The troops are not 'heroes'

[Overtaken]

They are not heroes, they are not defending anyone's freedom, and I do not universally, or even majorly, 'support' them.

So for those of you who want to tempt the US government to reinstate the sedition act, pile on in! Get cozy!

I'm only joking. As we know, afterall, the power of the corporate media to essentially create and lead a societal black-mail against anyone who opposes Big Brother, renders crude laws rather needless.

I cannot even watch the 'progressive' main-stream media, such as the Daily Show, without constant demand to basically worship the military, as though I ought to be grovelling at their feet for being so benevolent as to allow me to live. You'll lose your job, and probably receive (so appropriately) death-threats from 'freedom-loving patriots' for stating, on air, that you so much as 'hesitate' to call fallen American soldiers 'heroes'. The social pressure to conform, to accept without scrutiny, the righteousness of American foreign policy and especially the troops, is absolutely unreal, and I have a theory as to why this is.

For all intents and purposes, post-WWI America is essentially an alternative sort of nationalist state. Similar to Nazi Germany in a number of ways, such as the expectancy of compliance and acceptance of the power-structure's demands and decisions. There is no fundamental sense of skepticism ingrained in our psyche, rather a sense of retaliation and incredible embarrassment for daring to question the motives and ethical merits of the military and its decisions. There is immense social-value of the 'state', and all of its symbols, the flag, the uniform, etc. There is also an ever-present, never understood, dehumanized, abstract 'enemy', always lurking in the shadows, threatening to do immeasurable harm to anyone and at any time.

But it's different in some very key ways at the same time. the American system of manipulating and subjecting its own citizens is really remarkably nuanced and quite brilliant. In the less sophisticated and planned-out nationalist states like Nazi Germany, there was always an overly bearing demand on the citizens and even the soldiers to lower themselves beneath the state or 'nation'. It's effective as long as you can convince the population that there is an immediate or currently present threat, but it cannot sustain itself in-between those breaks in warfare and territory expansion. What we did in the US is actually convince ourselves quite thoroughly that it is indeed the citizens and the soldier who are above all else. 'Nation' in our context will only ever mean either "the government", which in a brilliant move convinces us is some loathsome bureaucracy, a veritable paper-mache pariah to absorb all internal conflict and blame, so easily, all the while maintaining perfect incumbency through the devilishly subversive illusion of power given to us through the two-party system, or, it will refer to abstract, symbolic artifacts that are constantly attributed to the mythology of our national identity; "Freedom", "God's favor", "Democracy", "Righteousness", etc. We have to contrive of some notion of how we are not only fundamentally different from other people, but actually superior.

But this leads me back to the topic at hand. This is a package of 21st century fascism, wrapped up in a star spangled banner and nothing cushions and secures it from challenge of its authority better than equating such a challenge to defaming and delegitimizing the 'patriot soldier heroes'. We now have no choice but to accept these outrageous wars (or to call them what they truly are: colonial conquests) because we would have to transitively accept that your brother, your friend, your child, whomever it may be that is in the military, are murders, mercenaries. The ensuing cognitive dissonance will quickly and decidedly favor the idea that you, your family and neighbors cannot have been responsible for doing something wrong, and will passively accept that the entire effort therefor cannot be wrong. The government and the corporations that own it have very discretely placed the face and sponsorship for warfare on us, where historically is was too easy for a disillusioned population to reject a fascist government by placing the blame for unethical war on it.

I simply can't fathom what goes through the minds of the anti-war 'left' or 'progressives' in this country when they speak against the Iraq war, for example, and recognize that it is clearly an unjustified act, yet simultaneously fall into the same pit, that the one sacred pit that no one may ever, ever violate, and dare believe, let alone speak it out-loud, that the people executing the unjustified acts of mass murder and invasion, might be anything less than demi-god supermen heroes and benevolent protectors of all things good in the universe. And it's because the burden has been shoved unto us, and we do deserve that burden in a lot of ways, that we cannot accept the wrongness of our foreign wars once they've been initiated.

So, to conclude in short, despite what we are constantly told, it's simply not the case that any soldier, anywhere in this world right now, is "fighting for" or "defending" anyone's freedom, whether they earnestly believe that they are or not. In fact, their jingoist protection and loyalty to our own government is the only thing that is in any unambiguous way actually a threat to our freedoms, and the assault began long even before the "patriot act". And so, I refuse to 'support' our troops. They tell me I should then leave the country, to which I say this country belongs to those of us who respect critical-democracy and peace, and that it is they who should be leaving if anyone.

So that's my thesis, and there is a lot more that could be said but I'll see where others want to take it (assuming anyone does). I do present this as topic of open-minded, constructive and respectful debate, I really don't expect a shortage of people who would disagree with me on this, or else I really am crazy. So what do you all think? Am I just nutty conspiracy theorist? Full of s*** and trying to be 'edgey'? Or do you agree that we are psychologically strong-armed into complacency by the industrial war complex?

 

[#HBC | Acrostic]

For people who missed out on the Patriot Act, they got another dose of it with PRISM. You're addressing the aftermath of the incarceration and the sought after incarceration of two whistle blowers who revealed national secrets that smeared the reputation of the country.

 

[Thor]

So that's my thesis, and there is a lot more that could be said but I'll see where others want to take it (assuming anyone does). I do present this as topic of open-minded, constructive and respectful debate, I really don't expect a shortage of people who would disagree with me on this, or else I really am crazy. So what do you all think? Am I just nutty conspiracy theorist? Full of s*** and trying to be 'edgey'? Or do you agree that we are psychologically strong-armed into complacency by the industrial war complex?

Based on the flaming rhetoric you use, this debate is far from presented as "open-minded, constructive, and respectful" - it much more approximates ad-homs, "I'm right you're wrong and stupid" and epistemological claims as an attempt to automatically debunk counter-arguments, which is the opposite of open-minded, constructive, and respectful.

Knowing that, I enter in here anyway...

Making heroes of the dead is non uniquely American, contrary to what you've said, it's simply human - Churchill has said that "never was so much owed to so many by so few", people "remembered the Alamo" when they annexed Texas, and most notably, those who violently oppose America (Al-Qaeda, among others) not only call their dead martyrs (the term for someone who died as a huge sacrifice and it was honorable/worth it/whatever), they incentivize it by using their religion as a basis to promise riches to the dead and paradise (and these claims are logically dubious - if you are to transcend to a higher plane, why do you need earthly stuff???), which adds to their ranks and commits the fallacy you claim to so grossly detest in America. Do you hate this sentiment everywhere? If so, do you even believe in the possibility of it changing?

I also submit Eric Erickson's contribution to psychology - he postulated that the final conflict in life was integrity versus despair - did I live my life in a way that I made a difference, that I meant something? If we choose to disdain those who died, we rob any sense of meaning from that person's life and the family that survives them, and the idea that the life of someone who claimed they cared (regardless of if they were brainwashed or not, I'll get to that later) dying for no reason is fundamentally at odds with we order the world - we like to think there was meaning in death - I think that's why people valorize death of soldiers all over the world.

I cannot even watch the 'progressive' main-stream media, such as the Daily Show, without constant demand to basically worship the military, as though I ought to be grovelling at their feet for being so benevolent as to allow me to live. You'll lose your job, and probably receive (so appropriately) death-threats from 'freedom-loving patriots' for stating, on air, that you so much as 'hesitate' to call fallen American soldiers 'heroes'. The social pressure to conform, to accept without scrutiny, the righteousness of American foreign policy and especially the troops, is absolutely unreal, and I have a theory as to why this is.

Re-election strategy. Also, you want to be person to be told that your spouse/brother is a murderer, because they cared? So they were brainwashed? The fact that, under their brainwashing, they cared enough to try to do the right thing as they knew it, is something to honor.

Also, there's plenty of anti-war sentiment, especially around Afghanistan (or was - most troops are out) - maybe you're watching the wrong news-stations, but many have attacked the war - we don't attack the soldiers though because it's the politicians on top, not the men on the front lines, who are at fault for whatever wars you've decided are unjust occur - we honor their ability to try to follow orders because of the officials we have elected saying it is in the US's best interests, regardless of if it is a good thing or not. You're attacking the pawns for the errors of the king, which strikes me as fundamentally unfair.

I'm trying to communicate something else but I can't seem to word it - I might add it in later.

