army stepping in to face the guerrillas and an outside force bombing the civilian infrastructure of the entire US to force them to retreat, because they can't find the US army to bomb. All of you know about the mass graves or the allegations about them, but what most of you don't know is that it wasn't as one sided as CNN and the rest of the media made it out to be.

Funnily enough, when Russia did a somewhat similar thing with their invasion of Georgia, all of our countries were up in arms. And the reason i say "somewhat similar" and not "same" is that while Russia did in fact attack a sovereign state friendly to the west to help two break-away provinces gain independence (just as NATO did in the Kosovo war to harm a state with Russian ties), Russia also afforded a few points of "moral legalization" in the entire affair that NATO's wars have lacked altogether: 1) There were indigenous Russian citizens dying in the provinces in question, while there were never any NATO-member citizens in the middle east or the balkans before NATO send troops there
2) There was a clear ultimatum in the sense of " you have 2 days to stop shelling residential areas" and none of the usual "our hands are tied by the other side/we will liberate this and this" rhetoric that goes hand in hand with the euphemism and shifting of blame so prevalent in our wars.
3) Russia is a country that has never been afraid to put troops in harm's way. This way their military casualties are bigger, but overall the gain is substantial. Instead of prortacted bombing campaigns and calling in air support or an overkill amount of firepower to swat a mosquito on the wall that result in high civilian casualties and susbequent resentment from the local population, they send their footsoldiers first. A soldier can be killed, but he can also discriminate much better between a car and an APC from a distance of 100-200m, select an appropriate weapon and minimize civilian death, than can a camera mounted on a jet that's travelling at mach 0.8 and the smallest thing it has available is a 250kg HE bomb. They went in, did what they wanted to do in a week, and got out, minimizing the chance of protracted conflict and civilian death. If we were to talk about guts and why we lack them in the west, it wouldn't be because of not going to war, we go to a lot of them...it would be because we're too chicken to fight in a way like this that gives the moral high ground, putting the troops in harms way to prevent loss of life to non-combatants.

In the end, Kosovo was the culmination of the interventions in former Yugoslavia. What did these interventions accomplish? They created homogenous tracts of land to be inhabited by muslim populations in the soft underbelly of Europe. And while American flags soared high on many an occasion in Pristina or Sarajevo due to the instrumental role of the US in forming these state/political entitities, the bombing attacks in London and Madrid that occured a few years back where traced by Interpol agents to Bosnia and Kosovo.

Essentially, under the leadership of the US, NATO created in Europe what NATO is fighting against in the middle east

But instead of rooting out terrorism by making it worthwhile for the locals to support something else (or not have to turn to these groups for provision of basic amenities, which is what usually happens in the middle east), i wouldn't be surprised if 10 years from now NATO bombed into oblivion the balkan states that it bombed into creation 10 years ago. Remember those awful, baby-eating, bad Serbs our media propaganda machine was featuring back then? They've been receiving NATO financial aid to rebuild core portions of their armed forces, as early as 2-4 years ago. What forces? Special, counter-terrorist ones. So, while the western allies press for the recognition of the independence of Kosovo, the silent admission of "we f*ed up" is there in the military cooperation with the "bad guys" whom they bombed in the first place? Why would they cooperate with them? But of course, because they need them to take out the trash if and when the poo-poo hits the fan.

Am i the only one who sees this as a total failure to institute rational policies or even a non-scandalous use of resources (from money to lives)?

"We need to be there and tell people how to run their own country, so let's back A against B under some vague pretext, forget about him, then 10 years from now we'll back B against A because somehow the Russians have come to like A, but B is still holding a grudge against us from way back, so we're trying to find a 4rd party, C, to balance things out, but these guys are cozy with China, so we don't know what to do now but we can always send more troops or use more firepower, even if we don't know the reason why"....and the knee-jerk reactions continue ad-infinitum. There's no sense of schedule or long term planning at all, just a series of isolated brute-force approach incidents, which the instigator easily forgets but the ones on the receiving end remember for decades.

It seems like a black-and-white seesaw where the only possible outcomes are good (this must always coincide with us or our allies) and evil (which applies to whoever disagrees), but it's becoming clear that failure to see gray and recognize motives to the opposition is much of the cause for the failures of western policy as of late.
If we outright denounce the opponent's human nature, we've just shut ourselves off from the whole discussion of "why does he do this? what motivates him? what forces his hand, in case it's not voluntary?", which leads in failure to profile the opposition, or decide on a reasonable course of action. The solution is not simply "more firepower" when millions are willing to die for a cause we don't understand, simply because we're too lazy to study it.

That's why i don't believe for a second that it's about morality, good and evil. There's been so much use of double-standards, back-room dealing and backstabbing, even among allies, that everyone can see what it's about. Certain circles of power operate in the west and mostly within the US. These are not the countries/nations per se nor the fault of said naitons exclusively, they are like parasitic organisms that lve in a host nation/state. What happens is that they back their host so that it can become the biggest bully on the block, then when the time comes to split the spoils of war among the population, the parasites gulp up the majority of it and the cycle starts afresh. That's why your people are dying in a war over imaginary WMDs and real oil, but the access to Iraqi oil fields couldn't prevent the collapse of the economy...there are people who march and mobilize entire nations to kill,maim and steal from each other and split the trophies among themselves while we stand here debating the morality of wars that we'll be forced to fight for them.

[I/ZG52_Gaga]

Hybris!

[Splitter]

As usual Blackdog, well reasoned. I don't agree with some of it, but I understand your logic.

