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Where Are the Brave Military Voices Against the Forever War?

theamericanconservative.com

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Re: Where Are the Brave Military Voices Against the Forever War?

#11

Post by RUG3Y »

peterwwillis wrote: post #7
RUG3Y wrote: post #2

After returning from Iraq, I was jaded. Young when I started, I thought we were doing a good thing. My idealism was stripped away pretty quickly. After being stateside for a while, there were rumors that our unit would be deploying to Afghanistan. A Lt. Colonel came and gave a presentation to the company about conditions there. During the Q.A., I stood up and asked, "Sir, what are we really doing there? For the life…

"Sir, what are we really doing there?" Wading through the knee-deep shit and blood that is a political quagmire. But I can't imagine a man who is entrusted with inspiring people to go out and die for said quagmire is allowed to say that.

These infantry officers really buy their own bullshit. I've never met one who didn't. It's like religion - the cost of facing the music is just too high for some people. Cognitive dissonance etc.

Re: Where Are the Brave Military Voices Against the Forever War?

#12

Post by ashark »

zeveb wrote: post #5
RUG3Y wrote: post #2

After returning from Iraq, I was jaded. Young when I started, I thought we were doing a good thing. My idealism was stripped away pretty quickly. After being stateside for a while, there were rumors that our unit would be deploying to Afghanistan. A Lt. Colonel came and gave a presentation to the company about conditions there. During the Q.A., I stood up and asked, "Sir, what are we really doing there? For the life…

> For the life of me, I can't understand the strategic purpose of invading Afghanistan. They're not even the ones who attacked us on 9/11. The Afghan government at the time offered sanctuary to Al Qaeda, refusing to hand over its members after they had declared war on the U.S., attacked USS Cole, hijacked four civilian aircraft and crashed them into the World Trade CEnter & the Pentagon, killing thousands; the strate…

> the strategic purpose of invading Afghanistan was to demonstrate to every country that shielding those who commit acts of war against the United States is itself an act of war against the United States — and that being in a state of war with the United States is an unhealthy condition.

It demonstrated that doing anything other than saying "how high?" when asked to jump by the US is unhealthy—if an only if you don't have nukes, anything resembling real air defenses, or a special economic relationship with the US. If any of those are true than you can just do whatever.

I would submit this wasn't a lesson worth spending so many lives and so much money to teach, seeing as everyone already knew that (see: the 80s and 90s). If we wanted to send a novel message we'd have hit countries that matter, and/or pumped all those Afghanistan and Iraq war dollars into renewable energy.

So, it was either a huge strategic blunder or was mostly for the purposes of directing anger away from said countries that matter while probably also hitting the Afghans for mostly-unrelated and unstated reasons. Or it was both.

Re: Where Are the Brave Military Voices Against the Forever War?

#14

Post by RUG3Y »

arprocter wrote: post #10
zeveb wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For the life of me, I can't understand the strategic purpose of invading Afghanistan. They're not even the ones who attacked us on 9/11. The Afghan government at the time offered sanctuary to Al Qaeda, refusing to hand over its members after they had declared war on the U.S., attacked USS Cole, hijacked four civilian aircraft and crashed them into the World Trade CEnter & the Pentagon, killing thousands; the strate…

I interpreted what you quoted as a sly nod towards the Saudis, but maybe GP can clarify

Yeah that's what I was referring to.

The whole Al Qaida thing is murky with CIA engineering and scapegoating. Maybe I sound like a conspiracy theorist, I don't know. They were a pretty convenient foil for us to invade a whole bunch of countries that we had no business invading.

Re: Where Are the Brave Military Voices Against the Forever War?

#15

Post by slamdance »

a decent article until it went political at the end - almost as a "BTW..."

It failed to bring most of the wars (or "police actions") into the picture. Maybe because all of the 'major' conflicts prior to desert storm (C/WW1/2/K/V) were headed by the opposite political party than that mentioned. This is not to say other conflicts didn't happen under other parties as they obviously have.

While the reasoning is sound insofar as the 'unmentioned' conflicts were fought primarily by draftees (again - politics?), it really gives no satisfactory reason, only conjecture and opinion (politics) on the current military actions - which SPANS political parties.

Sadly, the introduction of politics into an article initially put forth as something about the "morality or war" says more about the intent of the author than the question the article brings up.

Re: Where Are the Brave Military Voices Against the Forever War?

#16

Post by [deleted] »

slamdance wrote: post #15

a decent article until it went political at the end - almost as a "BTW..." It failed to bring most of the wars (or "police actions") into the picture. Maybe because all of the 'major' conflicts prior to desert storm (C/WW1/2/K/V) were headed by the opposite political party than that mentioned. This is not to say other conflicts didn't happen under other parties as they obviously have. While the reasoning is sound ins…

[deleted]

Re: Where Are the Brave Military Voices Against the Forever War?

