Yes, I know there is a song and even the meeting of the sentence but i just think it is an appropriate heading for what is to come next. Yesterday i was reading this post where I think the suggestions made were way reasonable. That America should focus on peaceful means and all until our resident defender of western values showed up to inform us that is idle talk, dreams of 12 year olds, so to speak. The military industrial complex and the emperor must all be appeased and pursuing peaceful coexistence through trade and cultural exchange and limiting the military to national defence and maybe international peacekeeping missions with other nations.
Maybe I am missing something since I live so far removed from the military or its workings that maybe it is important to have military outposts in every other country, occasionally have your spy agency overthrow democratically elected presidents and have drone assassinations miles away from home where children caught in the crossfire are collateral damage (what were they doing there, playing? Don’t know there are drones overhead?).
Tell me what you all think? William Astore or Tildeb?
Random thoughts 
Are you asking the experts here? Are you ready for institutionalized answers?
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Any answers.
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It is in our capital interests to keep the supply chain rolling and hope to provide a buffer to crazy that interrupts peaceful living. I don’t think doing nothing is really an option. Imagine how the world might be if we did nothing against the nazis? The Taliban would rule the world until every last one submits to Allah. Although I don’t like having outposts in every country, somebody probably ought to protect human rights, and in this case women’s rights. Afghanistan just stepped back 1300 years like Iran in ‘78.
But all these are natural forces in the process of evolution. Just as natural to fight the bad guys as it is to be one. How could it be any different?
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I don’t know. There have been times in present memory when it would have been great to intervene but the great US of A didn’t. I think there was probably no oil or some strategic resource to be got.
Half the world would be speaking German 🙂
As to human rights and especially that of women, we hope their situation will improve. You are aware that some of the oppressive laws in places like Uganda were supported by evangelical groups from the grand USA?
In a world where there are bad guys- first it was the commies, then the Muslims, there will always be need for big defense spending.
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Mak, I think you summed it up with this: I think there was probably no oil or some strategic resource to be got.. At its core, this is the incentive/impetus/reason for pretty much any and all of the U.S.’s actions in other countries.
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Nan, you don’t know it is spread democracy and maybe christianity- who knows. Maybe following the bombers are evangelicals or should i call them missionaries. The Brits when they colonized the world had the way paved with bibles then guns.
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Well of course the underlying reasons for ALL actions of ALL people depends on which side of religion you are on. Naturally if you’re a CHRISTIAN, then everything you do is right and proper and has God’s blessings.
Yes? 😈
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Yes!!
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Even the horrible SLAVE TRADE was all part of Gawd’s Plan…it introduced the heathen Sons of Ham to JAY-ZUSSSSSSS. Who cares if a few thousand died in the festering, leaking hulls of the slave ships?
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Well, to be fair, only the elderly and slaves with preexisting medical conditions actually died. Hope this makes the whole “slave” thing easier for you to swallow. 🙂
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Sounds like a win-win to me. Why should the slaveowners (or the ship captain) be forced to up their gruel expenditures on those who would not be “productive”?
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Absolutely!! 🙂
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I give up on you two
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Hahaha, Jeff you joke too much
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Only for folks whose panties are bunched up into their arse cracks. 🙂
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It was for their good
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Yes, yes and doing anything contrary would anger god. Just look at how angry he got because Lot’s wife turned to see for the last time, her friends and relatives who the loving god smote and killed her.
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Christianity and Judaism really are disgusting once one stops slurping the rum-spiked koolaid, aren’t they?
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Once the blinders are removed, problems galore
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I am sure the Afghan villagers repeatedly bombed back into the stone age deeply appreciated our “human rights” promoting air force bombers. Or the Okinawan women raped by our brave defenders of freedom. Or the Cambodians experiencing a rain of Agent Orange and a corrupt incompetent dictator (Lon Nol) who made them initially at least welcome the Khmer Rouge as a better option (Of course, in the latter case they were deeply wrong, but the United States created the environment that led to the Cambodian genocide. Your position, Jim, is ahistorical and arrogant. One of the reasons for the Nazis is Woodrow Wilson LIED us into WWI, which led to the punitive treatment of Germany which again, helped create the environment where the Nazis could come to power. If only we would stop trying to run the world.
The idea that the Taliban, a unique product of Afghani culture (and Pakistani secret service funding and training) will “take over the world” is a fear worthy of the worst foaming at the mouth Islamophobes. And I detest Islam as a religious system.
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Do you prefer Islam as a governmental system?