For all intents and purposes, post-WWI America is essentially an alternative sort of nationalist state. Similar to Nazi Germany in a number of ways, such as the expectancy of compliance and acceptance of the power-structure's demands and decisions. There is no fundamental sense of skepticism ingrained in our psyche, rather a sense of retaliation and incredible embarrassment for daring to question the motives and ethical merits of the military and its decisions. There is immense social-value of the 'state', and all of its symbols, the flag, the uniform, etc. There is also an ever-present, never understood, dehumanized, abstract 'enemy', always lurking in the shadows, threatening to do immeasurable harm to anyone and at any time.

But it's different in some very key ways at the same time. the American system of manipulating and subjecting its own citizens is really remarkably nuanced and quite brilliant. In the less sophisticated and planned-out nationalist states like Nazi Germany, there was always an overly bearing demand on the citizens and even the soldiers to lower themselves beneath the state or 'nation'. It's effective as long as you can convince the population that there is an immediate or currently present threat, but it cannot sustain itself in-between those breaks in warfare and territory expansion. What we did in the US is actually convince ourselves quite thoroughly that it is indeed the citizens and the soldier who are above all else. 'Nation' in our context will only ever mean either "the government", which in a brilliant move convinces us is some loathsome bureaucracy, a veritable paper-mache pariah to absorb all internal conflict and blame, so easily, all the while maintaining perfect incumbency through the devilishly subversive illusion of power given to us through the two-party system, or, it will refer to abstract, symbolic artifacts that are constantly attributed to the mythology of our national identity; "Freedom", "God's favor", "Democracy", "Righteousness", etc. We have to contrive of some notion of how we are not only fundamentally different from other people, but actually superior.

First, this thread, and especially Godwin's Law: http://smashboards.com/threads/referencing-hitler-in-arguments.354264/

And no: We don't rob rights of citizens, we try to advance equality (VAWA, minimum wage is arguably so, I could go on but it's not important). We don't accept the power-structure's demands and decisions - there's been record lows of dissatisfaction with Congress/the President and how the country's been run - and the fact that we have had people on various parts of the political aisle demanding that the military not intervene in Syria/Ukraine/Libya/Afghanistan again/etc. shows that we have a serious skepticism of the military - maybe you live in a house where the military is valorized, but it's certainly not mainstream America. People honor the flag and so on because they seek community, but American is actually highly individualized relative to other countries, where honor of the family (and the country) comes first - the faith that used to be omnipresent in the CCP is one example (you want to see a real nationalist state? look at North Korea). You've wildly exaggerated reality to make a point. And again, we don't question the men and women directly in the military because they aren't making these decisions, they just believed they could best help other people by joining - is that something we should refuse to honor, the desire to help the people they care about?

The enemy was Al-Qaeda, and we understood they wanted to kill us because we didn't fit with their religion and we had some past errors - your last statement has been much more true post-9/11 and after the fall of communism than prior, and communism was rather well-understood and people knew Russia had weapons and so on. I also don't know how much we actually dehumanize them as much as apply our standards and find they don't fit - the analysis I do above about how they valorize their dead suggests they are willing to die if they can kill enough and therefore dangerous because we don't have a way to dissuade them. Look at some mass shootings, do we look hard to humanize the Aurora shooters, the men of Columbine and Virginia Tech? These are people looking to commit similar acts, and we treat them as such.

And you say they're not a threat, but we've already lost about 3000 in a day - given that they have proven they will find the means to attack, do you say we should sit back? It's possible we let fear overtake us a bit, but this sort of turns into a debate about how we view IR, and whether threat construction actually works or not, or if the threats are real or not, and while I can cite sources and go there, I'm not sure that's what you had in mind when making this thread.

Ethno-centrism - it's the word that describes WHY the belief in superiority occurs. Our belief in superiority is natural (look to those whom we view as inferior - they view us as "infidels," or whatever), because everyone is raised to believe that what they know is right. When we look elsewhere, and see for instance, honor killings, the natural response is disgust and a belief that they are backwards. Coupled with the American belief that everyone should have a chance to get ahead, and seeing women held down, America wants to intervene. If we dump our ethnocentrism, though, do we get rid of our ethics? What systems are okay? You backlash against ethno-centrism, but would you prefer a world in which America refused to intervene ever because we can't think our morals are superior? Does that mean we refuse to try to change societies where women can be ***** and married and that's not crime is okay? Where honor killings are the norm? Where X color of people are whipped and made to be slaves? Where X minority ahs a genocide inflicted on them? If you said we shouldn't try to change any of that, you just attempted to impose your ethics on another group, exactly as the US military currently does, which means you've taken your beliefs to mean that your actions are superior - in effect you've become quite the hypocrite. If you've said no, keep in mind then, that you may be on the receiving end of this someday if society changes, but that other countries shouldn't intervene because it's not their place to assert their belief and ethics are right - that would just be more ethno-centrism and exceptionalism.

But this leads me back to the topic at hand. This is a package of 21st century fascism, wrapped up in a star spangled banner and nothing cushions and secures it from challenge of its authority better than equating such a challenge to defaming and delegitimizing the 'patriot soldier heroes'. We now have no choice but to accept these outrageous wars (or to call them what they truly are: colonial conquests) because we would have to transitively accept that your brother, your friend, your child, whomever it may be that is in the military, are murders, mercenaries. The ensuing cognitive dissonance will quickly and decidedly favor the idea that you, your family and neighbors cannot have been responsible for doing something wrong, and will passively accept that the entire effort therefor cannot be wrong. The government and the corporations that own it have very discretely placed the face and sponsorship for warfare on us, where historically is was too easy for a disillusioned population to reject a fascist government by placing the blame for unethical war on it.

I don't take issue with delegitimatizing the military, I take issue with delegitimatizing those who believed they were doing the right thing, sent out with the mission to protect people. If they were sent out with the mission "kill these people who will not try to harm us back" then I could see where you're coming from - that's not the case though. Colonial conquests? Is that what Syria was? Trying to establish a government where the minority wouldn't suppress the majority or be suppressed is a colonial conquest? I disagree - we didn't try to set up colonies or steal resources, we tried to make sure we had access to those resource (Where we pay for them at market value) and that those areas wouldn't be a threat - colonialism was never because Native Americans were a threat, it was because we wanted to exploit what we had and leave them worse off - ethno-centrism meant we tried to leave them with fewer drugs and a government where people would have a say.

And there are soldiers who come back from the war and don't re-enter the military because they feel that what they did was wrong and/or that they shouldn't have survived - many ultimately suffer from PTSD because they just feel they are murderers who deserve to die, and you've conveniently marginalized them to make an argument. Again, there are those who said we never should have started the war, that it was wrong from the beginning; and how can you NOT expect them to place the blame on the government, when they tried and failed to stop said government from deploying troops?

I simply can't fathom what goes through the minds of the anti-war 'left' or 'progressives' in this country when they speak against the Iraq war, for example, and recognize that it is clearly an unjustified act, yet simultaneously fall into the same pit, that the one sacred pit that no one may ever, ever violate, and dare believe, let alone speak it out-loud, that the people executing the unjustified acts of mass murder and invasion, might be anything less than demi-god supermen heroes and benevolent protectors of all things good in the universe. And it's because the burden has been shoved unto us, and we do deserve that burden in a lot of ways, that we cannot accept the wrongness of our foreign wars once they've been initiated.

It goes through their mind "I want to be re-elected" and also "They may have been wrong, but their hearts were in the right place" in some mixture. You'd condemn those with good intentions because what they did was ultimately labeled wrong by you/others - that's an elitist position of "I know what's right and anyone who falls outside it, regardless of what they intended to do, is wrong and should be viewed as evil." Yet ironically, you judge yourself by your own intentions, not your own actions, which are to harshly punish those who mess up despite trying to do the best for those they care about - should you be punished with manslaughter for trying to reduce the pain of a man who asked for some painkillers if you accidentally give him a little too much when he asked for as much as you gave? A good Samaritan law would protect you, but no such law protects these troops from your scorn...

So, to conclude in short, despite what we are constantly told, it's simply not the case that any soldier, anywhere in this world right now, is "fighting for" or "defending" anyone's freedom, whether they earnestly believe that they are or not. In fact, their jingoist protection and loyalty to our own government is the only thing that is in any unambiguous way actually a threat to our freedoms, and the assault began long even before the "patriot act". And so, I refuse to 'support' our troops. They tell me I should then leave the country, to which I say this country belongs to those of us who respect critical-democracy and peace, and that it is they who should be leaving if anyone.

