Greatest Threat to World Peace: A Gallup Survey

warp daddy wrote

 Wars are fn Useless  

I doubt the French, Poles, European Jews, Russia and many others feel that way after they were attacked by Germany. I also doubt the Israelis feel the wars to repeal aggressors feel that way. Sure everybody wishes they never happened but when attacked what choice is there, especially if the enemy wants to wipe you off the map.

One over looked aspect of the Afghan and Iraq wars was it was a time somebody, (other than the Israelis), punched back hard when countries let/encouraged/enabled/ terrorists to use their countries to attack another. I have no doubt the US told these places that if your country is used by terrorists to attack us, we will bomb the crap out of you. After Iraq/Afghan wars, these words had weight.

I can agree with Afghanistan and if that is all we went after we might have had a chance to clean up the mess we left when we enabled the terrorists during the Russian invasion. Don't forget - it was us who trained these guys and gave them their first taste of taking on a super power.

Coach Z wrote

No other country ever in history has been the victor of wars and then paid to reconstruct the loser.  We have done it too many times to count in the tune of Trillions of $'s.  Too many of you are the victims of  listening to and believing so called former journalists from the 60-70's era and thier brain washed followers.  Don't be sheep think for yourselves - talking to anyone that thinks any NBC news broadcast is not more biased than Fox News.

We may disagree but your denigration of people with opposing viewpoints as ill informed sheep is not helping your argument, it only shows you are not good at debating. You should avoid insulting other people's intelligence and ability to come to their own conclusions and stick to debating the points of the argument as valid or invalid.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

Though if you want to add as a tangent that all major televised corporate news media is deeply flawed, I'll get behind that notion. I have never had nor will ever have cable or television nor do I subscribe or fellow any of the major corporate news outlets.

You didn't respond to the previous points. Instead, you justified your previous points by citing our country is great for having been the victor of wars and paid money to rebuild the losers. Paying money to rebuild countries does not justify ill advised wars. "Winning" does not justify going to war if it caused more harm than good and was fought for terrible reasons.

Have we rebuilt that many countries? Doesn't seem like we've done very well with Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, etc. It seems like we REALLY screwed up Iraq, we blew it there big time. You can't keep citing WWII (i.e. the past) or the Marshall Plan as reasons for the country's current greatness. You can cite those reasons for our country's past greatness, and I'll agree.

Well, we did A LOT of building and rebuilding in Iraq.

One lesson learned from Iraq/ Afghan wars is that unlike other nations, they do not respond well at all to liberation. That is on solely them.

Saddam made some comments to this effect....  Without him (i.e. a strong dictator), the Iraqis would tear each other apart.

We now see this to be true. Other Islamic nation leaders have stated that their countries are not ready for freedom or democracy as they would just kill each other in mass and chaos would ensue.

Old arab proverb.... me against my brother, my brother against my uncle, my uncle against me. That's how they live.

The Iraqis themselves are blowing it big time.  

Snowballs wrote

I have no doubt the US told these places that if your country is used by terrorists to attack us, we will bomb the crap out of you. After Iraq/Afghan wars, these words had weight.

Did I blink and miss a war against Saudi Arabia?

Iraq was never a country.  It was three different countries that were held together by the brute force of a dictator with a 500,000 man army.  I'd say that a child would understand that removing that army would lead to the dissolution of the "country" but our "leaders" somehow, incredibly, did not grasp this.  I think the phrase used was "cake walk."

PeeTex wrote

So my point was that things either don't change or they get better - do you dispute that?

First of all, two countries is an awfully small sample size to draw a conclusion about "allowing" a country to obtain nukes. But I would probably say that Pakistan has behaved worse since 1998, although it's hard to judge. Regardless, it is not on the US to allow or disallow, we can try but a true rogue state will find a way.

riverc0il wrote

 
Have we rebuilt that many countries? Doesn't seem like we've done very well with Vietnam, Korea, Iraq,

Not to familiar with Korea, eh ? If we hadn't saved their ass, I wonder if South Korea would still be one of the shining economic tigers of Asia with a very high standard of living or would it be one of the worst countries on earth, full of torture and endless suffering like North Korea is and has been since then ? Besides all the physical suffering there in NK, there is immense mental torture as they practice a three generation policy. Meaning, if one relative looks cross ways at the state or utters one word against it, then three generations of that family go to the prison camps for life, endless torture and starvation.

Iraq got a new, fresh start and they totally blew it. That's completely on the Iraqis. Instead of living together, working together and then all reaping the wealth of their oil( like Kuwait) they'd rather kill and oppress each other endlessly.

For comparison, other countries liberated by the US in the recent past are doing very fine now. Why do you guys ignore that ?

Who knows what would have happened if the west hadn't stood against communism. How many more countries would have been communist and had to suffer that until..... who knows when ? Communism is accepted to have killed 200 million of it's own people during it's short reign.

You libs are also overlooking the huge fact that the good ol USA is absolutely by far the most generous nation in history - bar none. Not only our government, but the American people themselves privately give much more to the world than other people do or ever have

To paraphrase Ban Ki-Moon " America is the most generous nation in history. ".

Harvey wrote

Iraq was never a country.  It was three different countries that were held together by the brute force of a dictator with a 500,000 man army.  I'd say that a child would understand that removing that army would lead to the dissolution of the "country" but our "leaders" somehow, incredibly, did not grasp this.  I think the phrase used was "cake walk."