None of this is perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but it is all perfectly natural. But I’m sure Nadia Nadim would disagree with a lot of your comment
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ah, the old fashioned “Love it or leave it” argument. I don’t prefer Islam as a government system. I am an American. But WHICH Islam? From what period of time? I am not sure Al Adalus during its peak was worse than the Spanish Inquisition era of the Spanish Empire.
But that is not my point. The argument is whether the United States should be housing troops on 700 military bases around the world. The argument is whether the United States should engage in brutal 20 year 2 trillion dollar occupations that fall apart in a couple of weeks. The idea that the choice is between a vast military empire and “the Taliban taking over the world” is ludicrous to me.
Nadia Nadim may hate Islam. But the family whose infant children were just killed by American bombs are probably not too fond of American freedom, either. And I would bet in Afghanistan’s case there are far more of the latter, despite the nastiness of the Taliban government.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/singham/2021/08/31/more-civilians-killed-in-afghanistan/#more-65706
These folks might disagree.
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War is messy. Too bad the bombers carry their kids around with them.
“ The strike came two days after an Islamic State suicide attack outside the airport killed at least 169 Afghans and 13 U.S. service members.”
It’s easy to needle isolated points and dismiss the good stuff.
Sounds like that had it coming.
They are locking down their citizens from leaving and taking cheap shots at a tired bear. Nobody likes this, but I’m not sure what your point is, or what side you favor. If we leave it gets criticized, if we stay—more criticism.
Not sure why you think I’m a “love it or leave it” type. I stated it’s a perfectly natural response. No one can say what good actions do the most harm or what harm creates the most good. Oppenheimer said the world is going to hell. The only thing that may stop that is if we don’t try to prevent it. Absolutely nobody can account for the variables of any given action. But it’s fun to pick a side. Me, I’ll just watch and see what happens.
It’s no different than the vax/ antivax debate. Certainly vaccines are no good for the long term survival of humanity, fighting natural selection, yet somehow we can’t help ourselves. There are limits to our programming.
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On the one hand, I think I would agree with the Taliban in asking their qualified countrymen and women to stay behind. Why allow brain drain? Who is it who will build the new Afghanistan if everyone who is qualified to do so has left?
The critique here has not been that the US should have stayed. In fact, I don’t think anyone has made that claim on this blog. It has been made elsewhere. And the question being discussed here is a broader one, should the US have military bases everywhere or should it focus on something else?
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I am sure they must.
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Why create a false dichotomy, Jim. It is possible and valid to not prefer an Islamic government and to critique the US military action in Afghanistan
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Exactly. Cruise Missile Liberals and Neocons both LOVE false dichotomies. Such also allow for moral posturing which often hides economic or simple power politics rationales.
See: Iraq. Or to be “bipartisan”, look at how the Peace Prize President and the War Sow cooperated with France to destroy Libya. It has been 12+ years of utter misery and chaos. “But Khadaffy was a BAD MAN. Bad Man Bad. Let’s murder him with no plan on what would happen next!” The entire region is a mess now. (Not that it was the Garden of Eden before, but…)
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Iraq is being rebuilt into a beacon of democracy. Though I wonder how long that shall be given Biden’s announcement that Afghanistan marks the end of nation building efforts.
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How a bad man is determined is also very interesting.
Museveni our neighbour is guilty of human rights violations ans has been in power for as long as I have been alive, but he is a good guy. He still gets American funding for his army because he helps in raping the Congo!
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My favorite example from a while ago was the pious Peanut Farmer, Jimmy Carter (who was also a nuclear submarine commander…you have to be a bit nuts to hold that position) sold bullets to the Indonesian generals who slaughtered 1/3 of the population of East Timor.
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That’s a good president you got there
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Brian, you know I agree with you.
I read the kill ratio during that entire occupation was 20:1. I am sure most Afghanis are happy the occupation has ended, like those whose villages were flattened. I remember Trump once said if he had his way, he would bomb Afghanistan out of the map. I am sure Afghanis listening to that speech were very happy with him.
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Do you agree with Brian? “ There have been times in present memory when it would have been great to intervene but the great US of A didn’t”. So which is it?
I am not in a position to trust anyone, particularly the experts who have us right where we are today. And as you may have wondered, which experts do we trust? As you can see, my comments are “ahistorical and arrogant”, as Brian’s is real history and non arrogant. 😃
What part of that historical knowledge has prevented us in the past or future not to repeat it?
It appears we humans have a limited script to work from.
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Jim, you wrote
and it is this I said there are times when the grand US of A hasn’t responded. So it is possible to not do anything.
