Putin Is Sending Troops to Wipe Out ISIS

[Benton]

(10-13-2015, 02:52 PM)BFritz21 Wrote: Iraq is a stupid comparison because it was a war that wasn't organized and had no chance of succeeding.  

We need to crush Syria, and the airstrikes alone won't do it.  

We need can't let Iran keep being strengthened with a stronghold in Syria.   

Extremist groups are forming all over Syria.

Because we have allies that need Assad defeated.

Take your pick.

Eh, I wouldn't say that. We were pretty organized, we were just attacking the wrong targets because of politically motivated misinformation. I do agree that it had no chance of succeeding. Likewise, I don't think engaging in ground conflicts in Syria has any more of a chance of stopping th problem.

There's only one way to "win." Not participate. It's a mix of fundamentals, imagined ethnicity, religious beliefs and borders — all of which dates back centuries. In some cases a couple thousand years. We aren't going to bomb common sense into them. We aren't going to bring "western civilization" and expect everyone to get along and lower our oil prices because they finally get Seinfield reruns.

The best thing we can do is what we should have been doing the last half a century — working on an oil alternative and staying out of Middle East issues while offering an open door to those who want to escape that cycle of stupidity and start a better life with a clean slate in the greatest damn country on earth. But we didn't do that. We fell into the current political quagmire we're in (see Matt's thread about Nixon's southern block) and put the wrong people in charge, people like Cheney who spent decades manipulating public policy to the benefit of companies that made a lot of money in the Middle East.