I fail to understand how loyalty is a threat to freedom. There is also a vast, well-protected commitment to free speech that will undermine these imagined efforts to cut off freedoms. "This country belongs to those of us who respect critical-democracy and peace"? No? There are many many ignorant people in this country (I'd swear the right to remain stupid is written in invisible ink somewhere on the Bill of Rights), and there are people out there, like it or not, who would love to murder as many Americans as they can (some groups want nuclear weapons to use against the US or Israel - does Hezbollah ring a bell?) - peace is not the absence of war, but rather a determined commitment to peace, and when there are people determined to shatter the peace, you must be willing to be dominated or fight to let those you defend live in peace - those who were around the Anschluss in the 1940s learned that the hard way. Those in the military know this as well, so they are sent to place that are viewed by officials as a threat to peace on home soil to try to restore order.

They, then, are the ones who truly respect peace, and understand the costs of peace, and belong here far more than someone who refuses to acknowledge geopolitical realities does. That's why I support the troops while questioning whether the military as a whole should be in various places in the world (and for the most part, it probably doesn't belong in those areas). The men and women in the military, judged on their intentions, are nothing short of heroes - that's why America praises them. Human error exists, but if you want to believe only actions matter and that people should be perfect or punished and ridiculed, then fine, keep refusing to support or appreciate American soldiers.

EDIT: I wrote this over the course of 90 minutes, and it's late at night so I didn't reread all of it as I should - sorry if it's kind of a mess.

 

[#HBC | Acrostic]

EDIT: I wrote this over the course of 90 minutes, and it's late at night so I didn't reread all of it as I should - sorry if it's kind of a mess.

Wow. Nerd.

 

[Theftz22]

LOL. I've had my share of 90 min DH posts. Usually involved trying to explain something to Alt F4.

 

[~ Gheb ~]

Making heroes of the dead is non uniquely American, contrary to what you've said, it's simply human - Churchill has said that "never was so much owed to so many by so few", people "remembered the Alamo" when they annexed Texas, and most notably, those who violently oppose America (Al-Qaeda, among others) not only call their dead martyrs (the term for someone who died as a huge sacrifice and it was honorable/worth it/whatever), they incentivize it by using their religion as a basis to promise riches to the dead and paradise (and these claims are logically dubious - if you are to transcend to a higher plane, why do you need earthly stuff???), which adds to their ranks and commits the fallacy you claim to so grossly detest in America.

As far as I can see, Overtaken's point is that the nationalism-based idea behind the worshipping of the troops - fallen or not - has a number of undeniable similarities to fascist ideologies. You're aware that by making a comparison with Al-Qaeda you support his argument more than you oppose it, right?

 

[Overtaken]

Based on the flaming rhetoric you use, this debate is far from presented as "open-minded, constructive, and respectful" - it much more approximates ad-homs, "I'm right you're wrong and stupid" and epistemological claims as an attempt to automatically debunk counter-arguments, which is the opposite of open-minded, constructive, and respectful.

Knowing that, I enter in here anyway...

Making heroes of the dead is non uniquely American, contrary to what you've said, it's simply human - Churchill has said that "never was so much owed to so many by so few", people "remembered the Alamo" when they annexed Texas, and most notably, those who violently oppose America (Al-Qaeda, among others) not only call their dead martyrs (the term for someone who died as a huge sacrifice and it was honorable/worth it/whatever), they incentivize it by using their religion as a basis to promise riches to the dead and paradise (and these claims are logically dubious - if you are to transcend to a higher plane, why do you need earthly stuff???), which adds to their ranks and commits the fallacy you claim to so grossly detest in America. Do you hate this sentiment everywhere? If so, do you even believe in the possibility of it changing?

Of course I 'hate' this sentiment everywhere. And I do absolutely agree that it is not uniquely American, not the broader patterns and ideas at least. It's actually precisely my point. America is not so fundamentally different from Al-Qaeda. But again, it's not quite something we are allowed to say, is it?

I also submit Eric Erickson's contribution to psychology - he postulated that the final conflict in life was integrity versus despair - did I live my life in a way that I made a difference, that I meant something? If we choose to disdain those who died, we rob any sense of meaning from that person's life and the family that survives them, and the idea that the life of someone who claimed they cared (regardless of if they were brainwashed or not, I'll get to that later) dying for no reason is fundamentally at odds with we order the world - we like to think there was meaning in death - I think that's why people valorize death of soldiers all over the world.

Also not something I disagree with. That is definitely a large part of what motives people's actions throughout their whole adult lives arguably. But that doesn't excuse wrong-doing, it doesn't exonerate it or make it something to respect. Remember, most of the soldiers who have fought in Iraq and Afghanistan are still alive. What I'm arguing is that they are the morally vincible executors of an unjustified war, and should not be in life or death, treated as 'heroes' or as people who have 'defended my freedom' when they've only ever endangered my freedom for playing their role.

Re-election strategy. Also, you want to be person to be told that your spouse/brother is a murderer, because they cared? So they were brainwashed? The fact that, under their brainwashing, they cared enough to try to do the right thing as they knew it, is something to honor.

"Brain-washed" is a word I try to avoid these days. Yes, on the one hand there is this undeniably powerful force of psychological and social pressure and control being implemented by the power-structure, its media, its schools, etc. But none of that erases fundamental autonomy and the responsibility for critical thought when doing something that you know will result in killing other people (such as volunteering to join the army). Just because someone, in their refusal to seek perfectly free and available resources on history and ethics, believes that what they are doing is right despite the fact that history and logic can't even remotely support such a proposition, doesn't make it ok. No sooner anyway than the 9/11 hijackers should be absolved from their crimes, much less honored, because what they believed they were doing was right; they were told after-all that it was right, that it would ultimately liberate the entire region from the tyranny of the west and Israel, that Allah condoned it, etc.

Also, there's plenty of anti-war sentiment, especially around Afghanistan (or was - most troops are out) - maybe you're watching the wrong news-stations, but many have attacked the war - we don't attack the soldiers though because it's the politicians on top, not the men on the front lines, who are at fault for whatever wars you've decided are unjust occur - we honor their ability to try to follow orders because of the officials we have elected saying it is in the US's best interests, regardless of if it is a good thing or not. You're attacking the pawns for the errors of the king, which strikes me as fundamentally unfair.

Even officially, the primary directive of an American soldier is the Constitution, protecting it and upholding it. Soldiers are also forbidden from obeying illegal orders. I would take this one step further and say that they are ethically and morally obligated to disobey orders that are simply wrong, as opposed to merely illegal. History also takes this view, as soldiers from American military courts to the Nuremberg Trials have been consistently unsuccessful in using the "I was just following orders" defense in court. I would (or do) actually hold a tremendous amount of respect for soldiers who do and have disobeyed immoral orders, even at personal loss if they couldn't argue the order was strictly illegal but was however immoral.

So basically, the King is responsible for his role in an immoral or unjustified act, unquestioningly, but so too are the pawns. They are also moral agents all the same. They don't get the luxury of a free-pass just because someone in a position of 'authority' told them to do something wrong. If the threat against them for disobedience is some prison time, or a dishonorable discharge, and the moral cost of obeying the order is the lives of innocent people, then it is clear that the right thing to do is disobey. I could understand if you had no choice because you were drafted and the threat against you for disobedience is death, that's a less unambiguous situation. But say you're told to send a drone to strike a village where it will absolutely kill innocent people but there is some vague possibility passed down from intelligence that a belligerent target is hiding there. You don't get the free-pass to press the button just because you told to.

First, this thread, and especially Godwin's Law: http://smashboards.com/threads/referencing-hitler-in-arguments.354264/

Well I never mentioned Hitler, but ok enough I did of course reference Nazi Germany. The reason I did so is because they are analogous as a nationalist state, and there aren't many widely recognizable examples. But this really speaks to something greater. It shows just how effective American propaganda is at dehumanizing its targets, its enemies. Think about how in truth, Nazi Germany was a industrial-era country fettered by war, had to make some complex decisions, went primarily with authoritarianism, experienced some racism and used minorities as a scape-goat for their ails, violated some peoples rights, killed others because they honestly believed it was justified, that they were defending themselves from some foreign infiltration conspiracy. Its a fascinating story with a lot of parellels to human history, and in this context American history in particular. But what has all of this been reduced to? OMG HITLER HOLOCAUST EVIL!

