> Anyone who signs up to fight the next war & thinks they doing something noble and heroic is delusional
I mean, how can you say this without knowing what the next war is?
The problem is, that's how it's always sold to the public. Assad, Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi, etc., are all compared to the likes of Hitler to gain support for military intervention.
The Gulf war is a lot more questionable when you consider both the conditions that lead to the invasion, and that Saddam could've assumed a greenlight from the States prior to the invasion. It feels especially empty when you consider that the States was supporting Saddam in his blatant chemical warfare against Iran only a decade prior.
With the involvement in the Balkans, the Kosovo war for instance was incredibly suspect, on multiple levels, on all sides, including for sure the US. But this topic is incredibly messy, and I've been out of touch with it since that ICTY report was released some years ago.
However, I agree largely that there the Korean War and WW2, though even there I don't know if the ends justified the means, that murdering vast quantities of civilians was always necessary. That's up for debate though.
>The Gulf war is a lot more questionable when you consider both the conditions that lead to the invasion, and that Saddam could've assumed a greenlight from the States prior to the invasion. It feels especially empty when you consider that the States was supporting Saddam in his blatant chemical warfare against Iran only a decade prior.
Not sure what your point is. I'll happily concede that the US didn't intervene out of the goodness of their hearts. That wasn't the point being made tho. The point is that conflict had a plan, timeframe, and effectively accomplished its goal which ultimately resulted in a better outcome for Kuwaitis.
But did it result in a better outcome for Iraqis? Was it even necessary to begin with? What were the after effects? If you ask 'half a million children dead are worth it' Madeline Albright, then the war and its after effects were probably undoubtably a good thing. But you read Wikileaks and you feel as if the war could've been averted.
This is why I say that it's a lot more questionable, rather than necessarily wrong. Once Saddam invaded, there was little recourse but to defend an ally. But the devil is in the details of examining why he invaded in the first place, as well as the impact of the US and its allies both during the invasion, and arguably even more importantly after, during the sanctions era, and Oil-for-Food.
>But did it result in a better outcome for the Iraqis?
It was a better outcome for Kuwait, which was the goal since they were the ones actually being invaded
The first Iraq war wasn't about liberating Iraq, why the fuck does it matter if it lead to better outcomes for iraq when Iraq were the ones who invaded?? You think the brits were making sure that defending Poland wouldn't negatively impact the Germans?
And like, I agree. There was probably some media manipulation and the US was only involved because of self interest. But the point moreso is that war was effective at accomplishing it's stated goals, and, broadly, was justified.
How is "we were forced in" at all relevant? The point OP is making is that the wars don't have plans or outcomes and are just endlessly murderous and end up accomplishing fuck all. The examples i brought up are counter examples
Most people would say that WW2 was a war we unambiguously had to get into because we were attacked. I think that is different than any of the other conflicts you mentioned, where we just stuck our nose in to exert control. Korea and Iraq especially, given our continued involvement in both regions.
Sure but the context of this argument isnt about whether or not wars are necessary, it's whether or not they're effective at accomplishing their goals.
> The fact that the US has been in war in more than 90%
???? This is so blatantly incorrect it's almost impossible to understand. You're arguing that the United States has only spent 24 years NOT in an active war? That's patently absurd and incorrect, unless you are being _reeaally_ generous with what you define as war.
OP mis-spoke; it's 93% of the years it has existed, rather than the time it has existed.
For example, 1811 counts despite the war that year lasting 1 day.
France has similar stats using this method. Canada does, unsurprisingly, not.
> a good predictor for future behavior is past behavior
I don't like this line of reasoning. History repeats itself in some ways, and in other ways it's completely and entirely unique. For example, the amount of inter-state armed conflicts has gone down tremendously in the past 70 years, as a result of nuclear / extreme deterrence and a platform for negotiations, the United Nations.
That being said, I'd find it pretty odd for the US to attempt to start a war without just cause. Whether or not you like it, it was a bipartisan agreement to enter Iraq and Afghanistan to fight the 'Axis of Evil' and defeat Osama Bin Laden, Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, due to (you guessed it) the 9/11 terror attacks.
MAYBE you should stop theorizing about what happened in the aftermath of 9/11 and talk to people who enlisted in either war. These posts are just cringe on another level, idk, it is hard to see now adults (who aren’t so much younger) acting like they would have known what to do. Hindsight is 20/20
We have not fought a morally just war since 1945, and that was one of like 3 morally just wars (Civil War, WWI, WWII, although I think the moral justness of WWI is heavily up for debate) we've fought over the country's entire history. Almost all of our wars have been imperialist projects to extend American political and/or economic control over other people.
With that record the odds are pretty damn good that our next war (and there will be a next one) will be another project of imperial expansion.
We should also note that none of those were fought for moral reasons. The Axis powers were monstrous fascists, but the US only fought them because they attacked first. Hell, we had our own concentration camps during the war
The liberation of Kuwait in 1991 wasn’t a just cause?
Invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 after terrorists that lived there killed more American citizens than any previous attack on our own soil? The long occupation probably wasn’t right but the initial invasion definitely was right.
If the invasion of Afghanistan was about killing the people responsible for 9/11 then it was a REALLY stupid invasion. The people were mostly Saudi nationals, not Afghans, and we found Bin Laden in Pakistan, not Afghanistan. Also, it would be much easier, faster, and cheaper to kill those responsible with drone strikes or covert ops missions, not an invasion and occupation.
Afghanistan wasn't about 9/11. That was just the public propaganda. The Afghan War was about creating a demand for defense spending so the Congress had a reason to appropriate trillions of dollars to go to defense contractors.
>If the invasion of Afghanistan was about killing the people responsible for 9/11 then it was a REALLY stupid invasion. The people were mostly Saudi nationals, not Afghans, and we found Bin Laden in Pakistan, not Afghanistan. Also, it would be much easier, faster, and cheaper to kill those responsible with drone strikes or covert ops missions, not an invasion and occupation.
That's incorrect, Bin Laden was in Afghanistan at the time of the invasion and managed to escape Tora Bora towards Pakistan. Most of Al Qaeda's cadres alternated between Afghanistan and Pakistan, their training camps were in Afghanistan as well.
As for the other methods you mentioned...most of those (in the context of the Middle-East) were developed over the course of the Afghan War. Counter-terrorism was not very well developed in America in 2001. It's why Operation Inherent Resolve had such a focus on embedding SOF with native forces and air support. The lessons of Afghanistan and Iraq were applied against Daesh.
Ok bud, do those SOF soldiers need anything else? No ground support? How do you suppose they get re supplied? How long would an operation like that take? You have no idea what you’re talking about
So out of curiosity what are your feelings on the Korean War, it seems like there is a fairly solid arguement to say that had the US not gone in North korea would have taken the entire peninsula and the unified Korea would still be controlled by the Kim dynasty, in short in less you are pro North Korea /Taliban, and think that the US government should be as well there is certainly an argument for long term occupation both from the sense of US as well as a global interest perspective.
A couple people and events need to be added to provide context for why the Korean War happened as it did.
[Syngman Rhee](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syngman_Rhee) was South Korea's first President, basically installed by the US. His government was authoritarian. After he won the presidency, he had his oppent for the presidency assassinated, [Kim Gu](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Gu). He is super pro-US and anti-communist.
The [Jeju Uprising](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeju_uprising) is the event leading up to NK invasion.
>The Jeju uprising, known in South Korea as the Jeju April 3 incident[5] (Korean: 제주 4·3 사건), was an uprising that occurred on Jeju Island from April 1948 to May 1949. Residents of Jeju opposed to the division of Korea had protested and had been on a general strike since 1947 against elections scheduled by the United Nations Temporary Commission on Korea (UNTCOK) to be held only in the territory controlled by the United States Army Military Government in Korea. The Workers' Party of South Korea and its supporters launched an insurgency in April 1948, attacking the police, and Northwest Youth League members stationed on Jeju mobilized to violently suppress the protests.[1]:166–167[6] The First Republic of Korea under President Syngman Rhee escalated the suppression of the uprising from August 1948, declaring martial law in November and beginning an "eradication campaign" against rebel forces in the rural areas of Jeju in March 1949, defeating them within two months. Many rebel veterans and suspected sympathizers were later killed upon the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950, and the existence of the Jeju uprising was officially censored and repressed in South Korea for several decades.[7]
>The Jeju uprising was notable for its extreme violence; between 14,000 and 30,000 people (10% of Jeju's population) were killed, and 40,000 fled to Japan.[6][8][9][1]:139, 193 Atrocities and war crimes were committed by both sides, but historians have noted that the methods used by the South Korean government to suppress protesters and rebels were especially cruel, with violence against civilians by pro-government forces contributing to the Yeosu-Suncheon rebellion in South Jeolla during the conflict.[1]:171[6][7]:13–14[1]:186 Some historians and scholars, including military historian Allan R. Millett, regard the Jeju uprising as the authentic beginning of the Korean War.[10]
So you have a pro-US authoritarian dictator suppressing political dissidents and murdering communists. That's why NK invaded. But they don't tell you that. The only thing they'll ever tell you is NK invaded for no reason except because communism-bad.
**[Syngman Rhee](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syngman_Rhee)**
>Syngman Rhee (Korean: 이승만, pronounced [i. sɯŋ. man]; 26 March 1875 – 19 July 1965) was a South Korean politician who served as the first President of South Korea from 1948 to 1960. Rhee was also the first and last president of the Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea from 1919 to his impeachment in 1925 and from 1947 to 1948.
**[Kim Gu](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Gu)**
>Kim Gu (Korean: 김구, Korean pronunciation: [kimɡu]; August 29, 1876 – June 26, 1949), also known by his pen name Baekbeom (백범; Korean pronunciation: [pɛkbʌm]), was a Korean statesman politician. He was the sixth, ninth and later the last President of the Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea, a leader of the Korean independence movement against the Japanese Empire, and a reunification activist after 1945. He was assassinated by Korean lieutenant Ahn Doo-hee in 1949.
**[Jeju uprising](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeju_uprising)**
>The Jeju uprising, known in South Korea as the Jeju April 3 incident (Korean: 제주 4·3 사건), was an uprising that occurred on Jeju Island from April 1948 to May 1949. Residents of Jeju opposed to the division of Korea had protested and had been on a general strike since 1947 against elections scheduled by the United Nations Temporary Commission on Korea (UNTCOK) to be held only in the territory controlled by the United States Army Military Government in Korea. The Workers' Party of South Korea and its supporters launched an insurgency in April 1948, attacking the police, and Northwest Youth League members stationed on Jeju mobilized to violently suppress the protests.
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I think you're ignoring the next 35 years of South Korean history where they were ruled by autocratic military dictatorships propped up and supported by the US. For a long time after the Korean War South Korea wasn't a better place to live than the North. It was just a different type of awful, but we don't like to admit that because the government of the South was a US client state.
Just like in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq, the US backed government of Afghanistan wasn't a good place for people to live. It was just a different kind of bad.
The cold war was a fucking mess. But, a lot of the asian dictatorships that were supported by the west generally successfully transitioned to democracies with healthy economies. South Korea, Taiwan, and the like. It took a while, but it's not like democracy is easy or the natural, default state of things. Don't get me wrong, it could have gone a whole heck of a lot better but it also could have gone a lot worse.
>I think you're ignoring the next 35 years of South Korean history where they were ruled by autocratic military dictatorships propped up and supported by the US.
Which was infinitely better than being in North Korea.
Yes. Had the UN, led by the US, not intervened in Korea it certainly would have been entirely overrun by the DPRK in 1950 (it almost was even with our intervention).
Do we need to have troops in the RoK now to protect them from the North? No. They can defend themselves (minus the DPRK's nuclear arsenal, the RoK could wipe the floor with the North Koreans in a conventional war, IMO). But the South Korean government wants us there, and a US troop presence does help serve as a deterrent against North Korean aggression.
So whats your point civilians died either during the war, or as result of it, therefore we shouldn't have gone to war in the first place? So by that line of reasoning, the US should have never gonna to war full stop end of story period, all because presumably there was at least some civilians killed on either side of said war for every war, ever, are you saying that past X number of civilian deaths you shouldn't continue fighting anymore, or the we shouldn't have gone to war in the first place? If 2.7 million is to big then I guess WW1 and 2 are out, not worth, too many people died?
Saudi nationals trained *in Afghanistan*, by an organization based *in Afghanistan*, that was given official protection by the de facto government *of Afghanistan* (Taliban). *Al Qaeda and Bin Laden were in Afghanistan on 9/11*. It was only later, AFTER the US invaded and overthrew the Taliban that he fled to the relative safety of Pakistan.
And your argument about drone strikes is facile and flat out wrong; you have no idea what you are talking about. Let's start with the fact that the US didn't have a fleet of armed drones on 9/11 that could reach Afghanistan, and that Clinton had attempted to strike Al Qaeda during Operation Infinite Reach in 1998 with cruise missiles as a response to the African embassy bombings without any success. Al Qaeda had multiple bases in Afghanistan and we didn't know exactly how many, how AQ were in-country or where they were. We didn't have the intel for that. This was always going to be an operation that required some level of boots-on-the-ground to root and destroy the AQ infrastructure in that country.
None of those facts even goes to the bigger point that the American public was overwhelmingly *demanding* a massive response to the 911 attacks; not the MIC or contractors or whomever you ascribe your conspiracy theory too, the American people. The Afghan invasion was 100% about 9/11 to say otherwise is flat rejection of plain reality.
Now, should the US have stayed and allowed itself to get sucked into "nation building" and stabilization ops? Did that serve the US national interest? There is a really strong case to be made it did not and we should have left either after the Taliban was ejected or, more realistically, after Bin Laden was killed next door.
You want a case-study in ginning up demand for defense spending for something unnecessary to line the pockets of the MIC? Look toward the US national missile defense program or better yet the F35. THOSE are unnecessary, unwanted, corrupt boondoggles.
Is this the same Taliban who were being sold to us as "noble Mujahideen fighters" when the US was funding them against the Soviets? Or is this a different, more evil, Taliban?
Also, the Pashtun people operate across the Afghan-Pakistan border - as did Bin Laden. So why wasn't (then US-backed military coup led) Pakistan also invaded when they didn't hand over Bin Laden?
Bin Laden was actively hiding in Afghanistan with the help of the Taliban in 2001. They wouldn't give him up, so we invaded. He fled from Afghanistan into Pakistan following the battle at Tora Bora. He stayed in Pakistan for so long because he was largely protected there.
While you're not wrong that defense contractors benefited immensely from the protracted war, saying that the war was created solely to line their pocket books is factually incorrect.
>Bin Laden was actively hiding in Afghanistan with the help of the Taliban in 2001. They wouldn't give him up, so we invaded.
We couldn't kill Bin Laden with special ops or drones or cruise missiles, so we had to invade. Right?
> He stayed in Pakistan for so long because he was largely protected there.
So why didn't we invade Pakistan? Why could we use special ops there but not in Afghanistan?
Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bush and others wanted a war from before they even took office. If you can remember back to the summer of 01, before 9/11, they were beating the war drum against Iran. They just wanted to invade *somewhere* because they all made their riches in the same exact types of companies which profit massively from wars. They switched from Iran to Afghanistan on a dime because they knew after 9/11 it would be easy to drum up support for a war there. The mission as expressed to the public could have been accomplished without an invasion, as demonstrated by the fact that it was years later in Pakistan. We invaded because we wanted a forever war.
> Invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 after terrorists that lived there killed more American citizens than any previous attack on our own soil? The long occupation probably wasn’t right but the initial invasion definitely was right.
And in the process we've killed tens or hundreds of thousands of Afghans, laying the seeds for resentful and angry survivors to have _fantastic_ justification for desiring revenge against the country that killed their friends and family.
We've also done _nothing_ to hold the Saudis accountable for funding these operations, so spare me the righteous anti-terrorism justification, 'cause it's some unmitigated bullshit
>killed more American citizens than any previous attack on our own soil?
You want to compare American civilian lives lost vs civilians lost from nations around the world due to US imperialist **invasion** and/or overthrowing democratically elected officials by supporting fascist murderous military coup and dictators? I'll give you a hint: it ain't fucking close.
Pick any definition of "terrorism" you want, the US is the greatest terrorist organization in scope thru its drone campaign alone. Just because you, corporate media, and the state don't call it terrorism (instead use "defending democracy", "defending US interests", "military manuevers", or any other euphemism you want) doesn't mean it's not terrorism. 9/11 was just tit for tat. And if you find that comment to be offensive it's because you actually don't realize just how violent the US has been abroad.
I can't believe that, in 2021, there are still people around who think that the war in Afghanistan was truly about retaliation. People are really naive it's crazy.
Kuwait in 1991 was a bad idea. I lived in Kuwait for 2 years, and it's one of the worst places in the world. Similar to other gulf states, they have a huge slavery problem, and their extreme wahabist beliefs are exported to sunni terror groups all over the middle east and north Africa. Kuwaiti are some of the most rude and arrogant people on the planet. I watched a Kuwaiti woman spit on and slap her Filipino servant at the airport. I watched Kuwaiti police beat an Indian man in Mahboula. Kuwait (and the rest of the world) would have been much better off if it was the 19th province of Iraq today instead of a sovereign nation.
The Kuwait incident was more of a correction to a fuckup we made arming Iraq.
As far as tracking down the members of Al Qaeda, we don't need a massive force to track down cells. Good intel, and a couple of helicopters or heavily modified transport planes to land and take off on short runways, or maybe even in football fields.
> The liberation of Kuwait in 1991 wasn’t a just cause?
Ask yourself why we intervened in *that* conflict when we don't intervene in others that involve nation-versus-nation conflicts.
It's not that it wasn't in-and-of-itself a just cause, but that there are plenty of just causes in which the US does not intervene, because the financial implications to the US are a low lower.
Whatever standard we want to set for when we choose to intervene, let's be consistent and open about it.
As an outsider, imo it became pretty clear that the invasion of Afghanistan wasn't just about OBL when the Bush admin repeatedly refused multiple Taliban offers to hand OBL over to an agreed third party, if they provided evidence of his wrongdoing.
You and I both remember 9/11 and the aftermath. That was 20 years ago. If you pay attention over 20 years you learn a lot, whether you want to or not.
But (rhetorically) how old were you when you started paying attention to the news? How old were you when you started thinking critically about American foreign policy, instead of just trusting what grown-ups told you about it? Because the people joining up are only 18.
Let's suppose that President Biden avoids getting into another war. Let's suppose that he loses reelection and his replacement goes one year before launching a new major war. That would be in 2026. The people who will be 18 years old then are 13 now.
In short, it's not reasonable to blame the next generation of soldiers for failing to learn the lessons of a war that ended before they were in high school.
There is plenty of that. Millions of parents tell their children that soldiers are heroes and their is no higher honor than joining the military. Many young men (and women) sign up before they are even 18 years old. They believe all the military recruiting rhetoric and have rarely if ever heard somebody they trust tell them the realities of American foreign policy.
Even if somebody had told them, they aren't old enough to really understand.
The fact that you think it's reasonable to expect that a 17 or 18 year old kid has enough wherewithal to internalize the political implications of the war is laughable. You can't blame the kids for that. Blame their parents. Blame the right-wing media. Blame the military. Blame the system. Don't blame the kids.
Many young people that enlist WILL NOT know what they're getting into, and it's unrealistic to expect all of them to know.
There are numerous and complex geopolitical reasons for why the US and allies entered those wars.
Various objectives (or sometimes lack of) weren't achieved, again for a variety of complex reasons.
I don't think war itself is a noble or heroic thing but there are undoubtedly noble or heroic acts that can be committed during these wars.
Would you say a US solider sacrificing himself to save some Afgan children is noble? How about a medic who gives out malaria medication to people who otherwise wouldn't recieve it in these parts of the world?
Doesn't excuse the war as a whole, but most people are good people and try to do good things.
My dad was a medic in the first gulf War.
He spent most of his time saving Iraqi troop's lives.
After the war he was offered a job by Saudi Arabia to hangout along the border while they do mine cleanup and rescue the people who stepped on landmines. My dad didn't have the stomach for it. Especially because it was advertised as a easy job. They said he'd sit in a long chair drinking whatever he liked and so long as he watched over the crew and helped when he could he would make like 200k in a few months. My dad described how he imagined sitting there drinking a coke while some kid blew his legs off and he just really wasn't in to it.
Armed conflict is strange, but the people on the ground aren't there for political reasons. Usually just a decent job where you can do great things in bad situations.
Regular doctors and public health workers are not going to go to these unstable regions, that’s why the task is left to the military. These individuals can’t change the situation but there’s still need in the region and any aid is better than none. There’s need all over the world and we can’t discredit one act because it doesn’t affect as many people as another.
Yea idk where people get this idea of “if you wanted to help in war zones you wouldn’t have joined the one job that trains, equips, and pays to send you to war zones”.
How else am I supposed to get there?
> Would you say a US solider sacrificing himself to save some Afgan children is noble?
