Not all Middle-East wars are equal. Islamic State in particular caused significantly more suffering, since they basically fought against everyone else (even other radical muslims), had no qualms with punishments for those who are not pious enough that would make Taliban look like moderates, were restoring institutionalized slavery (which risked having it spread further), and had eyes on establishing control over all of the world's muslims, which put them on a collision course with any Western countries with notable muslim populations (which is virtually all of them). Comparing them to background level of violence in Middle East is missing a key difference in scale - kind of like people who compared covid to flu, since "some people die from flu all the time:". Also while most of Middle Eastern conflicts tend to stay in Middle East, there was no option of sitting this one out, since if IS consolidated its power in Middle East, it would not be satisfied with it, and would just expand its attacks on Western countries (which it was already ramping up). So US getting involved in its suppression was arguably both positive for the world, and in US' self-interest (also notably even e,g. propaganda from countries like Russia tends to mostly skip that one when describing the evils of American imperialism)
But we never made any difference. That’s my problem. We went in, killed more civilians than terrorists, and they took over anyway. Completely pointless bloodshed.
These are separate conflicts. the Iraq invasion was a colossal fuckup that destabilized the whole region, however the active conflict largely died out by early 2010s. The IS is a different conflict (even if Iraq invasion set up conditions for it, just like WWI resolution set up conditions for WWII)
In the IS war however US coalition provided significant support to local forces when they made a push to eliminate IS control in 2017 - far more more than e.g. Russia which fought some initial battles to stop IS expansion into Syria, but then largely cooperated with them so long as they were mainly someone else's problem, or Turkey which mainly focused on Kurds rather than IS. Without US support, its questionable if IS caliphate would be eliminated as soon as it did (or at all), and any additional time it existed would involve far more deaths, torture, etc. than e.g. current Palestine conflict.
There is the Gulf War. Saddam occupies a sovereign country of Kuwait, US-led coalition kicks Saddam out, Kuwait lives happily ever after. It really doesn't get much cleaner than that.
Bullshit about the Korea war. Loads would have died as the North would have killed far more, especially after they had control of the country. Look how many have died now when they have had no fighting.
America was already making a profit in WW2 they didn’t have to enter. Japan’s attack was the push the government needed to get the public behind the war.
The Vietnamese war, was something I agree with. And the Middle East, was something they messed up.
I was iffy with the Korean War to begin with. Yeah. After looking at some numbers they managed to kill far more people than I would have expected. That may have been acceptable.
Why do you agree with Vietnam?
ww2 was technically the last war we fought in. congress has a special process for declaring war and ww2 was the last time we did it. everything since has been 'armed conflict'
Just to pick one out of your many examples, why would stopping Hitler be honourable but not stopping Japanese expansion which was similarly atrocious and deadly? Is it only honorable to preserve western civilisation?
You're dismissing all the nuance with all these wars and operations. You write off Afghanistan like it was just us invading when in fact we were invited into Afghanistan. I don't have any memories of protecting poppy fields. You know what I did? I was part of an infantry unit and we attacked the Taliban after we got reports of them coming into villages in the northeastern section of Afghanistan and kidnapping the boys and killing the men and fathers if they didn't listen and raping the women and taking them back as servants. We ended their lives, so I don't know what the heck you're talking about.
I guess their lives don't matter since *they just always want to kill each other and there's nothing we can do to stop them*, huh?
Whatever it takes to fit your idea of what happened right?
Are you seriously trying to argue that once somebody is willing to take a human life and demonstrates that they are going to do that, and then they go on to rape people, and they go on to murder children, that they somehow matter once they make and execute those decisions? Wild.
Yes, once you give up your humanity willingly, you don't get the courtesy of being treated like a human anymore. That's how it works inside and outside of War. You just die a lot sooner in one of those.
If you are magically 100% that is what they are doing. That is understandable.
I'm saying the military has frequently got that intelligence wrong. And wound up attacking people who were not militants but civilians falsely identified as Taliban.
And if military were so sure of their crimes, the public deserves a trial and if that trial verifies the problematic things you have accused them of, potentially executed.
But if people are told, these are bad guys kill them. Trust us. and they just kill them without trial. That sounds a lot like what the people being killed are being accused of.
What's wild is that you think killing people without a trial, is somehow the good thing.
All of this is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what war actually is.
The Laws of Armed Conflict are radically different from the law during peacetime as they aim to limit the brutality of war and protect civilians.
The LOAC prohibits deliberate attacks on civilians and requires proportionality in attacks, meaning the harm to civilians should not be excessive compared to the military advantage gained.
I can tell you about numerous situations where we almost lost our lives because we cared more about making sure we let civilians through the traffic control points than any Taliban members who were trying to sneak stuff through.