That's it. That's all Nazi Germany is. A holocaust that in all likeliness was exaggerated by the winning countries (ok that's definitely a conversation for another thread). But the real struggles and problems that faced them as human beings, their treatment after Versailles, the poverty brought forth in the Wiemar Republic, it means nothing. They're just evil, mass murders. Surely they killed 6 million Jews, 6 million sounds like a good and obscene number, just because they are racists and loved killing people who weren't Aryan masters. Simple as that. But when we imprison people of a particular ethnicity, they are internment camps, when they do it, concentration camps. When we commit mass-murder, well s*** we were doing them a favor don't you know?, but their atrocities are holocausts and genocides. We can all celebrate pornographic deceptions of a Jewish man rather indiscriminately caving German soldiers heads in with a bat (I do love Tarantino still) which is a testament to just how powerful the system is at convincing us to reduce our perception of another group of people, every bit as complex and human as we are, to some demonic effigy. And thus, it's so out of bounds to compare another completely comparable culture is similar circumstances, in the same conflict no less, because it's somehow impossible to understand Nazi Germany or Hitler as anything but a virulent emotional prod.

And no: We don't rob rights of citizens, we try to advance equality (VAWA, minimum wage is arguably so, I could go on but it's not important). We don't accept the power-structure's demands and decisions - there's been record lows of dissatisfaction with Congress/the President and how the country's been run - and the fact that we have had people on various parts of the political aisle demanding that the military not intervene in Syria/Ukraine/Libya/Afghanistan again/etc. shows that we have a serious skepticism of the military - maybe you live in a house where the military is valorized, but it's certainly not mainstream America. People honor the flag and so on because they seek community, but American is actually highly individualized relative to other countries, where honor of the family (and the country) comes first - the faith that used to be omnipresent in the CCP is one example (you want to see a real nationalist state? look at North Korea). You've wildly exaggerated reality to make a point. And again, we don't question the men and women directly in the military because they aren't making these decisions, they just believed they could best help other people by joining - is that something we should refuse to honor, the desire to help the people they care about?

I disagree. I would argue you are white-washing our culture and system to sound just as they want us to believe it is. This whole country is based upon this pretext that we are in control, that it's a democracy and we are just a bunch of free-thinking spirits collaborating to do what's right. It's not. Take redistricting practices, corporate lobbying and the commercial media's incessant assault (or just ignorance) of third party and independent politicians and ballot requirements as a few major examples of how systemically rigged against us it all is. And that's without even getting into the propaganda and cultural pressure they fabricate to manipulate us. Yes, North Korea indeed has been more successful in that in-and-of itself, but they have also sacrificed a tremendous amount of international power and resources in doing so. The American system secures the incumbency of the corporate power in a much more sophisticated, subliminal sort of way that allows for it to expand unchallenged. And yes, there will always be some people who will vocally challenge the system, but it is designed so that we are always in the minority, or that even when we are not that our will as a democracy will be ignored and no retaliation will ever come of it.

The enemy was Al-Qaeda, and we understood they wanted to kill us because we didn't fit with their religion and we had some past errors - your last statement has been much more true post-9/11 and after the fall of communism than prior, and communism was rather well-understood and people knew Russia had weapons and so on. I also don't know how much we actually dehumanize them as much as apply our standards and find they don't fit - the analysis I do above about how they valorize their dead suggests they are willing to die if they can kill enough and therefore dangerous because we don't have a way to dissuade them. Look at some mass shootings, do we look hard to humanize the Aurora shooters, the men of Columbine and Virginia Tech? These are people looking to commit similar acts, and we treat them as such.

We ought to be humanizing them. It does no one any good when we fail to do so, and makes us no better than they are when they failed to humanize their victims.

And you say they're not a threat, but we've already lost about 3000 in a day - given that they have proven they will find the means to attack, do you say we should sit back?

Correct, they are not a threat. The motive they had to attack us had nothing to do with us not being Muslim or they should have attacked India for example, a larger country who has a much longer history of major, system abuses of its Muslim minorities. They attacked us because we have been occupying their territory against their will (and indeed their holy land) for the last 40 years or more, support a country that we forced into the region after WW2 who continuously annex territory from them and kill people in their settlements with weapons we are supplying, we prop up puppet regimes who in turn oppress their people just because it suits our economic and military interests. Then on top of that, we have "insurgents", a funny name for people who simply defending their country from a foreign invader, in two countries that never attacked us. They have a right to be just a little upset with the US, not to say the response of killing 3,000 innocent people was justified but they felt it was their only option. They felt they needed to incite a war where Muslim countries would unite with them against western oppression and meddling in their region. It didn't work obviously, was callous and stupid, but the point is it's a lot more complex than the government and media would have us believe. We need to remove ourselves from these countries wherein we are not welcome, and deny the 'military industrial complex' the influence and often straight-forward control of our government. Their interests are not our interests or humanity's interests. Second, when wrong is done we need to deal with it appropriately. Covert operations were called-for when taking on some country-less, mobile terrorist cell, not a full-scale conventional invasion. But the latter makes for a whole lot greater manufacturing contracts, doesn't it?

And let's not forget that the Bush administration deliberately neglected intelligence warnings specifically mentioning plane hijackings and using them to suicide bomb targets such as the pentagon or the WTC. Would it even remotely shock you that they would have 'oops accidentally misplaced that memo wink-wink' in order to secure a pretext for a war and contract bids with these corporations that funded their campaigns?

So no, not a threat. Al-Qaeda never took away my rights to due process of the law or privacy, the US government did, the very one whose power is assured by the blind obedience of the public and particularly the servicemen and women in the military.

It's possible we let fear overtake us a bit,

That's an understatement. With all of those ridiculous threat level warnings and being literally told by our president that we didn't have time to blink in making the decision to invade another country, do you think we were overtaken by fear just a little bit?

but this sort of turns into a debate about how we view IR, and whether threat construction actually works or not, or if the threats are real or not, and while I can cite sources and go there, I'm not sure that's what you had in mind when making this thread.

Ethno-centrism - it's the word that describes WHY the belief in superiority occurs. Our belief in superiority is natural (look to those whom we view as inferior - they view us as "infidels," or whatever), because everyone is raised to believe that what they know is right. When we look elsewhere, and see for instance, honor killings, the natural response is disgust and a belief that they are backwards. Coupled with the American belief that everyone should have a chance to get ahead, and seeing women held down, America wants to intervene. If we dump our ethnocentrism, though, do we get rid of our ethics? What systems are okay? You backlash against ethno-centrism, but would you prefer a world in which America refused to intervene ever because we can't think our morals are superior? Does that mean we refuse to try to change societies where women can be ***** and married and that's not crime is okay? Where honor killings are the norm? Where X color of people are whipped and made to be slaves? Where X minority ahs a genocide inflicted on them? If you said we shouldn't try to change any of that, you just attempted to impose your ethics on another group, exactly as the US military currently does, which means you've taken your beliefs to mean that your actions are superior - in effect you've become quite the hypocrite. If you've said no, keep in mind then, that you may be on the receiving end of this someday if society changes, but that other countries shouldn't intervene because it's not their place to assert their belief and ethics are right - that would just be more ethno-centrism and exceptionalism.

Natural? That's debatable. I don't see how it's natural to take the worst and most extreme examples of a culture, and compare them to the most idealized and seldom true examples of ours to make us feel superior unless we have some natural desire to exploit other people for profit. The people who rise to power in these "tribes" we call countries do, and they have been abundantly efficacious in manipulating people against their better judgment to feel superior, therefor justified, in committing acts of aggression against some other group.

I don't take issue with delegitimatizing the military, I take issue with delegitimatizing those who believed they were doing the right thing, sent out with the mission to protect people. If they were sent out with the mission "kill these people who will not try to harm us back" then I could see where you're coming from - that's not the case though. Colonial conquests? Is that what Syria was? Trying to establish a government where the minority wouldn't suppress the majority or be suppressed is a colonial conquest? I disagree - we didn't try to set up colonies or steal resources, we tried to make sure we had access to those resource (Where we pay for them at market value) and that those areas wouldn't be a threat - colonialism was never because Native Americans were a threat, it was because we wanted to exploit what we had and leave them worse off - ethno-centrism meant we tried to leave them with fewer drugs and a government where people would have a say.

