[General Battuta]

We face the threat we do today because of our own meddling in the past.

I'm gonna call bull**** on this.  If this were true, Europe would be a crater and the rest of us would be speaking German.  Everyone has to take responsibility for they're own actions.  It's easy to say, "IT'S ALL THEY'RE FAULT!", when in fact the reason that most of these countries are **** holes is because the populace won't stand up and take responsibility for themselves.  And when we try to give them the opportunity, they hate us for it.

IMO, I don't care any more.  They want to rape, murder and kill each other over centuries old grieveances between to sultans who got drunk, fine.  Just leave me and mine out of it.

Um, that has very little to do with my point.

In fact I think you made a point which I didn't make. Apparently you took my point and substituted your own.

[Aardwolf]

We face the threat we do today because of our own meddling in the past.

I'm gonna call bull**** on this.  If this were true, Europe would be a crater and the rest of us would be speaking German.  Everyone has to take responsibility for they're own actions.  It's easy to say, "IT'S ALL THEY'RE FAULT!", when in fact the reason that most of these countries are **** holes is because the populace won't stand up and take responsibility for themselves.  And when we try to give them the opportunity, they hate us for it.

IMO, I don't care any more.  They want to rape, murder and kill each other over centuries old grieveances between to sultans who got drunk, fine.  Just leave me and mine out of it.

Uh, no. He's talking about the CIA overthrowing dictators in the middle east to put their own dictators in.

[General Battuta]

Yep, that and us funding bin Laden against the Soviets.

We reap what we sow. Which is why our good actions overseas (shutting down the Nazis, helping out tsunami victims) have earned us endless goodwill and gratitude, and done far more for us than our clumsy attempts to turn things our way by force.

Seriously, let me pick that apart a little more:

We face the threat we do today because of our own meddling in the past.

I'm gonna call bull**** on this.

Funny, you then go on to agree with me.

If this were true, Europe would be a crater and the rest of us would be speaking German.

No? WWII happened because the Allies ****ed up the ending to WWI. We then had to face the consequences, and fortunately we handled them better the second time around: we helped rebuild Germany and Japan and made them our friends.

Everyone has to take responsibility for they're own actions.

Exactly what I'm arguing here: we are facing the consequences of our actions.

It's easy to say, "IT'S ALL THEY'RE FAULT!", when in fact the reason that most of these countries are **** holes is because the populace won't stand up and take responsibility for themselves.

What countries? Aren't all the 'freedom fighters' and rebels and terrorists standing up and taking responsibility for what happens to them?

Oh yeah, they are. They all scream about how they want the US to get the **** out. In fact the big grievance bin Laden always yelled about was the presence of US troops on 'Arab soil'. Trace his lineage back and the whole Islamist movement emerged as a reaction to the European domination of Arab land.

Which is not to say it's right - it's wrong and evil - but it means that we have to understand that acting the same way we did in the past will create further monsters like bin Laden.

IMO, I don't care any more.  They want to rape, murder and kill each other over centuries old grieveances between to sultans who got drunk, fine.  Just leave me and mine out of it.

They want to rape, murder, and kill YOU over what they see as something YOU did to them very recently. Which is why we end up having to kill them back. We just need to find much better ways to do it - ways that do not repeat the mistakes that created these very monsters in the first place.

Thus why killing 34 innocent people for every 1 bad guy we get is just going to get us more bad guys in the long run. If you read any AARs from Afghanistan you'd know that's how these guys recruit new hajjis.

It's no coincidence that the most successful units in Iraq and Afghanistan are the ones who stopped using heavy firepower to suppress targets and 'went native', working closely with natives they'd befriended. That's what SpecOps units have been doing and it's what almost worked for us in Vietnam too. History pays off, and if you bothered to talk to our soldiers abroad or read what I have to say, you'd know that.

We can't ignore what happens overseas, because if we **** up over there, it comes over here and bites us in the ass.

Not that you'll read or respond to any of this, but whatever.

[Nuclear1]

We face the threat we do today because of our own meddling in the past.

I'm gonna call bull**** on this.  If this were true, Europe would be a crater and the rest of us would be speaking German.  Everyone has to take responsibility for they're own actions.  It's easy to say, "IT'S ALL THEY'RE FAULT!", when in fact the reason that most of these countries are **** holes is because the populace won't stand up and take responsibility for themselves.  And when we try to give them the opportunity, they hate us for it.