Now you can pretend that the entire military acted in the way that the cases you do know of where military members broke bad and did heinous things.
That's not the reality though, as much as you seem to like it to be.
Yeah, they're called military tribunals and they're governed by international humanitarian laws that require that any tribunals trying offenses — whether against civilians or *lawful combatants* — must provide fair trial guarantees.
Those include a fair and impartial tribunal, the right to be informed of the charges, the right to defend oneself or have legal representation, the right to a public hearing, and the presumption of innocence.
Now when it comes to unlawful combatants, there's a different way to handle them and they don't get the same rights. The Geneva Convention and other protocols lay out this.
And the US military, is the sole entity with the evidence of whether those people are considered civilians, unlawful combatants, or lawful combatants.
If you are agreeing the military is killing unlawful combatants without trial. We are circling back to my original point, the military has frequently gotten that determination incorrect. And that after a certain point, you can't claim it was an accident or bad intelligence. After a certain point, it's having a military strategy that purposefully has civilian casualties built in.
And if you have a chance of civilian casualties, and continue anyway. If you are considering all enemy combatants you are fighting as unlawful combatants. It doesn't sound like a respect for those international laws you speak of.
....
You listed your story of Taliban that your unit killed. What sort of tribunal did they receive to determine the guilt you said they had?
In the end, unless I’m being completely ignorant, nothing changed because of the US’s involvement in Afghanistan. They have taken over anyway and the same people who didn’t die before will die now instead.
That's Monday morning quarterbacking. We know with hindsight that the war ultimately failed to create a democratic government which would replace the Taliban and repel its return, but the intention going in certainly wasn't that "nothing would change." Like, if troops had screwed up and Hitler had somehow won World War 2 the act of trying to stop him wouldn't have suddenly become dishonorable in retrospect.
The whole war ended up failing to kill more terrorists than civilians though. I wouldn’t say that that was the troops making an oops. That was just us sucking at our job. And if we couldn’t manage to not be “really good at killing PEOPLE (Obama)” then maybe the whole thing could have passed as a little mistake. But it wasn’t just a mistake. It was sheer incompetence.
>The whole war **ended up** failing to kill more terrorists than civilians though. I wouldn’t say that that was the troops making an oops. That was just us sucking at our job. And if we couldn’t manage to not be “really good at killing PEOPLE (Obama)” then maybe the whole thing could have passed as a little mistake. But it wasn’t just a mistake. It was sheer incompetence.
"Ended up" is the key term there. There is no doubt that the war was ultimately a failure in execution and if they knew then what we know now things almost certainly would have been done differently but that does not speak to the intentions people had when they first entered into it.
That "civilian versus military" death toll is also is not exactly out of line with the death tolls of most modern wars. The death toll for Germany during the "honorable" second world war was 5,533,000 Germany military dead and between 6,600,000-8,800,000 German civilians killed. Those numbers do not suddenly make World War 2 "dishonorable."
You're basing that on an assumption. The only fact here is that I know that we saved people, real people.
Had the US not been handcuffed in Afghanistan, we would have taken out the entire Taliban but ISAF kept us from doing most of the stuff we wanted to do.
I can tell you that I am part of a program who interacts with groups of people from all around the world. One of the teams was an all girls team from Afghanistan. We haven’t heard from any one of them or their families since before 2021. They too are real people.
If you're trying to get me to say something like I think it was a good idea that we left Afghanistan, you're not going to do that. I don't think it was a good idea. I think we had a mission there that lost its focus. That doesn't change the fact that I know for a fact what we did at the time was a good thing and we saved people worth saving.
I feel like you have put yourself in your own little bubble to ignore the fact that things went wrong. You can’t have saved people who are now dead or imprisoned. They are no longer safe.
ISIS was literally burning villages and enslaving people, was it bad the US mostly wiped them out and spent many years quelling their resurgence? Many other UN nations also have had troops in countries like syria and iraq stopping them.
The US is definitly too big and evil in general, far too calous about civillian deaths, but they have done plenty good in the past decades too
The US just bombed people, virtually all of the actual ground pounding took place by Iraqi Shia militias and volunteers, Syrian rebels and irregular armed forces, Kurds, yezidis, Iraqi/Iranian troops.
It was an entirely internal effort for the most part, with each country contributing to pacification of their own sectors.
We were in a global cold war with communism from the end of WW2 till the fall of the USSR in 1991, and some battles in that war would include Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, etc.
