BF2S Forums United States War in Iraq -- Can We Afford to Lose?

I like how some communities are building their own private broadband services. Home owners associations pooling resources in order to set up a residential service decreases stress on the overall network and forces large corporations to compete harder. We should be encouraging this.

i mean it’s a replay of vietnam and hosing down a random village for VCs.

anyone could have told you about the futility of that sort of warfare.

It was nice they waited for that Australian woman to be released first.

Killing one person achieves nothing, they're trying to start a war while Trump is still in office.

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15 Years of the SAS in Afghanistan still doesn't compare with an average day for the marines in Iraq, or the IDF in Palestine, or one botched airstrike for the USAF, in terms of innocent civilians blown away.

And unlike the IDF, for the SAS and marines deliberately shooting children in the head or the knee to kill or cripple them isn't part of mainstream military doctrine.

Last edited by Dilbert_X (2020-12-05 17:45:52)

The war in Iraq was a massive mistake but I don't buy into the idea our reputation in the Middle East would be significantly better had we not invaded. The Arabs and more specifically the Iraqis already held a grudge for Desert Storm. The severity of this grudge played was evidenced by 9/11.

America's issues with white supremacists and right wing terrorism is also a lesson that is applicable to our issues with the Islamic world. We agree that American right wingers want a holy war on the liberals/gays/minorities etc. for imagined or insignificant grievances, right? What makes you think Muslims in the 21st century would be immune to the same processes that make our own population extremist against our state? Look at the string of Islamist attacks in France and the Netherlands over cartoons. European Muslim minorities would have found reasons to kill people in their host region even if 9/11, The War in Afghanistan and the War in Iraq didn't happen.

And circling back to the U.S. as a point of comparison, we agree that the social safety net is a mess here and our minorities live in a much more destitute condition than European Muslim minorities. Why haven't American blacks and Hispanics committed to terrorism against the U.S. like the Muslims minority of Europe? Okay, I know "not all European Muslims are terrorist" but mass casualty attacks by U.S. minorities just do not take place at all. So I don't there must be things at work besides "cultural oppression/racism/etc."

And please spare me "you don't know about Islam". I have read a tremendous amount of books about Islam from Muslim authors, took classes on Islamic and Middle Eastern nations, closely followed the Syrian Civil War and Second Iraqi Civil War, and have read the Koran and Hadith. I even know a little bit of Arabic or at least enough to recognize terrorist speech and war terminology. And I do have a great deal of respect for Islam and even it's relationship to violence. I just think it may be a fact that Islam and Christianity cannot coexist in the same spaces. And it is naive to think that western acts in the Middle East in the slim 100ish years since World War 1 is the cause of all of our troubles.

The U.S. and west was in the Middle East before Israel existed. But we were in other places too that doesn't produce terrorism against us. Mexicans aren't traveling to Spain to commit terrorism. Indians don't try to kill British people. The Japanese are as interested in our culture and stuff as we are of them. In fact I would say that until very recently western culture, wealth, and goods were things other civilizations aspired to. The Chinese love French, Italian, and German products. If the CCP stopped censorship of China's media, the Chinese would probably become way more interested in our media than we will ever become of them. Why is the Islamic world the only place that looks at anything western with such intense derision?

uziq wrote:

mexico and india have both achieved independence from their colonial rulers. both are hugely complex cases, india in particular, wherein the new form of government is neo-colonial and in many ways casts itself in an imagined space similar to a british or german state. a large bureaucratic-intelligentsia class was leftover in india from british schooling systems and administrative posts, which has helped it to pivot to its own 'anglo-american' style of democracy.

why would indians still want to bomb british people, in that context? why would mexicans want to carry out terror attacks on the US, one of its main trading partners and a huge economy ally? what is the motivation?

these comparisons come off as mostly bizarre. the middle-east is still far more affected by outside actors and world geopolitics than mexico or india.

Most of the 9/11 attackers were from Saudi Arabia an independent state never colonized but instead widely supported by the west. The Boston bombers were Chechen refugees. The west had no role in the troubles from there. Mexican children are in cages at the border. Where are the Mexican terrorist attacks for that?

uziq wrote:

i mean, the comparison seems too wild and vague to be of any use. the relation of mexico and the US and the relation (perceived or real) between the West and islamic extremism are nothing alike. it would be way more useful and profitable to just analyse the phenomenon of islamic extremism directly rather than to constantly shed light on it from mexico or india or whatever.

some key events in the middle-east that have given the current geopolitical situation its shape, all more or less roundabout 1979 and the 1980s: the iranian revolution most obviously; the attack in saudi arabia on the mosque at mecca; a sunni insurgency in syria; pakistan's executing ali bhutto and the ascendancy of zia-ul-haq; the invasion of afghanistan by the soviet union.

and then of course, more directly, america's involvement with israel, the gulf wars and continued conflict with iran.

all of those events brought western powers into the middle-eastern theatre and set-up several long lines of alternating affiliation/resentment. you can't get at any of that stuff by talking about mexico and undocumented migrants.

I don't think comparisons between violence in the Middle East and Latin America is actually too wild. Both places have regional troubles and insurgencies. And the U.S. is deep into issues going on in Mexico and Colombia. Latin American sometimes export their violence to the U.S. in the forms of drug trade violence but the communist insurgencies in Colombia, and Peru aren't pulling off mass casualty attacks in San Antonio in order to get the DEA to leave their countries. Cubans are an interesting case and not unlike Algerian refugees that went to France. Why are the grandchildren of Cuban refugees flag waving Republicans meanwhile the grandchildren of Algerians are the ones shooting theaters full of people?

Last time I said something like "not that you'd know it from the coverage" here, I got lambasted for not "reading the right coverage," or "you must think all coverage is the same from your isolated little corner of the web," in spite of my having been aware of the issue (obviously picking it up somewhere) anyway.

But yeah, just "india strike" on a search engine alone brings up football on majority first page results for me. I guess that must mean I think nobody in the world cares about the India strike …

Actually I wouldn't be surprised to learn that many aren't aware of it!

Yes, thank you Israel for trolling us into attacking Iraq.

More cringe than a deflating swimming pool.