Oh the puppet theater show going on in Iraq was a red herring. The point wasn't to steal resources from them, it was to steal resources from the American public through these asinine, over-bloated contracts. Look how they try to hide it from us too, they won't even consider it a part of the budget, even though it is, because it's something we are f****** paying for. The "defense department" spending (If you're going to literally start using Orwell as a model for creating a subversive, manipulative oligarchy, why not just use the name "Ministry of Peace"?) accounts for more than 50% of the total actual spending each year since 2002 or 2003 I do believe.We now infamously have a larger army than the rest of the world combined.

And you could certainly argue that they were fulfilling their end of the bribery from the oil lobbies too, just simply by creating a war in that region, creating uncertainty and instability on the market for certain M.E. oil companies, they had bolstered the shares, and thus profit, of the western oil producers. Including the one our president of the time owned personally.

And there are soldiers who come back from the war and don't re-enter the military because they feel that what they did was wrong and/or that they shouldn't have survived - many ultimately suffer from PTSD because they just feel they are murderers who deserve to die, and you've conveniently marginalized them to make an argument.

They deserve those feelings if they are true. I wouldn't dehumanize them but neither would I pity them. They are agents of murder and are responsible for the role they chose to play. Granted, I believe PTSD is a tad more complicated and involved than people just feeling really guilty.

Again, there are those who said we never should have started the war, that it was wrong from the beginning; and how can you NOT expect them to place the blame on the government, when they tried and failed to stop said government from deploying troops?

Well I mostly addressed this earlier in this post, but I'll add this: We need to recognize that of course, the government and corporate officials who collude to make these unethical and illegal decisions are responsible for what they have done and need to be held accountable, but we have to also recognize that the military 'pawns' as you called them are able and obligated to make their own decisions, and when something as wrong as this is being ordered, as extreme as large scale loss of innocent life and indeed endangerment of their own life, for no excusable end besides concentrating wealth and power, then it's their responsibility to refuse. They are more than just complacent, they are active participants, accessories at a minimum. Especially in a country where military service is voluntary, and the Army hasn't been involved in conducting a legitimate war since before WWI, they may have even been so keen to have never joined in the first place. At least not army combat divisions. A lot of Navy divisions, and the National Guard, perfectly acceptable. My uncle in fact is a SEAL underwater constructor, he went to Japan after the tsunami to help rebuild underwater infrastructure. Perfectly lovely and honorable job. But that's sadly such a minority of the positions and roles of the military.

It goes through their mind "I want to be re-elected" and also "They may have been wrong, but their hearts were in the right place" in some mixture. You'd condemn those with good intentions because what they did was ultimately labeled wrong by you/others - that's an elitist position of "I know what's right and anyone who falls outside it, regardless of what they intended to do, is wrong and should be viewed as evil."

No, it's a position of not just demanding people be held responsible for their crimes, but even having to reject the notion that these criminals are worthy of honor. How much respect for Manson and McVeigh would you have if you knew that in their hearts they thought they were doing what was 'right'? And as the old adage goes, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions."

Yet ironically, you judge yourself by your own intentions, not your own actions, which are to harshly punish those who mess up despite trying to do the best for those they care about - should you be punished with manslaughter for trying to reduce the pain of a man who asked for some painkillers if you accidentally give him a little too much when he asked for as much as you gave? A good Samaritan law would protect you, but no such law protects these troops from your scorn...

If I did something irresponsible, then no I shouldn't spared, and by proportion of how irresponsible I was. I cost a man his life because I couldn't bother to read a dosage label? Sounds like I do deserve some prison time.

I fail to understand how loyalty is a threat to freedom. There is also a vast, well-protected commitment to free speech that will undermine these imagined efforts to cut off freedoms.

Right tell that to the Japanese-American victims of internment (imprisonment without the remotest due process of law) or the victims of McCarthy era assaults on free-speech and press where it was illegal to support communism. Tell them just how vigilantly this country protects basic human rights. Quite of few of these people are still alive, and during the evaporation of the cold war and disillusionment by post-baby-boomers, we have been making a lot of claims back on these rights. But the new millennium and 9/11 saw some more scrambling to take more rights away once again. That's what the tongue-in-cheek reference to sedition laws was about it in the OP. It's all but formally illegal to renounce the military worship. You're a commie d***bag and should just leave the country if you 'don't like it', I know this because I've been told many times, and if you're not behind the troops you should stand in front of them, and there is near 24-hour circle-jerk for the troops-athon on every news station, not to mention basically two federal holidays. There are few things that are more unacceptable to say than that you do not support the troops or don't think they are heroes. And even that isn't some sort of indictment. So basically, the conversation and any challenge to militarized system where no wrong can be done, is shut down.

"This country belongs to those of us who respect critical-democracy and peace"? No? There are many many ignorant people in this country (I'd swear the right to remain stupid is written in invisible ink somewhere on the Bill of Rights), and there are people out there, like it or not, who would love to murder as many Americans as they can (some groups want nuclear weapons to use against the US or Israel - does Hezbollah ring a bell?) - peace is not the absence of war, but rather a determined commitment to peace, and when there are people determined to shatter the peace, you must be willing to be dominated or fight to let those you defend live in peace - those who were around the Anschluss in the 1940s learned that the hard way. Those in the military know this as well, so they are sent to place that are viewed by officials as a threat to peace on home soil to try to restore order.

They, then, are the ones who truly respect peace, and understand the costs of peace, and belong here far more than someone who refuses to acknowledge geopolitical realities does. That's why I support the troops while questioning whether the military as a whole should be in various places in the world (and for the most part, it probably doesn't belong in those areas). The men and women in the military, judged on their intentions, are nothing short of heroes - that's why America praises them. Human error exists, but if you want to believe only actions matter and that people should be perfect or punished and ridiculed, then fine, keep refusing to support or appreciate American soldiers.

EDIT: I wrote this over the course of 90 minutes, and it's late at night so I didn't reread all of it as I should - sorry if it's kind of a mess.

There is a difference between empire-crafting aggression and self-defense. I never said there shouldn't be a military and measures for defending ourselves. But to reduce the foreign policy and behavior of the American government and its military over the last century or more, to "well sometimes we make woopsy-daisy here or there" and "Hey, the troops are stupid and doing wrong but shouldn't we be soooo grateful for how daring and well-intentioned they are?'. It's a little dishonest and probably even condescending toward the troops. If I were in the military I would rather be told that what I'm doing is wrong and therefor I am wrong, than be patronized and have someone say "Well yeah it's wrong but how could he have known any better? Gold star for effort for you young man!"

 

[Xivii]

 

[Thor]

As far as I can see, Overtaken's point is that the nationalism-based idea behind the worshipping of the troops - fallen or not - has a number of undeniable similarities to fascist ideologies. You're aware that by making a comparison with Al-Qaeda you support his argument more than you oppose it, right?

The OP made it seem like he was against only American soldiers, not war in general. I'm opposing the assertion that's it's uniquely America that does that, but not that valorization of the troops is not exactly desirable.

Of course I 'hate' this sentiment everywhere. And I do absolutely agree that it is not uniquely American, not the broader patterns and ideas at least. It's actually precisely my point. America is not so fundamentally different from Al-Qaeda. But again, it's not quite something we are allowed to say, is it?