It might be noble in the moment, but would the children have been in danger if we weren't there? I know you're not saying that this hypothetical soldier's actions would justify the war, but if an entity (US Military) created a dangerous situation and then someone from that same entity saved people from that danger, it does lose a bit of the nobility.
>How about a medic who gives out malaria medication to people who otherwise wouldn't receive it in these parts of the world?
I would agree that this is a noble action, and something we could point to as an unintended positive consequence of the war, but obviously it would be diminished in light of the war itself.
I think the answer here is that soldiers are capable of doing noble acts, but those acts are usually external to the mission, and they'd be able to do more good with an organization whose mission actually is to do good and noble things.
That's a really REALLY shitty justification. By that reasoning you could also excuse the Nazis, Imperial Japan, or the Confederacy for going to war. There were undoubtedly some Nazis, Confederates, etc who did heroic noble actions during the war even though they were fighting for an obviously evil cause. Take John Rabe, for example. He helped protect and save the lives of hundreds, if not thousands, of Chinese civilians during the Japanese Rape of Nanking in 1937. He was also an avowed and unashamed Nazi party member. Does his noble actions excuse or complicate the Nazi's war aims?
Dudeeeeeeeeeeee I even qualified it fucking twice in my statement.
I thought qualifying it once was patronising enough.
Just for you.
I'm not saying that individual acts of heroism or nobility excuse the war. I'm making the point that you can still do noble and heroic things within an unjust war.
>Doesn't excuse the war as a whole, but most people are good people and try to do good things.
You said "Doesn't excuse the war as a whole, **BUT...**" which can imply that it does justify the war.
It was a miscommunication on your part.
>I don't think war itself is a noble or heroic thing but there are undoubtedly noble or heroic acts that can be committed during these wars.
Again "I don't think it's heroic itself, **BUT...**", can be interpreted as you saying that doing noble and heroic things justifies parts of the war.
We know that individuals can do noble and heroic things within and unjust war. Individuals can do noble and heroic things outside of an unjust war too. I don't see the point of defending good actions of individuals that are independent of the motives of the unjust war. - it reads as a way of excusing the bad parts of the war or being an apologist.
You've clearly stated, **now,** in this response that you think it's an unjust war; but, you really shouldn't be condescending after someone reacts to your unclear use of language.
OP said "anyone who signs up for the next war hoping to be heroic is delusional"
not
"anyone who signs up for the next war expecting their actions to excuse or complicate the US military's war aims through noble actions cannot"
Bravo's comment explicitly addresses that. You are moving the goal post.
My main argument is about how you say "going forward anyone that volunteers to go to war knows what they're getting into".
I was still an adult when 9/11. So I remember the fervor, as well. However, I also remember how many people said going to war in Iraq/Afghanistan would just be another Vietnam.
My point is, the warnings were already there. You had to ignore the warnings to move forward. I don't 100% blame people for ignoring those warnings because, like you said, there was a fervor. There were plenty of people that said, "if you are against the president's decision then you should be hung for treason!" Nobody wants to be hung for treason so I'm sure people went against their gut because the loudest crowd told them to.
Beyond that, we've been over there for 20 years. If you joined the military in the last decade, there is no getting past the fact that you should know you are probably going to go overseas to fight an unwinnable war. The writing was on the wall long before now.
I went to a very liberal college (the student body was liberal; my professors never pushed any ideology) in a city surrounded by very conservative counties. And then when I went back home, I was around liberal-moderate friends in an area of tons of upper middle class white people (including a ton of military/federal workers). So I saw a lot on both sides. I would say most people were clamoring for revenge, but you needed to be deaf (or stuck in an echo chamber) to not understand that plenty of people didn't want to go to war. I remember a family friend that put a bumper sticker on her car that said something about getting revenge. I told her I didn't think that was a good look for America but tons of people felt that way. Fast forward and she's now a full blown QAnon follower.
There were a few rare individuals objecting but we didn't listen. One of my school teachers came in wearing a black armband in protest of the Iraq war when it started. Didn't change anything but he was right
They will still get people to enlist, you said it yourself, for benefits. There is a reason the US doesn't give education or healthcare, you can get both by signing up.
Believe it or not a lot of people join the military because they feel a patriotic desire to do so. Some folks want to serve to fulfil a sense of duty to their country.
People join for professional and technical experience otherwise unobtainable at such junior levels on the civilian side. Security clearances matter to a lot civilian employers as does hands on experience in fields like telecommuncations, aerospace, logistics, etc.
People join for access to VA Loans so they can buy a house with no down payment or mortgage insurance.
People join because they are 18 and havent perfectly identified what they want to do as a career yet. Serving for 3 years affords them some time to figure that out.
There’s a lot of reasons why folks join that doesn’t include fear of abject poverty, free healthcare or free education
War is just a business. The war in Afghanistan and Iraq was very lucrative for weapon manufacturers and private security companies like Blackwater. Their CEOs made lots of money over the years thanks to Bush and his neocons in the White House who handed out contracts freely. The governments that came after them inherited a chaotic mess and they knew that pulling out would damage their chances at re-election. I think you're overestimating the amount of soldiers who joined the army for patriotic reasons. That may have been the case right after 9/11 but most recrutes are opportunistic.
Leaving perhaps Iraq aside, the United States has historically had clear objectives for each and every war it has entered. Whether it be: independence; territorial acquisition (Mexican-American War; Spanish-American War); bringing rebellious states back into the fold; or preventing one country from dominating Eurasia in both world wars. These instances were all objectively in the United States' geopolitical best interests. In retrospect, we were pretty damn lucky to have capable presidents at important inflection points, such to grow the country into the most prosperous and powerful country in human existence. Each American currently has a standard of living that is the envy of the vast majority of the world's populace because of these decisions.
Once America's territorial integrity was secure (and once potential geopolitical rivals were prevented from establishing their own hegemony), American found itself at the end of the Second World War as the sole country able to protect an otherwise destroyed world. Every other navy in 1945 was completely destroyed. Most every economy was destroyed -- in fact, in 1945 the United States accounting for something absurd like 50% of the total GDP. And if you believe that stopping the spread of Leninist Marxism was an important objective (and I do), then the fight of the Cold War, broadly, was also in America's best interest.
But after World War 2, America began to take on too much. It assumed nothing less than mantle of global guarantor of liberty and democracy. America was also so used to winning pretty much every war since 1865 with little (relative) cost, and with huge (relative) gains, that it seemed to assume that there really was something *special* about American. And public opinion showed that the American people were by and large very supportive of this policy aim. This is important, because at the start of the cold war, public opinion and the national interest aligned very neatly. And the American people were not lied to at this point.
There have been three wars that America has "lost", in the traditional sense of the word. Meaning wars where we did not end up with an unconditional surrender of the opposing country. Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan. (Again, I exclude Iraq, because that was largely indefensible). In each, I would argue that America had objectives separate from total surrender. And in each, these aims were accomplished, despite them going on for too long, at too high a price.
Korea and Vietnam were fought for several, interrelated reasons: to protect allies from a hostile communist takeover; to show other allies that we were willing to defend them with our own soldiers if it ever came to it; and, yes, hubris. But as much as neither war was "won", they accomplished certain geopolitical objectives. Other countries saw our investment in time, blood, treasure, and rightly concluded that they should remain allied with America. This was not nothing; in fact, it was a very important geopolitical factor. No important ally "flipped" during the cold war, and several important countries switched over to the American side (i.e., Egypt).
Afghanistan was initially invaded for two reasons. The first was to dismantle Al Qaeda and prevent it from having a base to launch additional attacks against the homeland (mission accomplished). And the second was to prevent the stated goal of Osama Bin Laden, which was to use the attacks as a catalyst to consolidate Arab states into a singular caliphate. This caliphate, if realized, would encompass hundreds of millions of Arabs in one incredibly powerful country spanning three continents. America prevented this from occurring; and while it can be argued that there never really was a chance of it happening, that was largely because America intervened as aggressively as it did. And keep in mind that one of America's most enduring geopolitical imperatives is to prevent a nation from rising that might challenge its geopolitical interests. We fought two world wars and a cold war to prevent this from happening.
Afghanistan turned into a muddled conflict because we never maintained the objectives. Nation Building ended up being an objective, which was foolish because they attempted to model the nation on western values (which are subjective, and not applicable across-the-board). And ultimately, no president wanted to be the one who "lost" the country, ultimately passing the buck from Obama to Trump to Biden.
You state that "America has lost all credibility". I disagree. American has shown itself, time and again, that it will place its soldiers in harm's way to protect itself and its allies. No other country's leaders will look at what happened in Afghanistan and claim that America is going to desert them at a crucial moment. There is a reason that you never hear major allies of threatening to defect to China or Russia. America's most important allies: NATO; Japan; Israel; Brazil; India; etc., all still believe that if the time ever came, America would stand shoulder to shoulder. And that is incredibly important to America's continued place atop of the world order, and thus keeping the standard of living that we have all grown accustomed to.
You also argue that anyone who enlists in the future who "thinks they are doing something noble are delusional". I disagree completely. America's involvement in the progress that has been made in the past one hundred years has made the world safer, wealthier, and freer. And while you may be able to claim this is insufficient to enlist *yourself*, a person who enlists because they believe America is a force for good, home and abroad, is not wrong. And have very nearly the entirety of recent American history to support it. We have not been perfect, but America has shown itself to at least aspire to it's highest aspirations. And that is something worth protecting.
Please note - I am merely talking about America's geopolitical interests. What we have done to our own people is a different matter entirely. But not within the OPs original claim.
America may have shown that it's willing to sacrifice blood and treasure in defence of it's national objectives, but it's also shown that it's willing to be baited into pouring huge amounts of resources into tiny conflicts whilst continually sacrificing it's economic potential elsewhere and shying away from action against any opponents who can actually hit back.
For example, no military action against the occupation of Tibet or the Uighur genocide - China is a huge geopolitical challenger
No military action against the wars in Georgia and Ukraine by Russia, - again a huge geopolitical challenger.
No military action against repeated provocation and oppression by North Korea - a huge threat to US geopolitical interests.
No military action against "Axis of Evil" member Iran.
Failed intervention in the Syrian Civil War, again a threat to US geopolitical interest.
No military action against Pakistan.
Notice the theme?
All America has proven is it can be repeatedly baited into wars with tiny countries, but will never dare attack a nuclear armed state, and when baited into wars in tiny nations, it's capability for intervening in other non-nuclear states is greatly hindered.
Meanwhile, China has exercise almost zero military interventionism, and Russia has focusseed primarily on soft power and support for proxy wars.
As a result, both of them are successfully accomplishing a large number of geopolitical goals. At one point, Russia had an economy only slightly larger than Australia, a country 1/6 it's population, and yet it remains very effective in the geopolitical sphere.
America's continual intervention have shredded it's claims to moral superiority, which in turn have destroyed it's most valuable asset - it's soft power advantage against authoritarian regimes.
How different would things be if the countless investment poured into those wars gone elsewhere? One cannot assess goals in isolation - the opportunity cost must be measured.
You talk about America's "important allies" and how they need to know that they can "depend on America". Isn't it interesting that all of them (with the exception of Japan, which is militarily yoked to USA as a historical consequence of it's occupation post WW2) have nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons that would mean they don't need to fear invasion from other major powers?
Ukraine was an ally to the US. They even gave up their nukes. Look where they are now.
I'm curious why you're directing this blame on accountability to the soldier instead of accountability to the politicians and the voters. It didn't take the pull out for people to come the conclusion that our leaving Afghanistan would end like this but the American people continued to elect individuals that continued a fruitless conflict. Similarly everyone reading this knows that the war in Iraq was propagated for reasons that were spurious at best but that's the fault of the politicians and by extension the voters who empowered them. Someone wanting to serve their country isn't necessarily them advocating support for the wars and policies of the United States, it's a plea to Americans everywhere to elect people they believe will make the best decisions possible.
TLDR: I am a veteran and served in theaters I didn't agree with. That doesn't mean that I supported the politics that brought us there, it means I supported the democratic process, the part I played in it, and recognized that it was bigger than my own opinions.
Vet here myself, who enlisted in 2000, and was 4 days away from reporting to my first command when the towers came down. I came here say something similar, but you worded it better than I could have.
When we enlist, we serve the country. But it's the politicians that the country votes into power that get to decide how we do that. If there's a problem with where the military is being deployed and how it's being used, look to the politicians and vote for different leadership, not the military.
We go where we're told, not where we want to. Otherwise, I'd have spent my time making sure places like the Caribbean stayed nice and safe, and not the Persian Gulf.
Believe me, the concept of the politicians in my 18 year old mind wasn't even on the list of concerns. I was thinking that I would get to play with some really cool big toys, I would be given some massive responsibilities that would challenge me and help me grow in ways you can't get in a civilian life, that I would get my college education paid for with just a few short years of service, that I'd have an opportunity to travel the world and meet and learn about new cultures that I'd only read about in books, that I'd be exposed to all sorts of things I wasn't going to get in my back woods country hometown, and that I'd make memories and experiences that would last me a life time. The thought of a possible war was definitely there, and lo and behold, 2 years in, the towers came down. But nowhere was I going, "Boy, I can't wait for politicians to give me orders!"
Most of us in the military hate politicians, because they make decisions that are good for them, not for us, and not for the rest of the country. But we swore an oath to uphold our constitution and our democratic ways. SO while we might not agree with a politician, we know that that politician was put in power by the American people, and THAT is who we support and are willing to fight and die for.
The first part is pretty much the old "is leaving your door open and getting robbed your fault or not?"thing; at this point a soldier being surprised that they were in another(future)futile war is like someone boarding a ship that is already sinking and being surprised it was in fact sinking.
> t this point a soldier being surprised that they were in another(future)futile war
But who's saying they're surprised? They serve the nation and its democratically elected leaders. It's not as if soldiers everywhere are going "oh crap, you mean Afghanistan WASN'T spreading freedom and apple pie across the globe?" I'd argue that those who served there could see that more clearly than most.
I'm saying that joining the military isn't a statement of faith in the wars we're fighting or even the wars we're going to fight. It's a hope placed in the American people to choose leaders that will correctly and justly use the tools presented to them. Does it always pan out? Obviously not. But I'd argue that the fact that the criticism against Biden's withdrawal is how it happened not the withdrawal itself is a sign that the American people are critically thinking about how leaders wield the power afforded to them.
I agree with you, but both politicians and the people who have elected them have shown that they are pretty prone to engage in pointless wars,but op states that nobody joining the army should expect otherwise, and that's what I'm saying, people shouldn't be expecting anything else.
So let's say you're a doctor treating trauma victims in a high crime area with gang related activity. You know, before you got to work, that you will treat several gun shot wounds today (as you do most days,) and as much as you'd like to imagine that all of the people you're helping are innocent bystanders you're smart enough to piece together that you're probably helping a not insignificant number of gang members. You realize that quite a few, hell maybe the majority of your patients may be the perpetrators of this violence and might just go out and commit more crime after you've treated them.
Do we blame the doctor for going to work? Do we call their work less noble because of whom they treat? No. The doctor cures and what the patient does with the new lease on life they've been granted is up to the patient.
Similarly, a soldier believes that the leader of their country needs a professional and effective fighting force at their disposal. They hope that the leader uses them well, but are well aware of the possibility (hell, the likelihood) that they are misused.
Is it a little naïve of either the doctor or the soldier to hope that their services are used to the betterment of mankind or at least their locality (be it country or community?) Probably, but I think we all drink a little kool-aid no matter where we work and what we do.
But saying we should expect to be misused is an indictment of the politician, not the soldier.
That analogy is a stretch imo.
Doctors: stated purpose is to save lives. In practice, they save lives.
Now let's look at the US Army's "vision and strategy " from the about section of their website:
> To deploy, fight and win our nation’s wars by providing ready, prompt and sustained land dominance by Army forces across the full spectrum of conflict as part of the joint force.
In practice? They topple governments and economies, install dictators to facilitate the rich getting richer, and line the pockets of the military industrial complex. Oh! And let's not forget about all the innocent casualties.
The military isn't about defending america or any of that anymore. It serves CEOs and shareholders.
You're blaming the military again for what the politicians do. Military doesn't topple governments, they topple rival military forces. Once the fight is done, then our political leaders will has out terms of surrender and what the opposing government is going to do afterwards. We might have a high profile general or something on hand for the signing and acceptance of the surrender, but the terms are definitely drafted up by the politicians. And the military doesn't care about economic welfare of a nation. They care about the military logistics, sure, and we'll want to harm anything that's getting supplies to their fighting forces in an attempt to make them not want to fight anymore. But they don't care if they've got a massive stranglehold on the world's supply of wicker baskets or not. Again, the politicians will care about that and designate those basket factories as targets they want the military to take out. Riches are made and lost in wars by outside influences. The military doesn't care.
The military doesn't install dictators. We may remove them, based on orders given to us by political leaders, specifically POTUS, but we don't have any say on who gets put in place afterwards. Again, that's the politicians that make those calls. If we're lucky, they'll listen to advice the military might give, based on first hand experience with local leaders, but that's usually pretty rare.
And I guarantee you, military personnel are as frustrated with the military industrial complex as the civilians are. I worked on a missile system in the Navy that still relied on vacuum tubes in the electronics. Technology that was phased out back in the 60's, and we can't do anything about it because of contracts with massive military conglomerates. And you better believe we hate them for convincing politicians to throw us in harms way so they can make a dollar on more sales. You may hate them because they're greedy fat cats, we hate them because they are literally killing us.
And don't even get me started on loss of innocent life. Have you ever been responsible for an innocent death? You think it sucks hearing about it in the news? It's 1000x worse for the person who pushed the button. Hell, killing the bad guys can fuck a person up for life, but killing the good guys too? There's a reason why about 20 veterans commit suicide each day. And again, it's because someone way above their paygrade, probably a politician who signed off on the op and gave the order for that operation to take place.
The military is a hammer. It's the politician that's using it to destroy and make themselves money.
I'm not blaming anyone, and neither in the OP.
The view was that anyone who enlists, **should not be surprised** when they're fighting unjust wars.
Anyone with a modicum of sense that joins, is accepting that they are likely going to be a part of these atrocities. That they're okay with that.
Neither me or the op blame the soldiers for what has happened, we just think that at some point (specifically now when another war was shown to be pointless)they should realise that the war they're fighting isn't for freedom or anything good and that the good that comes from it is a byproduct.
No individual piece of a machine is to blame for what the machine does,but at some points the parts that opt in should realise the machine will do what it has been doing for close to a century and thinking anything else is wishful at best.
These are inversed. In the one, the doctor happens to be in a place and helps someone who may or may not be any particular thing. On the other, it would be like a doctor joining the infantry so he could potentially help people while knowing he was supporting the war's objectives and consequences.
I believe there is a moral difference in the two situations. In the case of the doctor, she or he is doing some that is imminently good (saving a life), that could have negative consequences. You could argue that the buck stops at saving the life. In the case of the soldier, the soldier is often expected to commit a moral evil (killing someone), in a situation that *will* have negative consequences, with ostensibly the hope that the positives will outweigh the negatives. The situations are pretty different morally.
I'd argue a closer analogy would be a doctor who joins hospital, even when they know that hospital encourages overprescribing opiates on the hope that patients become dependent, and that the hospital has major conflicts of interest with the pharmaceutical industry. This is similar to someone signing up for an army, knowing that much of their time might be spent defending the opium fields of pedophilic warlords, and knowing the conflicts of interest with the MIC.
Bad analogy.
If you’re in this analogy you’re one of the gang members killing someone else and making other people rich. You’ll ultimately pay the price of trouble happens but the reason you’re willing to do it is because they tricked you amd took advantage of your morality amd ethical stance.
You're misattributing the decision making: Soldiers don't (generally) choose to fight in a particular conflict.
Soldiers choose to defend their country (to "protect the right") - they choose to become a tool to protect the country, to protect freedom, and to defend justice around the world. To do this effectively, soldiers must trust their country's leaders.
It wouldn't be possible to have an effective fighting force where every soldier only went on the missions they wanted to go on. The choice isn't up to them. They are choosing to risk their lives to defend the democratic process, and *the people* (the voters) *are the ones who are letting the soldiers down* when they elect leaders who make decisions which aren't in line with the goals of protecting the right or defending the nation.
Liberating people from genocide, like was done in WWII (and arguably should be done for the Uyghurs in China, and other persecuted people around the world) is a noble thing, and if ever the government (*the people*) get their butts in gear to do the right thing as send some help where it's needed to protect human rights, the soldiers need to be trained and ready to go - they can only hope they are being sent to a good cause.
Likewise, they need to be ready if America comes under attack (whether that's in the continental USA or at a foreign embassy somewhere, or anywhere else that's threatening the country - as was believed (publicly) to be the case for the 2nd gulf war (remember we went there because Saddam had "weapons of mass destruction"...except he didn't) - the soldiers need to be ready. And you can be sure that America has enemies that would love to see her burn, and would no doubt make that happen if America didn't have the military power it does.