I totally agree with your assessment of how Russia fights: hard and quick (well, except Afghanistan which we all understand is a boondoggle). It's not always pretty, but it is decisive and, over all, saves lives.

I can tell you how the public was talked into Kosovo: It was our liberal media. They started throwing around the word "genocide'.

Why did our liberal media want a war? Because the President they backed was in trouble at home. The war provided a distraction and a way for him to become a hero. Preventing genocide seems honorable, right?

The President was roundly criticized by the conservatives for the way he fought the war. He wouldn't send in ground troops. He preferred to fight the war at 30 thousand feet.

Basically, he was a coward and would not commit forces to get the job done quickly. He was afraid of authorizing actions that would cause American casualties. But hey, he made up for it by passing up opportunities to take out Osama before 9/11 .

It's interesting to look at the which presidents "start wars". People want to call conservatives "Warmongers' but it is often our liberal Democrats who get frisky on the foreign front.

Blackdog, wouldn't it be fair to say that Greece's economic problems resulted from their government/economic system? It seems the government has used entitlements (pensions and other government funded programs) to buy votes and power. They kept handing out money until it ran out...then they handed out more lol.

The US is headed down that same path...the question will be who will bail us out? When we fall, the bail out funds needed will be calculated in trillions of US dollars and no one has that money.

BTW, I do feel sorry for the Palestinians. They are being used as pawns on the international scene. No peace is likely to be negotiated there because "peace" is not in the best interest of those "backing" the Palestinians. If they were suddenly taken out of the equation it would create a huge public relations gap. People would still find reasons to hate Israel, but it would be harder to justify.

Splitter

[Blackdog_kt]

I can't really discriminate between the US political spectrum, as i lack the experience of living there. What it seems like is that each party's presidents fight wars with different justifications and different means. Also, the main difference during the past decade has been the choice of front, with Democrat administrations favoring pro-muslim involvement in the Balkans as a means to curb the pro-Russian nations and Republicans favoring involvement in the middle east.

As for the economic problems in Greece, there's a variety of causes. A big one is nepotism and corruption in the higher echelons. It might be hard to believe, but even with state-run education, health care and pension programms, our debts were non-existent until the early 80s and very manageable until the mid-90s. It was the entry into the Euro-zone that made it very easy to borrow money, coupled with the "usual suspects" who descended on government funds like locusts that brought the situation where it is today. The vast majority of the people being called upon to contribute in limiting the debt had no involvement whatsoever in its creation.

One of the main reasons however is that a nation of 10 million has to sustain a modern military of 100000 just to maintain a credible deterrent and that's still being out-numbered 7 to 10, having to rely on operational planning and geography to ensure parity in the event of a conflict. As a comparison, Germany is a nation of 70 million and they have 200000 military personell. This is done with extensive use of conscription as there are no funds for a 100% professional army and it incurres great debts on society as a whole, not only directly in money but also in affecting the working life of every male in the country, as well as human lives.

Economically speaking, a farmer who's a father of three boys can count on about 3 years of work-hours being lost from the family due to his sons' army obligations and that's with today's reduced terms of 9 and 12 months (dependant on service branch), as terms used to be 18 to 25 months a few years ago.
There's also the cost fuel, maintenance and ammunition for exercises and maneuvers, as well as the fact that our air force is involved in intercepting the air force of another NATO member daily over our islands, the same ones that tourists flock to during the summer. It's not unusual to be having a swim and hear jet engines overhead in the distance.

Since 1976 when these overflights started, the cost of jet fuel alone for these very much operational flights has reached tens or even hundreds of millions of Euros.
And finally, there's operational and training accidents, many times involving conscripts. Also, despite having one of the lowest accident rates even when having such a rigorous schedule, when accidents do happen they seem to happen all at once. In the past month we've lost an Apache helicopter and the crew on a training exercise and a couple of days ago a couple of F-16s operating out of Suda bay AB had a mid-air during a dogfight exercise, one pilot was killed instantly, one survived and the other succumbed yesterday in the hospital. This is all during peace time and only about the air force. Add to that the maintenance of the border lines that also guard against human trafficking and drug smuggling, a job pretty much exclusively undertaken by conscripts, naval operations and international commitments and it starts taking its toll. We don't have combat troops in Afghanistan and we didn't send any to Iraq (we could get out of that since the NATO charter states that an obligation to send troops arises when an attack against another member has originated from that state...Iraq never attacked a NATO state so we managed to skip that), but we still have engineers and medics in Afghanistan and a couple of frigates on the EU anti-piracy mission off Somalia, expensive missions during a time of intense economic crisis where simple people left and right see their hard-worked-for cash and benefits diminish. If these missions provided something of value for the state, the financial cost would be justified. However, the war in Afghanistan mostly serves to send flocks of immigrants bound for Europe and usually stuck in Greece due to legalities. The Somalia mission holds more favor due the abundance of Greek merchant shipping around the world and its more or less internationally sanctioned nature. This is usually a staple of Greek involvement abroad, the public wants to know what it's for, why it happens and under what legal and moral justification. For example, we had troops in international missions as early as the Korean war, but that was also a UN sanctioned campaign. Same with Kosovo, we didn't participate in the campaign but contributed to the peacekeeping force because it was covered under a UN resolution.

This is all to the knowledge of both the US and the EU, as they are our main weapon suppliers. However, as long as we're left to deal with being the "wave breaker" of Europe without a formal statement of support in the event of conflict or guarantee of sovereignity, we can't really cut down on military spending.