Duality wise, Is War more evil or more good?

The OBL plan failed to cause the US to pull out of Saudi Arabia.

That was the reason for the attack.

It seems quite logical that terrorists would not go to that much trouble and expense to duplicate a plan that failed.

Maybe, but the reason stated for conquering Afghanistan was to get OBL.

And, we made an incredibly weak attempt to pursue OBL.

Now, you want to switch the objective of a past mission to conform to your current views?

Sure. So, then the task becomes one of figuring out how one might measure good and bad in determining what wars to embark on.

Or, one can question this "duality" based on wars we've embarked on in the past in hopes of learning something.

No, there absolutely has been NO such plan over the terms of many presidents.

Plus, it's been years since Netanyahu stated that he would die before agreeing to a two state solution, regardless of its definition.

If you think there has been a two state solution that has been on the table at any time since Arafat, then please post it.

 

I don't see how to apply this to any war decision we might need to make today and into the future.

I agree that governments can be a threat. Pol Pot should have been knocked off by his people, one might say.

But, I don't believe that the number of those killed by their own government is a useful measure of the US deciding whether war is the better tool in situations we may face.

That doesn't address our war decision to conquer Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam, etc.

The calculation is very different when the militia in question is preparing to fight a revolutionary war.

When we had to decide whether to go to war against Libya, Vietnam, Iraq, etc., we didn't have an opponent who was taking the lives of our citizens. Yet, there were still questions of whether war might be a legitimate tool.

 

OBL made a bunch of excuses for the attack as well as his declaration of war, but as I mentioned earlier, OBL had much loftier proactive goals that were based on his nostalgia for the glory days of the Arab caliphates that once ruled from Spain to India. This was a highly educated man who was well versed in the writings of jihadist ideologues such as Ibn Taymiyyah, Ibn Wahhab, Hasan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb.

BS on all counts.

First of all, the AUMF for Afghanistan doesn't even mention Osama bin Laden:

https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PLAW-107publ40/pdf/PLAW-107publ40.pdf

Secondly, our troops made an effort to pursue OBL and so did our intelligence services, but unfortunately he wasn't very cooperative and as we found out later it appears that the Pakistani military provided him with a safe haven in Abbattobad.

Would an invasion of Pakistan have satisfied you? To capture one man?

As I said, capturing/killing OBL had some value, but the notion that this would have meant the end of al Qaeda is spectacularly ignorant and delusional.

I agree, although the good in a war is not always clear at the beginning.

Bull.

The two-state solution has been U.S. policy since 1967 and the Palestinians have refused to accept it, which is their prerogative. They chose war and they chose poorly in my opinion.

 

That's absolute nonsense.

It's not a policy if it guides absolutely NOTHING we do.

In fact, by looking at what we do it becomes clear that our POLICY has been to support Israel in their humanitarian atrocities in Palestine.

We have not made ONE move in any other direction since Netanyahu tossed the Bush approach back in his face.

In fact, Obama caught hell from Republicans for not just having the USA bend over for every Netanyahu demand.

 

Former Rep. Ron Paul of Texas pushed for using letters of marque and reprisal to go after OBL in Afghanistan. That would have been a targeted operation. The rest of congress wrote a blank check with the AUMF instead. As Ron Paul says today: “How could the US war machine and all its allied profiteers make their billions if we didn’t put on a massive war?”

The comment about the AUMF has more to do with the fact that when we initiate war, we do not particularly worry about the justification.

In fact, the Taliban made 3 specific overtures to the USA concerning negotiating the handover of OBL to US forces before the war commenced. They were a new government and were enemies of OBL.

One of Rumsfeld's first moves was to combine these two enemies, the Taliban and OBL's people. In fact, it is claimed from more than one source that had Rumsfeld not done this he would have run out of bombing targets. And, there really wasn't any other reason to do so.

Rather than go after OBL, the US military focused on the Taliban. Gen. Mattis and 4,000 troops had OBL pinned down at Tora Bora, and requested permission to seal the Pakistan border. He was denied, which gave OBL an avenue to escape to Pakistan.

Basically, we used the broadly worded AUMF to conquer Afghanistan INSTEAD of going after OBL.


Of course, soon after that we abandoned our position in Afghanistan in order to move troops to help conquer Iraq!!! And, we had no excuse for THAT one, either.

Now YOU suggest maybe I'd have liked it if we tried to conquer Pakistan, too??? Seriously???