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Our way of life seems to be very well thought, sophisticated, and historically powered by some previous action, but really is no different than any of the “lower” animals. Occasionally a hippo saves a zebra from a crocodile. Can anyone explain that? Was there some past event that dictated a future one? It seems rather obvious that any particular moment in history has nothing to do with our current decisions. We can explain and formulate all kids of things, but the tape seems to be stuck on a loop. That’s hard for me to get passionate about.
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Of course our current decisions cannot affect history- what is said/ written about the past- but they can affect the future, even if it is just a local future.
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I think one answer is simple humility. I am sympathetic to the “moral nihilist” view of things, so as horrified as we may all be at many of the Taliban’s actions, I question where outsiders have a right to intervene. And no, Nazi Germany is not an example to the contrary, as they actively STARTED WWII.
Humanity, especially as organized in states, often does awful things. Including these United States, which was at least partly founded on genocide, slavery, and expropriation to a large extent. Does our history give us the right to invade other countries? Especially when the moral excuses given often hide less salubrious reasons (such as an oil pipeline across Afghanistan where the oil company and the USG wouldn’t negotiate with the Taliban).
China….who did not spend twenty years and two trillion dollars, will mop up the nice supplies of rare earths and ores that are purportedly in Afghanistan. Even from a practical, what works best standpoint, is the militarized American approach very effective? I am skeptical
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I agree. I am skeptical as well. It’s also a great show for the Christian and Irreligious alike, if we keep those things in their proper perspective. How can it matter so much if it doesn’t matter, or if god is in complete control, what’s all the worry? But, like the social experiment we had here in Seattle with CHAZ. I’m confident it will end about the same way.
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I am equally skeptical.
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I’d kind of preferred it if these United States of America had stuck to Thomas Jefferson’s wise adage of “Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.” and let the other nations sort out their own problems.
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there are people who think those ends cannot be attained if the grand US of A doesn’t hundred of outposts in the world and dropping a few missiles every so often.
do those who keep saying the Fed is huge (we want small government) think about the army as being extremely huge?
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Dwight Eisenhower warned us of the encroaching military industrial complex in his farewell address on Jan. 17, 1961.
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Maybe at that time he didn’t know how rich one would get from voting the right way to extend F35 programme or some other such spending
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I think he knew it all too well that the people who really run things in the District of Criminals, are the ones who work quietly (and sometimes not so quietly) behind the scenes extracting favors for money and votes.
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District of Criminals!
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Marcus Ranum’s blog covers this topic amazingly well. He is particularly fond of the F35. It is an amazingly bad project. China seems to be avoiding the kind of sclerotic “boys and their toys” thinking in their military systems. They would definitely kick our butts in any land or sea war in Asia.
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I think I saw (you must have shared it)the post on the F35.
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Wouldn’t that just be a great setup?
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Or in the words of Rodney King:
Can we all get along?
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Not if there is money to be made in murder
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Well, IMO, you know, a guy who’s solution to poverty is to gas and cremate all those lazy bastards who choose to be poor in America, I say, nuke everything and let Jeebus sort out the mess!!! God bless America!!! God bless Love!!! And God bless Freedom!! $Amen$
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I know that guy.
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If all nations practiced military isolationism, then I can perhaps see some merit in it, bit that’s never going to happen. Personally, I’d like to the UN Security Council step up to the plate and replace the bully boy practices of the USA. But for that to happen the power of veto by the five permanent member states must be removed. Until that happens (not that it ever will), the UN is a bit like a one armed wallpaper hanger with his hand tied behind his back.
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The UN is what my relatives would call a toothless dog. The US spends trillions of dollars investing in ever better warfare for national security, a security that is not threatened by many state or non state actors. It can pursue its goals through peace instead of through loss of life and limb
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Of course it’s a toothless dog. It was designed that way by giving 5 nations the power of veto. It’s possibly too late now as the ideal of international cooperation that was present in my youth seems to fast becoming a pipe dream. It’s becoming one of dog eat dog, which I don’t think has any benefits for humankind or the planet.
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when a man eats a dog, that is ok, when a man eats another man, then that’s a tragedy and that is what we have become.
the UN is like the AU, designed to fail from the beginning
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I bet inspired can give us simple, delicious recipes for “long pig”. You just gotta get em while they are young and tender! Then it is not a tragedy, but a feast!
Ugh. I am squicking myself out now.
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Haha. A grand feast that one!