We're different because we haven't stated unequivocally that all of a certain country should die for living there. There's an ethics issue here; I'll put something in here from an ethicist on why 9/11 is different from what American troops have done:

Spoiler

Issac 2(Prof of political science at Indiana-Bloomington, PhD from Yale Jeffery C., Dissent Magazine, Vol. 49, Iss. 2, p.)JFS
WHAT WOULD IT mean for the American left right now to take seriously the centrality of means in politics? First, it would mean taking seriously the specific means employed by the September 11 attackers--terrorism. There is a tendency in some quarters of the left to assimilate the death and destruction of September 11 to more ordinary (and still deplorable) injustices of the world system--the starvation of children in Africa, or the repression of peasants in Mexico, or the continued occupation of the West Bank and Gaza by Israel. But this assimilation is only possible by ignoring the specific modalities of September 11. It is true that in Mexico, Palestine, and elsewhere, too many innocent people suffer, and that is wrong. It may even be true that the experience of suffering is equally terrible in each case. But neither the Mexican nor the Israeli government has ever hijacked civilian airliners and deliberately flown them into crowded office buildings in the middle of cities where innocent civilians work and live, with the intention of killing thousands of people. Al-Qaeda did precisely this. That does not make the other injustices unimportant. It simply makes them different. It makes the September 11 hijackings distinctive, in their defining and malevolent purpose--to kill people and to create terror and havoc. This was not an ordinary injustice. It was an extraordinary injustice. The premise of terrorism is the sheer superfluousness of human life. This premise is inconsistent with civilized living anywhere. It threatens people of every race and class, every ethnicity and religion.Because it threatens everyone, and threatens values central to any decent conception of a good society, it must be fought. And it must be fought in a way commensurate with its malevolence. Ordinary injustice can be remedied. Terrorism can only be stopped. Second, it would mean frankly acknowledging something well understood, often too eagerly embraced, by the twentieth century Marxist left--that it is often politically necessary to employ morally troubling means in the name of morally valid ends. A just or even a better society can only be realized in and through political practice; in our complex and bloody world, it will sometimes be necessary to respond to barbarous tyrants or criminals, with whom moral suasion won't work. In such situations our choice is not between the wrong that confronts us and our ideal vision of a world beyond wrong. It is between the wrong that confronts us and the means--perhaps the dangerous means--we have to employ in order to oppose it. In such situations there is a danger that "realism" can become a rationale for the Machiavellian worship of power. But equally great is the danger of a righteousness that translates, in effect, into a refusal to act in the face of wrong. What is one to do? Proceed with caution. Avoid casting oneself as the incarnation of pure goodness locked in a Manichean struggle with evil. Be wary of violence. Look for alternative means when they are available, and support the development of such means when they are not. And never sacrifice democratic freedoms and open debate. Above all, ask the hard questions about the situation at hand, the means available, and the likely effectiveness of different strategies.

The tl;dr is that the army does not kill because it views life as superfluous, but because something else is a threat to a far greater number of people - Al-Qaeda kills because they believe the life of an American is worthless, something to be stamped out, like a bug. There's a reason we sent in counter-insurgency troops, to try to convert people away from wanting to kill America, and prevent further recruitment, while helping the nation by building schools and whatever else they do. Al-Qaeda's never tried to reason with Americans on what exactly we do wrong, they just assert that our whole lifestyle (which is not something that can be reduced, given the wealth inequalities and so forth) and seek to destroy all. America hasn't done much to reason with them either, admittedly, but that's because they've declared we must die regardless, and we don't seek out the general Isalmic person, but rather the people part of the radical group. Then we claim justice through the numbers game - lives are equal but we tend to value murderers less, and there's not 330 million of them, so it is acceptable to kill them, because as Isaac said, moral suasion doesn't work.

Also not something I disagree with. That is definitely a large part of what motives people's actions throughout their whole adult lives arguably. But that doesn't excuse wrong-doing, it doesn't exonerate it or make it something to respect. Remember, most of the soldiers who have fought in Iraq and Afghanistan are still alive. What I'm arguing is that they are the morally vincible executors of an unjustified war, and should not be in life or death, treated as 'heroes' or as people who have 'defended my freedom' when they've only ever endangered my freedom for playing their role.

I'm not sure that I understand how they threaten your freedom, but I'll state that your determination of what an unjustified war is won't be resolved here, because whether or not it was justified is entirely subjective. Was WWII American action on the Nazi front justified? The Japanese front? Was the American Revolution justified? The Civil War? There's pros and cons to all of them, we've just made value judgments (much as we make value judgments about the soldiers) and I don't think we'll reach an agreement on this point.

"Brain-washed" is a word I try to avoid these days. Yes, on the one hand there is this undeniably powerful force of psychological and social pressure and control being implemented by the power-structure, its media, its schools, etc. But none of that erases fundamental autonomy and the responsibility for critical thought when doing something that you know will result in killing other people (such as volunteering to join the army). Just because someone, in their refusal to seek perfectly free and available resources on history and ethics, believes that what they are doing is right despite the fact that history and logic can't even remotely support such a proposition, doesn't make it ok. No sooner anyway than the 9/11 hijackers should be absolved from their crimes, much less honored, because what they believed they were doing was right; they were told after-all that it was right, that it would ultimately liberate the entire region from the tyranny of the west and Israel, that Allah condoned it, etc.

"History and logic can't even remotely support such a position"? Patently false. Here, I'll even enthymeme it out for you:

A) There are people out there who want to suppress the freedom of women and kill Americans, good and bad, because we disagree.
B) These people are a threat to people who do not wish ill on the world or violence (American pacifists, for instance).
Conclusion: There are people who deserve protection because they want for a world they view as better and less violent and there are those who would kill them for it.
A) These people deserve protection.
B) I am able to protect them if I train myself and join the army to try to protect them.
--- Extra point: I can join the army to achieve these ends
Conclucion: Join the army, so I can defend those who want to make the world a better place for men and women to believe in.

Here's another article (spoilered) to read and consider the "evil history" or whatever that America's perpetrated, and the effects that honoring our troops have caused:

Spoiler

Thomas P.M.Barnett, chief analyst, Wikistrat, “The New Rules: Leadership Fatigue Puts U.S. and Globalization, at Crossroads,” WORLD POLITICS REVIEW, 3—7—11, www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/8099/the-new-rules-leadership-fatigue-puts-u-s-and-globalization-at-crossroads
It is worth first examining the larger picture: We live in a time of arguably the greatest structural change in the global order yet endured, with this historical moment's most amazing feature being its relative and absolute lack of mass violence. That is something to consider when Americans contemplate military intervention in Libya, because if we do take the step to prevent larger-scale killing by engaging in some killing of our own, we will not be adding to some fantastically imagined global death count stemming from the ongoing "megalomania" and "evil" of American "empire." We'll be engaging in the same sort of system-administering activity that has marked our stunningly successful stewardship of global order since World War II. Let me be more blunt: As the guardian of globalization, the U.S. military has been the greatest force for peace the world has ever known. Had America been removed from the global dynamics that governed the 20th century, the mass murder never would have ended. Indeed, it's entirely conceivablethere would now be no identifiable human civilization left, once nuclear weapons entered the killing equation. But the world did not keep sliding down that path of perpetual war. Instead, America stepped up and changed everything by ushering in our now-perpetual great-power peace. We introduced the international liberal trade order known as globalization and played loyal Leviathan over its spread. What resulted was the collapse of empires, an explosion of democracy, the persistent spread of human rights, the liberation of women, the doubling of life expectancy, a roughly 10-fold increase in adjusted global GDP and a profound and persistent reduction in battle deaths from state-based conflicts. That is what American "hubris" actually delivered. Please remember that the next time some TV pundit sells you the image of "unbridled" American military power as the cause of global disorder instead of its cure. With self-deprecation bordering on self-loathing, we now imagine a post-American world that is anything but. Just watch who scatters and who steps up as the Facebook revolutions erupt across the Arab world. While we might imagine ourselves the status quo power, we remain the world's most vigorously revisionist force. As for the sheer "evil" that is our military-industrial complex, again, let's examine what the world looked like before that establishment reared its ugly head. The last great period of global structural change was the first half of the 20th century, a period that saw a death toll of about 100 million across two world wars. That comes to an average of 2 million deaths a year in a world of approximately 2 billion souls. Today, with far more comprehensive worldwide reporting, researchers report an average of less than 100,000 battle deaths annually in a world fast approaching 7 billion people. Though admittedly crude, these calculations suggest a 90 percent absolute drop and a 99 percent relative drop in deaths due to war.

tl;dr : I'll just quote him: "The US military has been the greatest force for peace the world has ever known." American troops are heroes, because the American military has reduced the mass violence of the early 20th century by more than 90%, making huge gains in lowering war deaths and increasing rights for others (if you disagree with rights for women and the like that's a whole other discussion) by moderating conflicts and preventing outbreaks through deterrence. That's the history of the military as the statistics point out, which I think is worthy of being called heroism. So people have been killed? Okay, that would be happening on a VASTLY larger scale if this transition to US superiority never occurred, unless Europe managed to get it together, despite several centuries of spectacular failure to do just that (and keep in mind, supported by the US military, we gave about $15 billion to Europe for free [and offered to Russia, they refused] for rebuilding - if they hadn't had that, anger might've kept nationalist tensions high, and history could very well repeat once more).