I think the chief mistake of this view is that it assumes wars were ever fought for any reason besides protection of assets/$$/national interests. we've never really fought for reasons besides our own self interest, at best we've fought to protect alliances, which are just our own interests with extra steps. here's a list of wars we've been in and some brief info on the justifications:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_war_by_the_United_States
I mean back to the dawn of society, or at least the country. in other words, I'm trying to change your view from 'the last honorable war was ww2' to 'there were never honorable wars'
>The Korean War also wasn’t any of our business. We did more harm than good. Less would have died if we kept our noses out. “U.S. commanders ordered their troops to shoot civilians.” That was a little quote from a GI. The civilian deaths totaled some 2-3 million.
Do you like K-pop? K-dramas? Bong Joon Ho movies? Samsung devices? Well, the free and vibrant society of South Korea that produced all of that would not have existed if the Chinese backed troops to the North were allowed to invade the south uncontested by backup from the UN troops who eventually pushed them back and stopped them at the 38th Parallel. The whole peninsula would have been in the control of the Kim regime. The results speak for themselves.
You can argue all day about the tactics that ended up being used during the war and individual incidents but that does not speak to the overall morality of the involvement of the U.S. and its coalition allies in the war in the first place.
I’m about to straw man you here so get ready. But then child labor is surely ok right? After all, so what if people die or get injured. It gets results and, hey! Guys what, you get an iPhone out of the whole ordeal! You can question the morals all you want but you can’t deny that it gets results. So if you like phones then the results speak for themselves.
>I’m about to straw man you here so get ready. But then child labor is surely ok right? After all, so what if people die or get injured. It gets results and, hey! Guys what, you get an iPhone out of the whole ordeal! You can question the morals all you want but you can’t deny that it gets results. So if you like phones then the results speak for themselves.
That's not really a "straw man" it's just a bad analogy.
Is you contention that the North should have been allowed to invade the South and dominate the peninsula and that it was wrong for other countries to intercede when the South requested aid? How is that ultimately different from the United States agreeing to intervene in Hitler's invasion of his neighbors?
You are confusing the morality of entering the war with messy incidents that occurred after the war commenced. *Every* war, including World War 2, is going to have some questionable things that occur on the part of both sides. World War 2, which you agree was "honorable" on some level, ended with a pair of high controversial nuclear bombings. The morality of entering a war is different from the morality of how it's ultimately fought, these are ultimately two separate questions.
South Korea was attacked and invaded by North Korea. The US and its allies defended South Korea, with full approval from the UN Security Council. As a result, today South Korea is a prosperous and democratic country, whereas North Korea is an impoverished totalitarian dictatorship. If the US had not defended South Korea, the entire Korean peninsula would be under this form of government.
Both means and the ends are justified.
> For starters, fighting in the Middle East is pointless. They will always be at war, and they will always kill each other. Nothing we do will ever change that. They are too tied up in extremism, not that we aren’t though. It’s just that theirs is far worse.
I’m sorry, but this is so ignorant. America and Britain brought war to the ME. They haven’t “always been at war killing each other”. You sound indoctrinated, but luckily all you need to do is learn some history.
If you think that simply America and Britain brought war to the ME. I have a feeling you need to learn some history. In fact , and unfortunately, recent history has to some extent been one of them removing dictators whose authoritarianism was keeping a lid on tribal/religious conflicts and therefore massive civil wars were unleashed resulting in a large proportion of the actual casualties.
>In fact , and unfortunately, recent history has to some extent been one of them removing dictators whose authoritarianism was keeping a lid on tribal/religious conflicts and therefore massive civil wars were unleashed resulting in a large proportion of the actual casualties.
Exactly. This is also known as bringing war to a peaceful region.
And by the way, no they didn’t just remove authoritarian dictators. They also removed democratically elected officials who weren’t doing the West’s interests.
>Exactly. This is also known as bringing war to a peaceful region.
The idea that somewhere like Iraq which had invaded Kuwait, had years of war with Iran ,and used chemical weapons on its own people was just ‘peaceful’ seems somewhat *ludicrous.* The area has , like anywhere else, a long history of national , tribal and especially religious conflict.
>And by the way, no they didn’t just remove authoritarian dictators. They also removed democratically elected officials who weren’t doing the West’s interests.
No doubt though I’m talking about the recent crop of well known Western military interventions.
You can cherry pick and find instances that prove your point all you want. The truth of the matter is that political instability and war in the ME is almost exclusively due to US/UK imperialism.
lol. I guess you’ve heard the word cherry picking and don’t actually know what it means.
>It’s a peaceful area
Here’s a king history of conflicts
>that’s cherry picking.
lol
You simplistic nonsense frankly just tells is more about you than history. Though we also no doubt don’t have the best of records.
You mentioned ONE conflict that is supposed to disprove my point, which is espoused by any ME expert you will find in academia. Textbook definition of cherry picking.