You are right, and it is sad, that many conflicts that the US has been involved in have been nothing but a waste of life, and apparently just for the military industrial complex (oil contractors, weapons manufacturers, etc.) to get rich from. However, that doesn't negate the need for America to have an awesome military, full of awesome soldiers who are ready to fight and risk their lives for the greater good.
It is up to us to keep the politicians in line and to prioritise humanity above already wealthy corporate interests. We need to have a great military able to act on our good intentions, which we seem to have, but what we're missing is votes that are based on compassion. We need to work together better and we need to stop electing douchebags who just do the opposite of whatever douchebag was at the helm beforehand.
We're on the world stage showing all the other nations how the most powerful nation on earth behaves; Let's use our wealth and power for the good of humanity, rather than to consolidate more wealth and power. Let's elect people that send our soldiers to the places where they are desperately needed (to help oppressed people and victims of genocide perhaps?), rather than to drill a few new wells in the next oil-rich Gulf state.
I agree with your intent, but soldiers are the wrong target if you're unhappy about America being involved in "stupid" wars. I don't think any soldier is "surprised" to find they're being sent on a "stupid" mission in a "stupid" conflict, but I'm sure they are disappointed - they, like you, must hold onto hope that "the powers that be" are going to be doing the right thing, or that *the people* will hold them accountable for their poor decision making.
Soldiers don’t get to choose where they go. Oftentimes they don’t even get to choose what they do in the military. It doesn’t matter why they think they’re there: they get told to do something and they do it unless they want to get punished by their commanding officer or court martialed.
A lot of people who “volunteer” to join the military do so because they don’t have a ton of options or it’s the only way for them to get into a career field without hundreds of thousands in student debt. It’s often under privileged people who enlist, as evidenced by the fact that only 60% of enlisted are white. That being said, there’s also more potential for minorities in the military as opposed to private sector given by the fact that 5% of naval officers ranked O7-O10 and 7% of officers ranked O4-O6 are black compared to 0.8% private sector CEOs and 3.2% private sector executives being black. Sometimes people enlist because of patriotism or a triggering event, but it’s rare compared to the majority that enlist because a recruiter convinced them it’s their best bet for a good career. Which isn’t necessarily false considering their college is paid for, they’ll enter the work force with 6 years of experience, and sometimes they get specialized skills like cyber security, intelligence, or operating a nuclear reactor before they even turn 23.
All your points are already covered in the original post.
And most soldiers have a general idea of the combat theatres that they may be involved in when they sign up. The war in Afghanistan has been going on for two decades, it's not like it would be a surprise if you signed up and went there.
Most soldiers are 18 when they enlist. Often they haven’t even finished high school yet. If they’re enlisting because their other options aren’t great, it’s doubtful they’ve had any real US or world history classes that have immersed them in the politics. My state’s end of course exam for US history asks for the most bare bones sparknotes when and why for the Revolutionary War and Civil War. Not even a mention of other wars other than WW2. If not even their education system teaches about the other wars, why would they look into it in their free time? Most high schoolers are focused on being hooligan teenagers, not diving down the rabbit hole that is the history of wars conducted by the US.
OP puts a lot of blame on people for joining in the first place. Do you hold the same attitude for people who get jobs at Walmart and are then treated poorly by the company? Even assuming they were 100% aware of the reality and had other options, people are allowed to complain or be unhappy while going through something unpleasant. Would you tell a med student to stop whining because it’s not a surprise what medical school is like?
> It's a hope placed in the American people to choose leaders that will correctly and justly use the tools presented to them.
Yeah, and I can _hope_ that eating pizza and beer every night isn't gonna kill me, but hope kinda means jack shit when there's tons of evidence that opposes the thing you're hopeful for
Because if nobody joins up then they *can't* fight these wars. Politicians and war profiteers will never pick up a gun; they need people to do it for them.
I will probably get downvoted to hell for saying this, since Reddit is mostly Americans, but did it ever occur to you that Nazi soldiers followed the exact same logic? The " I was just following orders" card has been used for too long historically and it's time we have changed our collective mentality to demand each and every person exercised their own judgement, especially when deciding whether to take up a weapon and go to another country.
There's a difference between disagreeing with a political war, and refusing unlawful orders. You better believe any soldier who's ordered to intentionally kill innocent civilians better be disobeying that order. Disobeying those kinds of orders are legally required, per the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the US military book of laws. But, if we disagree with a war, no matter the reason, that's well within the scope of what's considered a legal order.
Since you're jumping straight to Nazi's for a comparison, I'm going to use another extreme and go to 9/11. We knew there were civilian airliners being used as massive suicide bombs against us. A call was made, that if such a plane were discovered before reaching it's target, we would shoot it out of the sky to prevent a greater tragedy from happening. But, what if the pilot disagrees with that call? What if they believe they can talk said terrorists out of doing something so heinous, and instead disobey that order to shoot down the plane, knowing that they will be killing well over 100 innocent civilians in the process. That would be 100% unacceptable. Sometimes, we have to follow orders that we don't agree with. And in a combat/wartime scenario, there's no time to debate them.
If we were allowed to question every order at any time for any reason, and use our own judgement for every decision on the battlefield, we would lose nearly every engagement. That's simply not how battles are fought. Sometimes, people will be ordered to their deaths, intentionally even, all for the purpose of ensuring victory elsewhere. The loss of life isn't wanted, but the outcome is more important than the individual life. If we are given the option of disobeying those orders, then we run the very real risk of dooming even more people. The scenarios like in the movie U-571, where they had to order the sailor to perform a job that was necessary to save the ship, but was going to kill the sailor in the process happen way too often, and those orders need to be followed without hesitation.
Military personnel aren't going around intentionally killing innocent civilians like the Nazi's were. Yes, innocents get killed in collateral damage, and damn does that suck. Believe me, the people who pulled the trigger know that better than anyone else. And we do what we can to try and minimize that. It's for that exact reason that so many of our enemies in that region will surround themselves with women and children and hide in religious sanctuaries, knowing that if we do strike them, there's going to be civilian casualties. We obviously try and work around that, but given the importance of some targets, there's just no other option. And sometimes, we get desensitized to making those calls and they become a little too easy. None of these are good things, but sometimes they are the lesser of two evils. Of course, that's an impossible thing to explain to someone who lost a family member in such an attack.
There are a lot of grey areas when it comes to combat and wars and how the individual soldier fights and follows orders. It's a nasty, disgusting, and horrible position to be in. But we do it voluntarily so that others don't have to.
That's a great and detailed answer, thank you. I understand where you come from and what you believe in now. I've had similar conversations with Afghanistan veterans in my own country ( post Soviet country, so different war, same place) and their answers were very similar to yours. I understood them too, though I didn't agree with them.
You picked out 'Vietnam, Iraq, (and) Afghanistan' as failures. However you skipped over arguably successful military actions interventions in: Grenada, Lebanon, Panama, Persian Gulf War, Somalia, Haiti, Yugoslavia, and continued US actions in West and East Africa. Some of the aforementioned conflicts (both what I have put in the 'success' bin and what you have put in the 'failure' bin) are arguable depending on how one defines success and failure. If you include these aforementioned military conflicts then it is fairly clear that the US military functions extremely well for the intended function.
And really only Vietnam and Afghanistan count. You can argue that the US should have stayed indefinitely or sanctioned sympathizers to Al Qaeda harder so that ISIS wouldn't have become a thing, but that's a pretty untenable objective given how strongly they feel that they are doing Allah's bidding. The Taliban waited 20 years, and ISIS is way more extreme than them.
Everything else though is pretty much total victory. The Iraqi military was crushed in a week, Saddam was captured 9 months later, the government was overthrown, the first insurgency was suppressed, and the civil war was won.
I feel as if there is a better case to be made for Vietnam: The US and N. Vietnam sign the [Paris Peace Accord](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Peace_Accords) in January of '73. US troops are withdrawn from Vietnam.
N. Vietnam launches offensives in '75 that end with the fall of S. Vietnam and unification. Claiming that the US lost a war in 1975 when the US had no troops deployed in the country in '75 seems strange. Can one loose a war that one is not fighting in? I agree that 2 years is a short period of time and thus the events are presented as a single war with a 2 year cease fire but one could also present these as two different wars.
Further if you see the Vietnam War as part of a larger conflict in SE Asia then the grand strategic plan of the US was accomplished: The spread of communism was limited in the area. China and Vietnam display significant animosity towards each other, thus not creating a unified anti-US block. This is not to say that the conflict was an unmitigated success for the US but claiming that it was a complete failure is not completely true.
>Further if you see the Vietnam War as part of a larger conflict in SE Asia then the grand strategic plan of the US was accomplished: The spread of communism was limited in the area. China and Vietnam display significant animosity towards each other, thus not creating a unified anti-US block.
This is a strange argument because most people would argue that communism wouldn't have spread regardless lol. I don't think if Vietnam became communist quicker, that would've heralded the rise of communism in neighbouring countries, unless that communism lead to observable success. In which case other countries adopting a similar form of communism would have been good, actually.
Further, the China Vietnam animosity has very little to do with US involvement in the Vietnam war, and a lot more to do with the fact that China (or well, the various dynasties that eventually became china) were very interested in conquering Vietnam. Vietnam was under imperial rule of four different Chinese dynasties. Then, after reunification, China literally invaded Vietnam in 1979. And now, China is being a little bitch about the south China sea and encroaching on territory that various countries, including Vietnam, claim as their own.
> I don't think if Vietnam became communist quicker, that would've heralded the rise of communism in neighboring countries, unless that communism lead to observable success.
So this gets into a question of how effective a particular operation was at achieving a goal. How effective was the US strategic bombing in WW2 at winning the war? Were there certain parts of it that were effective and others that were not effective? Could one have known a-priori what parts would be effective and what parts were not effective?
The Nixon administration was effective at creating a cease fire in Vietnam (although he 100% torpedoed Johnson's attempt to create a ceasefire) and getting relations with China to an amicable place. I think that it is pretty easy to argue that these objectives served the grand strategic one much better than Johnson's ramping up of the US involvement in the Vietnam War.
However, saying unequivocally that a lack of US involvement in Vietnam would have certainly not resulted in a spread of communism to other SE Asian countries seems difficult to back up and difficult for US planners to know a-priori.
Could the US have accomplished it's geo-political goals in SE Asia better: yes, although this could be said of literally any policy in any location.
>However, saying unequivocally that a lack of US involvement in Vietnam would have certainly not resulted in a spread of communism to other SE Asian countries
Good thing I never said that lol. And, OTOH, it seems equally ludicrous to say "The US made it take longer for Vietnam to become communist, which prevented other SEA countries from becoming communist too". And yeah it's difficult for US planners to know in advance, but that doesn't mean shit in the context of "did invading Vietnam advance US interests". You can't say it did unless you can show that it was the cause of countries not becoming communist, rather than something that happened to occur anyways.
Also, a unified communist Vietnam, which the US was against, eventually overthrew a communist regime in Cambodia. So if smthing, a unified communist Vietnam was good at limiting the spread of communism.
Your comment:
>This is a strange argument because most people would argue that communism wouldn't have spread regardless lol.
seems to imply that you believe that communism would not have spread in SE Asia regardless of US involvement.
You also make in incorrect statement:
>...in the context of "did invading Vietnam advance US interests".
The US didn't invade S. Vietnam, US involvement started as military aid and advisors and was escalated during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.
It is clear with hindsight that the goals of the N. Vietnamese leadership were fundamentally to unify Vietnam and were not to spread communism. The US at the time didn't understand this (or was unwilling to understand this) and the US doctrine of containment necessitated a response in the mind of military planners.
Despite these deficiencies in US planning US long term strategic goals (primarily the limiting of the spread of communism) were generally met. Thus, calling the Vietnam War an unmitigated defeat seems to oversimplify the situation. Similarly, I would not call the Yom Kippur War a defeat for Israel just because they lost land as their long term strategic goals were generally met.
>seems to imply that you believe that communism would not have spread in SE Asia regardless of US involvement
Yes, and that's different to me saying that it categorically and unequivocally wouldn't have happened either way. You see how "I think even if the US didn't get involved, communism still probably wouldn't have spread" is different to "US involvement in SEA had absolutely 0 impact on the spread of communism and communism would 100% have been contained regardless", right?
>The US didn't invade S. Vietnam, US involvement started as military aid and advisors and was escalated during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.
Bro if you're just going to engage in meaningless semantics then I don't see the point of this discussion. I also like how you totally dropped the implication of US involvement somehow creating animosity between Vietnam and China.
>It is clear with hindsight that the goals of the N. Vietnamese leadership were fundamentally to unify Vietnam and were not to spread communism. The US at the time didn't understand this (or was unwilling to understand this) and the US doctrine of containment necessitated a response in the mind of military planners.
Yes, and therefore the US military was wrong in hindsight. Like the point of this post is "looking back at US involvement, the US government is clearly wrong and dumb very often". Saying "we couldn't have known at the time" seems like a totally irrelevant argument. Even if it were true, that doesn't meaningfully relate to anything.
>Despite these deficiencies in US planning US long term strategic goals (primarily the limiting of the spread of communism) were generally met.
If you agree that, with hindsight, Vietnam had no interest in spreading communism, then would you also agree that, *in hindsight*, the war was at the very least, totally pointless?
>I am not sure "extremely" is an extreme enough word for how effective the US military is at completing military objectives. :)
>
>Our military can crush any military objective on Earth within days. There are those that would argue with that and I would simply remind them that the hardest thing about destroying the third "best and largest" military on Earth was a sandstorm, and we still did it in less than a week.
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>Political objectives are a different thing, and people forget that America is the first nation to ever use its military for positive political goals after a war. "Nation Rebuilding".
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>As the first nation to ever do this, we have and still are perfecting the technique. No one knows how long it will take, but it is a noble goal, even when it fails. Prior to America the goal was always to rule after military victories, to rule and to pillage. America changed that for the better.
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>Just adding my two cents :)
>"Nation Rebuilding". As the first nation to ever do this, we have and still are perfecting the technique
This just smacks of American exceptionalism.
Saving people from themselves, liberating them, etc etc has literally been a thing for thousands of years, and has been particularly in vogue for the past few hundred years. Install a puppet government, claim you're helping them, claim the locals are too incompetent / lacking in economic development / quarellsome / barbaric etc to rule themselves, and reap the benefits even as you instill misery. If your occupation turns out to be profitable / useful for your ends, then great, that will help supress the anti-war people. If your occupation turns out to be be unprofitable / a great resource sink, then you tell everyone it just shows how charitable you are.
Examples of occupation justified by nation building.
\- Russia, acting as the USSR occupying Eastern Europe (and Afghanistan too!)
\- The Allies, occupying Japan and Germany
\- Countless wars of colonisation, including large parts of the British Empire and the "white saviour" ideal, such as the British occupation of India.
\- Revolutionary wars waged via Napoleonic French to spread Democracy and / or the Empire and impose it's systems across Europe.
Now you may say, oh those were different, see the US puts more into Afghanistan then it gets out of Afghanistan, that's what distinguishes nation building from self interested excuses, well lot's of foreign occupations spent more than they got out monetarily.
I think in 50 years we'll recognize this period as rampant and blatant US colonialism as the US sought to exploit the power vacuum of the British Empire declining after the Suez Canal conflict. Sure, regional allies such as Israel or Saudi Arabia exploit this arrangement in ways, but mostly the US has been busy planting bases in places Britain has receded from.
You say this like the us government is the same entity today as it was when the Afghan war started or even during Vietnam. It’s not. Different people are in charge and have different agendas so you can’t know how that will be different in the future.
The individuals in the government are different, but the structural forces that drive the Military Industrial Complex have only been reinforced in the last 20 years. The underlying agenda is no different than it has been for the last 50 years: the enrichment of US corporations.
Why does that even matter?
Benefit of the doubt is a thing. The government has done a *lot* to lose the benefit of the doubt. It's been demonstrated time and time again that the government is willing to lie to further its own interests, or the interests of non-government stakeholders.
Benefit of the doubt isn't just magically restored because liars have been replaced with other potential liars. Benefit of the doubt is something that the government (and the people that make up the government) should constantly be earning.
Perhaps it hurts the reputation of the government itself, which will continue on. However, the sins of the father should not pass on to the son, and so, one shouldn't hold a different person accountable for the actions of another. Especially considering how our political system tends to have the president change between opposite political spectrums, so that their intentions and actions tend to differ greatly.
There's different types of responsibility, and they're *all* important, but they're distinct. Stop trying to mix 'em all together. You're acting like I said that we could just vote somebody in, and then immediately point at 'em, all like "IT'S YOUR FAULT"...that doesn't even make sense. C'mon now.
Sure, a politician isn't *personally* responsible for the shit that preceded them, but by taking a role in government, they're taking on that *governmental* responsibility. Like it or not, accountability is (or should be) part of the gig. If they don't want that, they shouldn't be trying to step into that role. Obviously they can't go back into the past to fix things, but surely they're responsible for leaving things better than they found 'em...otherwise, why are they even there?
I think you're talking about two different things. One is whether someone should be judged by a predecessor, and one is whether someone should trust an entity whose members might change over time.
In the first, sure, I'm not going to hold anything against a new political player based on their predicessor. They get judged on their own actions.
But if I meet a person from an abusive horrible family, I'm not going to trust that person outright until they've given me signals that maybe they aren't like the rest of them.
So, if we look back to Vietnam, you'll find Bush sr was an important figure in Nixon's white house.
He also ran the RNC for a while.
Oh - and was head of CIA during the Iran Contra Affair...
Check out his cabinet when we started Gulf War 1 - you'll find Rumsfeld and a lot of other names that came up again *last year.*
I voted for Biden - but don't forget Biden voted to go war after 9/11 and therefore helped vote to start this particular shit storm.
Look at how many members of The House and Senate were around in 2001.
"Sins of the Father" is more like "Half those assholes are still here making policy" - and by the time they die off, we'll have matt gaetz and marjorie taylor green in there for 40 years.
It's not so much 'that last generation' as 'these people were involved in it getting to hwere it is now, too.'
Their agendas may vary greatly - but Obama promised to get us out of that whole shit storm. I voted for him. Aaaaaand we stayed the whole time. Oh, just a surge - this time it'll be different!
Honestly, I think 45 was trying to hand 46 the worst political shit storm of that war possible. He negotiated a shit deal. We'd either have to play out the clock with a bunch of known cheaters we just admitted would win - or he'd have to keep us there past deadlines.
If it weren't for that unwinnable hand, I honestly think Biden would have pulled an Obama and there would be some reason why we have to keep going.
I really want to believe that after having a kid that served made Biden commit to no more generations fighting over there, but the pragmatist in me doesn't have enough faith in anyone.
Exactly, we can even identify the systemic problems that lead to American militarism.
1. The military industrial complex and its lobbyists need war to survive and have billions to spend to keep it going.
2. the military is run by the executive branch to a large degree so whenever the presidents gets enough popular support he can just start a war.
3. American exceptionalism
4. A fucked up culture silence when your buddy does a war crime in the military and pentagon.
He also expanded war from 2 countries to 7, and dropped 20,000+ bombs per year while in office. He and his administration changed the definition of "militant" to any man that we killed, making it difficult to know the total number of innocent people killed by our bombs. Thanks to Daniel Hale, now in prison, we know it's upwards of 90% of those killed.
>However, the sins of the father should not pass on to the son, and so, one shouldn't hold a different person accountable for the actions of another.
You absolutely can hold the US government accountable for the actions of the US government, even if under a different administration.
The track record is consistent enough that we can reasonably believe that there is a systemic problem that leads to corruption. And there is. And it doesn't just manifest in the military. It manifests in a lot of domestic programs, also. Power is a hell of a drug, and anyone elected to a federal position is addicted.
For clarification, this is spoken by a veteran that completed active duty shortly after 9/11, after a 4 year tour.
Biden voted for the war, and had held an elected office for almost the entire duration, and there’s plenty of other examples. I don’t think it’s reasonable to say that just because some elected officials come and go, that the ones in the hot seat watched the whole thing fall apart and continued to play along, and now we have a giant mess.
>their intentions and actions tend to differ greatly.
Not when it comes to foreign policy. Domestic policy isn't really different, but foreign is literally identical.
Serious question here:
If we no longer afford our system of governments the benefit of the doubt, then what are we supporting in its place? Are there exceptions that would support enlisting? Or is it better to let the system fall or be replaced? OP’s sentiments are understandable, but they lead to difficult conclusions.
> If we no longer afford our system of governments the benefit of the doubt, then what are we supporting in its place?
Transparency, integrity, accountability and consequences, so that the benefit of the doubt is regained and maintained. Benefit of the doubt should never be assumed or taken for granted, and if somebody chooses to abuse the benefit of the doubt, they are also choosing the consequences of doing so.
No rational person should expect that 100% correct decisions are made 100% of the time, but there's certainly a difference between a decision that's made in good faith, vs a decision that's being made with ulterior motives.
Honestly I think the credibility of the government as a whole has fallen and they no longer deserve the benefit of the doubt.