Hindsight amigo. Besides you're over simplifying it. Many other multi ethnic countries exist and have not Iraq's issues.

Too bad the Kurds would be landlocked if they ever got their own country.

Snowballs

+1000

Seems like a bizarre day to be having this discussion.  If you are not proud of this country maybe you need to go live somewhere else to see how great USA really is.  Seems like everyone else in the world that hate us so much still want to live and work here.

Never Forget
God bless America

Coach Z wrote

God bless America

God bless america was written by irving berlin who also wrote get thee behind me satan, and lots of other songs. Like one a day. Every country has some dumb patriotic thing about god being on their side. I'm plenty patriotic, I just want to keep morality on our side. At times we rush into things that are unjust. I can love my country while admitting that, but good try busting out the flag pin on the lapel while castigating libs.

And not all of us are hindsight 20/20, some of us (aka me and tens of thousands more in DC) did not want us to go to war and people called us unpatriotic then too.

I agree with your last two posts SB. I also believe that the current Iran deal is OK. I would love to see us get the religious leaders out of there but I think that will happen over time and if we open them back up to the western culture. Iran was a very progressive country back when I was young and the Shaw was in power. Things were simpler then.

If, out of the deal, Iran gets a nuke than they have to protect that nuke, maintain that nuke and invest in a delivery system for that nuke. Iran fears ISIS as much as we do and they will need to join the league of responsible nations to protect that capability. Will Iran promote covert terrorism - yes, and don't forget - we invented it. We all fight proxy wars in todays geopolitics.

A good text on the history of conflict in the middle east is "A war to end all peace - the fall of the Ottoman empire".  

Coach likes to cite WW2 as an example of the US's great contribution to world peace, it is. But lets not forget that although the first bomb we dropped on Japan was authorized by Truman, the second was not and that is why Nuclear weapons went under the control of the Department of Energy and not DOD. Towards the end of WW2 - when we just wanted it to be over we mercilessly killed. We were lucky that the populations of those countries saw the atrocities committed by their leaders and realized that there was justification. We were also lucky that our leaders knew that we needed to fill the vacuum with something other than poverty - something we fail to see now. Coach hates Roosevelt, but he and Truman, like Wilson before them and Andrew Johnson before them realized that we needed to build up rather than punish (Johnson was Lincolns VP and raised as a poor Southern Democrat in NC). Unfortunately today the balance of power is with those that don't believe in humanity but are out for a buck. Would we consider taking in thousands on Syrian refugees - hell no, it's there fault for not fighting for their freedom and they hate us to boot. Fuck'em, besides that - it might raise my taxes. Turn Iraq into a glass land and while were at it lets just take over the whole fucking middle east and drill baby drill.

For me America is the best place to live. I would never move.  Apparently many others agree and are willing to risk everything to get here.  That does not mean I am proud of everything we do. Iraq was a huge mistake.  I'm not religious in a traditional sense but I am big on thou shalt not kill. At least not for the hell of it. Iraq was never a real threat to the US before we invaded.  You can call it hindsight, but in my house we watched shock and awe with horror, we were so bummed.  Granted I didn't march the way ML did, so maybe I have no right to speak up now.

Coach you have to admit there are things America does that you don't approve of, and you criticize too. It's one of the great things about this country. We have the freedom to do it.

PT... great reading your pov, always seem to learn something. Would like to hear more about the second bomb and how that happened.

Coach, Truman was a Democrat. Don't forget.  In fact, so was Roosevelt. So your big WWII example shows how the US' involvement in the last great war was started by a Democratic President and finished by one.

it's a great old joke.

http://www.snopes.com/military/lighthouse.asp

It was different in the old days bro. Republicans voted for some crazy stuff like the civil rights act and the voting rights act

Thacheronix wrote

It was different in the old days bro. Republicans voted for some crazy stuff like the civil rights act and the voting rights act

Oh, I know!   You don't even have to go back that far. Nixon would be a liberal Democrat these days with how far right the GOP has become. He's the one who put a lot of Johnson's great society into action.

Harvey wrote

PT... great reading your pov, always seem to learn something. Would like to hear more about the second bomb and how that happened.

Truman became President in April of 1945. He was clueless as to what was going on, especially the Manhattan Project. He had given orders that the Military execute the war as quickly and as efficiently as possible. He had not idea of what was to come until Little Boy was dropped. I doubt he knew just how destructive it was. Little Boy was a Uranium bomb and thus - as far as atomic bombs are concerned, of lesser power. He knew we didn't have another one, Uranium is hard to enrich and he really did not understand the power. He did not authorize the second bomb but the military, under standing orders to execute the war "efficiently" dropped Fat Man, a plutonium bomb, much more powerful. When Truman heard what happened he stopped it the next day and issued an executive order that no atomic weapons were to be used unless directly authorized by him - that stopped it. On a side note - most military analysts of the time agree that it made very little difference in ending the war. What Japan needed to surrender was a concession, they would not accept unconditional surrender. We gave them a token concession and they accepted. That token concession was not important to us but of primary importance to them - the Emperor was allowed to stay although only in the role of a figure head.

No No NO damnit! That shit be whacked ! The concession made was America allowing Godzilla to be released from his RKO contract. They also wanted Phyllis Diller but we gave them Mothra and Rodan instead.  


I'd hit it.