All things Middle East related

[CRedskinsRule]

Originally Posted by That Guy

wow, there is just soo much wrong with what you've said here.

first, i'm glad you feel like you're the sole arbiter of whether we are or are not at war, but you're wrong. 100% wrong. we are at war and have been since 2001, and that's just facts.

now, when you declare a war against an abstract like terrorism, it's not like declaring a war on a state actor. there's no actual victory condition, which is why it was and still is a bad idea.

2nd you're line of thinking is part of why we're still fooling around aimlessly in the middle east. we can take ground and kill people all day every day, if the population doesn't want us there interfering, it's just inviting more unrest. everything you're talking about has already been done in iraq and it hasn't solved shit. most of that was due to bush/rumsfeld/et al deciding to unemploy the entire iraqi military and every organization involved with running iraq's day to day.

the vacuum was self created and then filled with a very sectarian ex-pat leader that basically did everything he could to destabilize the country.

I agree that you should never start a war without very clear/concise objectives and a viable exit strategy. that's what happens when people without any military leadership or general knowledge thereof are put in charge though. they have a hammer and everything looks like a nail, but dropping US forces in a place doesn't magically make all the ethnic and political divisions on the ground go away. and a foreign military that's conducting night raids and walking around in body armor and carrying automatic rifles isn't the best instrument to use if you want to win hearts and minds.

Show me a declaration of war enacted by the Congress and signed by the President. We can discuss the rest after that

edit. for the sake of adding thoughts:

We aren't at war, we are in a state of continual undeclared "war". The difference is huge in the political capital spent and gained by the use of imagery and fear tactics. You can declare war against non-state players, by declaring war against the non-state player AND any states that aid them.

You and I absolutely disagree on the cause of the vacuum, it was not self-created, it was created when Democrats who supported the initial war actions turned away from dealing with the cost of the war in human lives. We didn't win WW1 or WW2 by "winning the hearts and minds" we won it, by beating the opponents will to fight. You can do that even with the most die hard believers. The Japanese would have died to the last man for the Emperor at the start of WW2. Suicide bombers are no different than the Kamikaze's of that war. IED's were as prevalent in Germany at the end as they were in Iraq. War is hell, and to win it you have to go to hell and back. In Iraq the second time, we got to hell, then the politicians bailed because they couldn't stand the heat.

Winning the hearts and minds loses wars. Beating the opponent until they yield wins them. We didn't do that, and for the past 8 years the President and Congress have gotten away with overseeing a world where 10's of thousands of innocents die annually, and they posture and prance about as they smile and wave and send more US Soldiers to die in an unwinnable undeclared "war".