Freedom is on the march!

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Julius_Van_Der_Beak

Freedom is on the march!

Post by Julius_Van_Der_Beak » Tue Aug 17, 2021 3:02 pm

'People like you are still living in what we call the reality-based community. You believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. That's not the way the world really works anymore.'

'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

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Ferrus
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Location: Barcelona

Re: Freedom is on the march!

Post by Ferrus » Tue Aug 17, 2021 4:18 pm

Ex falso, quodlibet

Julius_Van_Der_Beak

Re: Freedom is on the march!

Post by Julius_Van_Der_Beak » Tue Aug 17, 2021 5:19 pm

Ferrus wrote:
Tue Aug 17, 2021 4:18 pm
Our empire is different because we are an exceptional nation anointed by God. None of the other empires believed that, because it wasn't true for them.

I'm a pragmatist.

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HighlyIrregular
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Formerly: BarIII

Re: Freedom is on the march!

Post by HighlyIrregular » Tue Aug 17, 2021 7:30 pm

I'm a pragmatist too. All administrations over the last 20 years probably did the same thing and the last two agreed on getting out of Afghanistan. Experts looked at and saw what was happening and were probably pragmatic about how to deal with it even with no great options. That's all we could ask for. As long as they weren't loyalists or presidential kin, I think decent/all-that-could-be-expected decisions were made based on the talent and options available. What should we do, see some counter production then leave and have the Taliban take over sooner? Somehow infringe on Afghanistan's sovereignty to stop their corruption? Be more open with the public about failures, lose support, get out, and have the Taliban take over sooner? I read about the watchdog's report. We supposedly didn't understand how Afghanistan works. Do you really think we didn't have experts on all issues involved working on this? I read about hours of meetings on a regular basis, between experts. What more do you want? This stuff apparently happens even in the US. What country would you prefer work on these things?

Julius_Van_Der_Beak

Re: Freedom is on the march!

Post by Julius_Van_Der_Beak » Tue Aug 17, 2021 7:40 pm

HighlyIrregular wrote:
Tue Aug 17, 2021 7:30 pm
I'm a pragmatist too. All administrations over the last 20 years probably did the same thing and the last two agreed on getting out of Afghanistan. Experts looked at and saw what was happening and were probably pragmatic about how to deal with it even with no great options. That's all we could ask for. As long as they weren't loyalists or presidential kin, I think decent/all-that-could-be-expected decisions were made based on the talent and options available. What should we do, see some counter production then leave and have the Taliban take over sooner? Somehow infringe on Afghanistan's sovereignty to stop their corruption? Be more open with the public about failures, lose support, get out, and have the Taliban take over sooner? I read about the watchdog's report. We supposedly didn't understand how Afghanistan works. Do you really think we didn't have experts on all issues involved working on this? I read about hours of meetings on a regular basis, between experts. What more do you want? This stuff apparently happens even in the US. What country would you prefer work on these things?
I don't think for the experts, if any of them did have any sense (and many of them probably did not.... the quote in the beginning is from a high up Bush Administration official, speculated to be Karl Rove, but I'll bet that view wasn't that unusual since the foreign policy experts went lockstep with what the administration wanted as far as I know) , it was ever about helping Afghans rebuild. The idea of the U.S. as the one "benevolent empire" is total bullshit.

Really anyone with real knowledge of the role of the U.S in the world in the postwar era who isn't totally indoctrinated would know that. The problem is that very little people do know that, because knowing about things that happened less than three weeks ago, or thinking about things that might happen more than three weeks from now, is considered to be for, essentially, gaywads.

The Taliban offered to surrender and turn Bin Laden in very early on. This was refused. We had to help the wimmenz and fight islamofascism, or at least that was what was sold to the center-left libs which I was at the time (eh, I was 16, at least I got Iraq right).

Julius_Van_Der_Beak

Re: Freedom is on the march!

Post by Julius_Van_Der_Beak » Tue Aug 17, 2021 11:26 pm

WHO LOST AFGHANISTAN?
Twenty years of lying and confusion by U.S. leaders ends in a predictable and bloody farce.

“We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking,” recalled Army Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, the White House war czar under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

“We did not know what we were doing,” said Richard Boucher, the Bush administration’s top diplomat for South and Central Asia.

“There was a tremendous … dysfunctionality in unity of command inside of Afghanistan, inside the military,” recalled Army Lt. Gen. David Barno, an early Afghanistan War commander.

“There was no campaign plan,” confessed Army Gen. Dan McNeill, who twice served as the top commander in Afghanistan under Bush. “I tried to get someone to define for me what winning meant, even before I went over, and nobody could.”

Julius_Van_Der_Beak

Re: Freedom is on the march!

Post by Julius_Van_Der_Beak » Wed Aug 18, 2021 1:17 am

Well at least defense contractors got rich.

But reading those Rumsfeld quotes... I now think casting Steve Carell as Rumsfeld in Vice was genius. So many of those higher-up quotes sound like they could come from an Office-type show about the military.

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