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Ever since we reneged on the decision Kennedy made to pull out of VietNam by Johnson, we've thought continually we were dealing with another defeated Japan or d

by mc32 5y ago

Ever since we reneged on the decision Kennedy made to pull out of VietNam by Johnson, we've thought continually we were dealing with another defeated Japan or defeated Germany --the enemy population would just comply to our wishes, so we kept on thinking we could "turn them into replicas of American government" This thinking has undermined our actions in every major war since then, with the exception of GWI. Gulf War One, we went in, did the job and got out. I'm not sure we should have gone in in the first place, but at least we didn't try to artificially change the government there. It's disheartening to see the admins of Bush and Obama arrogantly and foolishly pursuing a transformational goal. It does not work. A nation has to work out its own problems for itself. They have to experience an organic, sometimes violent, process of progression toward democracy for themselves. Let's go back to congress needing to authorize wars and give them sole war-powers with the exception of immediate threats.

heresie-dabord 5y ago
> A nation has to work out its own problems for itself. This point being raised, it is time for the US to spend money on education to support its own democracy.
- rjzzleep 5y ago
  One could argue that the seeds of destruction are so far entrenched, that there might only be 1-3 cycles left before the destruction of its own democracy is ensured. The Iranian clerical leadership was rejoicing on twitter about Trumps election claims and January 6th. This has also been cannonfodder for the Chinese leadership and countless other countries. I'd say the US elites are still somewhat in denial of what actually happened and that it didn't happen in a vacuum, but was years if not decades in the making. Remember that Bill Barr had the unitary executive theory in mind long before Trump came into power, but previous Republican leadership considered it too radical for the American public to accept. Those times have changed...
  - markus_zhang 5y ago
    US elites mostly only care about the trough. They know it but apres moi le deluge is the silent motto of many. The Democratic is no radical different from he Republicans, they simply have a nicer face.
  - rayiner 5y ago
    > Remember that Bill Barr had the unitary executive theory in mind long before Trump came into power, but previous Republican leadership considered it too radical for the American public to accept. The unitary executive dates back to the Federalists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitary_executive_theory#Adoption_of_constitutional_provisions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitary_executive_theory#Adopt.... You're invoking an anachronism--it wasn't until the 20th century that we even got the idea of "independent" bureaucrats insulated from accountability to the elected President. George Washington's original cabinet consisted of just four members: Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, Secretary of Treasury Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of War Henry Knox, and Attorney General Edmund Randolph. All of those were plainly intended to be subordinate to Washington as the President.
    - mc32 5y ago
      As recently as JFK we had Bobby Kennedy as AG (as competent as he was). Imagine the heart attacks people would have today if Biden tried putting a relative in as AG, or if Trump had tried the same.
      - rgbrenner 5y ago
        What JFK (and others) did is why Congress passed an anti-nepotism law ( 5 U.S.C. § 3110) in 1967.
- markus_zhang 5y ago
  Nowadays it's already difficult if not impossible. In the age of big data and open manipulation, there is zero incentive for the politicians, corporations and media to promote independent thought for ordinary people, or to put more precisely only independent thoughts that benefit their agendas. The same goes to millions of middle class employees of those entities. They might want to teach independent thoughts to their own kids but other than that they have zero incentive to promote independent thoughts to their customers because it's profit and power that feeds their family. I really don't see an easy way out of this downward spiral.
  - A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
    "They might want to teach independent thoughts to their own kids but other than that they have zero incentive to promote independent thoughts to their customers because it's profit and power that feeds their family." This point is about the only bright spot in an otherwise grim perspective. Just about everyone, and that appears to include Putin, wants to do well by their kids education-wise. The rest can fuck off and die, but the self-preservation in the sense of preserving genes by teaching the ability to think critically is important enough that at least there is a chance that spiral will hit a bump here and there.
    - fighterpilot 5y ago
      That's right. I don't have existential dread about Putin or Xi. They want total power, wealth and stability. They're corrupt pragmatists, not zealots who are going to die in a nuclear Armageddon. I fear the ideologically committed madman much more.
      - Yoric 5y ago