The major problem here is that we had NO MORTAL CLUE what the heck we were attempting to accomplish. We had NO plan. We IGNORED OBL, the only possible excuse for invasion. AND, we had the Project for a New American Century people populating our government from the VP on down, dead set on owning Iraq as a center for US military power in the ME - a purely military acquisition!


When we judge war, we have to include factors such as this that show up in these wars. We always make it sound like we have some well crafted focus that might be a justification for the wholesale slaughter and destruction of war.

Then, we just go stark raving NUTS.

 

No disagreements really. War is the ultimate competition and thus the ultimate driver of innovation. Just not sure its worth all the destruction... and certainly its not moral to make war just for the sake of competition.

 

We refused to sell Japan oil. They bombed us. War is a just response to war.

The Khmer Rouge were ethnically cleansing the Vietnamese people from within their borders. I think stopping that is a pretty good reason for war.

 

The native population, probably over 100,000,000 of them, had already been destroyed by de Soto's pigs much earlier.

 

Who do you think got?

 

IMO, war is still often a legitimate so long as their is a plan to achieve an unambiguous final victory.
Certainly whenever a nation is attacked a declaration of war is appropriate.

Rummel's research shows that war is not the most deadly threat to facing humanity.

 

An entrenched ruling political class will always tend to be very narrow minded and short sighted.
An informed public would never trust their judgement.

 

Yes... I did actually read your intriguing opening post a few days ago.....

I think of INFORMATION war as being pretty much my continual state which is one of the reasons why I justify working as a janitor after sunset on Friday evenings.....




4 And he saith unto them, Is it lawful to do good on the sabbath days, or to do evil? to save life, or to kill? But they held their peace.


http://www.drbo.org/chapter/45002.htm

 

My understanding of what you have claimed is that you believe the government got it.

But, I don't see any way for that to motivate war.

I proposed that the our gigantic private sector military industry benefits. And, they do have influence in government.

 

I like your first sentence.

It still does require a clear plan and an understanding of "final victory", of course. And, our action in Afghanistan clearly had neither. We also lacked one or both criteria in our actions (directly or indirectly) wrt Libya, the Balkans, Syria, West Bank, Iraq, and Vietnam.

After 911, the action part of the AUMF reads:

That doesn't even identify what nations of the world the president is free to conquer. It could be interpreted as authorizing action inside of Saudi Arabia, for example.

In the Balkans congress didn't have an opportunity to decide whether to declare war until 6 months after action had started. And, we all know about the mission creep that gave us Vietnam.

So, I like the principle in your first sentence, but I think it is extremely hard to follow in this modern world.

 

The Government spent the revenue. Do you know who got it?
Seems like we all should know. It was a lot of money.
Does the government still have CPS working for it?

 

I can't agree with that. I think the people have backed all our military actions.

In fact, our government has been responsive to the demands of the people to fight several these wars.

We blame Johnson for his Vietnam policy, but had he not chosen that direction he would have been far to unpopular to have any chance at election. The people WANTED that war at that time. Our leadership was responsive to that demand.

In the case of Iraq, some salesmanship was required. But, US citizens approved even that war.

I don't believe any president could have resisted the demands of the people to conquer Afghanistan after 911.

We the people are fine with supporting Israel's ongoing war against Palestine. Any idea that it is a humanitarian atrocity and clearly counter to every principle the USA stands for just does not resonate.

We the people WANT these wars. Besides, wars are FAR easier to sell than is diplomacy. We have NO ability to take the longer view. When we believe we are wronged, we demand that we do immediate damage.

 

I don't think we are supposed to worry our pretty little heads about it.
Will Rogers, a fairly neutral observer, explained everything. “Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.”

 

The people don't want them any more.

 

Well, giving power to any individual or group includes danger, obviously.

But, the catch with that particular statement is that we absolutely do need government, and our particular government provides us with the foundation for the stupendous standard of living that we enjoy.

 

Surely the last few years have once again pointed out the limits of military action as a solution.

I think this is more likely a temporary lull such as we experienced after Vietnam, another time when we learned the limits of military solutions.

I doubt we've built any lasting resistance to promoting war. We're still soundly behind Israel's war against Palestine - a war that is counter to every principle America stands for, a war with absolutely no objective other than ethnic cleansing and theft of land. A war where Israel will not even discuss a ceasefire, let alone negotiate an end.

I don't believe there is a way to argue that we've learned anything when we work to enable that war both politically and financially.

 

Tip of the iceberg that as many more old settlements show the larger population.

Good old lidar radar.

Count the native bodies, slaves of all colors, world wide and, ------- need I say more?