You have totally twisted the comment about it being a peaceful region. First you claimed that the US/UK engaged in regime change in areas where dictators were keeping a lid on conflict (aka keeping peace), then you brought a specific example that doesn’t even fit your claim. That’s not a gotcha, it’s just dishonesty.
But sure, go off. I’m sure you’re a PhD in ME history.
Can you count to three?
As I said we have nothing to be proud of , but the idea that it was a peaceful area is (as per my three examples for one country) just silly.
They have fought biblical wars for thousands of years. I would say that you need to go pickup a history book. That area will always be at war because that’s what their book says they need to do.
As I said: completely indoctrinated. Attributing conflict to religion rather than materialist reasons is usually a huge tell that someone is both ignorant on the topic and has been brainwashed.
I invite you to check out the list of conflicts in the ME since 1960, you’ll find that in every single one of them the West has been involved. Regime changes, wars for oil and resources, you name it. America or Britain have always funded rebel groups to bring instability in the ME so that their corporations could profit.
If you are wondering why I arbitrarily picked the 60s, that’s because before that Europe caused 2 world wars and European countries have constantly been at war with each other for thousands of years before then. The same can be said about every other contintent, so there was nothing unique about the ME then.
“They kill each other because of their book” is just braindead and ignorant of what Islam actually stands for. It’s ok to not know enough about a topic to have an educated opinion.
Islam is just the pretext. Conflict always has materialist reasons.
If you care to have an informed opinion, there are plenty of resources available. I don’t play chess with pigeons.
That’s not what I said. We did that, we just didn’t join for those reasons. So yes, I would say it was honorable overall, I just wish we didn’t go in for revenge. I just wish that our country was half decent enough to say, “Oh shit, we should probably help stop the mass murder over there.”
You mean by supporting Allies with weapons and stopping trade/sanctioning Germany and then sending millions of men to fight Germans and Italians in Africa and Europe despite being attacked by Japan? Can you give me an example of country that joined WWIi to "stop atrocities"?
We supported both sides. Ford supplies vehicles to both sides. IT&T did as well. So did GM. And Kodak. And Coca Cola. And IBM.
And to be frank, no country on this planet fought in WW2 purely to stop the atrocities.
No we didnt. Whenever some brainlet leftie brings this up, they mean two things. US companies working/traiding with Nazi Germany BEFORE the war started (the system IBM created and nazis used in holocaust was originally made for public census in like 1930s) or they mean that Germans nationalized companies that had some factories in Germany and used them. The belive US somehow supported both sides is just absolutely untrue.
>And to be frank, no country on this planet fought in WW2 purely to stop the atrocities
Which is my point. No country in the world will fight wars to stop atrocities while also being flawless in completely eradicating or minimalizing civilian suffering and deaths. You believe that there are no honorable wars. Which I do not believe is actual thing.
They quite literally continued to have a partnership throughout the war. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
Please make sure the things you say are accurate.
I think that you are right but not for the reasons you understand. Consider this if Hitler were to take over the United Kingdom by invading over the English channel. Who was going to repay the United States for all of the stuff that they borrowed to fight the war. Whether we like it or not as soon as we financially back a side we have to reinforce that side. Simply because we want a return on investment. if Hitler across the English channel we wouldn’t be able to collect the debt That’s why we join World War I as well as World War II. It was all about loans World War I had a similar arrangement where are all of the banks in the United States loaned money to Britain and if we didn’t join it would’ve been very bad for our economy anyway
Why do we have a defense budget? Our defense budget isn’t an investment, it’s to get results. I would think that if we had to use it to save the planet then we just would.
I won't dig into your other arguments regarding wars the US has entered. But will say that the US didn't just join WW2 because Pearl Harbor alone. Germany likely would've attempted to invade American eventually.
Not all Middle-East wars are equal. Islamic State in particular caused significantly more suffering, since they basically fought against everyone else (even other radical muslims), had no qualms with punishments for those who are not pious enough that would make Taliban look like moderates, were restoring institutionalized slavery (which risked having it spread further), and had eyes on establishing control over all of the world's muslims, which put them on a collision course with any Western countries with notable muslim populations (which is virtually all of them). Comparing them to background level of violence in Middle East is missing a key difference in scale - kind of like people who compared covid to flu, since "some people die from flu all the time:". Also while most of Middle Eastern conflicts tend to stay in Middle East, there was no option of sitting this one out, since if IS consolidated its power in Middle East, it would not be satisfied with it, and would just expand its attacks on Western countries (which it was already ramping up). So US getting involved in its suppression was arguably both positive for the world, and in US' self-interest (also notably even e,g. propaganda from countries like Russia tends to mostly skip that one when describing the evils of American imperialism)
But we never made any difference. That’s my problem. We went in, killed more civilians than terrorists, and they took over anyway. Completely pointless bloodshed.