        You have a point. However, they are also empire builders whose agenda requires weakening the power, wealth and stability of every entity that they consider targets and/or competitor. As someone who lives in one such entity, I consider this threatening. Not glorious-nuclear-self-destruction dreadful, but still potentially life-threatening.
- rayiner 5y ago
  The U.S. spends among the most on education of any developed country, both in absolute terms and a percentage of GDP. Our education spending is over 6% of GDP: https://waterpedia.wiki/image/education-spending-share-gdp-selected-countries-2015.aGqj https://waterpedia.wiki/image/education-spending-share-gdp-s.... All of the people involved in these foreign war debacles were highly pedigreed. (Fun fact: the President of Afghanistan, who fled Kabul yesterday, is an Ivy League-educated professor who "literally wrote the book on fixing failed states.") The education, in fact, the problem. Universities is where people learn hare-brained ideas like Wilsonianism. It's where people learn to view government as a set of laws and policies and boxes on org charts, rather than the manifestation of the culture and political tradition of people. Coming from a traditional Muslim country ourselves, my family knew in 2001 that nation building in Afghanistan was an absurd idea. Our own country has a thousand-year head start on Afghanistan in terms of civilization, and has still struggled with democracy. It's not in the people. But Americans are so far separated from their culture--that is to say, their village won't die of starvation if they indulge in cultural experimentation--they can't even locate the wellspring of democracy in culture and traditions.
  - mc32 5y ago
    The cultural aspect is critical and people have overlooked in many places. The Optimism for Russia after the fall of the USSR, Ukraine and Afghanistan, Libya, etc. Places with no democratic foundation or tradition but plagued by corruption. It needs to grow over decades organically for the people to get used to the idea and the institutions, for example, like in Hong-Kong. Singapore is another example and they yet don't have completely open democracy. The ground must be fertile, as they say in allegorical terms, for democracy to take root. You can't impose it and then wish it to work and have it work. You can't throw money at it (as AF has shown us). It's a messy process. Sometimes, like Panama, you have the right accidents happen and it works --but at least then they could rely on the legacy of Marti (as they were part of Columbia during independence from Spain) and they had the US administer the Canal Zone till '00, I believe.
    - rayiner 5y ago
      In Bangladesh, we have had real elections, leaving aside the the assassinations and that one military dictatorship. But we're back to one-party rule as the leader of the opposition party has been jailed. And that's after having 800+ years of civilization under the Sultanates and 200 years under Britain. It's not economics--our PPP GDP per capita is about what the U.S. was at in the late 19th century (at which point it had been a successful multi-party democracy for 70-80 years).
baybal2 5y ago
> we've thought continually we were dealing with another defeated Japan or defeated Germany --the enemy population would just comply to our wishes, so we kept on thinking we could "turn them into replicas of American government" You though, but you did not did. In both prior cases US ran moderately competent occupation government, and by some accounts one better than their own. The model US followed in Vietnam was not this. Ngo Dinh Diem was a Syngman Rhee 2.0, but even worse. Here, you can say Karzai was Syngman Rhee 3.0. All shared a history of being overthrown because of progressing nationalist drift within their own power bases.
- AtlasBarfed 5y ago
  Those countries knew they would be treated as equals on the economic world forum, not puppet states for resource extraction. The only remarkable thing is that we treated Japan so well, considering how its fellow far east countries were treated as client states or worse for so long. I think it was latent guilt of using the nuke on them.
  - mc32 5y ago
    Japan had an industrial base... well, it had to in order to engage in a long fought war of attrition in all of the Pacific controlling and subjugating very large portions of the population and land area. So they had an industrial base. No so much for (S) Korea and VietNam. They were very agrarian (like Japan before they built up their war machine). So their problem was peasant farmers with no land + a growing population on the brink of starvation. US advisors made recommendations to alleviate this problem by doing land redistribution for tenant farmers. South VietNam would have none of that. Korea did appease the peasants albeit reluctantly so they avoided the worst.
  - rjzzleep 5y ago
    That's actually a really interesting point. South Korea was actually steamrolled by the north, because the US made sure they had no independent way of defending themselves. The US pulled in the UNSC to fight on their own in Korea, while the Soviets had built up a strong local military in the North. Taiwan is now incapable to protect its own borders. They even had a nuclear weapons program in response to mainland China which the CIA infiltrated and shut down. Another example of a local military that was just steamrolled by an insurgency was the Iraqi military. The US has a pretty good track record when it comes to building insurgencies though, remember that the Taliban were built and trained by ISI and the CIA. Iran had islamic groups that the Shah used to silence opposition forces. There's no way their training and equipment wasn't done in coordination with their US partners given how much of a puppet the Shah was. Or take a look at a lot of the groups that were part of the opposition in Syria. I wonder if there's any analysis why the US has been so good at building and training insurgency groups, but so bad at making local armies to protect their own territorial borders.