Spoiler

inb4 you flame me

Well I never mentioned Hitler, but ok enough I did of course reference Nazi Germany. The reason I did so is because they are analogous as a nationalist state, and there aren't many widely recognizable examples. But this really speaks to something greater. It shows just how effective American propaganda is at dehumanizing its targets, its enemies. Think about how in truth, Nazi Germany was a industrial-era country fettered by war, had to make some complex decisions, went primarily with authoritarianism, experienced some racism and used minorities as a scape-goat for their ails, violated some peoples rights, killed others because they honestly believed it was justified, that they were defending themselves from some foreign infiltration conspiracy. Its a fascinating story with a lot of parellels to human history, and in this context American history in particular. But what has all of this been reduced to? OMG HITLER HOLOCAUST EVIL!
That's it. That's all Nazi Germany is. A holocaust that in all likeliness was exaggerated by the winning countries (ok that's definitely a conversation for another thread). But the real struggles and problems that faced them as human beings, their treatment after Versailles, the poverty brought forth in the Wiemar Republic, it means nothing. They're just evil, mass murders. Surely they killed 6 million Jews, 6 million sounds like a good and obscene number, just because they are racists and loved killing people who weren't Aryan masters. Simple as that. But when we imprison people of a particular ethnicity, they are internment camps, when they do it, concentration camps. When we commit mass-murder, well s*** we were doing them a favor don't you know?, but their atrocities are holocausts and genocides. We can all celebrate pornographic deceptions of a Jewish man rather indiscriminately caving German soldiers heads in with a bat (I do love Tarantino still) which is a testament to just how powerful the system is at convincing us to reduce our perception of another group of people, every bit as complex and human as we are, to some demonic effigy. And thus, it's so out of bounds to compare another completely comparable culture is similar circumstances, in the same conflict no less, because it's somehow impossible to understand Nazi Germany or Hitler as anything but a virulent emotional prod.

"some racism"? It's significantly higher than today's racism (which is unfortunate that it's present), but you're either vastly exaggerating US racism or trivializing what minorities actually went through - either way it's depressing to read.

"used minorities as a scape-goat"? We don't use general minorities, we use those with beliefs that state it's okay to kill all of us because of who we are. Jews didn't think it was all right to kill all Germans because they were Germans - you conveniently ignore difference that actually matter when doing an analysis to make a point, which undermines what you try to say.

"But what has all of this been reduced to? OMG HITLER HOLOCAUST EVIL!"? You're the only reductionist here - we're not authoritarianism either (don't make me laugh), and the Jews never actually launched an assault - Al-Qaeda has and has expressed intent to repeat this offense - you'd have to be stupid or more forgiving than almost any politician ever has been (I acknowledge Nelson Mandela was a good man) to not take this as a threat and mount some defenses and a counter-offense, since they've shown their creativity.

"That's all Nazi Germany is"? I almost quit reading here because of how much you eradicate real, substantial differences between the US and Nazi Germany, and just posted this as is. But I'll keep reading.

"A holocaust that in all likeliness was exaggerated by the winning countries (ok that's definitely a conversation for another thread)." Oh you're a holocaust denier. The fact that they only killed (we'll go with the lowest number I've seen) 500,000 makes it okay, it makes it all right to starve parts of a people to death, burn and gas them to death in a manner we won't use for the most violent, evil criminals out there?

"But the real struggles and problems that faced them as human beings, their treatment after Versailles, the poverty brought forth in the Wiemar Republic, it means nothing."? No, it doesn't mean nothing, as we didn't repeat that error. And they didn't have to cause around 90% of the Jewish population to disappear (or I guess as a denier, these numbers are either much close to like 20%, as there were never that many Jews in Germany, or else you need accounting skills), and we never tried to make Muslims or Islamic people all die - the government has struggled with trying to stop suppression of any religion [there has been struggle - mosque by ground zero], while the German government actually actively sought out and killed these people.

Your trivialization of the Holocaust makes me sick. It's okay for these mass murders to do it because they were poor, but not okay to kill a group that aims to kill hundreds of millions without reason because they've already struck and want to strike again?

"But when we imprison people of a particular ethnicity, they are internment camps, when they do it, concentration camps. When we commit mass-murder, well s*** we were doing them a favor don't you know?, but their atrocities are holocausts and genocides."? We don't have death camps in the US. They did. Again, you've managed to conveniently ignore history to make a point, at the expense of actually saying something that means anything. And you'd have to point out mass murders - I don't know of a time the US killed 6 million because we thought they were animals who deserved to die, despite not having a vendetta against us.

I don't understand most of the rest of what you say, other than that it's not an emotional prod for me - I've looked into some of what they did (mobile killing squads - they go out, round up Jews, make them dig holes "for the war effort", then either stick them in the van and gas them all or else have them stand in the hole and shoot them dead right there) and it's distinctly worse than what the US does. It's not a prod, it's just a fact.

Also, fun fact, Eisenhower said when he first found one of these camps (not verbatim but VERY close): "I told my men, "Start taking photos." I know the Nazis will try to hide this and that future people will try to deny this even took place, so I will do everything I can to make sure proof of their atrocities exists, so that people can know not to repeat them." Funny enough, in 1945 all he did was take photos in the interests of making sure that no one could deny what happened. He was not fully successful though.

I disagree. I would argue you are white-washing our culture and system to sound just as they want us to believe it is. This whole country is based upon this pretext that we are in control, that it's a democracy and we are just a bunch of free-thinking spirits collaborating to do what's right. It's not. Take redistricting practices, corporate lobbying and the commercial media's incessant assault (or just ignorance) of third party and independent politicians and ballot requirements as a few major examples of how systemically rigged against us it all is. And that's without even getting into the propaganda and cultural pressure they fabricate to manipulate us. Yes, North Korea indeed has been more successful in that in-and-of itself, but they have also sacrificed a tremendous amount of international power and resources in doing so. The American system secures the incumbency of the corporate power in a much more sophisticated, subliminal sort of way that allows for it to expand unchallenged. And yes, there will always be some people who will vocally challenge the system, but it is designed so that we are always in the minority, or that even when we are not that our will as a democracy will be ignored and no retaliation will ever come of it.

First, significantly less white-washing than you have done of Nazi Germany, enough to make me feel ill and worried as to what your history skills actually are, so I don't even really care about most of the rest of the post, but I'll keep responding. You disagree because you ignore how much good the US government actually does, both absolutely and relative to other governments in the world. I don't support either party, as I've said before, so I'm outside of what you talk about attacking third partiers, as those are the only people I consider supporting at all. I disagree with redistricting, and the liberal media's assault on all that's not liberal is rather ridiculous. But unlike in Nazi Germany (I'll even go back there once more), you may be ignored, but you are still acknowleged as having the right to live, something more than the minorities in that time in Germany ever got. I think dollars run a lot of the system, but that's because "power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely" - it's all over the place, you're just more familiar with it because you live in the US. Your epistemological assumptions are attacks on what I say, but you've failed to question how you view the US relative to the rest of the world - your claims are how the anti-Americans want you to sound, but not actually how America stacks up, which is what matters - then you'd have to argue for a system that is either hopelessly utopian, or else defend something and explain why it will work when all other nations have failed.

We ought to be humanizing them. It does no one any good when we fail to do so, and makes us no better than they are when they failed to humanize their victims.

We should humanize the Sandy Hook shooter for killing elementary school kids? It's okay, he's human, humans screw up? We should humanize the level 3 sex offenders? It's fine that you ***** and murdered a 2-year old? We ought to humanize those who would kill us in a heartbeat not because of who we are, but because of where we live?

No, we shouldn't humanize them. They do NOT deserve dignity or respect as humans for what they have done. Why? They have made a conscious choice to say that other people are not worthy of the dignity and respect that others should have. You would hold them in higher regard than they ever held their victims. You would give them something they never gave others. Being viewed as a human is not a guaranteed right, and neither is walking free on this earth - it is a right you are assumed to have, and it can be revoked when you violate someone else's right. Why are we better than them, you ask? Because we didn't say that we should revoke the rights of those who have done nothing to deserve it. We only look to preserve everyone's right to be seen as human, and those who violate that right should be punished for it.