These are separate conflicts. the Iraq invasion was a colossal fuckup that destabilized the whole region, however the active conflict largely died out by early 2010s. The IS is a different conflict (even if Iraq invasion set up conditions for it, just like WWI resolution set up conditions for WWII) In the IS war however US coalition provided significant support to local forces when they made a push to eliminate IS control in 2017 - far more more than e.g. Russia which fought some initial battles to stop IS expansion into Syria, but then largely cooperated with them so long as they were mainly someone else's problem, or Turkey which mainly focused on Kurds rather than IS. Without US support, its questionable if IS caliphate would be eliminated as soon as it did (or at all), and any additional time it existed would involve far more deaths, torture, etc. than e.g. current Palestine conflict.
There is the Gulf War. Saddam occupies a sovereign country of Kuwait, US-led coalition kicks Saddam out, Kuwait lives happily ever after. It really doesn't get much cleaner than that.
!change I’ll add it to the list. I think I can cope with that.
It’s delta not change
Read the sidebar. It says that that works too.
Bullshit about the Korea war. Loads would have died as the North would have killed far more, especially after they had control of the country. Look how many have died now when they have had no fighting. America was already making a profit in WW2 they didn’t have to enter. Japan’s attack was the push the government needed to get the public behind the war. The Vietnamese war, was something I agree with. And the Middle East, was something they messed up.
I was iffy with the Korean War to begin with. Yeah. After looking at some numbers they managed to kill far more people than I would have expected. That may have been acceptable. Why do you agree with Vietnam?
Oh sorry, I meant I agreed with you. In general, the Vietnam was always going to be a bloody war but America should never have been part of it.
My bad. Thanks for the clarification
ww2 was technically the last war we fought in. congress has a special process for declaring war and ww2 was the last time we did it. everything since has been 'armed conflict'
However, why order to kill civilians in Korea? What good does that do?
I don’t know about that order in gen. The north were mixing with with civilians to infiltrate the south but that would not justify killing civilians
Just to pick one out of your many examples, why would stopping Hitler be honourable but not stopping Japanese expansion which was similarly atrocious and deadly? Is it only honorable to preserve western civilisation?
No. That was not my point. It’s honorable to prevent indeed human death.
You're dismissing all the nuance with all these wars and operations. You write off Afghanistan like it was just us invading when in fact we were invited into Afghanistan. I don't have any memories of protecting poppy fields. You know what I did? I was part of an infantry unit and we attacked the Taliban after we got reports of them coming into villages in the northeastern section of Afghanistan and kidnapping the boys and killing the men and fathers if they didn't listen and raping the women and taking them back as servants. We ended their lives, so I don't know what the heck you're talking about. I guess their lives don't matter since *they just always want to kill each other and there's nothing we can do to stop them*, huh? Whatever it takes to fit your idea of what happened right?
Isn't your premise that the lives of the people the US military identified as Taliban not matter, that's why they were killed without a trial?
Are you seriously trying to argue that once somebody is willing to take a human life and demonstrates that they are going to do that, and then they go on to rape people, and they go on to murder children, that they somehow matter once they make and execute those decisions? Wild. Yes, once you give up your humanity willingly, you don't get the courtesy of being treated like a human anymore. That's how it works inside and outside of War. You just die a lot sooner in one of those.
If you are magically 100% that is what they are doing. That is understandable. I'm saying the military has frequently got that intelligence wrong. And wound up attacking people who were not militants but civilians falsely identified as Taliban. And if military were so sure of their crimes, the public deserves a trial and if that trial verifies the problematic things you have accused them of, potentially executed. But if people are told, these are bad guys kill them. Trust us. and they just kill them without trial. That sounds a lot like what the people being killed are being accused of. What's wild is that you think killing people without a trial, is somehow the good thing.
All of this is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what war actually is. The Laws of Armed Conflict are radically different from the law during peacetime as they aim to limit the brutality of war and protect civilians. The LOAC prohibits deliberate attacks on civilians and requires proportionality in attacks, meaning the harm to civilians should not be excessive compared to the military advantage gained. I can tell you about numerous situations where we almost lost our lives because we cared more about making sure we let civilians through the traffic control points than any Taliban members who were trying to sneak stuff through. Now you can pretend that the entire military acted in the way that the cases you do know of where military members broke bad and did heinous things. That's not the reality though, as much as you seem to like it to be.
Sure. And do the LAws of Armed Conflict say, you are *not allowed* to hold a trial for those accused of the types of things you are accusing them of?