grecy 5y ago
> Let's go back to congress needing to authorize wars and give them sole war-powers The issue there is the massive conflict of interest and legal bribery. Members of congress are getting obscenely rich from the Military Industrial Complex and their "campaign contributions". Their bank accounts want more wars.
- adventured 5y ago
  > Members of congress are getting obscenely rich from the Military Industrial Complex and their "campaign contributions". Please explain for me how that is so, without diverting into claiming that they're being handed tens of millions of dollars secretly under the table. I'm familiar with how campaign contributions work and the legal regulations involved, including what they're allowed to do - and not do - with the money. How do campaign contributions from military industrial complex firms translate into Congressional members getting obscenely rich? Every single Congressional member would have been better off buying any number of dozens of various traditional tech stocks than any of the military industrial stocks (Lockheed, Boeing, Northrop, etc.). Amazon/Netflix/Apple/Microsoft/Google/Facebook/Tesla/etc. > Northrop Cloudflare is up more since its IPO than Boeing is over ~15 years. Watch out for those CDN campaign contributions?
  - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
    > Please explain for me how that is so, without diverting into claiming that they're being handed tens of millions of dollars secretly under the table. There are two aspects to this. The first is campaign contributions. Recent US Presidential election campaigns have exceeded a billion dollars. House and Senate races have been millions to hundreds of millions, per election. The people "giving" this money are not doing so out of altruism. It's not secret money under the table, it's all open and disclosed, but nobody thinks it has no effect on behavior. At best the representatives are entirely scrupulous and never allow the money to affect their positions, but then the candidates with pro-corporate positions find it easier to raise money, the money allows them to buy more advertising, and the candidates who want to shovel tax dollars into corporate coffers win more elections. The second is the revolving door. You go serve some time in Congress, do what the corporations want, and when you retire or fail to win re-election because your constituents got fed up with what you were doing, you have a cushy job paying six, seven, eight figures a year waiting for you after. Or that job goes to a member of your family while you're still in office.
JBaudrillard 5y ago
> Gulf War One, we went in, did the job and got out. The Gulf War did not take place. (It was a police action marketed as a war.)
dragonwriter 5y ago
> Gulf War One, we went in, did the job and got out. No, we didn't, we were perpetually militarily engaged in Iraq, at a lower level, between the 1991 war and the 2003 war. We weren't occupying or administering Iraq, but we didn't leave, either. > Let's go back to congress needing to authorize wars Both of the long wars started under Bush had Congressional authorization.
- mc32 5y ago
  >We weren't occupying or administering Iraq, but we didn't leave, either. I mean, we never left Germany or S. Korea, so... Playing big brother to Q8? I'm not mad. Like other countries, we can pick sides and aid whatever side we think has our interest. I'm not interested in intervening with infantry and all the necessary materiel unless it's to defend ourselves from grave danger. Especially avoid stupid the boondoggle of "nation-building". Not everyone wants democracy right now. It may come later. >Both of the long wars started under Bush had Congressional authorization. True, but they gave him blanket authorization for use of military force (open ended) rather than a declaration of war), this open-endedness allowed Obama! to use the same AUMF to engage in further conflict.
  - aiisjustanif 5y ago
    > I'm not interested in intervening with infantry and all the necessary materiel unless it's to defend ourselves from grave danger. Especially avoid stupid the boondoggle of "nation-building". Not everyone wants democracy right now. It may come later. This short sightedness might cost more in lives globally and money loss from trade and resources being restricted.
    - mc32 5y ago
      While it seems crude, the way we used to do it, the way the Soviets used to do it, the way China does it now, seems to work best for this kind of interest. You invest in a despot let them have their little fiefdom and you let them run what's theirs and you get to take what you think is yours. Nation-building is hubris. Work with someone local who fits hand-in-glove. Is the unstable "stability" worth 6T and thousands of soldiers' lives and many tens of thousands traumatized? Not to mention the losses from the locals. What was the human cost of Saddam in power vs the cost after toppling him?
dillondoyle 5y ago
Congress basically in practice abdicated that power with an incredibly broad AUMF 'war on terrorism .' I think there is even one from like cold war on the books. I know the house voted to end them but the Senate didn't act?
