ISIS

[Dill]

(11-10-2016, 06:00 PM)Shake n Blake Wrote: Also agree with Fred. Service only feels noble and heroic when you are actually making a difference.

I haven't felt that way about the wars in the middle east since before I got out 8 years ago.

It sucks to give up hope, but it just doesn't feel like we can make much peace there.

Gotta vote for the right leaders.

Carter achieved peace between Egypt and Israel and got a peace process started with the PLO.  Then came Reagan.

The US has made good decisions in the Middle East. E.g., Bush 41 kicked Saddam out of Kuwait, then refused to "break" Iraq and bog the US down in quagmire.

Bush 43 saw it differently. Now we have ISIS.  And if we had stayed as many think Obama should have, then we'd have another 4,000 dead and 20,000 wounded by now. Plus the billions more drained from the US Treasury.

And after routing the Taliban out of Afghanistan, Bush, Cheney, and Rummy sent half the occupying force to Iraq and let the warlords have the country back--the people who drove Afghanis into the arms of the Taliban in the first place.

It is not true that the US "can't make peace"--or at least not in the case of Afghanistan. Could have been done, just as it was done in Japan and Germany. Nation build with the military in control of development funds--NOT HALLIBURTON.

Even after the invasion of Iraq, the country could have been stabilized if the Bush team had not gone in with the mindset of "small government, fire the army and send them home with their guns, open the oil fields to international ownership."
There were people all along the way pointing out what could go wrong, but the "intellectual elite" were ignored.