No one brought up World War II, and it wasn't what we were talking about.  How about a couple of examples from what we were talking about:

By upholding dictatorships in Egypt and Saudi Arabia for our own political and economic benefit, and unquestioningly supporting rapid expansion of Israeli settlements at the expense of innocent Arabs who did nothing wrong other than live in the wrong place, we outright guarantee whole generations of terrorists to hate us and the West.  

We overthrew a democratically-elected government in Iran and installed the Shah, guaranteeing that after the 1979 Revolution, Iranians would despise us.  Which in turn leads to us supplying Saddam's Iraq with weapons to use against the Iranians in the second-longest and one of the costliest conventional wars of the 20th century.

Our commitment to overthrow the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 80s by arming the mujahideen worked great militarily...until we completely abandoned the country and left it in shambles, allowing the Taliban to swiftly come into power and install an Islamic dictatorship in the power void.

So let me translate that for you:  a man who we trained in guerrilla warfare and then told to screw off when he came to defend his homeland used the weapons we gave him during the war to execute devastating terrorist attacks against the US over the course of a decade, and took refuge in a country we left devastated after our proxy-war with Soviets.  So we just spent the last eight years fighting a war we never should have fought, had we made half-intelligent decisions starting 20 years beforehand.

SHORT AND SIMPLE:  Despite what Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh tell you, our meddling resulted in 9/11[/i].  We were stupid and disregarding of the long-term consequences of our actions in the Middle East, and innocent people paid the price for it.

But since you want to cherry-pick moments in American history to try to overshadow the times we ****ed up, that's fine too!  Just ignore us doing anything wrong!  We shouldn't have to fix it or anything!

IMO, I don't care any more.

Then for the love of Christ, stop with the goddamn drive-by posting and trolling!  

[General Battuta]

+1 for all that. And it doesn't mean that the terrorists aren't evil and whatnot - so don't you dare construe it as saying that, Liberator, nobody is arguing that they're justified - it just means we also need to be aware of the consequences of our own power. Great responsibility and all that.

And let me just quote this for great justice to make sure it gets read:

Our commitment to overthrow the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 80s by arming the mujahideen worked great militarily...until we completely abandoned the country and left it in shambles, allowing the Taliban to swiftly come into power and install an Islamic dictatorship in the power void.

So let me translate that for you:  a man who we trained in guerrilla warfare and then told to screw off when he came to defend his homeland used the weapons we gave him during the war to execute devastating terrorist attacks against the US over the course of a decade, and took refuge in a country we left devastated after our proxy-war with Soviets.  So we just spent the last eight years fighting a war we never should have fought, had we made half-intelligent decisions starting 20 years beforehand.

This is completely true. It does not mean the suicide terrorists who attacked us on our own soil are not horrible people. It just means we had a hand in creating and enabling them.

We've got to play it smart.

[StarSlayer]

+1 for all that. And it doesn't mean that the terrorists aren't evil and whatnot - so don't you dare construe it as saying that, Liberator, nobody is arguing that they're justified - it just means we also need to be aware of the consequences of our own power. Great responsibility and all that.

And let me just quote this for great justice to make sure it gets read:

Our commitment to overthrow the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 80s by arming the mujahideen worked great militarily...until we completely abandoned the country and left it in shambles, allowing the Taliban to swiftly come into power and install an Islamic dictatorship in the power void.

So let me translate that for you:  a man who we trained in guerrilla warfare and then told to screw off when he came to defend his homeland used the weapons we gave him during the war to execute devastating terrorist attacks against the US over the course of a decade, and took refuge in a country we left devastated after our proxy-war with Soviets.  So we just spent the last eight years fighting a war we never should have fought, had we made half-intelligent decisions starting 20 years beforehand.

This is completely true. It does not mean the suicide terrorists who attacked us on our own soil are not horrible people. It just means we had a hand in creating and enabling them.

We've got to play it smart.

Actually we had dollars in creating them, the hand was most likely Inter-Services Intelligence.  Pakistan's Military Intelligence was the direct interface between US and Saudi funding and the war in Afghanistan, we were actually pretty hands off so far as how the money was spent (which is what really bit us in the ass).  When some suicide bomber in Afghanistan says he was trained in a madarasa in Pakistani border region it was probably built with US tax dollars in the 1980s.  If you're really interested in the events of the 1980s Afghan war leading up to September 11th Ghost Wars by Steve Coll was an  fascinating read.

In any case the tunnel vision we had in our attempts to contain Communism literally makes you want to face palm in retrospect.

[General Battuta]

Yeah. We built our next enemy in our attempt to handle the last one. I don't want to see a repeat of that, thus my comment on why trading 34 innocent lives for 1 bad guy is a poor ratio since it generates new bad guys.