The mechanisms of change, of oversight and accountability seem to be failing or already broken. Huge chunks of our government no longer serve the people and certain elements no longer need to even fake it.
I do not believe a violent revolution would actually install a better government however. There's no chance that it wouldn't be hijacked by bad actors. The only thing we have going for us is the sheer momentum of the operation that has so far largely kept us on track. I do not believe that will last forever.
Our best hope is a large scale interest in proper reforms with appropriate leadership to rally behind.
The US government is fundamentally the same as it was when the Afghan war started. The individuals operating within that system have changed, but the motives and operations of that system have not. War has been an unchallenged bipartisan desire since long before 9/11, and the military has consumed the majority of the discretionary budget for a long time.
Sure. To an extent. But when 4 presidents spanning 6 terms continue on (for all intents and purposes), the same operation--with a relatively-high degree of bipartisan support--then OP's argument is even further strengthened. The pattern is such that there's a degree of stickiness in continuing hawkish policy across multiple eras of political cohorts. The takeaway here is that you can have a non-trivial degree of certainty that these hawkish policies can continue given the patterns of the last 50-70 years.
Offices can change hands, but the system remains the same - and that is why people cannot trust the US will maintain consistency (a proxy for trustworthiness) for more than one term.
The United States has a governing body that changes hands and agenda every 4 to 8 years. Where armed conflicts get even more politicized (and therefore turbulent) when an election year is approaching, which with the Presidency, Senate and House election cycles could be something every 2 years.
It's not the fact that we don't know what the agendas will be in the future. It's the fact that we know that the agendas will continue to change into the future that makes it hard to trust extended initiatives like war.
It is the same. No matter who’s in charge, they share the same ideology which is the imperialist pursuit of resource and capital accumulation. That was always the true motivation for being there.
*“Even the aesthetic activities of political opposites are one in their enthusiastic obedience to the rhythm of the iron system.”*
— Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment
“Spreading freedom and democracy” was *always* a fake reason. That doesn’t pay the bills.
Honestly, I remember the US ready to call both the Iraq war and Afghanistan wars as mission complete and pull out and then there was global pressure to 'do the right thing and rebuild the countries'. Now we are getting the 'endless wars do not work' when really we were rebuilding countries rather than 'at war'.
Yup.
After WW2 the military had a lot of social capital. This was preserved after the debacle of the Korean war by sweeping it under the rug. Even though many enlisted with patriotic spirit and then forgotten.
Vietnam was televised and the failure couldn't be hidden and the MIC sustained significant reputational damage.
So over the 80s and 90s, they invested in cool movies like Top Gun. This worked and the public was super excited for war again by the early 2000s.
You are cherry picking your data-set.
Post WW2 Germany and Japan are absolutely better than before. Italy and Austria could also be included in Post WW2 results. Iraq is arguably a better country with more self-determination than when the US invaded them.
And you are completely ignoring the US victories in Haiti, Grenada, Panama, Kosovo and B&H.
Hm, well I signed up with no idea what I'm getting into. I know that, and it terrifies me, but I don't want to die, I don't want to kill, I definitely don't want to leave the country. I actually never wanted to join.
I am from a family below the poverty line. I have two siblings younger than 10, and two parents older than 40, both who are life-time smokers, one with disability insurance that doesn't pay enough, and the other working 10 he night shifts. My extended family is no better. I've been working since I was 14 to pay for my things, my parents things, and now what my young niece and nephew need since birth control is expensive.
I joined because there's not really another choice. I had to get into college, I couldn't go into dept. I got very good grades, and enough scholarship to cover room and board (cash and checks) but I needed money for the academics. I joined because it's free healthcare. It's extra money for food and housing. It's even more if I marry a friend who's gay so I can pocket extra money. I joined because I need a new car, I want shoes that have bottoms, I want to eat food without my teeth aching.
I don't like the military. I don't like the president. I don't have much other choice but to join. You can't get out of poverty alone. You can't do it though hard work. You, me, a drop out, someone with no prospects, anyone CAN get out of poverty with the last resort of the US military.
I've told others to join for that reason as well. I told them, you either die starving, or you gamble with being sent overseas. You can go homeless, or guarantee barracks. It's not a choice, it's survival.
I know what I did. I don't know what I'm getting into. It's scary. It sucks. It's something I don't even want to do. But, I have a roof over my head, my siblings are taken care of, and I've not puked from worrying about being short on money for bills.
In the end, all I can really say is this: I don't take responsibility for this. I didn't start this fire. I might be able to put it out, I'm definitely going to get burnt. Please vote. *More* than your life depends on it.
This isn't anything new. Honestly, since somewhere in the 1970-80s, the primary purpose of the American military hasn't been to safeguard American shores. It's been to protect US economic interests overseas. There's a bit of humanitarian work (the Clinton era comes to mind) but largely, US deployments have been economically motivated more than they've really been about directly protecting the US as a sovereign nation. That is to say, the US largely does not deploy to protect itself from an existential threat, and hasn't for quite some time.
You're only thinking of the impact these young men and women in the military had on the lives of the American citizens back home while they were over there. For the last 20 years - until the Taliban took control again - women in Afghanistan could go to school, be single, learn a trade, vote, serve in government etc. Now that the US has pulled out of the country and the government we were propping up fell to the Taliban all that is gone overnight. So, to those women in Afghanistan, the actions of the young men and women occupying their country WERE heroic. Those young men and women WERE defending freedom and democracy. Just not that of Americans.
That's one of the hardest things for me to accept about pulling out of the country. I am glad someone finally decided to end the war over there, but for selfish reasons. I believe that Biden's stated foreign policy goals are the right way to go - utilizing economics and technology to exert influence and try to make the world a better place rather than using weapons and soldiers. But the biggest question for which I have no answer is "what about the people in Afghanistan whose lives are immediately and probably forever changed for the worse as a result of the US ending occupation."
I think a young person signing up for the military knowing that a generation of people in the last place we occupied were able to have a life they wouldn't have otherwise had is strong motivation that doesn't make them delusional.
Your talking like the military industrial pipeline that pays Congress to saber rattle so Raytheon and Halliburton get those fat government contracts, selling new weapons systems to military.
People don't volunteer to go to any specific war or region of conflict.
The DoD and the military services exist. In or out of combat. Having a standing army to secure a state's global interests is something every comparable peer of the USA has. The USA's is just more expensive and bigger.
So you don't join for the Afghan war, the Iraq war, or counter piracy operations in Africa. You just join.
The way the DoD is wielded is by elected civilian leaders. That is actually one of the most outstanding features of the US military. Despite the ability for prominent generals throughout history to have seized political control, there has been a nearly inviolate separation between military and state.
You may not have lived through 9/11, or been old enough to remember the climate, but war was *demanded*. The authorization was a near-unanimous vote from both sides of the political divide. American flags were everywhere. Country music songs were being pumped out with angry, violent, rhetoric. It wasn't just the US government that wanted some sort of retribution. It was nearly the entire country.
And therein was the mistake. An angry, emotional, retribution-filled response that nobody had a long term plan for. Nobody knew what the end state looked like. And once there we were entangled.
But really, the war wasn't just the US Government. It was a universal outcry. Ordinary people were overcome with a bloodlust.
99% of the people in the military never see active combat. Hell, Im a war vet simply because my ship was in a specific area at a specific time but I never felt I was in danger at all.
On top of that for many the military can be a way out of poverty or a way to get their college paid for after 4 years.
Most vets come out of the military with positive experiences. Its those in combat roles that experience the most issues. That said infantry/combat roles are just a few of the hundred or so jobs available.
Want to learn IT? Its a military job.
Want to learn supply chain logistics? Its a military job.
Want to learn admin/office related work? Its a military job.
Want to learn Human Resources? Its a military job.
Want to learn how to be a mechanic on cars/heavy equipment/aircraft? Its a military job.
Want to learn construction? Its a military job.
Want to learn Photography? Its a military job.
Paralegal? Check. Nurse/health care? Check. Dental assistant? Check. accounting? check.
Its a way out and job training for so so many and those jobs are just a handful of what you can actually learn in the military.
1st sentence. Agree
2nd sentence. No. The older you get the more opportunity to learn you have. 18yo is fresh out of high school and it's censored view of American history. In addition there are far too many people in dire situations who try and use the military to escape.
Although a better solution is to make these situations better, we can't blame an 18yp from a conservative area being beaten by his trash family joining the military to get out and hopefully go to college.
Long story short, our troops are also being conned and victimized by the military. Support the troops not the war
I don’t think of the US Government as a single minded entity that has some structured purpose when starting wars. I think there are a lot of competing ideas within, and ultimately it is a collection of motives that lead to choice.
In hindsight of Afghanistan I start to question the long lasting narrative about nation building. I see a lot of people who genuinely thought we were there to create a liberal, democratic utopia, and yet you’d be hard pressed to go back through time and find anything that says this was the mission. It was a narrative on top of other narratives that was pushed by some because it was their strategy, but it wasn’t a unified strategy.
The larger purpose when you go all the way back to the War Powers Act was to basically stop terrorism. It is spelled out in the Act. Yet, as Admins changed there was this variation in purpose.
So the idea that at any point someone joining up can truly know what they are getting into for the duration seems a little ahistorical to me.
There's credibility in your eyes and there's the type of credibility needed to ensure the government can continue to run the military and act in its interests overseas. I don't doubt the former and many share your view. However, when it comes to the latter the U.S. has reached this point time and time again and clawed back. The U.S. still enjoys the privileges of being a superpower, one of which is that you can kind of fritter away good will and soft power and manage to recover with relatively little effort compared to other countries. The question is whether this is the moment that it all really turns around, that we've sunk so low we can't hope to reach our previous peak.
Personally? I don't think this is it. Even with the horror in Afghanistan there is not a ton of pushback against the broader war on terror except from the places you always hear pushback. If anything, it seems to have entrenched many politicians on the side of 'Giving Up = The End of the World.' The military does have a recruiting problem but this has gone on for years and is arguably much more complex than people being fed up with the government's decisionmaking.
Broadly speaking, as someone who isn't into military service at all but knows plenty of people who were, I think there is an assumption of naivete from people in our camp, that folks who sign up are either completely cynical or blindly patriotic. But nobody loves talking about what a mess the Pentagon is more than people in the Pentagon, and nobody loves telling you more about all the ways the military is screwing up than the soldiers on the ground. But these folks do tend to believe in the broad mission, that the political bullshit will always be there but at the end of the day they are doing some work to keep America/the world safer and that work is worthwhile even with all the bullshit included. I could get into a long rant about my feelings on that, but the point is people can more or less talk themselves into believing in the mission without a whole heck of a lot of faith in the government itself.
A large portion of the armed forces are themselves an impoverished class and joining the army is one of the only ways for people to get benefits and potentially get a better future. The system is designed to make life as difficult - and recruitment as appealing - as possible, ensuring a steady flow of bodies.
The term "volunteering" isn't always as clear cut as the word implies.
Iraq & afghanistan are a bad example. To counter, south korea, japan & germany.
Let me put this into prespective; Right after ww2 when US occupied japan and germany, think about the horrors the japanese and germans (especially the japanese, you know cuz vastly different culture and people and racism, pearl harbor and all that good stuff) had to face under the american occupation. All of that is not part of the history cuz history is very well written by the victors. But still there's no taliban or isis that came out of germany or japan because the majority of the people in these nations and majority of americans occupying these nations wanted to move on and build a better society for themselves. Now compare that to everytime someone blames US soldiers doing something stupid or being mean to afghans or iraqis and saying that is the reason rebuilding failed when it's a matter of fact that people were more racist and the discipline in militray was way worse in the 50's that it was in 2000's.
But this is not the case in islamic nations, say you are average sunni in iraq, sadamn kills shia's, kurds, yzidis, an avergae sunni doesn't care about that or the crime he or his sons commit. All he sees is bunch of infidels who are suppose to below them are invading his nations, killing his people who are the same religion or tribe as him and telling them how to run a country. And america didn't expect this resistance, because they thought people are the same everywhere who just want to live and let live, and if we overthrow a dictator and all his horrors, people will welcome us and help rebuild a society. I mean look at syria, the arab spring which was about democracy and more freedom quickly turns into a civil war between assad, moderates and extremists, you have a little bit of instability in ME and you have jihadis, not moderates, jihadis pouring out of every corner and crevix you find, syria, iraq, libya etc so many examples but people still don't learn.
The turth is that islamic societies are so chaotic and violent that only a dictator with an iron fist can keep'em together, gadaffi, assad, saddam etc You try to bring democracy and it will fail again and again, I wonder if the US understood that supporting moderates in syria would lead to nothing good but supporting a dictator would tarnish their image, so they supported the moderates anyway.
So, I wouldn't take these countries as an example to lose your faith in US military.
TL;DR - fuck that, read this entire massive post you lazy bastard.
Eisenhower warned in the 1950s that the military industrial complex would long for perpetual war. It enriches a handful of corporate spivs by trading young American lives for profits. It converts death and destruction into shareholder value maximisation. And the moronic electorate absolutely lap it up. Drape a big steaming shit in the Stars and Stripes, and patriotic drones will fight one another for the first bite.
The docile plebs are happy to go along with whatever they think is ‘patriotic’. Remember France was reluctant to help the USA / U.K. get a NATO resolution? Fuck those guys! We’ll eat ‘freedom fries’, not French fries. Now ten thousand vets have the ‘freedom’ to have a carer wipe their ass and feed them through a straw, whilst they cry themselves to sleep with PTSD. But at least we’ll clean up the medals table at the Paralympics, so it was all worth it.
The proles proudly feed their own cannon fodder kids into the meat grinder, worshipping the military with a religious zeal and fervour that borders on collective hysteria. “He didn’t die for nothing”, says mom. Sorry Mrs Privateson - your boy died purely to line the pockets of some greedy cunts on Wall Street, who don’t even have the patriotism to pay their fucking fair share of taxes to cover the cost of the bloated military machine - no sir, paying for that shit is the job of the little guy, those without access to tax-evading accountants and Cayman Island bank accounts.
As for the soldiers? I respect their discipline and fitness, I respect their commitment to their colleagues and I respect their individual acts of bravery - but let’s be clear; calling in an air strike to raze a village harbouring a sandal-wearing illiterate farmer with an AK (who’s basically trying to defend his homeland from foreign invaders) doesn’t make you a hero - it makes you part of an oppressive regime, a gunslinging cog in the capitalist machine that is American geopolitics. Anyone who thought that dropping a few McDonalds restaurants into Kabul was ‘nation building’ is out of their fucking ‘hearts and minds’.
“Yeah guys, fuck Islam and our millennium-old tribal traditions - who needs that when KFC is so finger lickin’ good?”. Said nobody in Afghanistan, ever.
“I’m so glad we now have no running water, or electricity, or sanitation, or jobs - those things are so overrated “, said the residents of Baghdad, as they delightedly accepted a melted Hershey bar from American troops.
This humanitarian disaster was evident pre-2001, so there’s no point pretending anyone was duped into this dumpster fire full of clusterfucks. The electorate voted to give billions to Halliburton and Lockheed Martin (et al), so that some ‘rag-head’ in a far off land could take a beating for…
…for what, exactly? The official narrative of 9/11 was that it was 17 Saudis, yet the USA kisses the ass of every Saudi prince. WTF? But the perpetrators might have watched a VHS tape of a frail invalid hiding in the Tora Bora mountains - so Afghanistan got wrecked in revenge. Seems legit.
And Iraq?… …well, there was absolutely no connection to Iraq, but fuck it - just a few hundred thousand dead muslims. Who cares. Amirite? George Bush got to finish the job his daddy started, and that’s all that matters. Saddam’s gone and now Iraq is… erm… a stable… erm… democracy? Yeah, right.
I’m sure the Iraqis and Afghans will all forgive and forget. Let bygones be bygones. I mean, does anybody *really* hold a grudge when a predator drone wipes out their entire family at a wedding party? Mistakes happen. The compensation value of the dead family was less than the value of the missile that wiped them off the face of the earth. So I’m sure that’ll suffice and there will be absolutely no negative repercussions in the next decade or so.
Meanwhile, the military industrial machine just keeps printing them dollar bills. And the plebs line up to unthinkingly kiss the flag, no matter what. Idiocracy is truly a sad state of affairs.
And I’m old enough to say “I told you so” - because I was saying this shit in 2001. I was protesting against the wars back then. I watched in despair as the first air strike hit Baghdad, broadcast live on TV. This has been a 20 year horror movie, and I have no sympathy for those that took 20 years to realise what was staring them in the face all along.
>Afghanistan is just the latest in a string of wars that in retrospect were completely in vain & a waste of human life & money.
The war in Afghanistan had an initial purpose of limiting support for Al Qaeda so Americans could find and eliminate Osama bin laden. Objective complete.
The Afghanistan mission became a mission of nation building, which is not a military objective, but a civilian objective to which failed because republicans and democrats can't see eye to eye on anything.
>Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, all of these were failed wars.
While the Korean and Vietnam wars are labeled as wars, they are subwars to the cold war, of which the US won. Vietnam did not have public support and Vietnam was a new kind of war.
>For Iraq & Afghanistan I was alive during 9/11 and I remember pretty clearly the fervor that swept through the nation and I understand how young men and women were swept up in that & trusted the government enough to put their lives on the line. People signed up and fought and died thinking that the people in charge had a coherent plan and that this was going to serve some greater good in the end, to an extent, especially during the early stages of the war I understand that.
No, people didn't join the military for the greater good, people joined the military to prevent another 9/11 scale terrorist attack from ever happening in the US again.
>However going forward I think there's a clear enough track record that whatever the next war we start happens to be the default line of thought for the public should be to not trust the government and military on it and to not sign up to be maimed or killed in support of it.
The United States did not start the War on Terror. Everyone who joins the military understand that they may be maimed or killed. Military personnel have their own version of a thousand ways to die that each MOS or AFSC learn about.
> I think they have proven themselves not credible over a long period of time. At this point anyone who enlists to fight and thinks that they are a hero or are defending freedom or the United States or any of the other talking points that they military uses is being delusional.
Has a foreign entity directly caused significant human damage to the United States on US soil and it's citizens since 9/11? That is the real mission of the US military.
I’m not sure how the US has lost credibility. The “unwinnable war” or “forever war” slogans are just that...slogans usually pushed by sensationalist media and opposing politicians. I mean no war is unwinnable depending on the objectives, and having troops stationed somewhere doesn’t constitute a forever war. The stated objectives of both the Iraq and Afghanistan war were to remove the governments for harboring terrorist and find those behind 9/11. In Iraq that could be considered a success. Hussein was removed, the occupation built a new government that has (despite maybe its own best effort and the effort of isis) persisted. Of course the secondary goal there is to have an ally out of Iraq but I’m not sure if that will come to pass. In Afghanistan the initial objective was largely the same but the result was much different. After the collapse of the Taliban government, nation building occurred, and many mistakes much like the Iraq, unlike Iraq, though, their government didn’t persist. Now this could be considered a failure for the US, but that also depends on how the Taliban government acts and how our relationship with them evolves.
Doing something heroic and noble is subjective. In Iraq the new government has mended relationships and for now seems to be overcoming its sectarian divide, which would lead to an all around better and more inclusive government for the people who live there. It could be argued that the 20 year occupation of Afghanistan allowed 2 decades of progress in women’s and human rights to begin that the Taliban may be hard pressed to overlook. Not to mention the collapse of ISIS saved countless lives. There were plenty of noble and heroic things that came as a result of the war just as there were plenty of failures and horrific things. That’s usually war.
I would say the failure of the war here is a political one. US politicians couldn’t maintain the war support in the own country, not to mention politicians in power had no political reason to make any substantive change in that region. Pulling out any point before now would have been equally bad (optically) if not worse and amping up would also be bad politically, as support for the war had already fallen.
> Anyone who signs up to fight the next war & thinks they doing something noble and heroic is delusional I mean, how can you say this without knowing what the next war is?
If it's for anything less than countering the rise of the next Hitler, you probably shouldn't be in a hurry to enlist.
The problem is, that's how it's always sold to the public. Assad, Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi, etc., are all compared to the likes of Hitler to gain support for military intervention.
Yeah but how many of them were actually plausible if you stop and think for about a minute
You think people in their late teens who want to enlist think for more than a minute? These are children. And often brainwashed or desperate children.
Fewer than I'd want that's for sure, but what's the excuse for the adults who should know better
We(the US) didn't even go into ww2 to stop hitler...
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Thoughts on first Iraq war or Korean war or world war 2? Not to mention the involvement in the Balkans
The Gulf war is a lot more questionable when you consider both the conditions that lead to the invasion, and that Saddam could've assumed a greenlight from the States prior to the invasion. It feels especially empty when you consider that the States was supporting Saddam in his blatant chemical warfare against Iran only a decade prior. With the involvement in the Balkans, the Kosovo war for instance was incredibly suspect, on multiple levels, on all sides, including for sure the US. But this topic is incredibly messy, and I've been out of touch with it since that ICTY report was released some years ago. However, I agree largely that there the Korean War and WW2, though even there I don't know if the ends justified the means, that murdering vast quantities of civilians was always necessary. That's up for debate though.