#17

Post by danharaj »

slamdance wrote: post #15

a decent article until it went political at the end - almost as a "BTW..." It failed to bring most of the wars (or "police actions") into the picture. Maybe because all of the 'major' conflicts prior to desert storm (C/WW1/2/K/V) were headed by the opposite political party than that mentioned. This is not to say other conflicts didn't happen under other parties as they obviously have. While the reasoning is sound ins…

You want to talk about war without talking about politics? And do you think the level of politics where war is decided really care which party is in power at the time?

Re: Where Are the Brave Military Voices Against the Forever War?

#18

Post by ashark »

RUG3Y wrote: post #9
zeveb wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For the life of me, I can't understand the strategic purpose of invading Afghanistan. They're not even the ones who attacked us on 9/11. The Afghan government at the time offered sanctuary to Al Qaeda, refusing to hand over its members after they had declared war on the U.S., attacked USS Cole, hijacked four civilian aircraft and crashed them into the World Trade CEnter & the Pentagon, killing thousands; the strate…

I asked the question ~2009. What never made sense to me is that with unsecured borders, what's the point of invaded a poor country of goat farmers? Ok yeah, so Al Qaeda supposedly attacked us and they were allegedly being harbored in Afghanistan. But the guys in the planes were Saudi. Why didn't we invade Saudi Arabia? (That's a rhetorical question). If someone wants to come here and hurt us, they can do it pretty ea…

Yeah, by '09 there was clearly no reason. When they originally sold the war they played up Al Qaeda's size, power, and level of infrastructure (specifically in Afghanistan) so, assuming you believed that[1] the original invasion kind of made sense.

[1] personally, my suspicions that the claims that this organization was so huge and capable and dangerous, yet had only just now managed anything so big and had totally failed to achieve any of the more obvious follow-on attacks, smelled a bit of BS (that is, its size and capabilities were being wildly exaggerated) were confirmed when IIRC Rumsfeld went on the news with a diagram of some GI Joe playset-style giant underground base thing that couldn't conceivably have been built in secret due to its scale and equipment, and claimed that Bin Laden had "not one, but several" of these obviously-fantasy supervillain lairs hidden in Afghanistan. That they were clearly lying about the popular war that was an easy sell definitely colored how I received their later pitch on Iraq. Not that it mattered.

Re: Where Are the Brave Military Voices Against the Forever War?

#19

Post by the-dude »

RUG3Y wrote: post #14
arprocter wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I interpreted what you quoted as a sly nod towards the Saudis, but maybe GP can clarify

Yeah that's what I was referring to. The whole Al Qaida thing is murky with CIA engineering and scapegoating. Maybe I sound like a conspiracy theorist, I don't know. They were a pretty convenient foil for us to invade a whole bunch of countries that we had no business invading.

Dude, I think it is great you have left the army. I offer you another anecdata :

I have an American friend here in Groningen ( NL ) who has been living here for about 30 years now.

In the eighties he was stationed in Germany. Due to the thawing relationship between the US and the USSR a meet and greet between Russian and American soldiers was organised. He discovered they were ordinary guys, not monsters. They talked intelligence : both groups had knowledge about weapon systems of their enemies.

It opened his eyes, he left the army and stayed in our beautiful city.

The cold war too, was just 'a story line'.

Re: Where Are the Brave Military Voices Against the Forever War?

#20

Post by jMyles »

zeveb wrote: post #5
RUG3Y wrote: post #2

After returning from Iraq, I was jaded. Young when I started, I thought we were doing a good thing. My idealism was stripped away pretty quickly. After being stateside for a while, there were rumors that our unit would be deploying to Afghanistan. A Lt. Colonel came and gave a presentation to the company about conditions there. During the Q.A., I stood up and asked, "Sir, what are we really doing there? For the life…

> For the life of me, I can't understand the strategic purpose of invading Afghanistan. They're not even the ones who attacked us on 9/11. The Afghan government at the time offered sanctuary to Al Qaeda, refusing to hand over its members after they had declared war on the U.S., attacked USS Cole, hijacked four civilian aircraft and crashed them into the World Trade CEnter & the Pentagon, killing thousands; the strate…

> the strategic purpose of invading Afghanistan was to demonstrate to every country that shielding those who commit acts of war against the United States is itself an act of war against the United States

In hindsight (actually, even it seemed even at the time) it was probably better to offer a more mature presentation to the world community about what we knew about Al Qaeda, why we believed some of its associates to be in Afghanistan, etc.

Rumsfeld and Bush didn't across as authors of some thought-out strategy; they seemed like buffoons. Underground fortresses? [0] Watch this drive? [1]

As it is, most of the world now doesn't believe that the US had any idea what it was doing. We also now know that some well-connected Saudis were directly responsible for some of the planning of the attack.

So I don't think that this "strategic value" panned out in the slightest.

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGhGHxw0mSo

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCm9788Tb5g

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