datavirtue 5y ago
Who says they are heading toward democracy at all? Do you stop at fascism along the way? Afghanistan was essentially our state. It was beginning to prosper and experience the rights and freedoms already established by our presence--why do "they" need to create a government if we already have one that works and that their people seemed to like? We should open up to voluntarily annexing states like Afghanistan and Puerto Rico instead of continuing to drool over some fuedal age government philosophy. Invite people in. The current system of fight-and-flight is looking a bit dated.
- colordrops 5y ago
  Puerto Rico and Afghanistan have virtually nothing in common. Puerto Rico is not next to Russia and the Middle East, and doesn't cost hundreds of billions to keep stable.
dcolkitt 5y ago
> This thinking has undermined our actions in every major war since then, with the exception of GWI. Kosovo? Bosnia?
- cm2187 5y ago
  Lybia, Syria, Panama
- mc32 5y ago
  That was a European problem which Europeans should have solved by themselves. Why did we have to piss abound there when they could have managed it themselves? Let's say something came up in Puerto Rico... and then we have Europe come in and fix things instead of the US, does that seem the way it should work?
  - rini17 5y ago
    That isn't fair assessment. Europeans have plenty of experience how they failed to manage fixing problems by wars. Also at that time, NATO expansion was the only option on the table, Washington was uneasy about the prospects of some independent european alliance influenced much by the newly unified Germany. So it was only natural they decided to come and showcase fixing problems in ex-yugoslavia. By the way Europe is in fact fixing American problems, by dealing with of refugees from american (and russian) wars, at the price of political and cultural turmoil.
spoonjim 5y ago
Exactly. Basketcase governments are products of basketcase societies. Go in and topple the government and you now have the impossible task of developing a sustainable high quality government on top of a low quality society/culture.
- mc32 5y ago
  Agreed. It's the same for Russia or Ukraine as it is for Afghanistan or Libya. These people have been under a totally different form of government where they had very little agency. The hubris of thinking, yeah, the CPSU (or Bath, etc.) is dissolved, democracy will take over, it's people's destiny! When you've known nothing of democracy, it's a foreign concept. You need the culture around democracy to form for it to be successful.
Glyptodon 5y ago
Eh, I think a few of your points are sort-of correct, but transformational goals could work if we were more willing to commit to manpower, occupation, hard measures, and direct control (not saying that we should, or that it fits with modern sensibilities). On top of that, "preventing the production of terrorists" (to paraphrase) was a stated goal of Afghanistan and it doesn't seem obvious how it can be fulfilled with either the current outcome or an "invade, accomplish, withdraw" operation unless we intended to just entirely massacre the populace to the point that the nation becomes a giant wildlife reserve. There are relatively few (if any) cases of forced national reform lasting 40+ years with the intent to have a relatively "free democracy" at the end so I'm also having trouble considering your contention about transformation proven. (Though I definitely concur a single birth to adult score of years seems an unlikely interval for success with half-measures.)
throw0101a 5y ago
> we've thought continually we were dealing with another defeated Japan or defeated Germany --the enemy population would just comply to our wishes, so we kept on thinking we could "turn them into replicas of American government" They did not "comply". They came to realize it was better to emulate the US: > This is not to say that Japan remained fascist (as some left-wing commentators assert). It most obviously and manifestly did not remain fascist. Instead, various leaders who had earlier supported and even participated in fascism decided that liberal democracy was better for the country. One reason they made this decision is that the U.S. had just proven liberal democracy’s economic and military effectiveness by winning WW2. They almost certainly could have restored dictatorship in Japan — the U.S. was clearly willing to tolerate dictatorships among its Cold War allies in Korea, Taiwan and elsewhere — but they chose not to. Instead, they drew from a liberal democratic trend that had existed in Japan well before the military takeover of the 1930s. * https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-afghanistan-occupation-and-the https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-afghanistan-occupation... Both Japan and Germany had liberal democratic histories before they got taken over by fascists, so it wasn't a stretch. Cultures based on clan/kinship tend to have higher corruption and lower stability: * https://ideas.repec.org/p/sfu/sfudps/dp17-17.html https://ideas.repec.org/p/sfu/sfudps/dp17-17.html * https://www.u4.no/publications/the-kinship-in-public-office-indicator-kin-connectivity-as-a-proxy-for-nepotism-in-the-public-sector https://www.u4.no/publications/the-kinship-in-public-office-... * https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation.aspx?paperid=108992 https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation.aspx?paperid=...