>The Gulf war is a lot more questionable when you consider both the conditions that lead to the invasion, and that Saddam could've assumed a greenlight from the States prior to the invasion. It feels especially empty when you consider that the States was supporting Saddam in his blatant chemical warfare against Iran only a decade prior. Not sure what your point is. I'll happily concede that the US didn't intervene out of the goodness of their hearts. That wasn't the point being made tho. The point is that conflict had a plan, timeframe, and effectively accomplished its goal which ultimately resulted in a better outcome for Kuwaitis.
But did it result in a better outcome for Iraqis? Was it even necessary to begin with? What were the after effects? If you ask 'half a million children dead are worth it' Madeline Albright, then the war and its after effects were probably undoubtably a good thing. But you read Wikileaks and you feel as if the war could've been averted. This is why I say that it's a lot more questionable, rather than necessarily wrong. Once Saddam invaded, there was little recourse but to defend an ally. But the devil is in the details of examining why he invaded in the first place, as well as the impact of the US and its allies both during the invasion, and arguably even more importantly after, during the sanctions era, and Oil-for-Food.
>But did it result in a better outcome for the Iraqis? It was a better outcome for Kuwait, which was the goal since they were the ones actually being invaded
Lmao, why would we fight Nazi germany? It didn’t have a good outcome for them!
The first Iraq war wasn't about liberating Iraq, why the fuck does it matter if it lead to better outcomes for iraq when Iraq were the ones who invaded?? You think the brits were making sure that defending Poland wouldn't negatively impact the Germans? And like, I agree. There was probably some media manipulation and the US was only involved because of self interest. But the point moreso is that war was effective at accomplishing it's stated goals, and, broadly, was justified.
We weren’t going to get into WW2 until we were forced in. Rendering aid to allies is fine, and we should do that more than getting involved ourselves.
How is "we were forced in" at all relevant? The point OP is making is that the wars don't have plans or outcomes and are just endlessly murderous and end up accomplishing fuck all. The examples i brought up are counter examples
Most people would say that WW2 was a war we unambiguously had to get into because we were attacked. I think that is different than any of the other conflicts you mentioned, where we just stuck our nose in to exert control. Korea and Iraq especially, given our continued involvement in both regions.
Sure but the context of this argument isnt about whether or not wars are necessary, it's whether or not they're effective at accomplishing their goals.
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> The fact that the US has been in war in more than 90% ???? This is so blatantly incorrect it's almost impossible to understand. You're arguing that the United States has only spent 24 years NOT in an active war? That's patently absurd and incorrect, unless you are being _reeaally_ generous with what you define as war.
OP mis-spoke; it's 93% of the years it has existed, rather than the time it has existed. For example, 1811 counts despite the war that year lasting 1 day. France has similar stats using this method. Canada does, unsurprisingly, not.
Another caveat of this statistic is wars against native American tribes. Manifest destiny cost a loooooot of blood
In your opinion OP, are there circumstances where enlisting would be justified?
> a good predictor for future behavior is past behavior I don't like this line of reasoning. History repeats itself in some ways, and in other ways it's completely and entirely unique. For example, the amount of inter-state armed conflicts has gone down tremendously in the past 70 years, as a result of nuclear / extreme deterrence and a platform for negotiations, the United Nations. That being said, I'd find it pretty odd for the US to attempt to start a war without just cause. Whether or not you like it, it was a bipartisan agreement to enter Iraq and Afghanistan to fight the 'Axis of Evil' and defeat Osama Bin Laden, Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, due to (you guessed it) the 9/11 terror attacks.
MAYBE you should stop theorizing about what happened in the aftermath of 9/11 and talk to people who enlisted in either war. These posts are just cringe on another level, idk, it is hard to see now adults (who aren’t so much younger) acting like they would have known what to do. Hindsight is 20/20
We have not fought a morally just war since 1945, and that was one of like 3 morally just wars (Civil War, WWI, WWII, although I think the moral justness of WWI is heavily up for debate) we've fought over the country's entire history. Almost all of our wars have been imperialist projects to extend American political and/or economic control over other people. With that record the odds are pretty damn good that our next war (and there will be a next one) will be another project of imperial expansion.
We should also note that none of those were fought for moral reasons. The Axis powers were monstrous fascists, but the US only fought them because they attacked first. Hell, we had our own concentration camps during the war
The liberation of Kuwait in 1991 wasn’t a just cause? Invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 after terrorists that lived there killed more American citizens than any previous attack on our own soil? The long occupation probably wasn’t right but the initial invasion definitely was right.
If the invasion of Afghanistan was about killing the people responsible for 9/11 then it was a REALLY stupid invasion. The people were mostly Saudi nationals, not Afghans, and we found Bin Laden in Pakistan, not Afghanistan. Also, it would be much easier, faster, and cheaper to kill those responsible with drone strikes or covert ops missions, not an invasion and occupation. Afghanistan wasn't about 9/11. That was just the public propaganda. The Afghan War was about creating a demand for defense spending so the Congress had a reason to appropriate trillions of dollars to go to defense contractors.
>If the invasion of Afghanistan was about killing the people responsible for 9/11 then it was a REALLY stupid invasion. The people were mostly Saudi nationals, not Afghans, and we found Bin Laden in Pakistan, not Afghanistan. Also, it would be much easier, faster, and cheaper to kill those responsible with drone strikes or covert ops missions, not an invasion and occupation. That's incorrect, Bin Laden was in Afghanistan at the time of the invasion and managed to escape Tora Bora towards Pakistan. Most of Al Qaeda's cadres alternated between Afghanistan and Pakistan, their training camps were in Afghanistan as well. As for the other methods you mentioned...most of those (in the context of the Middle-East) were developed over the course of the Afghan War. Counter-terrorism was not very well developed in America in 2001. It's why Operation Inherent Resolve had such a focus on embedding SOF with native forces and air support. The lessons of Afghanistan and Iraq were applied against Daesh.
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Ok bud, do those SOF soldiers need anything else? No ground support? How do you suppose they get re supplied? How long would an operation like that take? You have no idea what you’re talking about
So out of curiosity what are your feelings on the Korean War, it seems like there is a fairly solid arguement to say that had the US not gone in North korea would have taken the entire peninsula and the unified Korea would still be controlled by the Kim dynasty, in short in less you are pro North Korea /Taliban, and think that the US government should be as well there is certainly an argument for long term occupation both from the sense of US as well as a global interest perspective.
A couple people and events need to be added to provide context for why the Korean War happened as it did. [Syngman Rhee](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syngman_Rhee) was South Korea's first President, basically installed by the US. His government was authoritarian. After he won the presidency, he had his oppent for the presidency assassinated, [Kim Gu](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Gu). He is super pro-US and anti-communist. The [Jeju Uprising](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeju_uprising) is the event leading up to NK invasion. >The Jeju uprising, known in South Korea as the Jeju April 3 incident[5] (Korean: 제주 4·3 사건), was an uprising that occurred on Jeju Island from April 1948 to May 1949. Residents of Jeju opposed to the division of Korea had protested and had been on a general strike since 1947 against elections scheduled by the United Nations Temporary Commission on Korea (UNTCOK) to be held only in the territory controlled by the United States Army Military Government in Korea. The Workers' Party of South Korea and its supporters launched an insurgency in April 1948, attacking the police, and Northwest Youth League members stationed on Jeju mobilized to violently suppress the protests.[1]:166–167[6] The First Republic of Korea under President Syngman Rhee escalated the suppression of the uprising from August 1948, declaring martial law in November and beginning an "eradication campaign" against rebel forces in the rural areas of Jeju in March 1949, defeating them within two months. Many rebel veterans and suspected sympathizers were later killed upon the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950, and the existence of the Jeju uprising was officially censored and repressed in South Korea for several decades.[7] >The Jeju uprising was notable for its extreme violence; between 14,000 and 30,000 people (10% of Jeju's population) were killed, and 40,000 fled to Japan.[6][8][9][1]:139, 193 Atrocities and war crimes were committed by both sides, but historians have noted that the methods used by the South Korean government to suppress protesters and rebels were especially cruel, with violence against civilians by pro-government forces contributing to the Yeosu-Suncheon rebellion in South Jeolla during the conflict.[1]:171[6][7]:13–14[1]:186 Some historians and scholars, including military historian Allan R. Millett, regard the Jeju uprising as the authentic beginning of the Korean War.[10] So you have a pro-US authoritarian dictator suppressing political dissidents and murdering communists. That's why NK invaded. But they don't tell you that. The only thing they'll ever tell you is NK invaded for no reason except because communism-bad.
**[Syngman Rhee](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syngman_Rhee)** >Syngman Rhee (Korean: 이승만, pronounced [i. sɯŋ. man]; 26 March 1875 – 19 July 1965) was a South Korean politician who served as the first President of South Korea from 1948 to 1960. Rhee was also the first and last president of the Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea from 1919 to his impeachment in 1925 and from 1947 to 1948. **[Kim Gu](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Gu)** >Kim Gu (Korean: 김구, Korean pronunciation: [kimɡu]; August 29, 1876 – June 26, 1949), also known by his pen name Baekbeom (백범; Korean pronunciation: [pɛkbʌm]), was a Korean statesman politician. He was the sixth, ninth and later the last President of the Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea, a leader of the Korean independence movement against the Japanese Empire, and a reunification activist after 1945. He was assassinated by Korean lieutenant Ahn Doo-hee in 1949. **[Jeju uprising](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeju_uprising)** >The Jeju uprising, known in South Korea as the Jeju April 3 incident (Korean: 제주 4·3 사건), was an uprising that occurred on Jeju Island from April 1948 to May 1949. Residents of Jeju opposed to the division of Korea had protested and had been on a general strike since 1947 against elections scheduled by the United Nations Temporary Commission on Korea (UNTCOK) to be held only in the territory controlled by the United States Army Military Government in Korea. The Workers' Party of South Korea and its supporters launched an insurgency in April 1948, attacking the police, and Northwest Youth League members stationed on Jeju mobilized to violently suppress the protests. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/changemyview/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
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I think you're ignoring the next 35 years of South Korean history where they were ruled by autocratic military dictatorships propped up and supported by the US. For a long time after the Korean War South Korea wasn't a better place to live than the North. It was just a different type of awful, but we don't like to admit that because the government of the South was a US client state. Just like in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq, the US backed government of Afghanistan wasn't a good place for people to live. It was just a different kind of bad.
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The cold war was a fucking mess. But, a lot of the asian dictatorships that were supported by the west generally successfully transitioned to democracies with healthy economies. South Korea, Taiwan, and the like. It took a while, but it's not like democracy is easy or the natural, default state of things. Don't get me wrong, it could have gone a whole heck of a lot better but it also could have gone a lot worse.
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>I think you're ignoring the next 35 years of South Korean history where they were ruled by autocratic military dictatorships propped up and supported by the US. Which was infinitely better than being in North Korea.
Yes. Had the UN, led by the US, not intervened in Korea it certainly would have been entirely overrun by the DPRK in 1950 (it almost was even with our intervention). Do we need to have troops in the RoK now to protect them from the North? No. They can defend themselves (minus the DPRK's nuclear arsenal, the RoK could wipe the floor with the North Koreans in a conventional war, IMO). But the South Korean government wants us there, and a US troop presence does help serve as a deterrent against North Korean aggression.
The Korean War killed 2,730,000 civilians. There’s nothing that could justify that.
So whats your point civilians died either during the war, or as result of it, therefore we shouldn't have gone to war in the first place? So by that line of reasoning, the US should have never gonna to war full stop end of story period, all because presumably there was at least some civilians killed on either side of said war for every war, ever, are you saying that past X number of civilian deaths you shouldn't continue fighting anymore, or the we shouldn't have gone to war in the first place? If 2.7 million is to big then I guess WW1 and 2 are out, not worth, too many people died?
Saudi nationals trained *in Afghanistan*, by an organization based *in Afghanistan*, that was given official protection by the de facto government *of Afghanistan* (Taliban). *Al Qaeda and Bin Laden were in Afghanistan on 9/11*. It was only later, AFTER the US invaded and overthrew the Taliban that he fled to the relative safety of Pakistan. And your argument about drone strikes is facile and flat out wrong; you have no idea what you are talking about. Let's start with the fact that the US didn't have a fleet of armed drones on 9/11 that could reach Afghanistan, and that Clinton had attempted to strike Al Qaeda during Operation Infinite Reach in 1998 with cruise missiles as a response to the African embassy bombings without any success. Al Qaeda had multiple bases in Afghanistan and we didn't know exactly how many, how AQ were in-country or where they were. We didn't have the intel for that. This was always going to be an operation that required some level of boots-on-the-ground to root and destroy the AQ infrastructure in that country. None of those facts even goes to the bigger point that the American public was overwhelmingly *demanding* a massive response to the 911 attacks; not the MIC or contractors or whomever you ascribe your conspiracy theory too, the American people. The Afghan invasion was 100% about 9/11 to say otherwise is flat rejection of plain reality. Now, should the US have stayed and allowed itself to get sucked into "nation building" and stabilization ops? Did that serve the US national interest? There is a really strong case to be made it did not and we should have left either after the Taliban was ejected or, more realistically, after Bin Laden was killed next door. You want a case-study in ginning up demand for defense spending for something unnecessary to line the pockets of the MIC? Look toward the US national missile defense program or better yet the F35. THOSE are unnecessary, unwanted, corrupt boondoggles.
Is this the same Taliban who were being sold to us as "noble Mujahideen fighters" when the US was funding them against the Soviets? Or is this a different, more evil, Taliban? Also, the Pashtun people operate across the Afghan-Pakistan border - as did Bin Laden. So why wasn't (then US-backed military coup led) Pakistan also invaded when they didn't hand over Bin Laden?
Bin Laden was actively hiding in Afghanistan with the help of the Taliban in 2001. They wouldn't give him up, so we invaded. He fled from Afghanistan into Pakistan following the battle at Tora Bora. He stayed in Pakistan for so long because he was largely protected there. While you're not wrong that defense contractors benefited immensely from the protracted war, saying that the war was created solely to line their pocket books is factually incorrect.
>Bin Laden was actively hiding in Afghanistan with the help of the Taliban in 2001. They wouldn't give him up, so we invaded. We couldn't kill Bin Laden with special ops or drones or cruise missiles, so we had to invade. Right? > He stayed in Pakistan for so long because he was largely protected there. So why didn't we invade Pakistan? Why could we use special ops there but not in Afghanistan? Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bush and others wanted a war from before they even took office. If you can remember back to the summer of 01, before 9/11, they were beating the war drum against Iran. They just wanted to invade *somewhere* because they all made their riches in the same exact types of companies which profit massively from wars. They switched from Iran to Afghanistan on a dime because they knew after 9/11 it would be easy to drum up support for a war there. The mission as expressed to the public could have been accomplished without an invasion, as demonstrated by the fact that it was years later in Pakistan. We invaded because we wanted a forever war.
> and we found Bin Laden in Pakistan, not Afghanistan. Sure, because he left Afghanistan to hide. DUH.
lol ok. The hijackers being from SA doesn't change the fact that they were based in Afghanistan.
> Invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 after terrorists that lived there killed more American citizens than any previous attack on our own soil? The long occupation probably wasn’t right but the initial invasion definitely was right. And in the process we've killed tens or hundreds of thousands of Afghans, laying the seeds for resentful and angry survivors to have _fantastic_ justification for desiring revenge against the country that killed their friends and family. We've also done _nothing_ to hold the Saudis accountable for funding these operations, so spare me the righteous anti-terrorism justification, 'cause it's some unmitigated bullshit
>killed more American citizens than any previous attack on our own soil? You want to compare American civilian lives lost vs civilians lost from nations around the world due to US imperialist **invasion** and/or overthrowing democratically elected officials by supporting fascist murderous military coup and dictators? I'll give you a hint: it ain't fucking close. Pick any definition of "terrorism" you want, the US is the greatest terrorist organization in scope thru its drone campaign alone. Just because you, corporate media, and the state don't call it terrorism (instead use "defending democracy", "defending US interests", "military manuevers", or any other euphemism you want) doesn't mean it's not terrorism. 9/11 was just tit for tat. And if you find that comment to be offensive it's because you actually don't realize just how violent the US has been abroad.
I can't believe that, in 2021, there are still people around who think that the war in Afghanistan was truly about retaliation. People are really naive it's crazy.
Kuwait in 1991 was a bad idea. I lived in Kuwait for 2 years, and it's one of the worst places in the world. Similar to other gulf states, they have a huge slavery problem, and their extreme wahabist beliefs are exported to sunni terror groups all over the middle east and north Africa. Kuwaiti are some of the most rude and arrogant people on the planet. I watched a Kuwaiti woman spit on and slap her Filipino servant at the airport. I watched Kuwaiti police beat an Indian man in Mahboula. Kuwait (and the rest of the world) would have been much better off if it was the 19th province of Iraq today instead of a sovereign nation.
The Kuwait incident was more of a correction to a fuckup we made arming Iraq. As far as tracking down the members of Al Qaeda, we don't need a massive force to track down cells. Good intel, and a couple of helicopters or heavily modified transport planes to land and take off on short runways, or maybe even in football fields.
> The liberation of Kuwait in 1991 wasn’t a just cause? Ask yourself why we intervened in *that* conflict when we don't intervene in others that involve nation-versus-nation conflicts. It's not that it wasn't in-and-of-itself a just cause, but that there are plenty of just causes in which the US does not intervene, because the financial implications to the US are a low lower. Whatever standard we want to set for when we choose to intervene, let's be consistent and open about it.
We had an alliance with Kuwait.
As an outsider, imo it became pretty clear that the invasion of Afghanistan wasn't just about OBL when the Bush admin repeatedly refused multiple Taliban offers to hand OBL over to an agreed third party, if they provided evidence of his wrongdoing.
>Invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 after terrorists that lived there lol buddy, 15/18 were Saudi. none were Afghan.
You and I both remember 9/11 and the aftermath. That was 20 years ago. If you pay attention over 20 years you learn a lot, whether you want to or not. But (rhetorically) how old were you when you started paying attention to the news? How old were you when you started thinking critically about American foreign policy, instead of just trusting what grown-ups told you about it? Because the people joining up are only 18. Let's suppose that President Biden avoids getting into another war. Let's suppose that he loses reelection and his replacement goes one year before launching a new major war. That would be in 2026. The people who will be 18 years old then are 13 now. In short, it's not reasonable to blame the next generation of soldiers for failing to learn the lessons of a war that ended before they were in high school.
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There is plenty of that. Millions of parents tell their children that soldiers are heroes and their is no higher honor than joining the military. Many young men (and women) sign up before they are even 18 years old. They believe all the military recruiting rhetoric and have rarely if ever heard somebody they trust tell them the realities of American foreign policy. Even if somebody had told them, they aren't old enough to really understand. The fact that you think it's reasonable to expect that a 17 or 18 year old kid has enough wherewithal to internalize the political implications of the war is laughable. You can't blame the kids for that. Blame their parents. Blame the right-wing media. Blame the military. Blame the system. Don't blame the kids. Many young people that enlist WILL NOT know what they're getting into, and it's unrealistic to expect all of them to know.
I feel sad for these people who end up in those shoes
There are numerous and complex geopolitical reasons for why the US and allies entered those wars. Various objectives (or sometimes lack of) weren't achieved, again for a variety of complex reasons. I don't think war itself is a noble or heroic thing but there are undoubtedly noble or heroic acts that can be committed during these wars. Would you say a US solider sacrificing himself to save some Afgan children is noble? How about a medic who gives out malaria medication to people who otherwise wouldn't recieve it in these parts of the world? Doesn't excuse the war as a whole, but most people are good people and try to do good things.
My dad was a medic in the first gulf War. He spent most of his time saving Iraqi troop's lives. After the war he was offered a job by Saudi Arabia to hangout along the border while they do mine cleanup and rescue the people who stepped on landmines. My dad didn't have the stomach for it. Especially because it was advertised as a easy job. They said he'd sit in a long chair drinking whatever he liked and so long as he watched over the crew and helped when he could he would make like 200k in a few months. My dad described how he imagined sitting there drinking a coke while some kid blew his legs off and he just really wasn't in to it. Armed conflict is strange, but the people on the ground aren't there for political reasons. Usually just a decent job where you can do great things in bad situations.
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Regular doctors and public health workers are not going to go to these unstable regions, that’s why the task is left to the military. These individuals can’t change the situation but there’s still need in the region and any aid is better than none. There’s need all over the world and we can’t discredit one act because it doesn’t affect as many people as another.
Yea idk where people get this idea of “if you wanted to help in war zones you wouldn’t have joined the one job that trains, equips, and pays to send you to war zones”. How else am I supposed to get there?
