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An Accidental War

LowDown

Curmudgeon
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An Accidental War

The administration’s ingenious plan is to lose this war in far less time than we usually take. In the unimprovable formulation of an unnamed official speaking to the Los Angeles Times, the White House is carefully calibrating a military action “just muscular enough not to get mocked.”

...In the world’s most legalistic culture, it was perhaps inevitable that battle plans would eventually be treated under courtroom discovery rules and have to be disclosed to the other side in your pre-war statement. But in this case it doesn’t seem to be impressing anyone. Like his patrons in Tehran and Moscow, Assad’s reaction to American threats is to double up with laughter and say, “Bring it, twerkypants.” Headline from Friday’s Guardian in London: “Syria: ‘Napalm’ Bomb Dropped on School Playground, BBC Claims” — which, if true, suggests that even a blood-soaked mass murderer is not without a sense of humor.

Perfunctory and ineffectual war making in Syria is worse than nothing. It's no wonder the Brits want no part of it.

In any case, the goal of war isn't to kill people or destroy things, it's to break the will of the enemy, and whether we are talking about Benghazi militia or Egyptian generals we've seldom been able to do that. There's certainly no reason to think that a couple of days of bombing will.
 
An Accidental War

Perfunctory and ineffectual war making in Syria is worse than nothing. It's no wonder the Brits want no part of it.

In any case, the goal of war isn't to kill people or destroy things, it's to break the will of the enemy, and whether we are talking about Benghazi militia or Egyptian generals we've seldom been able to do that. There's certainly no reason to think that a couple of days of bombing will.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor couldn't be a better illustration of your point.
 
An Accidental War



Perfunctory and ineffectual war making in Syria is worse than nothing. It's no wonder the Brits want no part of it.

In any case, the goal of war isn't to kill people or destroy things, it's to break the will of the enemy, and whether we are talking about Benghazi militia or Egyptian generals we've seldom been able to do that. There's certainly no reason to think that a couple of days of bombing will.

Vietnam certainly broke the American will.

But again .....Obama has no intention to declare war on Syria ...it's going to be a strike ...pay attention.
You guys are nauseating in your attempt to ignore the facts!!

Obama has proven himself smarter than you guys ...over and over again ....sometimes I wonder if he's part Chinese.

This is Obama's plan ...since you're not able to figure it out on your own.

Obama is as concerned of the killing in Syria by conventional weaponry as he is for the use the WMD.
Also, Obama and the world can see Assad must go ....the WMD is a way for Obama to tip the scale of the war ....to get rid of Assad....to stop the mass migration of Syrian refugee. The Syrians will be left to figure things out for themselves after Assad.
 
Obama has proven himself smarter than you guys ...over and over again .....

All you have to do is look just not at Syria but also Egypt, Libya in fact the entire Middle East and North Africa and compare how things were back in 2008.

Come on, most of use know the difference between a Navy corpsman and a Navy-corpse man. Or that we don't have "ships that go under water."
 
Vietnam certainly broke the American will.

But again .....Obama has no intention to declare war on Syria ...it's going to be a strike ...pay attention.
You guys are nauseating in your attempt to ignore the facts!!

Obama has proven himself smarter than you guys ...over and over again ....sometimes I wonder if he's part Chinese.

This is Obama's plan ...since you're not able to figure it out on your own.

Obama is as concerned of the killing in Syria by conventional weaponry as he is for the use the WMD.
Also, Obama and the world can see Assad must go ....the WMD is a way for Obama to tip the scale of the war ....to get rid of Assad....to stop the mass migration of Syrian refugee. The Syrians will be left to figure things out for themselves after Assad.

I'm certainly glad we have Obama supporters around to explain him. When he does stupid and ill considered things they read his mind to make sense out of it so anxious are they for the President's image. However, methinks there is too much wishful thinking involved.

What we are saying is that the planned strike is unlikely to get rid of Assad or to get him to change his tactics. It will make things much worse. And a military strike is an act of war whether you want to use that word or not.