Christians and Canadians just recently apologised for residential schools, while the pedophile priests continue to pass the collect plate in the reserves.

Insane that.

Regards
DL

 

Project your thinking for me.

What would happen to us, as a hierarchical species, if we stopped competing?

Regards
DL

 

Total stagnation and probably eventually extinction.

But we can compete and advance without physically attacking eachother. Most of us can, anyway.

 

That is the traditional American take on government - that it is, at best, a necessary evil.
IMO, a government that somehow manages to expend $6.5 trillion on a war in Afghanistan should be considered intolerable.

 

That was my point. The population in the Americas was far larger before it was exposed to the plagues of the world.

"So many epidemics occurred in the Americas, Dobyns argued, that the old data used by Mooney and his successors represented population nadirs. From the few cases in which before-and-after totals are known with relative certainty, Dobyns estimated that in the first 130 years of contact about 95 percent of the people in the Americas died-the worst demographic calamity in recorded history."

"[O]n May 30, 1539, Hernando de Soto landed his private army
near Tampa Bay, in Florida. ... He came to Florida with 200 horses, 600 soldiers, and 300 pigs....

... Soto died of fever with his expedition in ruins; along the way his men had managed to rape, torture, enslave, and kill countless Indians. But the worst thing the Spaniards did, some researchers say, was entirely without malice-bring the pigs....

After Soto left, no Europeans visited this part of the Mississippi Valley for more than a century. Early in 1682 whites appeared again, this time Frenchmen in canoes. One of them was Rene-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle. The French passed through the area where Soto had found cities cheek by jowl. It was deserted-La Salle didn't see an Indian village for 200 miles. About fifty settlements existed in this strip of the Mississippi when Soto showed up, according to Anne Ramenofsky, an anthropologist at the University of New Mexico. By La Salle's time the number had shrunk to perhaps ten, some probably inhabited by recent immigrants. Soto "had a privileged glimpse" of an Indian world, Hudson says. "The window opened and slammed shut. When the French came in and the record opened up again, it was a transformed reality. A civilization crumbled. The question is, how did this happen?"

... Disaster of this magnitude suggests epidemic disease. In the view of Ramenofsky and Patricia Galloway, an anthropologist at the University of Texas, the source of the contagion was very likely not Soto's army but its ambulatory meat locker: his 300 pigs. Soto's force itself was too small to be an effective biological weapon. Sicknesses like measles and smallpox would have burned through his 600 soldiers long before they reached the Mississippi. But the same would not have held true for the pigs, which multiplied rapidly and were able to transmit their diseases to wildlife in the surrounding forest. ...The fact is that what scientists call zoonotic disease was little known in the Americas. Swine alone can disseminate anthrax, brucellosis, leptospirosis, taeniasis, trichinosis, and tuberculosis. Pigs breed exuberantly and can transmit diseases to deer and turkeys. Only a few of Soto's pigs would have had to wander off to infect the forest....

"That's one reason whites think of Indians as nomadic hunters," says Russell Thornton, an anthropologist at the University of California at Los Angeles. "Everything else-all the heavily populated urbanized societies-was wiped out."...

One reason is that Indians were fresh territory for many plagues, not just one. Smallpox, typhoid, bubonic plague, influenza, mumps, measles, whooping cough-all rained down on the Americas in the century after Columbus. ... In Indian New England, Neal Salisbury, a historian at Smith College, wrote in Manitou and Providence (1982), family and friends gathered with the shaman at the sufferer's bedside to wait out the illness-a practice that "could only have served to spread the disease more rapidly." ...

In 1966 Dobyns's insistence on the role of disease was a shock to his colleagues. Today the impact of European pathogens on the New World is almost undisputed. ...

To Elizabeth Fenn, the smallpox historian, the squabble over numbers obscures a central fact. Whether one million or 10 million or 100 million died, she believes, the pall of sorrow that engulfed the hemisphere was immeasurable. Languages, prayers, hopes, habits, and dreams-entire ways of life hissed away like steam. The Spanish and the Portuguese lacked the germ theory of disease and could not explain what was happening (let alone stop it). Nor can we explain it; the ruin was too long ago and too all-encompassing. In the long run, Fenn says, the consequential finding is not that many people died but that many people once lived."
Charles C. Mann, "1491," Atlantic Monthly, March 2002.

Slavery and warfare were not nearly as lethal as de Soto's pigs.

Only the systemic evil institutions of the modern industrial nation states have been able to exterminate as many human being.