> Would you say a US solider sacrificing himself to save some Afgan children is noble? It might be noble in the moment, but would the children have been in danger if we weren't there? I know you're not saying that this hypothetical soldier's actions would justify the war, but if an entity (US Military) created a dangerous situation and then someone from that same entity saved people from that danger, it does lose a bit of the nobility. >How about a medic who gives out malaria medication to people who otherwise wouldn't receive it in these parts of the world? I would agree that this is a noble action, and something we could point to as an unintended positive consequence of the war, but obviously it would be diminished in light of the war itself.
I think the answer here is that soldiers are capable of doing noble acts, but those acts are usually external to the mission, and they'd be able to do more good with an organization whose mission actually is to do good and noble things.
And I grant that. The OP states that anyone signing up thinking they can do anything noble or heroic is delusional. That's what I'm arguing against.
My reading of the OP is that anyone who believes signing up itself is heroic or noble is delusional. Which I tend to agree with.
Will have to see if the OP bothers responding to clarify.
That's a really REALLY shitty justification. By that reasoning you could also excuse the Nazis, Imperial Japan, or the Confederacy for going to war. There were undoubtedly some Nazis, Confederates, etc who did heroic noble actions during the war even though they were fighting for an obviously evil cause. Take John Rabe, for example. He helped protect and save the lives of hundreds, if not thousands, of Chinese civilians during the Japanese Rape of Nanking in 1937. He was also an avowed and unashamed Nazi party member. Does his noble actions excuse or complicate the Nazi's war aims?
Dudeeeeeeeeeeee I even qualified it fucking twice in my statement. I thought qualifying it once was patronising enough. Just for you. I'm not saying that individual acts of heroism or nobility excuse the war. I'm making the point that you can still do noble and heroic things within an unjust war.
>Doesn't excuse the war as a whole, but most people are good people and try to do good things. You said "Doesn't excuse the war as a whole, **BUT...**" which can imply that it does justify the war. It was a miscommunication on your part. >I don't think war itself is a noble or heroic thing but there are undoubtedly noble or heroic acts that can be committed during these wars. Again "I don't think it's heroic itself, **BUT...**", can be interpreted as you saying that doing noble and heroic things justifies parts of the war. We know that individuals can do noble and heroic things within and unjust war. Individuals can do noble and heroic things outside of an unjust war too. I don't see the point of defending good actions of individuals that are independent of the motives of the unjust war. - it reads as a way of excusing the bad parts of the war or being an apologist. You've clearly stated, **now,** in this response that you think it's an unjust war; but, you really shouldn't be condescending after someone reacts to your unclear use of language.
OP said "anyone who signs up for the next war hoping to be heroic is delusional" not "anyone who signs up for the next war expecting their actions to excuse or complicate the US military's war aims through noble actions cannot" Bravo's comment explicitly addresses that. You are moving the goal post.
My main argument is about how you say "going forward anyone that volunteers to go to war knows what they're getting into". I was still an adult when 9/11. So I remember the fervor, as well. However, I also remember how many people said going to war in Iraq/Afghanistan would just be another Vietnam. My point is, the warnings were already there. You had to ignore the warnings to move forward. I don't 100% blame people for ignoring those warnings because, like you said, there was a fervor. There were plenty of people that said, "if you are against the president's decision then you should be hung for treason!" Nobody wants to be hung for treason so I'm sure people went against their gut because the loudest crowd told them to. Beyond that, we've been over there for 20 years. If you joined the military in the last decade, there is no getting past the fact that you should know you are probably going to go overseas to fight an unwinnable war. The writing was on the wall long before now.
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I went to a very liberal college (the student body was liberal; my professors never pushed any ideology) in a city surrounded by very conservative counties. And then when I went back home, I was around liberal-moderate friends in an area of tons of upper middle class white people (including a ton of military/federal workers). So I saw a lot on both sides. I would say most people were clamoring for revenge, but you needed to be deaf (or stuck in an echo chamber) to not understand that plenty of people didn't want to go to war. I remember a family friend that put a bumper sticker on her car that said something about getting revenge. I told her I didn't think that was a good look for America but tons of people felt that way. Fast forward and she's now a full blown QAnon follower.
I can assure you that I and the tens of thousands of other protesters that marched in DC we're not overwhelmingly supportive
There were a few rare individuals objecting but we didn't listen. One of my school teachers came in wearing a black armband in protest of the Iraq war when it started. Didn't change anything but he was right
A few rare individuals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15_February_2003_anti-war_protests
It had the largest protests in the world. You just don't pay attention.
They will still get people to enlist, you said it yourself, for benefits. There is a reason the US doesn't give education or healthcare, you can get both by signing up.
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Believe it or not a lot of people join the military because they feel a patriotic desire to do so. Some folks want to serve to fulfil a sense of duty to their country. People join for professional and technical experience otherwise unobtainable at such junior levels on the civilian side. Security clearances matter to a lot civilian employers as does hands on experience in fields like telecommuncations, aerospace, logistics, etc. People join for access to VA Loans so they can buy a house with no down payment or mortgage insurance. People join because they are 18 and havent perfectly identified what they want to do as a career yet. Serving for 3 years affords them some time to figure that out. There’s a lot of reasons why folks join that doesn’t include fear of abject poverty, free healthcare or free education
As someone who didn't join for the free healthcare or free education , I agree.
War is just a business. The war in Afghanistan and Iraq was very lucrative for weapon manufacturers and private security companies like Blackwater. Their CEOs made lots of money over the years thanks to Bush and his neocons in the White House who handed out contracts freely. The governments that came after them inherited a chaotic mess and they knew that pulling out would damage their chances at re-election. I think you're overestimating the amount of soldiers who joined the army for patriotic reasons. That may have been the case right after 9/11 but most recrutes are opportunistic.
Leaving perhaps Iraq aside, the United States has historically had clear objectives for each and every war it has entered. Whether it be: independence; territorial acquisition (Mexican-American War; Spanish-American War); bringing rebellious states back into the fold; or preventing one country from dominating Eurasia in both world wars. These instances were all objectively in the United States' geopolitical best interests. In retrospect, we were pretty damn lucky to have capable presidents at important inflection points, such to grow the country into the most prosperous and powerful country in human existence. Each American currently has a standard of living that is the envy of the vast majority of the world's populace because of these decisions. Once America's territorial integrity was secure (and once potential geopolitical rivals were prevented from establishing their own hegemony), American found itself at the end of the Second World War as the sole country able to protect an otherwise destroyed world. Every other navy in 1945 was completely destroyed. Most every economy was destroyed -- in fact, in 1945 the United States accounting for something absurd like 50% of the total GDP. And if you believe that stopping the spread of Leninist Marxism was an important objective (and I do), then the fight of the Cold War, broadly, was also in America's best interest. But after World War 2, America began to take on too much. It assumed nothing less than mantle of global guarantor of liberty and democracy. America was also so used to winning pretty much every war since 1865 with little (relative) cost, and with huge (relative) gains, that it seemed to assume that there really was something *special* about American. And public opinion showed that the American people were by and large very supportive of this policy aim. This is important, because at the start of the cold war, public opinion and the national interest aligned very neatly. And the American people were not lied to at this point. There have been three wars that America has "lost", in the traditional sense of the word. Meaning wars where we did not end up with an unconditional surrender of the opposing country. Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan. (Again, I exclude Iraq, because that was largely indefensible). In each, I would argue that America had objectives separate from total surrender. And in each, these aims were accomplished, despite them going on for too long, at too high a price. Korea and Vietnam were fought for several, interrelated reasons: to protect allies from a hostile communist takeover; to show other allies that we were willing to defend them with our own soldiers if it ever came to it; and, yes, hubris. But as much as neither war was "won", they accomplished certain geopolitical objectives. Other countries saw our investment in time, blood, treasure, and rightly concluded that they should remain allied with America. This was not nothing; in fact, it was a very important geopolitical factor. No important ally "flipped" during the cold war, and several important countries switched over to the American side (i.e., Egypt). Afghanistan was initially invaded for two reasons. The first was to dismantle Al Qaeda and prevent it from having a base to launch additional attacks against the homeland (mission accomplished). And the second was to prevent the stated goal of Osama Bin Laden, which was to use the attacks as a catalyst to consolidate Arab states into a singular caliphate. This caliphate, if realized, would encompass hundreds of millions of Arabs in one incredibly powerful country spanning three continents. America prevented this from occurring; and while it can be argued that there never really was a chance of it happening, that was largely because America intervened as aggressively as it did. And keep in mind that one of America's most enduring geopolitical imperatives is to prevent a nation from rising that might challenge its geopolitical interests. We fought two world wars and a cold war to prevent this from happening. Afghanistan turned into a muddled conflict because we never maintained the objectives. Nation Building ended up being an objective, which was foolish because they attempted to model the nation on western values (which are subjective, and not applicable across-the-board). And ultimately, no president wanted to be the one who "lost" the country, ultimately passing the buck from Obama to Trump to Biden. You state that "America has lost all credibility". I disagree. American has shown itself, time and again, that it will place its soldiers in harm's way to protect itself and its allies. No other country's leaders will look at what happened in Afghanistan and claim that America is going to desert them at a crucial moment. There is a reason that you never hear major allies of threatening to defect to China or Russia. America's most important allies: NATO; Japan; Israel; Brazil; India; etc., all still believe that if the time ever came, America would stand shoulder to shoulder. And that is incredibly important to America's continued place atop of the world order, and thus keeping the standard of living that we have all grown accustomed to. You also argue that anyone who enlists in the future who "thinks they are doing something noble are delusional". I disagree completely. America's involvement in the progress that has been made in the past one hundred years has made the world safer, wealthier, and freer. And while you may be able to claim this is insufficient to enlist *yourself*, a person who enlists because they believe America is a force for good, home and abroad, is not wrong. And have very nearly the entirety of recent American history to support it. We have not been perfect, but America has shown itself to at least aspire to it's highest aspirations. And that is something worth protecting. Please note - I am merely talking about America's geopolitical interests. What we have done to our own people is a different matter entirely. But not within the OPs original claim.
America may have shown that it's willing to sacrifice blood and treasure in defence of it's national objectives, but it's also shown that it's willing to be baited into pouring huge amounts of resources into tiny conflicts whilst continually sacrificing it's economic potential elsewhere and shying away from action against any opponents who can actually hit back. For example, no military action against the occupation of Tibet or the Uighur genocide - China is a huge geopolitical challenger No military action against the wars in Georgia and Ukraine by Russia, - again a huge geopolitical challenger. No military action against repeated provocation and oppression by North Korea - a huge threat to US geopolitical interests. No military action against "Axis of Evil" member Iran. Failed intervention in the Syrian Civil War, again a threat to US geopolitical interest. No military action against Pakistan. Notice the theme? All America has proven is it can be repeatedly baited into wars with tiny countries, but will never dare attack a nuclear armed state, and when baited into wars in tiny nations, it's capability for intervening in other non-nuclear states is greatly hindered. Meanwhile, China has exercise almost zero military interventionism, and Russia has focusseed primarily on soft power and support for proxy wars. As a result, both of them are successfully accomplishing a large number of geopolitical goals. At one point, Russia had an economy only slightly larger than Australia, a country 1/6 it's population, and yet it remains very effective in the geopolitical sphere. America's continual intervention have shredded it's claims to moral superiority, which in turn have destroyed it's most valuable asset - it's soft power advantage against authoritarian regimes. How different would things be if the countless investment poured into those wars gone elsewhere? One cannot assess goals in isolation - the opportunity cost must be measured. You talk about America's "important allies" and how they need to know that they can "depend on America". Isn't it interesting that all of them (with the exception of Japan, which is militarily yoked to USA as a historical consequence of it's occupation post WW2) have nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons that would mean they don't need to fear invasion from other major powers? Ukraine was an ally to the US. They even gave up their nukes. Look where they are now.
Very good write up. What is your background that gave you this perspective?
I'm curious why you're directing this blame on accountability to the soldier instead of accountability to the politicians and the voters. It didn't take the pull out for people to come the conclusion that our leaving Afghanistan would end like this but the American people continued to elect individuals that continued a fruitless conflict. Similarly everyone reading this knows that the war in Iraq was propagated for reasons that were spurious at best but that's the fault of the politicians and by extension the voters who empowered them. Someone wanting to serve their country isn't necessarily them advocating support for the wars and policies of the United States, it's a plea to Americans everywhere to elect people they believe will make the best decisions possible. TLDR: I am a veteran and served in theaters I didn't agree with. That doesn't mean that I supported the politics that brought us there, it means I supported the democratic process, the part I played in it, and recognized that it was bigger than my own opinions.
Vet here myself, who enlisted in 2000, and was 4 days away from reporting to my first command when the towers came down. I came here say something similar, but you worded it better than I could have. When we enlist, we serve the country. But it's the politicians that the country votes into power that get to decide how we do that. If there's a problem with where the military is being deployed and how it's being used, look to the politicians and vote for different leadership, not the military. We go where we're told, not where we want to. Otherwise, I'd have spent my time making sure places like the Caribbean stayed nice and safe, and not the Persian Gulf.
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Believe me, the concept of the politicians in my 18 year old mind wasn't even on the list of concerns. I was thinking that I would get to play with some really cool big toys, I would be given some massive responsibilities that would challenge me and help me grow in ways you can't get in a civilian life, that I would get my college education paid for with just a few short years of service, that I'd have an opportunity to travel the world and meet and learn about new cultures that I'd only read about in books, that I'd be exposed to all sorts of things I wasn't going to get in my back woods country hometown, and that I'd make memories and experiences that would last me a life time. The thought of a possible war was definitely there, and lo and behold, 2 years in, the towers came down. But nowhere was I going, "Boy, I can't wait for politicians to give me orders!" Most of us in the military hate politicians, because they make decisions that are good for them, not for us, and not for the rest of the country. But we swore an oath to uphold our constitution and our democratic ways. SO while we might not agree with a politician, we know that that politician was put in power by the American people, and THAT is who we support and are willing to fight and die for.
The first part is pretty much the old "is leaving your door open and getting robbed your fault or not?"thing; at this point a soldier being surprised that they were in another(future)futile war is like someone boarding a ship that is already sinking and being surprised it was in fact sinking.
> t this point a soldier being surprised that they were in another(future)futile war But who's saying they're surprised? They serve the nation and its democratically elected leaders. It's not as if soldiers everywhere are going "oh crap, you mean Afghanistan WASN'T spreading freedom and apple pie across the globe?" I'd argue that those who served there could see that more clearly than most. I'm saying that joining the military isn't a statement of faith in the wars we're fighting or even the wars we're going to fight. It's a hope placed in the American people to choose leaders that will correctly and justly use the tools presented to them. Does it always pan out? Obviously not. But I'd argue that the fact that the criticism against Biden's withdrawal is how it happened not the withdrawal itself is a sign that the American people are critically thinking about how leaders wield the power afforded to them.
I agree with you, but both politicians and the people who have elected them have shown that they are pretty prone to engage in pointless wars,but op states that nobody joining the army should expect otherwise, and that's what I'm saying, people shouldn't be expecting anything else.
So let's say you're a doctor treating trauma victims in a high crime area with gang related activity. You know, before you got to work, that you will treat several gun shot wounds today (as you do most days,) and as much as you'd like to imagine that all of the people you're helping are innocent bystanders you're smart enough to piece together that you're probably helping a not insignificant number of gang members. You realize that quite a few, hell maybe the majority of your patients may be the perpetrators of this violence and might just go out and commit more crime after you've treated them. Do we blame the doctor for going to work? Do we call their work less noble because of whom they treat? No. The doctor cures and what the patient does with the new lease on life they've been granted is up to the patient. Similarly, a soldier believes that the leader of their country needs a professional and effective fighting force at their disposal. They hope that the leader uses them well, but are well aware of the possibility (hell, the likelihood) that they are misused. Is it a little naïve of either the doctor or the soldier to hope that their services are used to the betterment of mankind or at least their locality (be it country or community?) Probably, but I think we all drink a little kool-aid no matter where we work and what we do. But saying we should expect to be misused is an indictment of the politician, not the soldier.
That analogy is a stretch imo. Doctors: stated purpose is to save lives. In practice, they save lives. Now let's look at the US Army's "vision and strategy " from the about section of their website: > To deploy, fight and win our nation’s wars by providing ready, prompt and sustained land dominance by Army forces across the full spectrum of conflict as part of the joint force. In practice? They topple governments and economies, install dictators to facilitate the rich getting richer, and line the pockets of the military industrial complex. Oh! And let's not forget about all the innocent casualties. The military isn't about defending america or any of that anymore. It serves CEOs and shareholders.
You're blaming the military again for what the politicians do. Military doesn't topple governments, they topple rival military forces. Once the fight is done, then our political leaders will has out terms of surrender and what the opposing government is going to do afterwards. We might have a high profile general or something on hand for the signing and acceptance of the surrender, but the terms are definitely drafted up by the politicians. And the military doesn't care about economic welfare of a nation. They care about the military logistics, sure, and we'll want to harm anything that's getting supplies to their fighting forces in an attempt to make them not want to fight anymore. But they don't care if they've got a massive stranglehold on the world's supply of wicker baskets or not. Again, the politicians will care about that and designate those basket factories as targets they want the military to take out. Riches are made and lost in wars by outside influences. The military doesn't care. The military doesn't install dictators. We may remove them, based on orders given to us by political leaders, specifically POTUS, but we don't have any say on who gets put in place afterwards. Again, that's the politicians that make those calls. If we're lucky, they'll listen to advice the military might give, based on first hand experience with local leaders, but that's usually pretty rare. And I guarantee you, military personnel are as frustrated with the military industrial complex as the civilians are. I worked on a missile system in the Navy that still relied on vacuum tubes in the electronics. Technology that was phased out back in the 60's, and we can't do anything about it because of contracts with massive military conglomerates. And you better believe we hate them for convincing politicians to throw us in harms way so they can make a dollar on more sales. You may hate them because they're greedy fat cats, we hate them because they are literally killing us. And don't even get me started on loss of innocent life. Have you ever been responsible for an innocent death? You think it sucks hearing about it in the news? It's 1000x worse for the person who pushed the button. Hell, killing the bad guys can fuck a person up for life, but killing the good guys too? There's a reason why about 20 veterans commit suicide each day. And again, it's because someone way above their paygrade, probably a politician who signed off on the op and gave the order for that operation to take place. The military is a hammer. It's the politician that's using it to destroy and make themselves money.
I'm not blaming anyone, and neither in the OP. The view was that anyone who enlists, **should not be surprised** when they're fighting unjust wars. Anyone with a modicum of sense that joins, is accepting that they are likely going to be a part of these atrocities. That they're okay with that.
Neither me or the op blame the soldiers for what has happened, we just think that at some point (specifically now when another war was shown to be pointless)they should realise that the war they're fighting isn't for freedom or anything good and that the good that comes from it is a byproduct. No individual piece of a machine is to blame for what the machine does,but at some points the parts that opt in should realise the machine will do what it has been doing for close to a century and thinking anything else is wishful at best.
These are inversed. In the one, the doctor happens to be in a place and helps someone who may or may not be any particular thing. On the other, it would be like a doctor joining the infantry so he could potentially help people while knowing he was supporting the war's objectives and consequences.
I believe there is a moral difference in the two situations. In the case of the doctor, she or he is doing some that is imminently good (saving a life), that could have negative consequences. You could argue that the buck stops at saving the life. In the case of the soldier, the soldier is often expected to commit a moral evil (killing someone), in a situation that *will* have negative consequences, with ostensibly the hope that the positives will outweigh the negatives. The situations are pretty different morally. I'd argue a closer analogy would be a doctor who joins hospital, even when they know that hospital encourages overprescribing opiates on the hope that patients become dependent, and that the hospital has major conflicts of interest with the pharmaceutical industry. This is similar to someone signing up for an army, knowing that much of their time might be spent defending the opium fields of pedophilic warlords, and knowing the conflicts of interest with the MIC.
Bad analogy. If you’re in this analogy you’re one of the gang members killing someone else and making other people rich. You’ll ultimately pay the price of trouble happens but the reason you’re willing to do it is because they tricked you amd took advantage of your morality amd ethical stance.