by mc32 5y ago

heresie-dabord 5y ago

> A nation has to work out its own problems for itself. This point being raised, it is time for the US to spend money on education to support its own democracy.

rjzzleep 5y ago
One could argue that the seeds of destruction are so far entrenched, that there might only be 1-3 cycles left before the destruction of its own democracy is ensured. The Iranian clerical leadership was rejoicing on twitter about Trumps election claims and January 6th. This has also been cannonfodder for the Chinese leadership and countless other countries. I'd say the US elites are still somewhat in denial of what actually happened and that it didn't happen in a vacuum, but was years if not decades in the making. Remember that Bill Barr had the unitary executive theory in mind long before Trump came into power, but previous Republican leadership considered it too radical for the American public to accept. Those times have changed...
- markus_zhang 5y ago
  US elites mostly only care about the trough. They know it but apres moi le deluge is the silent motto of many. The Democratic is no radical different from he Republicans, they simply have a nicer face.
- rayiner 5y ago
  > Remember that Bill Barr had the unitary executive theory in mind long before Trump came into power, but previous Republican leadership considered it too radical for the American public to accept. The unitary executive dates back to the Federalists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitary_executive_theory#Adoption_of_constitutional_provisions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitary_executive_theory#Adopt.... You're invoking an anachronism--it wasn't until the 20th century that we even got the idea of "independent" bureaucrats insulated from accountability to the elected President. George Washington's original cabinet consisted of just four members: Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, Secretary of Treasury Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of War Henry Knox, and Attorney General Edmund Randolph. All of those were plainly intended to be subordinate to Washington as the President.
  - mc32 5y ago
    As recently as JFK we had Bobby Kennedy as AG (as competent as he was). Imagine the heart attacks people would have today if Biden tried putting a relative in as AG, or if Trump had tried the same.
    - rgbrenner 5y ago
      What JFK (and others) did is why Congress passed an anti-nepotism law ( 5 U.S.C. § 3110) in 1967.
markus_zhang 5y ago
Nowadays it's already difficult if not impossible. In the age of big data and open manipulation, there is zero incentive for the politicians, corporations and media to promote independent thought for ordinary people, or to put more precisely only independent thoughts that benefit their agendas. The same goes to millions of middle class employees of those entities. They might want to teach independent thoughts to their own kids but other than that they have zero incentive to promote independent thoughts to their customers because it's profit and power that feeds their family. I really don't see an easy way out of this downward spiral.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
  "They might want to teach independent thoughts to their own kids but other than that they have zero incentive to promote independent thoughts to their customers because it's profit and power that feeds their family." This point is about the only bright spot in an otherwise grim perspective. Just about everyone, and that appears to include Putin, wants to do well by their kids education-wise. The rest can fuck off and die, but the self-preservation in the sense of preserving genes by teaching the ability to think critically is important enough that at least there is a chance that spiral will hit a bump here and there.
  - fighterpilot 5y ago
    That's right. I don't have existential dread about Putin or Xi. They want total power, wealth and stability. They're corrupt pragmatists, not zealots who are going to die in a nuclear Armageddon. I fear the ideologically committed madman much more.
    - Yoric 5y ago
      You have a point. However, they are also empire builders whose agenda requires weakening the power, wealth and stability of every entity that they consider targets and/or competitor. As someone who lives in one such entity, I consider this threatening. Not glorious-nuclear-self-destruction dreadful, but still potentially life-threatening.
rayiner 5y ago
The U.S. spends among the most on education of any developed country, both in absolute terms and a percentage of GDP. Our education spending is over 6% of GDP: https://waterpedia.wiki/image/education-spending-share-gdp-selected-countries-2015.aGqj https://waterpedia.wiki/image/education-spending-share-gdp-s.... All of the people involved in these foreign war debacles were highly pedigreed. (Fun fact: the President of Afghanistan, who fled Kabul yesterday, is an Ivy League-educated professor who "literally wrote the book on fixing failed states.") The education, in fact, the problem. Universities is where people learn hare-brained ideas like Wilsonianism. It's where people learn to view government as a set of laws and policies and boxes on org charts, rather than the manifestation of the culture and political tradition of people. Coming from a traditional Muslim country ourselves, my family knew in 2001 that nation building in Afghanistan was an absurd idea. Our own country has a thousand-year head start on Afghanistan in terms of civilization, and has still struggled with democracy. It's not in the people. But Americans are so far separated from their culture--that is to say, their village won't die of starvation if they indulge in cultural experimentation--they can't even locate the wellspring of democracy in culture and traditions.
- mc32 5y ago
  The cultural aspect is critical and people have overlooked in many places. The Optimism for Russia after the fall of the USSR, Ukraine and Afghanistan, Libya, etc. Places with no democratic foundation or tradition but plagued by corruption. It needs to grow over decades organically for the people to get used to the idea and the institutions, for example, like in Hong-Kong. Singapore is another example and they yet don't have completely open democracy. The ground must be fertile, as they say in allegorical terms, for democracy to take root. You can't impose it and then wish it to work and have it work. You can't throw money at it (as AF has shown us). It's a messy process. Sometimes, like Panama, you have the right accidents happen and it works --but at least then they could rely on the legacy of Marti (as they were part of Columbia during independence from Spain) and they had the US administer the Canal Zone till '00, I believe.
  - rayiner 5y ago
    In Bangladesh, we have had real elections, leaving aside the the assassinations and that one military dictatorship. But we're back to one-party rule as the leader of the opposition party has been jailed. And that's after having 800+ years of civilization under the Sultanates and 200 years under Britain. It's not economics--our PPP GDP per capita is about what the U.S. was at in the late 19th century (at which point it had been a successful multi-party democracy for 70-80 years).

