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Hopefully it entered your thoughts after Iraq and Afghanistan?

by kidme5 5y ago

sandworm101 5y ago
Did you really just call out a solider for his post-9/11 service? Wow. Good thing HN isn't twitter. A tweet like that could come back to haunt a person. Save some hate for the firefighters and kindergarten teachers.
freedomben 5y ago
Well, I don't know that I would agree that what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan qualifies as "imperialism." I would call that "nation building," and the motives were/are a lot different (although not entirely void of Venn diagram overlap). Most of us really thought our sacrifice was making life better for people and giving them a chance to experience freedom. At this point I think history has shown that nation building is a bad idea and doesn't work. I think we wasted a ton of money and blood (on all sides) in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it would have been better had we never gone at all. Now all that said, I think it's terribly fallacious and prejudiced to assume what somebody's views are because they served in the military. The military is quite diverse. You'll find people with all sorts of viewpoints and all sorts of reasons for joining.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > Well, I don't know that I would agree that what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan qualifies as "imperialism." Afghanistan is arguably more complex, Iraq (2003) was pure imperialism.
  - freedomben 5y ago
    Wikipedia says: > Imperialism is a policy or ideology of extending rule over peoples and other countries, for extending political and economic access, power and control, often through employing hard power, especially military force, but also soft power. While related to the concepts of colonialism and empire, imperialism is a distinct concept that can apply to other forms of expansion and many forms of government [1] The goal in Iraq was to topple the Hussein Regime (which the CIA told us had WMDs) and build up a local democratic government. The original plan was for US troops to leave after a few years. If you want to go to "Bush lied and really just wanted cheap oil" then go for it. I have no idea what Bush's "real" motives were. I'm no fan of Bush but I don't think he was Hitler. Anyway what I've said is what I and everyone else I talked to thought about the effort. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperialism
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      > The goal in Iraq was to topple the Hussein Regime (which the CIA told us had WMDs) and build up a local democratic government No, it wasn't; the war was conceived long before the WMD narrative (which did not come from the CIA) was concocted to justify it; both control of strategic resources and a regional powerbase as a lever to recast other regimes in the region to support the politico-economic vision of America as the metropolitan power were the motivations, as several of the architects of the war wrote openly in the years before the Bush Administration came into office. The architects of war in the administration initially sought to seize on blaming Iraq for 9/11 as the pretext for their preplanned war, raising it as early, IIRC, as while the attacks were still in progress.
      - freedomben 5y ago
        That's quite a claim. You should probably include some citations to back up something like that. But, for sake of conversation, assuming 100% accuracy on your part, it still seems really absurd to me to assume that the average military member was even aware of this conspiracy, let alone supporting it while simultaneously pretending that we thought we were building up a local democratic government.
        freedomben 5y ago
        It just occurred to me, we are probably talking about different things. My understanding of this thread was that the subject is the average military member, as those are the people who are being prejudged and stereotyped as discussed further up thread. It seems like you are specifically talking about political leaders at the very top. If that is true, then we're probably just talking past each other, and we probably agree more than we think.
  - sandworm101 5y ago
    But neither concept should be laid at the feet of individual soldier. Those are the decisions of elected politicians, and the people that put them in office.
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      > But neither concept should be laid at the feet of individual soldier. Well, no, individual soldiers don't, as a rule, have any more influence in the decision to go to war than the average civilian. That being said, neither is it the case that the imperialist urge is isolated to a closed decision-making cabal; the ideological bloc advocating war for overtly imperialist reasons included people in all walks of life. Military personnel were not especially innocent, any more than they were categorically guilty.

Hopefully it entered your thoughts after Iraq and Afghanistan?

by kidme5 5y ago

Hopefully it entered your thoughts after Iraq and Afghanistan?

Did you really just call out a solider for his post-9/11 service? Wow. Good thing HN isn't twitter. A tweet like that could come back to haunt a person. Save some hate for the firefighters and kindergarten teachers.

freedomben 5y ago

Well, I don't know that I would agree that what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan qualifies as "imperialism." I would call that "nation building," and the motives were/are a lot different (although not entirely void of Venn diagram overlap). Most of us really thought our sacrifice was making life better for people and giving them a chance to experience freedom. At this point I think history has shown that nation building is a bad idea and doesn't work. I think we wasted a ton of money and blood (on all sides) in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it would have been better had we never gone at all. Now all that said, I think it's terribly fallacious and prejudiced to assume what somebody's views are because they served in the military. The military is quite diverse. You'll find people with all sorts of viewpoints and all sorts of reasons for joining.

dragonwriter 5y ago
> Well, I don't know that I would agree that what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan qualifies as "imperialism." Afghanistan is arguably more complex, Iraq (2003) was pure imperialism.
- freedomben 5y ago
  Wikipedia says: > Imperialism is a policy or ideology of extending rule over peoples and other countries, for extending political and economic access, power and control, often through employing hard power, especially military force, but also soft power. While related to the concepts of colonialism and empire, imperialism is a distinct concept that can apply to other forms of expansion and many forms of government [1] The goal in Iraq was to topple the Hussein Regime (which the CIA told us had WMDs) and build up a local democratic government. The original plan was for US troops to leave after a few years. If you want to go to "Bush lied and really just wanted cheap oil" then go for it. I have no idea what Bush's "real" motives were. I'm no fan of Bush but I don't think he was Hitler. Anyway what I've said is what I and everyone else I talked to thought about the effort. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperialism
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > The goal in Iraq was to topple the Hussein Regime (which the CIA told us had WMDs) and build up a local democratic government No, it wasn't; the war was conceived long before the WMD narrative (which did not come from the CIA) was concocted to justify it; both control of strategic resources and a regional powerbase as a lever to recast other regimes in the region to support the politico-economic vision of America as the metropolitan power were the motivations, as several of the architects of the war wrote openly in the years before the Bush Administration came into office. The architects of war in the administration initially sought to seize on blaming Iraq for 9/11 as the pretext for their preplanned war, raising it as early, IIRC, as while the attacks were still in progress.
    - freedomben 5y ago
      That's quite a claim. You should probably include some citations to back up something like that. But, for sake of conversation, assuming 100% accuracy on your part, it still seems really absurd to me to assume that the average military member was even aware of this conspiracy, let alone supporting it while simultaneously pretending that we thought we were building up a local democratic government.
      - freedomben 5y ago
        It just occurred to me, we are probably talking about different things. My understanding of this thread was that the subject is the average military member, as those are the people who are being prejudged and stereotyped as discussed further up thread. It seems like you are specifically talking about political leaders at the very top. If that is true, then we're probably just talking past each other, and we probably agree more than we think.
- sandworm101 5y ago
  But neither concept should be laid at the feet of individual soldier. Those are the decisions of elected politicians, and the people that put them in office.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > But neither concept should be laid at the feet of individual soldier. Well, no, individual soldiers don't, as a rule, have any more influence in the decision to go to war than the average civilian. That being said, neither is it the case that the imperialist urge is isolated to a closed decision-making cabal; the ideological bloc advocating war for overtly imperialist reasons included people in all walks of life. Military personnel were not especially innocent, any more than they were categorically guilty.