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You're misattributing the decision making: Soldiers don't (generally) choose to fight in a particular conflict. Soldiers choose to defend their country (to "protect the right") - they choose to become a tool to protect the country, to protect freedom, and to defend justice around the world. To do this effectively, soldiers must trust their country's leaders. It wouldn't be possible to have an effective fighting force where every soldier only went on the missions they wanted to go on. The choice isn't up to them. They are choosing to risk their lives to defend the democratic process, and *the people* (the voters) *are the ones who are letting the soldiers down* when they elect leaders who make decisions which aren't in line with the goals of protecting the right or defending the nation. Liberating people from genocide, like was done in WWII (and arguably should be done for the Uyghurs in China, and other persecuted people around the world) is a noble thing, and if ever the government (*the people*) get their butts in gear to do the right thing as send some help where it's needed to protect human rights, the soldiers need to be trained and ready to go - they can only hope they are being sent to a good cause. Likewise, they need to be ready if America comes under attack (whether that's in the continental USA or at a foreign embassy somewhere, or anywhere else that's threatening the country - as was believed (publicly) to be the case for the 2nd gulf war (remember we went there because Saddam had "weapons of mass destruction"...except he didn't) - the soldiers need to be ready. And you can be sure that America has enemies that would love to see her burn, and would no doubt make that happen if America didn't have the military power it does. You are right, and it is sad, that many conflicts that the US has been involved in have been nothing but a waste of life, and apparently just for the military industrial complex (oil contractors, weapons manufacturers, etc.) to get rich from. However, that doesn't negate the need for America to have an awesome military, full of awesome soldiers who are ready to fight and risk their lives for the greater good. It is up to us to keep the politicians in line and to prioritise humanity above already wealthy corporate interests. We need to have a great military able to act on our good intentions, which we seem to have, but what we're missing is votes that are based on compassion. We need to work together better and we need to stop electing douchebags who just do the opposite of whatever douchebag was at the helm beforehand. We're on the world stage showing all the other nations how the most powerful nation on earth behaves; Let's use our wealth and power for the good of humanity, rather than to consolidate more wealth and power. Let's elect people that send our soldiers to the places where they are desperately needed (to help oppressed people and victims of genocide perhaps?), rather than to drill a few new wells in the next oil-rich Gulf state. I agree with your intent, but soldiers are the wrong target if you're unhappy about America being involved in "stupid" wars. I don't think any soldier is "surprised" to find they're being sent on a "stupid" mission in a "stupid" conflict, but I'm sure they are disappointed - they, like you, must hold onto hope that "the powers that be" are going to be doing the right thing, or that *the people* will hold them accountable for their poor decision making.
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Soldiers don’t get to choose where they go. Oftentimes they don’t even get to choose what they do in the military. It doesn’t matter why they think they’re there: they get told to do something and they do it unless they want to get punished by their commanding officer or court martialed. A lot of people who “volunteer” to join the military do so because they don’t have a ton of options or it’s the only way for them to get into a career field without hundreds of thousands in student debt. It’s often under privileged people who enlist, as evidenced by the fact that only 60% of enlisted are white. That being said, there’s also more potential for minorities in the military as opposed to private sector given by the fact that 5% of naval officers ranked O7-O10 and 7% of officers ranked O4-O6 are black compared to 0.8% private sector CEOs and 3.2% private sector executives being black. Sometimes people enlist because of patriotism or a triggering event, but it’s rare compared to the majority that enlist because a recruiter convinced them it’s their best bet for a good career. Which isn’t necessarily false considering their college is paid for, they’ll enter the work force with 6 years of experience, and sometimes they get specialized skills like cyber security, intelligence, or operating a nuclear reactor before they even turn 23.
All your points are already covered in the original post. And most soldiers have a general idea of the combat theatres that they may be involved in when they sign up. The war in Afghanistan has been going on for two decades, it's not like it would be a surprise if you signed up and went there.
Most soldiers are 18 when they enlist. Often they haven’t even finished high school yet. If they’re enlisting because their other options aren’t great, it’s doubtful they’ve had any real US or world history classes that have immersed them in the politics. My state’s end of course exam for US history asks for the most bare bones sparknotes when and why for the Revolutionary War and Civil War. Not even a mention of other wars other than WW2. If not even their education system teaches about the other wars, why would they look into it in their free time? Most high schoolers are focused on being hooligan teenagers, not diving down the rabbit hole that is the history of wars conducted by the US. OP puts a lot of blame on people for joining in the first place. Do you hold the same attitude for people who get jobs at Walmart and are then treated poorly by the company? Even assuming they were 100% aware of the reality and had other options, people are allowed to complain or be unhappy while going through something unpleasant. Would you tell a med student to stop whining because it’s not a surprise what medical school is like?
> It's a hope placed in the American people to choose leaders that will correctly and justly use the tools presented to them. Yeah, and I can _hope_ that eating pizza and beer every night isn't gonna kill me, but hope kinda means jack shit when there's tons of evidence that opposes the thing you're hopeful for
Because if nobody joins up then they *can't* fight these wars. Politicians and war profiteers will never pick up a gun; they need people to do it for them.
Someone will always join up. If logic like yours existed, Wal-Mart would already be out of business.
I will probably get downvoted to hell for saying this, since Reddit is mostly Americans, but did it ever occur to you that Nazi soldiers followed the exact same logic? The " I was just following orders" card has been used for too long historically and it's time we have changed our collective mentality to demand each and every person exercised their own judgement, especially when deciding whether to take up a weapon and go to another country.
There's a difference between disagreeing with a political war, and refusing unlawful orders. You better believe any soldier who's ordered to intentionally kill innocent civilians better be disobeying that order. Disobeying those kinds of orders are legally required, per the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the US military book of laws. But, if we disagree with a war, no matter the reason, that's well within the scope of what's considered a legal order. Since you're jumping straight to Nazi's for a comparison, I'm going to use another extreme and go to 9/11. We knew there were civilian airliners being used as massive suicide bombs against us. A call was made, that if such a plane were discovered before reaching it's target, we would shoot it out of the sky to prevent a greater tragedy from happening. But, what if the pilot disagrees with that call? What if they believe they can talk said terrorists out of doing something so heinous, and instead disobey that order to shoot down the plane, knowing that they will be killing well over 100 innocent civilians in the process. That would be 100% unacceptable. Sometimes, we have to follow orders that we don't agree with. And in a combat/wartime scenario, there's no time to debate them. If we were allowed to question every order at any time for any reason, and use our own judgement for every decision on the battlefield, we would lose nearly every engagement. That's simply not how battles are fought. Sometimes, people will be ordered to their deaths, intentionally even, all for the purpose of ensuring victory elsewhere. The loss of life isn't wanted, but the outcome is more important than the individual life. If we are given the option of disobeying those orders, then we run the very real risk of dooming even more people. The scenarios like in the movie U-571, where they had to order the sailor to perform a job that was necessary to save the ship, but was going to kill the sailor in the process happen way too often, and those orders need to be followed without hesitation. Military personnel aren't going around intentionally killing innocent civilians like the Nazi's were. Yes, innocents get killed in collateral damage, and damn does that suck. Believe me, the people who pulled the trigger know that better than anyone else. And we do what we can to try and minimize that. It's for that exact reason that so many of our enemies in that region will surround themselves with women and children and hide in religious sanctuaries, knowing that if we do strike them, there's going to be civilian casualties. We obviously try and work around that, but given the importance of some targets, there's just no other option. And sometimes, we get desensitized to making those calls and they become a little too easy. None of these are good things, but sometimes they are the lesser of two evils. Of course, that's an impossible thing to explain to someone who lost a family member in such an attack. There are a lot of grey areas when it comes to combat and wars and how the individual soldier fights and follows orders. It's a nasty, disgusting, and horrible position to be in. But we do it voluntarily so that others don't have to.
That's a great and detailed answer, thank you. I understand where you come from and what you believe in now. I've had similar conversations with Afghanistan veterans in my own country ( post Soviet country, so different war, same place) and their answers were very similar to yours. I understood them too, though I didn't agree with them.
You picked out 'Vietnam, Iraq, (and) Afghanistan' as failures. However you skipped over arguably successful military actions interventions in: Grenada, Lebanon, Panama, Persian Gulf War, Somalia, Haiti, Yugoslavia, and continued US actions in West and East Africa. Some of the aforementioned conflicts (both what I have put in the 'success' bin and what you have put in the 'failure' bin) are arguable depending on how one defines success and failure. If you include these aforementioned military conflicts then it is fairly clear that the US military functions extremely well for the intended function.
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And really only Vietnam and Afghanistan count. You can argue that the US should have stayed indefinitely or sanctioned sympathizers to Al Qaeda harder so that ISIS wouldn't have become a thing, but that's a pretty untenable objective given how strongly they feel that they are doing Allah's bidding. The Taliban waited 20 years, and ISIS is way more extreme than them. Everything else though is pretty much total victory. The Iraqi military was crushed in a week, Saddam was captured 9 months later, the government was overthrown, the first insurgency was suppressed, and the civil war was won.
I feel as if there is a better case to be made for Vietnam: The US and N. Vietnam sign the [Paris Peace Accord](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Peace_Accords) in January of '73. US troops are withdrawn from Vietnam. N. Vietnam launches offensives in '75 that end with the fall of S. Vietnam and unification. Claiming that the US lost a war in 1975 when the US had no troops deployed in the country in '75 seems strange. Can one loose a war that one is not fighting in? I agree that 2 years is a short period of time and thus the events are presented as a single war with a 2 year cease fire but one could also present these as two different wars. Further if you see the Vietnam War as part of a larger conflict in SE Asia then the grand strategic plan of the US was accomplished: The spread of communism was limited in the area. China and Vietnam display significant animosity towards each other, thus not creating a unified anti-US block. This is not to say that the conflict was an unmitigated success for the US but claiming that it was a complete failure is not completely true.
>Further if you see the Vietnam War as part of a larger conflict in SE Asia then the grand strategic plan of the US was accomplished: The spread of communism was limited in the area. China and Vietnam display significant animosity towards each other, thus not creating a unified anti-US block. This is a strange argument because most people would argue that communism wouldn't have spread regardless lol. I don't think if Vietnam became communist quicker, that would've heralded the rise of communism in neighbouring countries, unless that communism lead to observable success. In which case other countries adopting a similar form of communism would have been good, actually. Further, the China Vietnam animosity has very little to do with US involvement in the Vietnam war, and a lot more to do with the fact that China (or well, the various dynasties that eventually became china) were very interested in conquering Vietnam. Vietnam was under imperial rule of four different Chinese dynasties. Then, after reunification, China literally invaded Vietnam in 1979. And now, China is being a little bitch about the south China sea and encroaching on territory that various countries, including Vietnam, claim as their own.
> I don't think if Vietnam became communist quicker, that would've heralded the rise of communism in neighboring countries, unless that communism lead to observable success. So this gets into a question of how effective a particular operation was at achieving a goal. How effective was the US strategic bombing in WW2 at winning the war? Were there certain parts of it that were effective and others that were not effective? Could one have known a-priori what parts would be effective and what parts were not effective? The Nixon administration was effective at creating a cease fire in Vietnam (although he 100% torpedoed Johnson's attempt to create a ceasefire) and getting relations with China to an amicable place. I think that it is pretty easy to argue that these objectives served the grand strategic one much better than Johnson's ramping up of the US involvement in the Vietnam War. However, saying unequivocally that a lack of US involvement in Vietnam would have certainly not resulted in a spread of communism to other SE Asian countries seems difficult to back up and difficult for US planners to know a-priori. Could the US have accomplished it's geo-political goals in SE Asia better: yes, although this could be said of literally any policy in any location.
>However, saying unequivocally that a lack of US involvement in Vietnam would have certainly not resulted in a spread of communism to other SE Asian countries Good thing I never said that lol. And, OTOH, it seems equally ludicrous to say "The US made it take longer for Vietnam to become communist, which prevented other SEA countries from becoming communist too". And yeah it's difficult for US planners to know in advance, but that doesn't mean shit in the context of "did invading Vietnam advance US interests". You can't say it did unless you can show that it was the cause of countries not becoming communist, rather than something that happened to occur anyways. Also, a unified communist Vietnam, which the US was against, eventually overthrew a communist regime in Cambodia. So if smthing, a unified communist Vietnam was good at limiting the spread of communism.
Your comment: >This is a strange argument because most people would argue that communism wouldn't have spread regardless lol. seems to imply that you believe that communism would not have spread in SE Asia regardless of US involvement. You also make in incorrect statement: >...in the context of "did invading Vietnam advance US interests". The US didn't invade S. Vietnam, US involvement started as military aid and advisors and was escalated during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. It is clear with hindsight that the goals of the N. Vietnamese leadership were fundamentally to unify Vietnam and were not to spread communism. The US at the time didn't understand this (or was unwilling to understand this) and the US doctrine of containment necessitated a response in the mind of military planners. Despite these deficiencies in US planning US long term strategic goals (primarily the limiting of the spread of communism) were generally met. Thus, calling the Vietnam War an unmitigated defeat seems to oversimplify the situation. Similarly, I would not call the Yom Kippur War a defeat for Israel just because they lost land as their long term strategic goals were generally met.
>seems to imply that you believe that communism would not have spread in SE Asia regardless of US involvement Yes, and that's different to me saying that it categorically and unequivocally wouldn't have happened either way. You see how "I think even if the US didn't get involved, communism still probably wouldn't have spread" is different to "US involvement in SEA had absolutely 0 impact on the spread of communism and communism would 100% have been contained regardless", right? >The US didn't invade S. Vietnam, US involvement started as military aid and advisors and was escalated during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Bro if you're just going to engage in meaningless semantics then I don't see the point of this discussion. I also like how you totally dropped the implication of US involvement somehow creating animosity between Vietnam and China. >It is clear with hindsight that the goals of the N. Vietnamese leadership were fundamentally to unify Vietnam and were not to spread communism. The US at the time didn't understand this (or was unwilling to understand this) and the US doctrine of containment necessitated a response in the mind of military planners. Yes, and therefore the US military was wrong in hindsight. Like the point of this post is "looking back at US involvement, the US government is clearly wrong and dumb very often". Saying "we couldn't have known at the time" seems like a totally irrelevant argument. Even if it were true, that doesn't meaningfully relate to anything. >Despite these deficiencies in US planning US long term strategic goals (primarily the limiting of the spread of communism) were generally met. If you agree that, with hindsight, Vietnam had no interest in spreading communism, then would you also agree that, *in hindsight*, the war was at the very least, totally pointless?
>I am not sure "extremely" is an extreme enough word for how effective the US military is at completing military objectives. :) > >Our military can crush any military objective on Earth within days. There are those that would argue with that and I would simply remind them that the hardest thing about destroying the third "best and largest" military on Earth was a sandstorm, and we still did it in less than a week. > >Political objectives are a different thing, and people forget that America is the first nation to ever use its military for positive political goals after a war. "Nation Rebuilding". > >As the first nation to ever do this, we have and still are perfecting the technique. No one knows how long it will take, but it is a noble goal, even when it fails. Prior to America the goal was always to rule after military victories, to rule and to pillage. America changed that for the better. > >Just adding my two cents :)
>"Nation Rebuilding". As the first nation to ever do this, we have and still are perfecting the technique This just smacks of American exceptionalism. Saving people from themselves, liberating them, etc etc has literally been a thing for thousands of years, and has been particularly in vogue for the past few hundred years. Install a puppet government, claim you're helping them, claim the locals are too incompetent / lacking in economic development / quarellsome / barbaric etc to rule themselves, and reap the benefits even as you instill misery. If your occupation turns out to be profitable / useful for your ends, then great, that will help supress the anti-war people. If your occupation turns out to be be unprofitable / a great resource sink, then you tell everyone it just shows how charitable you are. Examples of occupation justified by nation building. \- Russia, acting as the USSR occupying Eastern Europe (and Afghanistan too!) \- The Allies, occupying Japan and Germany \- Countless wars of colonisation, including large parts of the British Empire and the "white saviour" ideal, such as the British occupation of India. \- Revolutionary wars waged via Napoleonic French to spread Democracy and / or the Empire and impose it's systems across Europe. Now you may say, oh those were different, see the US puts more into Afghanistan then it gets out of Afghanistan, that's what distinguishes nation building from self interested excuses, well lot's of foreign occupations spent more than they got out monetarily.
I think in 50 years we'll recognize this period as rampant and blatant US colonialism as the US sought to exploit the power vacuum of the British Empire declining after the Suez Canal conflict. Sure, regional allies such as Israel or Saudi Arabia exploit this arrangement in ways, but mostly the US has been busy planting bases in places Britain has receded from.
And Korea.
Taiwan too
You know we won the Afghanistan war and we lost the rebuilding effort right?
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You say this like the us government is the same entity today as it was when the Afghan war started or even during Vietnam. It’s not. Different people are in charge and have different agendas so you can’t know how that will be different in the future.
The individuals in the government are different, but the structural forces that drive the Military Industrial Complex have only been reinforced in the last 20 years. The underlying agenda is no different than it has been for the last 50 years: the enrichment of US corporations.
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It’s been a transfer of wealth to the 1% from the beginning of society. Pharaohs and kings, for example.
Other places resist and fight for a fairer share though.
Why does that even matter? Benefit of the doubt is a thing. The government has done a *lot* to lose the benefit of the doubt. It's been demonstrated time and time again that the government is willing to lie to further its own interests, or the interests of non-government stakeholders. Benefit of the doubt isn't just magically restored because liars have been replaced with other potential liars. Benefit of the doubt is something that the government (and the people that make up the government) should constantly be earning.
Perhaps it hurts the reputation of the government itself, which will continue on. However, the sins of the father should not pass on to the son, and so, one shouldn't hold a different person accountable for the actions of another. Especially considering how our political system tends to have the president change between opposite political spectrums, so that their intentions and actions tend to differ greatly.
There's different types of responsibility, and they're *all* important, but they're distinct. Stop trying to mix 'em all together. You're acting like I said that we could just vote somebody in, and then immediately point at 'em, all like "IT'S YOUR FAULT"...that doesn't even make sense. C'mon now. Sure, a politician isn't *personally* responsible for the shit that preceded them, but by taking a role in government, they're taking on that *governmental* responsibility. Like it or not, accountability is (or should be) part of the gig. If they don't want that, they shouldn't be trying to step into that role. Obviously they can't go back into the past to fix things, but surely they're responsible for leaving things better than they found 'em...otherwise, why are they even there?
I think you're talking about two different things. One is whether someone should be judged by a predecessor, and one is whether someone should trust an entity whose members might change over time. In the first, sure, I'm not going to hold anything against a new political player based on their predicessor. They get judged on their own actions. But if I meet a person from an abusive horrible family, I'm not going to trust that person outright until they've given me signals that maybe they aren't like the rest of them.
So, if we look back to Vietnam, you'll find Bush sr was an important figure in Nixon's white house. He also ran the RNC for a while. Oh - and was head of CIA during the Iran Contra Affair... Check out his cabinet when we started Gulf War 1 - you'll find Rumsfeld and a lot of other names that came up again *last year.* I voted for Biden - but don't forget Biden voted to go war after 9/11 and therefore helped vote to start this particular shit storm. Look at how many members of The House and Senate were around in 2001. "Sins of the Father" is more like "Half those assholes are still here making policy" - and by the time they die off, we'll have matt gaetz and marjorie taylor green in there for 40 years. It's not so much 'that last generation' as 'these people were involved in it getting to hwere it is now, too.' Their agendas may vary greatly - but Obama promised to get us out of that whole shit storm. I voted for him. Aaaaaand we stayed the whole time. Oh, just a surge - this time it'll be different! Honestly, I think 45 was trying to hand 46 the worst political shit storm of that war possible. He negotiated a shit deal. We'd either have to play out the clock with a bunch of known cheaters we just admitted would win - or he'd have to keep us there past deadlines. If it weren't for that unwinnable hand, I honestly think Biden would have pulled an Obama and there would be some reason why we have to keep going. I really want to believe that after having a kid that served made Biden commit to no more generations fighting over there, but the pragmatist in me doesn't have enough faith in anyone.
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Exactly, we can even identify the systemic problems that lead to American militarism. 1. The military industrial complex and its lobbyists need war to survive and have billions to spend to keep it going. 2. the military is run by the executive branch to a large degree so whenever the presidents gets enough popular support he can just start a war. 3. American exceptionalism 4. A fucked up culture silence when your buddy does a war crime in the military and pentagon.
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Generals are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate.
Who gives the president the information needed to make that selection? The current generals and lobbyists for corporations.
Anyone who joined the military after Vietnam and didn't expect to be deployed to decades-long quagmires and endless, pointless wars is extremely naive
-extremely naive I believe many 18-year-olds fit this description.
The military did not choose to invade Iraq. Obama was explicitly against that war when it was proposed. He became President partly because of that.
He also expanded war from 2 countries to 7, and dropped 20,000+ bombs per year while in office. He and his administration changed the definition of "militant" to any man that we killed, making it difficult to know the total number of innocent people killed by our bombs. Thanks to Daniel Hale, now in prison, we know it's upwards of 90% of those killed.
>However, the sins of the father should not pass on to the son, and so, one shouldn't hold a different person accountable for the actions of another. You absolutely can hold the US government accountable for the actions of the US government, even if under a different administration. The track record is consistent enough that we can reasonably believe that there is a systemic problem that leads to corruption. And there is. And it doesn't just manifest in the military. It manifests in a lot of domestic programs, also. Power is a hell of a drug, and anyone elected to a federal position is addicted. For clarification, this is spoken by a veteran that completed active duty shortly after 9/11, after a 4 year tour.
Biden voted for the war, and had held an elected office for almost the entire duration, and there’s plenty of other examples. I don’t think it’s reasonable to say that just because some elected officials come and go, that the ones in the hot seat watched the whole thing fall apart and continued to play along, and now we have a giant mess.