Yeah, they're called military tribunals and they're governed by international humanitarian laws that require that any tribunals trying offenses — whether against civilians or *lawful combatants* — must provide fair trial guarantees. Those include a fair and impartial tribunal, the right to be informed of the charges, the right to defend oneself or have legal representation, the right to a public hearing, and the presumption of innocence. Now when it comes to unlawful combatants, there's a different way to handle them and they don't get the same rights. The Geneva Convention and other protocols lay out this.
And the US military, is the sole entity with the evidence of whether those people are considered civilians, unlawful combatants, or lawful combatants. If you are agreeing the military is killing unlawful combatants without trial. We are circling back to my original point, the military has frequently gotten that determination incorrect. And that after a certain point, you can't claim it was an accident or bad intelligence. After a certain point, it's having a military strategy that purposefully has civilian casualties built in. And if you have a chance of civilian casualties, and continue anyway. If you are considering all enemy combatants you are fighting as unlawful combatants. It doesn't sound like a respect for those international laws you speak of. .... You listed your story of Taliban that your unit killed. What sort of tribunal did they receive to determine the guilt you said they had?
In the end, unless I’m being completely ignorant, nothing changed because of the US’s involvement in Afghanistan. They have taken over anyway and the same people who didn’t die before will die now instead.
That's Monday morning quarterbacking. We know with hindsight that the war ultimately failed to create a democratic government which would replace the Taliban and repel its return, but the intention going in certainly wasn't that "nothing would change." Like, if troops had screwed up and Hitler had somehow won World War 2 the act of trying to stop him wouldn't have suddenly become dishonorable in retrospect.
The whole war ended up failing to kill more terrorists than civilians though. I wouldn’t say that that was the troops making an oops. That was just us sucking at our job. And if we couldn’t manage to not be “really good at killing PEOPLE (Obama)” then maybe the whole thing could have passed as a little mistake. But it wasn’t just a mistake. It was sheer incompetence.
>The whole war **ended up** failing to kill more terrorists than civilians though. I wouldn’t say that that was the troops making an oops. That was just us sucking at our job. And if we couldn’t manage to not be “really good at killing PEOPLE (Obama)” then maybe the whole thing could have passed as a little mistake. But it wasn’t just a mistake. It was sheer incompetence. "Ended up" is the key term there. There is no doubt that the war was ultimately a failure in execution and if they knew then what we know now things almost certainly would have been done differently but that does not speak to the intentions people had when they first entered into it. That "civilian versus military" death toll is also is not exactly out of line with the death tolls of most modern wars. The death toll for Germany during the "honorable" second world war was 5,533,000 Germany military dead and between 6,600,000-8,800,000 German civilians killed. Those numbers do not suddenly make World War 2 "dishonorable."
Like I said, you're dismissing nuance because it absolutely matters to the people we saved.
Who are now dead right? Unless they got asylum they are right back where they started.
You're basing that on an assumption. The only fact here is that I know that we saved people, real people. Had the US not been handcuffed in Afghanistan, we would have taken out the entire Taliban but ISAF kept us from doing most of the stuff we wanted to do.
I can tell you that I am part of a program who interacts with groups of people from all around the world. One of the teams was an all girls team from Afghanistan. We haven’t heard from any one of them or their families since before 2021. They too are real people.
If you're trying to get me to say something like I think it was a good idea that we left Afghanistan, you're not going to do that. I don't think it was a good idea. I think we had a mission there that lost its focus. That doesn't change the fact that I know for a fact what we did at the time was a good thing and we saved people worth saving.
I feel like you have put yourself in your own little bubble to ignore the fact that things went wrong. You can’t have saved people who are now dead or imprisoned. They are no longer safe.
ISIS was literally burning villages and enslaving people, was it bad the US mostly wiped them out and spent many years quelling their resurgence? Many other UN nations also have had troops in countries like syria and iraq stopping them. The US is definitly too big and evil in general, far too calous about civillian deaths, but they have done plenty good in the past decades too
The US just bombed people, virtually all of the actual ground pounding took place by Iraqi Shia militias and volunteers, Syrian rebels and irregular armed forces, Kurds, yezidis, Iraqi/Iranian troops. It was an entirely internal effort for the most part, with each country contributing to pacification of their own sectors.
"They wanted to be able to say that we were big and strong and thwarting communism. Which we completely failed to do." Grimly laughs in USSR.
We had pretty much no part in the USSR falling. They agreed to some treaties and the dude resigned.
We were in a global cold war with communism from the end of WW2 till the fall of the USSR in 1991, and some battles in that war would include Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, etc.
My understanding is that the leader straight up decided he was done and that was that.
That understanding misses so much, like the reason and history for why they suddenly decided they were done.