[mxlm]

I don't want to see a repeat of that

Too late.

[redsniper]

THEY'RE

Every god damned post. Every time you should put 'their' you put this instead.
 I understand people make typos and the occasional grammar frak-up. I understand there's slang and the generally laid back nature of internet communication, but can you really expect to be taken seriously if you can't handle even the most basic grammar of your native tongue?

[NGTM-1R]

Yeah. We built our next enemy in our attempt to handle the last one. I don't want to see a repeat of that, thus my comment on why trading 34 innocent lives for 1 bad guy is a poor ratio since it generates new bad guys.

With all due respect, lots of people die in Afghanistan and Pakistan every day, and the US didn't kill them. We simply get blamed anyways. Not every 34 innocent people are our fault. Not even most.

We will simply be blamed because it's convenient. No, we don't really create our own next enemies. They create themselves by using us as a rallying cry.

[karajorma]

Actually that's not true in the case of the current set.

Islamic terrorists tend to be isolationists. They don't particularly care about the outside world except when it interferes with their country. While these people would probably be terrorists without the influence of the West they would be domestic terrorists. They wouldn't give a damn about the US or anything outside the borders of the Muslim world if they weren't bothered by the West.

I'll admit that they do use hatred of the West as a rallying cry but it is incredibly unlikely that they'd be bothering to attack Western targets if they were left alone. They'd have far too much to do attacking targets in their own countries to bother with the West.

[NGTM-1R]

Actually that's not true in the case of the current set.

Islamic terrorists tend to be isolationists. They don't particularly care about the outside world except when it interferes with their country. While these people would probably be terrorists without the influence of the West they would be domestic terrorists. They wouldn't give a damn about the US or anything outside the borders of the Muslim world if they weren't bothered by the West.

I'll admit that they do use hatred of the West as a rallying cry but it is incredibly unlikely that they'd be bothering to attack Western targets if they were left alone. They'd have far too much to do attacking targets in their own countries to bother with the West.

Which is why we had the terrorists who went by Islamic Jihad in the early '70s, yes? It's not that simple. They have been told for generations that the West in general and US in particular is responsible for their problems, long before the invasion of Iraq, First Gulf, even Operation Preying Mantis and Operation Earnest Will in the late '70s and early '80s as the first real US interventions in the region. The US inherited the legacy of their hate for the British Empire and France by being the obvious pointman for the Western world with Preying Mantis, but we did not build the people or the organizations that came before the Taliban or Al Queda, the things that made them possible. They built themselves. We just happen to be the enemy du jour.

[Kosh]

What about Operation Ajax?

[NGTM-1R]

What about Operation Ajax?

Didn't catch attention the way wiping out the Iranian Navy and Air Force did.

[karajorma]

We just happen to be the enemy du jour.

We don't just happen to be the enemy, we are doing things to remind them that we should be considered the enemy.

You've basically named a whole long list of the constant reminders we've given them. There's a reason why they continue to bother the UK but don't bother France as much despite France having a larger Muslim population.

Arguing that we just happen to be the enemy sounds too much like the Bush administrations "They hate our freedom" bollocks for my liking. It's way too close to giving the West a free pass on why they're the targets of so much aggression.

[NGTM-1R]

And why do we keep giving them reminders? They keep giving us reasons to remind them. For the US, it begins with Iran declaring open season on tanker traffic in the late '70s, an outcome that nobody in the world could stand but only the USN and RN had the means to actually do something about. We are the enemy du jour. That's not a statement that absolves anyone of anything. You say it reads like a list of reasons. It was a list of reasons. But they're crappy reasons. They usually are when it comes to armed conflict. Until very recently, however, they weren't crappy reasons in every direction.

[karajorma]

If that's when it begun then the US started it by toppling the government of Iran to install the Shah then.

[Inquisitor]

Eventually the blame game leads to Godwinning.

[Sushi]

Eventually the blame game leads to Godwinning.

I thought God always wins?

(ducks)

[Snail]

We face the threat we do today because of our own meddling in the past.

I'm gonna call bull**** on this.  If this were true, Europe would be a crater and the rest of us would be speaking German.  Everyone has to take responsibility for they're own actions.  It's easy to say, "IT'S ALL THEY'RE FAULT!", when in fact the reason that most of these countries are **** holes is because the populace won't stand up and take responsibility for themselves.  And when we try to give them the opportunity, they hate us for it.

IMO, I don't care any more.  They want to rape, murder and kill each other over centuries old grieveances between to sultans who got drunk, fine.  Just leave me and mine out of it.

LAWRENCE OF ARABIA