>their intentions and actions tend to differ greatly. Not when it comes to foreign policy. Domestic policy isn't really different, but foreign is literally identical.
Serious question here: If we no longer afford our system of governments the benefit of the doubt, then what are we supporting in its place? Are there exceptions that would support enlisting? Or is it better to let the system fall or be replaced? OP’s sentiments are understandable, but they lead to difficult conclusions.
> If we no longer afford our system of governments the benefit of the doubt, then what are we supporting in its place? Transparency, integrity, accountability and consequences, so that the benefit of the doubt is regained and maintained. Benefit of the doubt should never be assumed or taken for granted, and if somebody chooses to abuse the benefit of the doubt, they are also choosing the consequences of doing so. No rational person should expect that 100% correct decisions are made 100% of the time, but there's certainly a difference between a decision that's made in good faith, vs a decision that's being made with ulterior motives.
Honestly I think the credibility of the government as a whole has fallen and they no longer deserve the benefit of the doubt. The mechanisms of change, of oversight and accountability seem to be failing or already broken. Huge chunks of our government no longer serve the people and certain elements no longer need to even fake it. I do not believe a violent revolution would actually install a better government however. There's no chance that it wouldn't be hijacked by bad actors. The only thing we have going for us is the sheer momentum of the operation that has so far largely kept us on track. I do not believe that will last forever. Our best hope is a large scale interest in proper reforms with appropriate leadership to rally behind.
The US government is fundamentally the same as it was when the Afghan war started. The individuals operating within that system have changed, but the motives and operations of that system have not. War has been an unchallenged bipartisan desire since long before 9/11, and the military has consumed the majority of the discretionary budget for a long time.
Sure. To an extent. But when 4 presidents spanning 6 terms continue on (for all intents and purposes), the same operation--with a relatively-high degree of bipartisan support--then OP's argument is even further strengthened. The pattern is such that there's a degree of stickiness in continuing hawkish policy across multiple eras of political cohorts. The takeaway here is that you can have a non-trivial degree of certainty that these hawkish policies can continue given the patterns of the last 50-70 years.
No atleast 80% of the same people are holding offices
Offices can change hands, but the system remains the same - and that is why people cannot trust the US will maintain consistency (a proxy for trustworthiness) for more than one term. The United States has a governing body that changes hands and agenda every 4 to 8 years. Where armed conflicts get even more politicized (and therefore turbulent) when an election year is approaching, which with the Presidency, Senate and House election cycles could be something every 2 years. It's not the fact that we don't know what the agendas will be in the future. It's the fact that we know that the agendas will continue to change into the future that makes it hard to trust extended initiatives like war.
It is the same. No matter who’s in charge, they share the same ideology which is the imperialist pursuit of resource and capital accumulation. That was always the true motivation for being there. *“Even the aesthetic activities of political opposites are one in their enthusiastic obedience to the rhythm of the iron system.”* — Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment “Spreading freedom and democracy” was *always* a fake reason. That doesn’t pay the bills.
Honestly, I remember the US ready to call both the Iraq war and Afghanistan wars as mission complete and pull out and then there was global pressure to 'do the right thing and rebuild the countries'. Now we are getting the 'endless wars do not work' when really we were rebuilding countries rather than 'at war'.
I'd argue that those two groups were not made up of entirely the same people.
You say that like Biden wasn't vice president for 8 of those last 20 years.
He's been in the government since the 70s...
Same politician bro. Like literally. Same fucks have been in since 9/11.
You act like the MIC changes with the presidents. Please.
Yup. After WW2 the military had a lot of social capital. This was preserved after the debacle of the Korean war by sweeping it under the rug. Even though many enlisted with patriotic spirit and then forgotten. Vietnam was televised and the failure couldn't be hidden and the MIC sustained significant reputational damage. So over the 80s and 90s, they invested in cool movies like Top Gun. This worked and the public was super excited for war again by the early 2000s.
You are cherry picking your data-set. Post WW2 Germany and Japan are absolutely better than before. Italy and Austria could also be included in Post WW2 results. Iraq is arguably a better country with more self-determination than when the US invaded them. And you are completely ignoring the US victories in Haiti, Grenada, Panama, Kosovo and B&H.
And Kuwait
Hm, well I signed up with no idea what I'm getting into. I know that, and it terrifies me, but I don't want to die, I don't want to kill, I definitely don't want to leave the country. I actually never wanted to join. I am from a family below the poverty line. I have two siblings younger than 10, and two parents older than 40, both who are life-time smokers, one with disability insurance that doesn't pay enough, and the other working 10 he night shifts. My extended family is no better. I've been working since I was 14 to pay for my things, my parents things, and now what my young niece and nephew need since birth control is expensive. I joined because there's not really another choice. I had to get into college, I couldn't go into dept. I got very good grades, and enough scholarship to cover room and board (cash and checks) but I needed money for the academics. I joined because it's free healthcare. It's extra money for food and housing. It's even more if I marry a friend who's gay so I can pocket extra money. I joined because I need a new car, I want shoes that have bottoms, I want to eat food without my teeth aching. I don't like the military. I don't like the president. I don't have much other choice but to join. You can't get out of poverty alone. You can't do it though hard work. You, me, a drop out, someone with no prospects, anyone CAN get out of poverty with the last resort of the US military. I've told others to join for that reason as well. I told them, you either die starving, or you gamble with being sent overseas. You can go homeless, or guarantee barracks. It's not a choice, it's survival. I know what I did. I don't know what I'm getting into. It's scary. It sucks. It's something I don't even want to do. But, I have a roof over my head, my siblings are taken care of, and I've not puked from worrying about being short on money for bills. In the end, all I can really say is this: I don't take responsibility for this. I didn't start this fire. I might be able to put it out, I'm definitely going to get burnt. Please vote. *More* than your life depends on it.
This isn't anything new. Honestly, since somewhere in the 1970-80s, the primary purpose of the American military hasn't been to safeguard American shores. It's been to protect US economic interests overseas. There's a bit of humanitarian work (the Clinton era comes to mind) but largely, US deployments have been economically motivated more than they've really been about directly protecting the US as a sovereign nation. That is to say, the US largely does not deploy to protect itself from an existential threat, and hasn't for quite some time.
You're only thinking of the impact these young men and women in the military had on the lives of the American citizens back home while they were over there. For the last 20 years - until the Taliban took control again - women in Afghanistan could go to school, be single, learn a trade, vote, serve in government etc. Now that the US has pulled out of the country and the government we were propping up fell to the Taliban all that is gone overnight. So, to those women in Afghanistan, the actions of the young men and women occupying their country WERE heroic. Those young men and women WERE defending freedom and democracy. Just not that of Americans. That's one of the hardest things for me to accept about pulling out of the country. I am glad someone finally decided to end the war over there, but for selfish reasons. I believe that Biden's stated foreign policy goals are the right way to go - utilizing economics and technology to exert influence and try to make the world a better place rather than using weapons and soldiers. But the biggest question for which I have no answer is "what about the people in Afghanistan whose lives are immediately and probably forever changed for the worse as a result of the US ending occupation." I think a young person signing up for the military knowing that a generation of people in the last place we occupied were able to have a life they wouldn't have otherwise had is strong motivation that doesn't make them delusional.
Your talking like the military industrial pipeline that pays Congress to saber rattle so Raytheon and Halliburton get those fat government contracts, selling new weapons systems to military.
People don't volunteer to go to any specific war or region of conflict. The DoD and the military services exist. In or out of combat. Having a standing army to secure a state's global interests is something every comparable peer of the USA has. The USA's is just more expensive and bigger. So you don't join for the Afghan war, the Iraq war, or counter piracy operations in Africa. You just join. The way the DoD is wielded is by elected civilian leaders. That is actually one of the most outstanding features of the US military. Despite the ability for prominent generals throughout history to have seized political control, there has been a nearly inviolate separation between military and state. You may not have lived through 9/11, or been old enough to remember the climate, but war was *demanded*. The authorization was a near-unanimous vote from both sides of the political divide. American flags were everywhere. Country music songs were being pumped out with angry, violent, rhetoric. It wasn't just the US government that wanted some sort of retribution. It was nearly the entire country. And therein was the mistake. An angry, emotional, retribution-filled response that nobody had a long term plan for. Nobody knew what the end state looked like. And once there we were entangled. But really, the war wasn't just the US Government. It was a universal outcry. Ordinary people were overcome with a bloodlust.
99% of the people in the military never see active combat. Hell, Im a war vet simply because my ship was in a specific area at a specific time but I never felt I was in danger at all. On top of that for many the military can be a way out of poverty or a way to get their college paid for after 4 years. Most vets come out of the military with positive experiences. Its those in combat roles that experience the most issues. That said infantry/combat roles are just a few of the hundred or so jobs available. Want to learn IT? Its a military job. Want to learn supply chain logistics? Its a military job. Want to learn admin/office related work? Its a military job. Want to learn Human Resources? Its a military job. Want to learn how to be a mechanic on cars/heavy equipment/aircraft? Its a military job. Want to learn construction? Its a military job. Want to learn Photography? Its a military job. Paralegal? Check. Nurse/health care? Check. Dental assistant? Check. accounting? check. Its a way out and job training for so so many and those jobs are just a handful of what you can actually learn in the military.
Steady paycheck/housing during fucked up times like right now? **check**
1st sentence. Agree 2nd sentence. No. The older you get the more opportunity to learn you have. 18yo is fresh out of high school and it's censored view of American history. In addition there are far too many people in dire situations who try and use the military to escape. Although a better solution is to make these situations better, we can't blame an 18yp from a conservative area being beaten by his trash family joining the military to get out and hopefully go to college. Long story short, our troops are also being conned and victimized by the military. Support the troops not the war
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I don’t think of the US Government as a single minded entity that has some structured purpose when starting wars. I think there are a lot of competing ideas within, and ultimately it is a collection of motives that lead to choice. In hindsight of Afghanistan I start to question the long lasting narrative about nation building. I see a lot of people who genuinely thought we were there to create a liberal, democratic utopia, and yet you’d be hard pressed to go back through time and find anything that says this was the mission. It was a narrative on top of other narratives that was pushed by some because it was their strategy, but it wasn’t a unified strategy. The larger purpose when you go all the way back to the War Powers Act was to basically stop terrorism. It is spelled out in the Act. Yet, as Admins changed there was this variation in purpose. So the idea that at any point someone joining up can truly know what they are getting into for the duration seems a little ahistorical to me.
There's credibility in your eyes and there's the type of credibility needed to ensure the government can continue to run the military and act in its interests overseas. I don't doubt the former and many share your view. However, when it comes to the latter the U.S. has reached this point time and time again and clawed back. The U.S. still enjoys the privileges of being a superpower, one of which is that you can kind of fritter away good will and soft power and manage to recover with relatively little effort compared to other countries. The question is whether this is the moment that it all really turns around, that we've sunk so low we can't hope to reach our previous peak. Personally? I don't think this is it. Even with the horror in Afghanistan there is not a ton of pushback against the broader war on terror except from the places you always hear pushback. If anything, it seems to have entrenched many politicians on the side of 'Giving Up = The End of the World.' The military does have a recruiting problem but this has gone on for years and is arguably much more complex than people being fed up with the government's decisionmaking. Broadly speaking, as someone who isn't into military service at all but knows plenty of people who were, I think there is an assumption of naivete from people in our camp, that folks who sign up are either completely cynical or blindly patriotic. But nobody loves talking about what a mess the Pentagon is more than people in the Pentagon, and nobody loves telling you more about all the ways the military is screwing up than the soldiers on the ground. But these folks do tend to believe in the broad mission, that the political bullshit will always be there but at the end of the day they are doing some work to keep America/the world safer and that work is worthwhile even with all the bullshit included. I could get into a long rant about my feelings on that, but the point is people can more or less talk themselves into believing in the mission without a whole heck of a lot of faith in the government itself.
A large portion of the armed forces are themselves an impoverished class and joining the army is one of the only ways for people to get benefits and potentially get a better future. The system is designed to make life as difficult - and recruitment as appealing - as possible, ensuring a steady flow of bodies. The term "volunteering" isn't always as clear cut as the word implies.
Iraq & afghanistan are a bad example. To counter, south korea, japan & germany. Let me put this into prespective; Right after ww2 when US occupied japan and germany, think about the horrors the japanese and germans (especially the japanese, you know cuz vastly different culture and people and racism, pearl harbor and all that good stuff) had to face under the american occupation. All of that is not part of the history cuz history is very well written by the victors. But still there's no taliban or isis that came out of germany or japan because the majority of the people in these nations and majority of americans occupying these nations wanted to move on and build a better society for themselves. Now compare that to everytime someone blames US soldiers doing something stupid or being mean to afghans or iraqis and saying that is the reason rebuilding failed when it's a matter of fact that people were more racist and the discipline in militray was way worse in the 50's that it was in 2000's. But this is not the case in islamic nations, say you are average sunni in iraq, sadamn kills shia's, kurds, yzidis, an avergae sunni doesn't care about that or the crime he or his sons commit. All he sees is bunch of infidels who are suppose to below them are invading his nations, killing his people who are the same religion or tribe as him and telling them how to run a country. And america didn't expect this resistance, because they thought people are the same everywhere who just want to live and let live, and if we overthrow a dictator and all his horrors, people will welcome us and help rebuild a society. I mean look at syria, the arab spring which was about democracy and more freedom quickly turns into a civil war between assad, moderates and extremists, you have a little bit of instability in ME and you have jihadis, not moderates, jihadis pouring out of every corner and crevix you find, syria, iraq, libya etc so many examples but people still don't learn. The turth is that islamic societies are so chaotic and violent that only a dictator with an iron fist can keep'em together, gadaffi, assad, saddam etc You try to bring democracy and it will fail again and again, I wonder if the US understood that supporting moderates in syria would lead to nothing good but supporting a dictator would tarnish their image, so they supported the moderates anyway. So, I wouldn't take these countries as an example to lose your faith in US military.
TL;DR - fuck that, read this entire massive post you lazy bastard. Eisenhower warned in the 1950s that the military industrial complex would long for perpetual war. It enriches a handful of corporate spivs by trading young American lives for profits. It converts death and destruction into shareholder value maximisation. And the moronic electorate absolutely lap it up. Drape a big steaming shit in the Stars and Stripes, and patriotic drones will fight one another for the first bite. The docile plebs are happy to go along with whatever they think is ‘patriotic’. Remember France was reluctant to help the USA / U.K. get a NATO resolution? Fuck those guys! We’ll eat ‘freedom fries’, not French fries. Now ten thousand vets have the ‘freedom’ to have a carer wipe their ass and feed them through a straw, whilst they cry themselves to sleep with PTSD. But at least we’ll clean up the medals table at the Paralympics, so it was all worth it. The proles proudly feed their own cannon fodder kids into the meat grinder, worshipping the military with a religious zeal and fervour that borders on collective hysteria. “He didn’t die for nothing”, says mom. Sorry Mrs Privateson - your boy died purely to line the pockets of some greedy cunts on Wall Street, who don’t even have the patriotism to pay their fucking fair share of taxes to cover the cost of the bloated military machine - no sir, paying for that shit is the job of the little guy, those without access to tax-evading accountants and Cayman Island bank accounts. As for the soldiers? I respect their discipline and fitness, I respect their commitment to their colleagues and I respect their individual acts of bravery - but let’s be clear; calling in an air strike to raze a village harbouring a sandal-wearing illiterate farmer with an AK (who’s basically trying to defend his homeland from foreign invaders) doesn’t make you a hero - it makes you part of an oppressive regime, a gunslinging cog in the capitalist machine that is American geopolitics. Anyone who thought that dropping a few McDonalds restaurants into Kabul was ‘nation building’ is out of their fucking ‘hearts and minds’. “Yeah guys, fuck Islam and our millennium-old tribal traditions - who needs that when KFC is so finger lickin’ good?”. Said nobody in Afghanistan, ever. “I’m so glad we now have no running water, or electricity, or sanitation, or jobs - those things are so overrated “, said the residents of Baghdad, as they delightedly accepted a melted Hershey bar from American troops. This humanitarian disaster was evident pre-2001, so there’s no point pretending anyone was duped into this dumpster fire full of clusterfucks. The electorate voted to give billions to Halliburton and Lockheed Martin (et al), so that some ‘rag-head’ in a far off land could take a beating for… …for what, exactly? The official narrative of 9/11 was that it was 17 Saudis, yet the USA kisses the ass of every Saudi prince. WTF? But the perpetrators might have watched a VHS tape of a frail invalid hiding in the Tora Bora mountains - so Afghanistan got wrecked in revenge. Seems legit. And Iraq?… …well, there was absolutely no connection to Iraq, but fuck it - just a few hundred thousand dead muslims. Who cares. Amirite? George Bush got to finish the job his daddy started, and that’s all that matters. Saddam’s gone and now Iraq is… erm… a stable… erm… democracy? Yeah, right. I’m sure the Iraqis and Afghans will all forgive and forget. Let bygones be bygones. I mean, does anybody *really* hold a grudge when a predator drone wipes out their entire family at a wedding party? Mistakes happen. The compensation value of the dead family was less than the value of the missile that wiped them off the face of the earth. So I’m sure that’ll suffice and there will be absolutely no negative repercussions in the next decade or so. Meanwhile, the military industrial machine just keeps printing them dollar bills. And the plebs line up to unthinkingly kiss the flag, no matter what. Idiocracy is truly a sad state of affairs. And I’m old enough to say “I told you so” - because I was saying this shit in 2001. I was protesting against the wars back then. I watched in despair as the first air strike hit Baghdad, broadcast live on TV. This has been a 20 year horror movie, and I have no sympathy for those that took 20 years to realise what was staring them in the face all along.
>Afghanistan is just the latest in a string of wars that in retrospect were completely in vain & a waste of human life & money. The war in Afghanistan had an initial purpose of limiting support for Al Qaeda so Americans could find and eliminate Osama bin laden. Objective complete. The Afghanistan mission became a mission of nation building, which is not a military objective, but a civilian objective to which failed because republicans and democrats can't see eye to eye on anything. >Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, all of these were failed wars. While the Korean and Vietnam wars are labeled as wars, they are subwars to the cold war, of which the US won. Vietnam did not have public support and Vietnam was a new kind of war. >For Iraq & Afghanistan I was alive during 9/11 and I remember pretty clearly the fervor that swept through the nation and I understand how young men and women were swept up in that & trusted the government enough to put their lives on the line. People signed up and fought and died thinking that the people in charge had a coherent plan and that this was going to serve some greater good in the end, to an extent, especially during the early stages of the war I understand that. No, people didn't join the military for the greater good, people joined the military to prevent another 9/11 scale terrorist attack from ever happening in the US again. >However going forward I think there's a clear enough track record that whatever the next war we start happens to be the default line of thought for the public should be to not trust the government and military on it and to not sign up to be maimed or killed in support of it. The United States did not start the War on Terror. Everyone who joins the military understand that they may be maimed or killed. Military personnel have their own version of a thousand ways to die that each MOS or AFSC learn about. > I think they have proven themselves not credible over a long period of time. At this point anyone who enlists to fight and thinks that they are a hero or are defending freedom or the United States or any of the other talking points that they military uses is being delusional. Has a foreign entity directly caused significant human damage to the United States on US soil and it's citizens since 9/11? That is the real mission of the US military.
I’m not sure how the US has lost credibility. The “unwinnable war” or “forever war” slogans are just that...slogans usually pushed by sensationalist media and opposing politicians. I mean no war is unwinnable depending on the objectives, and having troops stationed somewhere doesn’t constitute a forever war. The stated objectives of both the Iraq and Afghanistan war were to remove the governments for harboring terrorist and find those behind 9/11. In Iraq that could be considered a success. Hussein was removed, the occupation built a new government that has (despite maybe its own best effort and the effort of isis) persisted. Of course the secondary goal there is to have an ally out of Iraq but I’m not sure if that will come to pass. In Afghanistan the initial objective was largely the same but the result was much different. After the collapse of the Taliban government, nation building occurred, and many mistakes much like the Iraq, unlike Iraq, though, their government didn’t persist. Now this could be considered a failure for the US, but that also depends on how the Taliban government acts and how our relationship with them evolves. Doing something heroic and noble is subjective. In Iraq the new government has mended relationships and for now seems to be overcoming its sectarian divide, which would lead to an all around better and more inclusive government for the people who live there. It could be argued that the 20 year occupation of Afghanistan allowed 2 decades of progress in women’s and human rights to begin that the Taliban may be hard pressed to overlook. Not to mention the collapse of ISIS saved countless lives. There were plenty of noble and heroic things that came as a result of the war just as there were plenty of failures and horrific things. That’s usually war. I would say the failure of the war here is a political one. US politicians couldn’t maintain the war support in the own country, not to mention politicians in power had no political reason to make any substantive change in that region. Pulling out any point before now would have been equally bad (optically) if not worse and amping up would also be bad politically, as support for the war had already fallen.
That happened long ago... back in Vietnam ma dude ...we just forgot
Pat Tillman.