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发帖数: 1709 | 1 How the War Party Lost the Middle East
https://townhall.com/columnists/patbuchanan/2019/01/01/how-the-war-party-
lost-the-middle-east-n2538314
"Assad must go, Obama says."
So read the headline in The Washington Post, Aug. 18, 2011.
The story quoted President Barack Obama directly:
"The future of Syria must be determined by its people, but President Bashar
al-Assad is standing in their way... the time has come for President Assad
to step aside."
France's Nicolas Sarkozy and Britain's David Cameron signed on to the Obama
ultimatum: Assad must go!
Seven years and 500,000 dead Syrians later, it is Obama, Sarkozy, and
Cameron who are gone. Assad still rules in Damascus, and the 2,000 Americans
in Syria are coming home. Soon, says President Donald Trump.
But we cannot "leave now," insists Sen. Lindsey Graham, or "the Kurds are
going to get slaughtered."
Question: Who plunged us into a Syrian civil war, and so managed the
intervention that were we to go home after seven years our enemies will be
victorious and our allies will "get slaughtered"?
Seventeen years ago, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan to oust the Taliban for
granting sanctuary to al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden.
U.S. diplomat Zalmay Khalilzad is today negotiating for peace talks with
that same Taliban. Yet, according to former CIA director Mike Morell,
writing in The Washington Post today, the "remnants of al-Qaeda work closely
" with today's Taliban.
It would appear that 17 years of fighting in Afghanistan has left us with
these alternatives:
Stay there, and fight a forever war to keep the Taliban out of Kabul,
or withdraw and let the Taliban overrun the place.
Who got us into this debacle?
After Trump flew into Iraq over Christmas but failed to meet with its
president, the Iraqi Parliament, calling this a "U.S. disregard for other
nations' sovereignty" and a national insult, began debating whether to expel
the 5,000 U.S. troops still in their country.
George W. Bush launched Operation Iraq Freedom to strip Saddam Hussein of
WMD he did not have and to convert Iraq into a democracy and Western bastion
in the Arab and Islamic world.
Fifteen years later, Iraqis are debating our expulsion.
Muqtada al-Sadr, the cleric with American blood on his hands from the
fighting of a decade ago, is leading the charge to have us booted out. He
heads the party with the largest number of members in the parliament.
Consider Yemen. For three years, the U.S. has supported with planes,
precision-guided munitions, air-to-air refueling and targeting information,
a Saudi war on Houthi rebels that degenerated into one of the worst
humanitarian disasters of the 21st century.
Belatedly, Congress is moving to cut off U.S. support for this war. Crown
Prince Mohammed bin Salman, its architect, has been condemned by Congress
for complicity in the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the consulate
in Istanbul. And the U.S. is seeking a truce in the fighting.
Who got us into this war? And what have years of killing Yemenis, in which
we have been collaborators, done to make Americans safer?
Consider Libya. In 2011, the U.S. attacked the forces of dictator Moammar
Gadhafi and helped to effect his ouster, which led to his murder.
Told of news reports of Gadhafi's death, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
joked, "We came, we saw, he died."
The Libyan conflict has since produced tens of thousands of dead. The output
of Libya's crucial oil industry has collapsed to a fraction of what it was.
In 2016, Obama said that not preparing for a post-Gadhafi Libya was
probably the "worst mistake" of his presidency.
The price of all these interventions for the United States?
Some 7,000 dead, 40,000 wounded and trillions of dollars.
For the Arab and Muslim world, the cost has been far greater. Hundreds of
thousands of dead in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Libya, civilian
and soldier alike, pogroms against Christians, massacres, and millions
uprooted and driven from their homes.
How has all this invading, bombing and killing made the Middle East a better
place or Americans more secure? One May 2018 poll of young people in the
Middle East and North Africa found that more of them felt that Russia was a
closer partner than was the United States of America.
The fruits of American intervention?
We are told ISIS is not dead but alive in the hearts of tens of thousands of
Muslims, that if we leave Syria and Afghanistan, our enemies will take over
and our friends will be massacred, and that if we stop helping Saudis and
Emiratis kill Houthis in Yemen, Iran will notch a victory.
In his decision to leave Syria and withdraw half of the 14,000 troops in
Afghanistan, Trump enraged our foreign policy elites, though millions of
Americans cannot get out of there soon enough.
In Monday's editorial celebrating major figures of foreign policy in the
past half-century, The New York Times wrote,
"As these leaders pass from the scene, it will be left to a new generation
to find a way forward from the wreckage Mr. Trump has already created." | b*********3
发帖数: 1709 | 2 War industry is like medical industry. You do not want to cure the disease,
there is more profit in treating the disease for years and years. | b*********3
发帖数: 1709 | 3 Under US capitalism, there's a lot of money to be made off of killing people
, Pat.
Plus, war means that your nation's capitalists get the opportunity to
dominate key lucrative global markets.
The ruling-class elites who constantly promote war know why they love war.
They're not stupid. They're not confused. Keep in mind that these people who
supposedly want to help poor, abused people abroad and "police the world
for the good of us all" don't want to spend even one thin dime on bettering
the lives of American workers. These are people don't mind firing millions
of American workers and sending their jobs to slave-waged locations around
the world. They eagerly plan for the day when they can fire all American
workers and replace them with robots. They are ******* psychopaths. Stop
believing their ridiculous lies, Pat, and you'll begin to comprehend what
their wars are all about. The wars are about killing, stealing and looting.
Capitalism is a criminal enterprise of the highest order. | b*********3
发帖数: 1709 | 4 The war party is over and done with. Stick a fork. The nation is sick and
tired of 100+ years of mindless mass-killings and humanitarian genocides in
the name of freedom and liberty. No American political party that endorses
foreign wars, humanitarian invasions, collateral damages, "idealistic"
liberal interventionism and alike swindles will EVER win the elections again
, no matter the war lobby, no matter the neocon cabal, no matter the
Pentagon army of armchair Napoleons. |
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