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The United States is like a corrupt Southern Sheriff called in by African American neighbors to stop a bad house party. Always makes things worse. We spent twenty years and two trillion dollars and the idea that our involvement created some kind of paradise for the “Afghan women” outside a few connected circles in Kabul….Come on folks, we are supposed to be “skeptics” here. That kind of thinking is worthy of the crazy Prophetess who babbles about “taking Authority in the name of Jay-zus” over the latest hurricane that swamped New Orleans.
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I find that refrain about the women the height of hypocrisy. It’s similar to that of the morality police, it is for the children! I tend to think after the defeat, some people want something noble to hold on to, and to many, talking of the womenfolk gives them enough currency.
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I always ask them: You do understand that women were not treated very well in territories controlled by our allies?
Can outsiders FORCE cultural change? When can we expect European Union troops on U.S. soil in the heart of the American South? I welcome our new Danish overlords! 🙂
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Oh, do NOT get me started on the Danes!!! Godless, liberal BASTARDS!! 🙂
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At least they are not swamping you in those horrific meatballs. In lingonberry sauce. What are lingonberries? Some kind of secret biological weapon designed to spread a new Swedish Black Plague?
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They’re like legumes purple pits. (No idea, actually.)
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It is said after colonisation, the Africans were neither fully African nor white as their colonisers intended leading to alienation from the self or sth like that.
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The media, left leaning media, has convinced us that a safe space was created for all da women. Those of us questioning are just being blind
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One aspect of excessive military force and spending that is too often overlooked is that it is frequently the christian enthusiasts who support and encourage their targets. The same always manage to focus the blame elsewhere rather than the true source.
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Oh yes. They are praying for a Christian victory over others
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How much have you read about Kissinger?
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That he belongs in a jail or something
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Other than that 🙂 He pursued a policy of controlled chaos, carefully inciting enmity in certain regions. This keeps those regions from forming strong blocks. When you hear Republicans like John Bolton criticising the EU as a concept and being very pro-Brexit that’s because they feel American interests are easier to push forward with a divided Europe.
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You forgot to mention that Kissinger was named People Magazine’s “Sexiest Man Alive” for 1992! I think it’s the eye glasses that do it for ’em.
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LOL!
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He belongs in a dungeon.
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In other words, Kissinger’s foreign policy goals were remarkably similar to the Putin program. Kissinger GOOD Putin BAD BAD BAD.
As much as I despised Trump. I wonder how many wars Hillary Clinton (a scion of the Kissinger school of foreign policy) would have drug us into? Trump was a corrupt chancer and real estate criminal, but he had no real ties to “defense” industries (War is a Racket). Like our decrepit senior (in all ways) senator from California Diane “War Profiteer” Feinstein. You don’t think a Senator’s salary bought that Pacific Heights mega-mansion, do you? Her family has been described as the “Democratic Haliburton”. 🙂
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Feinstein is friggin horrible.
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And waaaaay too old to be making decisions for her constituents (and/or others). She and Nancy (another old fogy) need to be put out to pasture asap.
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Nancy at least still has some spark and cognitive function going on, not so for Diane. But I do agree with you.
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As someone much younger than DiFi, I am happy to trot off to pasture in early November. Despite my otherwise failures in so many ways at “adulting” the one thing I did right was stick it out in my public sector California job. One of the few left with a defined benefit pension. Why can’t DiFi and Pelosi do the same? DiFi is a multimillionaire.
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Power, baby! Power!
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is it that soon, Brian! I thought you’re 23 at heart and everything else is just a rumour?
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I AM indeed Transchronological, but my aching knees and borderline metabolic syndrome and mediocre eyesight REFUSE to listen to my new ideological truths!
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Clinton might have followed in the footsteps of the Nobel Prize president; send drones wherever. It is in line with saving American lives where others are collateral damage. All for the greater good.
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If I believed in Hell, that should be his destination imho.
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This is all quibble! Nothing will change, nothing has ever changed when it comes to power struggles, the strong will always subdue the weak until being replaced by an even stronger power. Unless we ignore our human histories and choose a life in a brainwashed or drug-induced existence.
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This was true even in the prophetic trilogy Mad Max. I just want to be Humungus!
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We don’t expect any change now, but life is fluid. Empires collapse and new ones rise in their place.
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I have found an interesting YouTube channel by a rational, “liberal” Muslim who presents in some detail vignettes on the history of South Central Asia and the Muslim World. Really fascinating stuff. It is amusing to see the Islamist fanatics in his comments section ding him for not being a rabid polemicist for Islamic supremacy.
https://www.youtube.com/c/AlMuqaddimah
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