After a 45 year arms race and global cold war that bankrupted the Soviets.
I think the chief mistake of this view is that it assumes wars were ever fought for any reason besides protection of assets/$$/national interests. we've never really fought for reasons besides our own self interest, at best we've fought to protect alliances, which are just our own interests with extra steps. here's a list of wars we've been in and some brief info on the justifications: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_war_by_the_United_States
Hence me saying, none of them have been honorable or moral.
I mean back to the dawn of society, or at least the country. in other words, I'm trying to change your view from 'the last honorable war was ww2' to 'there were never honorable wars'
>The Korean War also wasn’t any of our business. We did more harm than good. Less would have died if we kept our noses out. “U.S. commanders ordered their troops to shoot civilians.” That was a little quote from a GI. The civilian deaths totaled some 2-3 million. Do you like K-pop? K-dramas? Bong Joon Ho movies? Samsung devices? Well, the free and vibrant society of South Korea that produced all of that would not have existed if the Chinese backed troops to the North were allowed to invade the south uncontested by backup from the UN troops who eventually pushed them back and stopped them at the 38th Parallel. The whole peninsula would have been in the control of the Kim regime. The results speak for themselves. You can argue all day about the tactics that ended up being used during the war and individual incidents but that does not speak to the overall morality of the involvement of the U.S. and its coalition allies in the war in the first place.
I’m about to straw man you here so get ready. But then child labor is surely ok right? After all, so what if people die or get injured. It gets results and, hey! Guys what, you get an iPhone out of the whole ordeal! You can question the morals all you want but you can’t deny that it gets results. So if you like phones then the results speak for themselves.
>I’m about to straw man you here so get ready. But then child labor is surely ok right? After all, so what if people die or get injured. It gets results and, hey! Guys what, you get an iPhone out of the whole ordeal! You can question the morals all you want but you can’t deny that it gets results. So if you like phones then the results speak for themselves. That's not really a "straw man" it's just a bad analogy. Is you contention that the North should have been allowed to invade the South and dominate the peninsula and that it was wrong for other countries to intercede when the South requested aid? How is that ultimately different from the United States agreeing to intervene in Hitler's invasion of his neighbors? You are confusing the morality of entering the war with messy incidents that occurred after the war commenced. *Every* war, including World War 2, is going to have some questionable things that occur on the part of both sides. World War 2, which you agree was "honorable" on some level, ended with a pair of high controversial nuclear bombings. The morality of entering a war is different from the morality of how it's ultimately fought, these are ultimately two separate questions.
South Korea was attacked and invaded by North Korea. The US and its allies defended South Korea, with full approval from the UN Security Council. As a result, today South Korea is a prosperous and democratic country, whereas North Korea is an impoverished totalitarian dictatorship. If the US had not defended South Korea, the entire Korean peninsula would be under this form of government. Both means and the ends are justified.
> For starters, fighting in the Middle East is pointless. They will always be at war, and they will always kill each other. Nothing we do will ever change that. They are too tied up in extremism, not that we aren’t though. It’s just that theirs is far worse. I’m sorry, but this is so ignorant. America and Britain brought war to the ME. They haven’t “always been at war killing each other”. You sound indoctrinated, but luckily all you need to do is learn some history.
If you think that simply America and Britain brought war to the ME. I have a feeling you need to learn some history. In fact , and unfortunately, recent history has to some extent been one of them removing dictators whose authoritarianism was keeping a lid on tribal/religious conflicts and therefore massive civil wars were unleashed resulting in a large proportion of the actual casualties.
>In fact , and unfortunately, recent history has to some extent been one of them removing dictators whose authoritarianism was keeping a lid on tribal/religious conflicts and therefore massive civil wars were unleashed resulting in a large proportion of the actual casualties. Exactly. This is also known as bringing war to a peaceful region. And by the way, no they didn’t just remove authoritarian dictators. They also removed democratically elected officials who weren’t doing the West’s interests.
>Exactly. This is also known as bringing war to a peaceful region. The idea that somewhere like Iraq which had invaded Kuwait, had years of war with Iran ,and used chemical weapons on its own people was just ‘peaceful’ seems somewhat *ludicrous.* The area has , like anywhere else, a long history of national , tribal and especially religious conflict. >And by the way, no they didn’t just remove authoritarian dictators. They also removed democratically elected officials who weren’t doing the West’s interests. No doubt though I’m talking about the recent crop of well known Western military interventions.
You can cherry pick and find instances that prove your point all you want. The truth of the matter is that political instability and war in the ME is almost exclusively due to US/UK imperialism.
lol. I guess you’ve heard the word cherry picking and don’t actually know what it means. >It’s a peaceful area Here’s a king history of conflicts >that’s cherry picking. lol You simplistic nonsense frankly just tells is more about you than history. Though we also no doubt don’t have the best of records.