But no matter. Now that Obama will be turning it over the Congress I'll be shocked if the strike is authorized. Perhaps Obama wanted this as a way out of the box he put himself in, but the effect of it will be to make him and us look weak.
 
And so it is, at the end of the american experiment....
 
An Accidental War



Perfunctory and ineffectual war making in Syria is worse than nothing. It's no wonder the Brits want no part of it.

In any case, the goal of war isn't to kill people or destroy things, it's to break the will of the enemy, and whether we are talking about Benghazi militia or Egyptian generals we've seldom been able to do that. There's certainly no reason to think that a couple of days of bombing will.

Yep, Afghanistan is gonna break your will and the US is gonna come home in utter defeat. No, it's not Obama's fault. Well, yes it is. But it's also Bush's fault, and all the generals too, for invading in the first place.

No, you wouldn't have won if you "really wanted" to. Russians tried that and you also tried that in Vietnam and still got owned. The problem is pointless wars, not the wage in which they are waged.
 
but the effect of it will be to make him and us look weak.

That is definitely a good thing. The last thing on Earth that we need is a tough-guy president and armchair generals like yourself cheering them on. Tough-guy presidents are a scourge to the Earth. They prove their "toughness" by being brave - with other peoples lives, lol!

By the way, who is this "us" you speak of? I don't recall threatening the Syrian president with an ultimatum. Did you? As far as I'm concerned that was the actions of one individual. If he or you want to go fight in Syria be my guest, I won't stop you.

You are the archetype of the subject of Randolph Bourne's "War is the Health of the State."

The US False Flag –

“With the shock of war,” however, “the state comes into its own again.” War is the health of the state. It is the reason given for high taxes, internal revenue bureaucracies, pervasive spying, censorship, military conscription, the abolition of civil liberties, heavy debt, an explosive growth of government spending and borrowing, extensive excise taxation, nationalization of industries, socialist central planning, massive public indoctrination campaigns, the punishment and imprisonment of dissenters to the state’s rule, the shooting of deserters from its armies, the conquest of other countries, inflation of the currency, demonization of private enterprise and the civil society for being insufficiently “patriotic,” the growth of a military/industrial complex, a vast expansion of governmental pork barrel spending, the demonization of the ideas of freedom and individualism and those who espouse them, and a never-ending celebration, if not deification, of statism and militarism.

The average citizen has no interest in any of this. The average citizen of a militaristic empire is nothing more than a taxpayer/supplier of cannon fodder in the eyes of the state. Therein lies the state’s biggest conundrum: How to go about getting the masses to go along with their own self enslavement as taxpayers and cannon fodder and cheerleaders for war. The answer to this conundrum has always been the crafting of a series of lies about the “imperative” to wage war. For as Bourne also wrote: “[A]ll foreign policy, the diplomatic negotiations which produce or forestall war are . . . the private property of the Executive part of the Government, and are equally exposed to no check whatever from popular bodies, or the people voting as a mass themselves.”

Most people are “rationally ignorant” of almost all of what government does, and they are the most ignorant about foreign policy. This allows politicians to lie nations into war with impunity, for they have always understood that “the moment war is declared . . . the mass of the people through some spiritual alchemy, become convinced that they have willed and executed the deed [of starting a war] themselves (emphasis added).” At that point “the citizen throws off his contempt and indifference to Government, identifies himself with its purposes, revives all his military memories and symbols, and the state once more walks in august presence, through the imaginations of men.” Most destructively, “the patriot loses all sense of the distinction between state, nation, and government.”
 
That is definitely a good thing. The last thing on Earth that we need is a tough-guy president and armchair generals like yourself cheering them on. Tough-guy presidents are a scourge to the Earth. They prove their "toughness" by being brave - with other peoples lives, lol!

Strength tends to keep other nations from becoming too adventurous. As Aristotle said, we go to war to live in peace.
 
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