baybal2 5y ago

> we've thought continually we were dealing with another defeated Japan or defeated Germany --the enemy population would just comply to our wishes, so we kept on thinking we could "turn them into replicas of American government" You though, but you did not did. In both prior cases US ran moderately competent occupation government, and by some accounts one better than their own. The model US followed in Vietnam was not this. Ngo Dinh Diem was a Syngman Rhee 2.0, but even worse. Here, you can say Karzai was Syngman Rhee 3.0. All shared a history of being overthrown because of progressing nationalist drift within their own power bases.

AtlasBarfed 5y ago
Those countries knew they would be treated as equals on the economic world forum, not puppet states for resource extraction. The only remarkable thing is that we treated Japan so well, considering how its fellow far east countries were treated as client states or worse for so long. I think it was latent guilt of using the nuke on them.
- mc32 5y ago
  Japan had an industrial base... well, it had to in order to engage in a long fought war of attrition in all of the Pacific controlling and subjugating very large portions of the population and land area. So they had an industrial base. No so much for (S) Korea and VietNam. They were very agrarian (like Japan before they built up their war machine). So their problem was peasant farmers with no land + a growing population on the brink of starvation. US advisors made recommendations to alleviate this problem by doing land redistribution for tenant farmers. South VietNam would have none of that. Korea did appease the peasants albeit reluctantly so they avoided the worst.
- rjzzleep 5y ago
  That's actually a really interesting point. South Korea was actually steamrolled by the north, because the US made sure they had no independent way of defending themselves. The US pulled in the UNSC to fight on their own in Korea, while the Soviets had built up a strong local military in the North. Taiwan is now incapable to protect its own borders. They even had a nuclear weapons program in response to mainland China which the CIA infiltrated and shut down. Another example of a local military that was just steamrolled by an insurgency was the Iraqi military. The US has a pretty good track record when it comes to building insurgencies though, remember that the Taliban were built and trained by ISI and the CIA. Iran had islamic groups that the Shah used to silence opposition forces. There's no way their training and equipment wasn't done in coordination with their US partners given how much of a puppet the Shah was. Or take a look at a lot of the groups that were part of the opposition in Syria. I wonder if there's any analysis why the US has been so good at building and training insurgency groups, but so bad at making local armies to protect their own territorial borders.