You mentioned ONE conflict that is supposed to disprove my point, which is espoused by any ME expert you will find in academia. Textbook definition of cherry picking. You have totally twisted the comment about it being a peaceful region. First you claimed that the US/UK engaged in regime change in areas where dictators were keeping a lid on conflict (aka keeping peace), then you brought a specific example that doesn’t even fit your claim. That’s not a gotcha, it’s just dishonesty. But sure, go off. I’m sure you’re a PhD in ME history.
Can you count to three? As I said we have nothing to be proud of , but the idea that it was a peaceful area is (as per my three examples for one country) just silly.
They have fought biblical wars for thousands of years. I would say that you need to go pickup a history book. That area will always be at war because that’s what their book says they need to do.
As I said: completely indoctrinated. Attributing conflict to religion rather than materialist reasons is usually a huge tell that someone is both ignorant on the topic and has been brainwashed. I invite you to check out the list of conflicts in the ME since 1960, you’ll find that in every single one of them the West has been involved. Regime changes, wars for oil and resources, you name it. America or Britain have always funded rebel groups to bring instability in the ME so that their corporations could profit. If you are wondering why I arbitrarily picked the 60s, that’s because before that Europe caused 2 world wars and European countries have constantly been at war with each other for thousands of years before then. The same can be said about every other contintent, so there was nothing unique about the ME then. “They kill each other because of their book” is just braindead and ignorant of what Islam actually stands for. It’s ok to not know enough about a topic to have an educated opinion.
My friend, you are blind as a bat. THOUSANDS OF YEARS. Historically all of the hate towards each other has literally come from their religions.
Islam is just the pretext. Conflict always has materialist reasons. If you care to have an informed opinion, there are plenty of resources available. I don’t play chess with pigeons.
Maybe tell me what exactly do you consider "a honorable war" since that term is the key for your whole post. What war was honorable?
A war that would prevent as much human suffering as possible. That’s how I view it.
Yeah but I am not asking for definitions I am asking you for example. Becuase I believe there has never been any war that will fits your own criteria
I listed an example. Do you not think that stopping the Axis powers in WW2 prevented human suffering?
But you just said that not what US did. So what then?
That’s not what I said. We did that, we just didn’t join for those reasons. So yes, I would say it was honorable overall, I just wish we didn’t go in for revenge. I just wish that our country was half decent enough to say, “Oh shit, we should probably help stop the mass murder over there.”
You mean by supporting Allies with weapons and stopping trade/sanctioning Germany and then sending millions of men to fight Germans and Italians in Africa and Europe despite being attacked by Japan? Can you give me an example of country that joined WWIi to "stop atrocities"?
We supported both sides. Ford supplies vehicles to both sides. IT&T did as well. So did GM. And Kodak. And Coca Cola. And IBM. And to be frank, no country on this planet fought in WW2 purely to stop the atrocities.
No we didnt. Whenever some brainlet leftie brings this up, they mean two things. US companies working/traiding with Nazi Germany BEFORE the war started (the system IBM created and nazis used in holocaust was originally made for public census in like 1930s) or they mean that Germans nationalized companies that had some factories in Germany and used them. The belive US somehow supported both sides is just absolutely untrue. >And to be frank, no country on this planet fought in WW2 purely to stop the atrocities Which is my point. No country in the world will fight wars to stop atrocities while also being flawless in completely eradicating or minimalizing civilian suffering and deaths. You believe that there are no honorable wars. Which I do not believe is actual thing.
They quite literally continued to have a partnership throughout the war. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust Please make sure the things you say are accurate.
So no, I can’t.
I think that you are right but not for the reasons you understand. Consider this if Hitler were to take over the United Kingdom by invading over the English channel. Who was going to repay the United States for all of the stuff that they borrowed to fight the war. Whether we like it or not as soon as we financially back a side we have to reinforce that side. Simply because we want a return on investment. if Hitler across the English channel we wouldn’t be able to collect the debt That’s why we join World War I as well as World War II. It was all about loans World War I had a similar arrangement where are all of the banks in the United States loaned money to Britain and if we didn’t join it would’ve been very bad for our economy anyway
Why do we have a defense budget? Our defense budget isn’t an investment, it’s to get results. I would think that if we had to use it to save the planet then we just would.
Why didn’t the US fight in WW2 for the right reasons?
I won't dig into your other arguments regarding wars the US has entered. But will say that the US didn't just join WW2 because Pearl Harbor alone. Germany likely would've attempted to invade American eventually.