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The U.S. has lost any strategic thinking. The U.S. is now fighting a active war against "loosely connected groups from north West Africa to Central Asia" most
by nickik 9y ago
The U.S. has lost any strategic thinking.
The U.S. is now fighting a active war against "loosely connected groups from north West Africa to Central Asia" most are Sunni Extremists. This is already a insane thing to do, war on loosely connected groups that reach over 10000km even when the waste majority of these groups have never actually attacked the US or have any plans to. There is also almost no evidence that one can actually win such a war in a military sense. The guy who lead ISIS was turned into a terrorist not in the 1980s when the US was supporting Afgans against the Soviets but rather in 2004 during the Battle of Fallujah. Fighting and bombing people everywhere will create more Anti-American opinions then it destroys. Ironically the only place people actually like the US is in Iran where the US have not been able to bomb anybody for 40 years or so.
Outside of that they are also actively working against and sometimes fighting with the Iranian block (Iran, Syria, Hezbollah and maybe even the Houthis plus a few other groups) who are often equally opposed to the before mentioned "loosely connected groups from north West Africa to Central Asia". This means the US is at a total strategic impact where there are people already fighting but the US wants to get in there and crush both groups but also make sure the destruction of one does not empower the other.
The allies of the US, Israel, Saudis and Pakistan are all highly problematic and in many ways strategically counterproductive. Israel because support for Israel makes everybody else, especially among the population of the region angry prevent the government from embracing any alliance with the US. The Saudis and the Pakistanis are largely responsible for the creation of many of the before mentioned "loosely connected groups" and continue to support them all over the world.
The US supports Sunni governments against Shia governments but is fighting a war against both Shia and Sunni non-government actors. At the same time non of the governments they support actually give flying fuck about the US except for the support they can get from the US.
Why all of this? The US was only involved in the region because of oil. The US does not actually need the oil anymore, even if they did the resources spent are probably higher then just paying the higher price for oil. Not to mention that even without the US everybody who has oil has a huge intensive to sell it.
If you look objectively at any of this you can only shake your head. The danger of all of these groups is minimal. Yet the US spends the same amount of money they did when they were opposing another world supper power.
Sadly in Washington there is a foreign policy consensus and a echo chamber and there is almost nobody who moves very far from the 'party line' on foreign policy. Not to mention the massive vested interest that it supports when the Saudis buy 10 Billions in US weapons.
- AndyMcConachie 9y agoAs long as money keeps flowing from the Pentagon to private contractors who cares? There hasn't been any other point to defense for a long time.
- nickik 9y agoThe problem is that that explanation is not sufficient. This is something that makes change harder, but fundamentally its not enough. The US political class really do believe in this project. They do teach these things in reputable schools. This goes to deep to be just about cronyism. That explanation does not work for WW1, neither does it here.
- mattnewton 9y agoMilitary spending can never be racheted down because you can be gutted in the next election for not valuing our safety. The military industrial engine's ever increasing funds then needs more enemies to use them against.
- nickik 9y agoMany democracies have done so before. The US can do so too.
- arca_vorago 9y ago>Why all of this? It's about strategic positioning to control resource routes in anticipation of the coming resource wars that everyone pretends isn't going to happen. This while the Leo Strauss-ians like Kissinger and Brzezinski work hard to initiate cold-war 2.0 because the Middle East destablization program was simply a precursor to bigger more nasty conflicts, (which start economically) and most of this is arising due to the fact that technology has advanced so fast it altered the nation-states threat model and they don't know how to handle a kind of world where any lone-wolf actor could do devestating things. Hence a surveillance state of totalitarian dystopia is the only response they know that might be able to handle it except they don't really care about national security that much or they wouldn't be wasting taxpayer dollars on kickbacks to relatives around the beltway instead of fixing problems. Africa is a war ground for precious minerals and metals (and some oil) and because the Chinese have been making big plays there the Americans want to balance out the power so they have a foothold when the minerals that go in that phone in your pocket become more scarce because China suddenly halted exports of theirs or something similar. I spent some time in the Horn of Africa, and I can tell you I'd rather be in Iraq... at least Iraqi's pickup their dead bodies, and I never saw a 12 year old patrolling with an AK in Iraq either. The point is that while you are right that we need to rethink how far we overextend our forces into foreign entanglements, there are other things at play here of which terrorism is only a part of and is often a byproduct of. We also need to consider how often such moves have resulted in blowback worse than the initial problem. I look all over the world and see problems that are blowback from our meddling in the first place. (Iran is a prime example of this. The Mullahs would have never come to power if we hadn't overthrown their gov for oil in the first place.)