grecy 5y ago

> Let's go back to congress needing to authorize wars and give them sole war-powers The issue there is the massive conflict of interest and legal bribery. Members of congress are getting obscenely rich from the Military Industrial Complex and their "campaign contributions". Their bank accounts want more wars.

adventured 5y ago
> Members of congress are getting obscenely rich from the Military Industrial Complex and their "campaign contributions". Please explain for me how that is so, without diverting into claiming that they're being handed tens of millions of dollars secretly under the table. I'm familiar with how campaign contributions work and the legal regulations involved, including what they're allowed to do - and not do - with the money. How do campaign contributions from military industrial complex firms translate into Congressional members getting obscenely rich? Every single Congressional member would have been better off buying any number of dozens of various traditional tech stocks than any of the military industrial stocks (Lockheed, Boeing, Northrop, etc.). Amazon/Netflix/Apple/Microsoft/Google/Facebook/Tesla/etc. > Northrop Cloudflare is up more since its IPO than Boeing is over ~15 years. Watch out for those CDN campaign contributions?
- AnthonyMouse 5y ago
  > Please explain for me how that is so, without diverting into claiming that they're being handed tens of millions of dollars secretly under the table. There are two aspects to this. The first is campaign contributions. Recent US Presidential election campaigns have exceeded a billion dollars. House and Senate races have been millions to hundreds of millions, per election. The people "giving" this money are not doing so out of altruism. It's not secret money under the table, it's all open and disclosed, but nobody thinks it has no effect on behavior. At best the representatives are entirely scrupulous and never allow the money to affect their positions, but then the candidates with pro-corporate positions find it easier to raise money, the money allows them to buy more advertising, and the candidates who want to shovel tax dollars into corporate coffers win more elections. The second is the revolving door. You go serve some time in Congress, do what the corporations want, and when you retire or fail to win re-election because your constituents got fed up with what you were doing, you have a cushy job paying six, seven, eight figures a year waiting for you after. Or that job goes to a member of your family while you're still in office.

JBaudrillard 5y ago

> Gulf War One, we went in, did the job and got out. The Gulf War did not take place. (It was a police action marketed as a war.)

dragonwriter 5y ago

> Gulf War One, we went in, did the job and got out. No, we didn't, we were perpetually militarily engaged in Iraq, at a lower level, between the 1991 war and the 2003 war. We weren't occupying or administering Iraq, but we didn't leave, either. > Let's go back to congress needing to authorize wars Both of the long wars started under Bush had Congressional authorization.

mc32 5y ago
>We weren't occupying or administering Iraq, but we didn't leave, either. I mean, we never left Germany or S. Korea, so... Playing big brother to Q8? I'm not mad. Like other countries, we can pick sides and aid whatever side we think has our interest. I'm not interested in intervening with infantry and all the necessary materiel unless it's to defend ourselves from grave danger. Especially avoid stupid the boondoggle of "nation-building". Not everyone wants democracy right now. It may come later. >Both of the long wars started under Bush had Congressional authorization. True, but they gave him blanket authorization for use of military force (open ended) rather than a declaration of war), this open-endedness allowed Obama! to use the same AUMF to engage in further conflict.
- aiisjustanif 5y ago
  > I'm not interested in intervening with infantry and all the necessary materiel unless it's to defend ourselves from grave danger. Especially avoid stupid the boondoggle of "nation-building". Not everyone wants democracy right now. It may come later. This short sightedness might cost more in lives globally and money loss from trade and resources being restricted.
  - mc32 5y ago
    While it seems crude, the way we used to do it, the way the Soviets used to do it, the way China does it now, seems to work best for this kind of interest. You invest in a despot let them have their little fiefdom and you let them run what's theirs and you get to take what you think is yours. Nation-building is hubris. Work with someone local who fits hand-in-glove. Is the unstable "stability" worth 6T and thousands of soldiers' lives and many tens of thousands traumatized? Not to mention the losses from the locals. What was the human cost of Saddam in power vs the cost after toppling him?

dillondoyle 5y ago

Congress basically in practice abdicated that power with an incredibly broad AUMF 'war on terrorism .' I think there is even one from like cold war on the books. I know the house voted to end them but the Senate didn't act?

datavirtue 5y ago

Who says they are heading toward democracy at all? Do you stop at fascism along the way? Afghanistan was essentially our state. It was beginning to prosper and experience the rights and freedoms already established by our presence--why do "they" need to create a government if we already have one that works and that their people seemed to like? We should open up to voluntarily annexing states like Afghanistan and Puerto Rico instead of continuing to drool over some fuedal age government philosophy. Invite people in. The current system of fight-and-flight is looking a bit dated.

colordrops 5y ago
Puerto Rico and Afghanistan have virtually nothing in common. Puerto Rico is not next to Russia and the Middle East, and doesn't cost hundreds of billions to keep stable.

dcolkitt 5y ago

> This thinking has undermined our actions in every major war since then, with the exception of GWI. Kosovo? Bosnia?

cm2187 5y ago
Lybia, Syria, Panama
mc32 5y ago
That was a European problem which Europeans should have solved by themselves. Why did we have to piss abound there when they could have managed it themselves? Let's say something came up in Puerto Rico... and then we have Europe come in and fix things instead of the US, does that seem the way it should work?
- rini17 5y ago
  That isn't fair assessment. Europeans have plenty of experience how they failed to manage fixing problems by wars. Also at that time, NATO expansion was the only option on the table, Washington was uneasy about the prospects of some independent european alliance influenced much by the newly unified Germany. So it was only natural they decided to come and showcase fixing problems in ex-yugoslavia. By the way Europe is in fact fixing American problems, by dealing with of refugees from american (and russian) wars, at the price of political and cultural turmoil.

spoonjim 5y ago

Exactly. Basketcase governments are products of basketcase societies. Go in and topple the government and you now have the impossible task of developing a sustainable high quality government on top of a low quality society/culture.

mc32 5y ago
Agreed. It's the same for Russia or Ukraine as it is for Afghanistan or Libya. These people have been under a totally different form of government where they had very little agency. The hubris of thinking, yeah, the CPSU (or Bath, etc.) is dissolved, democracy will take over, it's people's destiny! When you've known nothing of democracy, it's a foreign concept. You need the culture around democracy to form for it to be successful.

Glyptodon 5y ago

Eh, I think a few of your points are sort-of correct, but transformational goals could work if we were more willing to commit to manpower, occupation, hard measures, and direct control (not saying that we should, or that it fits with modern sensibilities). On top of that, "preventing the production of terrorists" (to paraphrase) was a stated goal of Afghanistan and it doesn't seem obvious how it can be fulfilled with either the current outcome or an "invade, accomplish, withdraw" operation unless we intended to just entirely massacre the populace to the point that the nation becomes a giant wildlife reserve. There are relatively few (if any) cases of forced national reform lasting 40+ years with the intent to have a relatively "free democracy" at the end so I'm also having trouble considering your contention about transformation proven. (Though I definitely concur a single birth to adult score of years seems an unlikely interval for success with half-measures.)

throw0101a 5y ago

> we've thought continually we were dealing with another defeated Japan or defeated Germany --the enemy population would just comply to our wishes, so we kept on thinking we could "turn them into replicas of American government" They did not "comply". They came to realize it was better to emulate the US: > This is not to say that Japan remained fascist (as some left-wing commentators assert). It most obviously and manifestly did not remain fascist. Instead, various leaders who had earlier supported and even participated in fascism decided that liberal democracy was better for the country. One reason they made this decision is that the U.S. had just proven liberal democracy’s economic and military effectiveness by winning WW2. They almost certainly could have restored dictatorship in Japan — the U.S. was clearly willing to tolerate dictatorships among its Cold War allies in Korea, Taiwan and elsewhere — but they chose not to. Instead, they drew from a liberal democratic trend that had existed in Japan well before the military takeover of the 1930s. * https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-afghanistan-occupation-and-the https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-afghanistan-occupation... Both Japan and Germany had liberal democratic histories before they got taken over by fascists, so it wasn't a stretch. Cultures based on clan/kinship tend to have higher corruption and lower stability: * https://ideas.repec.org/p/sfu/sfudps/dp17-17.html https://ideas.repec.org/p/sfu/sfudps/dp17-17.html * https://www.u4.no/publications/the-kinship-in-public-office-indicator-kin-connectivity-as-a-proxy-for-nepotism-in-the-public-sector https://www.u4.no/publications/the-kinship-in-public-office-... * https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation.aspx?paperid=108992 https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation.aspx?paperid=...