Correct, they are not a threat. The motive they had to attack us had nothing to do with us not being Muslim or they should have attacked India for example, a larger country who has a much longer history of major, system abuses of its Muslim minorities. They attacked us because we have been occupying their territory against their will (and indeed their holy land) for the last 40 years or more, support a country that we forced into the region after WW2 who continuously annex territory from them and kill people in their settlements with weapons we are supplying, we prop up puppet regimes who in turn oppress their people just because it suits our economic and military interests. Then on top of that, we have "insurgents", a funny name for people who simply defending their country from a foreign invader, in two countries that never attacked us. They have a right to be just a little upset with the US, not to say the response of killing 3,000 innocent people was justified but they felt it was their only option. They felt they needed to incite a war where Muslim countries would unite with them against western oppression and meddling in their region. It didn't work obviously, was callous and stupid, but the point is it's a lot more complex than the government and media would have us believe. We need to remove ourselves from these countries wherein we are not welcome, and deny the 'military industrial complex' the influence and often straight-forward control of our government. Their interests are not our interests or humanity's interests. Second, when wrong is done we need to deal with it appropriately. Covert operations were called-for when taking on some country-less, mobile terrorist cell, not a full-scale conventional invasion. But the latter makes for a whole lot greater manufacturing contracts, doesn't it?

And let's not forget that the Bush administration deliberately neglected intelligence warnings specifically mentioning plane hijackings and using them to suicide bomb targets such as the pentagon or the WTC. Would it even remotely shock you that they would have 'oops accidentally misplaced that memo wink-wink' in order to secure a pretext for a war and contract bids with these corporations that funded their campaigns?

So no, not a threat. Al-Qaeda never took away my rights to due process of the law or privacy, the US government did, the very one whose power is assured by the blind obedience of the public and particularly the servicemen and women in the military.

They'd kill those who occupy their lands, just as you claim we mercilessly kill them. An insurgent is a word to describe those that undermine their own government - the American Revolution was insurgents versus British, and the Taliban were around trying to seize control and attack before we got around. There's also things like Sunnis vs Shiites and conflicts I don't even understand around religion, and we had reason to believe at the time that the country backed the terrorists, so a full-scale invasion to deal with the country and the terrorists was called for at the time (we may have gotten stuck in there too long, but information that's contrary to aims tends to travel slow on all sides).

Bush ignored warnings because they weren't credible at the time. Now you expect people to ignore warnings when credibility has been proven? lol

Privacy rights are a load of **** - if you've done something wrong you deserve to be caught and punished, if not, you shouldn't care if someone can read your email - yeah your door shouldn't be kicked down, but this ain't 1776 anymore - can't find much stuff that's legal but you wouldn't want seen on an email.

We're at odds again on due process - if there is reasonable suspicion that lives are in immanent danger, and the person you have X evidence of a crime would likely hold information, it's vital to get that information - at that point lives and rights are more important than laws, which is why trying to find that information is first. The torture used was unfortunate and likely not the only remaining option when it was employed, but incarcerating and interrogating them ASAP was fully in line with the belief that the government needs to protect the lives of those who are under its rule.

That's an understatement. With all of those ridiculous threat level warnings and being literally told by our president that we didn't have time to blink in making the decision to invade another country, do you think we were overtaken by fear just a little bit?

You clearly don't give a damn about American lives - they were said to have nukes and just killed 3000 with some planes - if you've been woken up in the middle of the night by 5 men and they say they have a gun and want to kill you, but you can kill them all right now, you're telling me you wouldn't lash out? Or are you telling me you should feel ashamed of yourself when it turns out they had just a BB gun? It wasn't just the fear-motivated decision, it was rational - making sure they couldn't launch assaults with grievous loss of life is the priority, so finding the base of operations and shutting it down is fully rational.

Natural? That's debatable. I don't see how it's natural to take the worst and most extreme examples of a culture, and compare them to the most idealized and seldom true examples of ours to make us feel superior unless we have some natural desire to exploit other people for profit. The people who rise to power in these "tribes" we call countries do, and they have been abundantly efficacious in manipulating people against their better judgment to feel superior, therefor justified, in committing acts of aggression against some other group.

At least my example are still factually accurate for some people. And it's definitely not about exploiting others for profit, it's about not letting others exploit others down the line, which is what occurs to many groups in far too many countries (and for a few unlucky souls, still exists in the US, though we have laws and try to crack down on it).

The combat to it is enculturation, but I won't go into that for now.

Oh the puppet theater show going on in Iraq was a red herring. The point wasn't to steal resources from them, it was to steal resources from the American public through these asinine, over-bloated contracts. Look how they try to hide it from us too, they won't even consider it a part of the budget, even though it is, because it's something we are f****** paying for. The "defense department" spending (If you're going to literally start using Orwell as a model for creating a subversive, manipulative oligarchy, why not just use the name "Ministry of Peace"?) accounts for more than 50% of the total actual spending each year since 2002 or 2003 I do believe. We now infamously have a larger army than the rest of the world combined.
And you could certainly argue that they were fulfilling their end of the bribery from the oil lobbies too, just simply by creating a war in that region, creating uncertainty and instability on the market for certain M.E. oil companies, they had bolstered the shares, and thus profit, of the western oil producers. Including the one our president of the time owned personally.

We don't have a right to resources, it's about what people will pay for them - that's how the system works. The budget for military spending is about 700 billion, as is the budget for social security, and the budget for medicare and Medicaid combined is about 750 billion - maybe your numbers were right in 2003, but baby boomers and the war draw down make them wrong.

Our army isn't larger than the rest of the world combined, China's is actually bigger as of now: over 2,000,00, while the US has about 1,300,000 (though we have almost 900,000 in reserve, so we could have more, but other armies out there added to China would certainly beat ours). Fact check time.

Western oil companies were too small at the time for a price spike to be profitable - that hamstrings our military too much since OPEC had too much oil at the time - the point was to block an attempted embargo.

They deserve those feelings if they are true. I wouldn't dehumanize them but neither would I pity them. They are agents of murder and are responsible for the role they chose to play. Granted, I believe PTSD is a tad more complicated and involved than people just feeling really guilty.

Those who were conscripted in the 40s against their will deserved to suffer from PTSD? Damn you're heartless.

It's legally not murder - countries around the world agree that it's non-criminal homicide to kill an enemy in a time of war if you don't try to be inhumane (i.e. make them bleed out and suffer). And it's not about killing the terrorists that keeps them up - it's about how their commander, or someone farther up, bleeped up and they messed up a bomb de-fusing or something and they let a comrade die in battle, or misinformation caused them to kill someone who shouldn't have died. You don't pity them because they are harmed by someone else's mistake? Yet you pity those who are harmed by the mistakes you state the US military makes...

Well I mostly addressed this earlier in this post, but I'll add this: We need to recognize that of course, the government and corporate officials who collude to make these unethical and illegal decisions are responsible for what they have done and need to be held accountable, but we have to also recognize that the military 'pawns' as you called them are able and obligated to make their own decisions, and when something as wrong as this is being ordered, as extreme as large scale loss of innocent life and indeed endangerment of their own life, for no excusable end besides concentrating wealth and power, then it's their responsibility to refuse. They are more than just complacent, they are active participants, accessories at a minimum. Especially in a country where military service is voluntary, and the Army hasn't been involved in conducting a legitimate war since before WWI, they may have even been so keen to have never joined in the first place. At least not army combat divisions. A lot of Navy divisions, and the National Guard, perfectly acceptable. My uncle in fact is a SEAL underwater constructor, he went to Japan after the tsunami to help rebuild underwater infrastructure. Perfectly lovely and honorable job. But that's sadly such a minority of the positions and roles of the military.

First, the Barnett above - you exaggerate. Second, there was nothing illegitimate about counter-attacking an attack on US soil or trying to stop Nazis from world domination in WWII (the goal was to control all of Europe at least, and Hitler's next logical step was the US, especially since they'd offered food to Britain since they didn't believe in letting an ally starve - they also gave warships, but that was meant to be in secret, not sure how much Germany knew of it). The "pawns" are about protection - the orders seem right because they come from people who claim to have the information - and some orders are right, so how can they separate the right from the wrong? That's an absurd burden to ask of someone who has been trained to follow orders.

No, it's a position of not just demanding people be held responsible for their crimes, but even having to reject the notion that these criminals are worthy of honor. How much respect for Manson and McVeigh would you have if you knew that in their hearts they thought they were doing what was 'right'? And as the old adage goes, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions."

Some criminal who tried to do good is not worthy of honor, but the mass murders and rapists should be viewed as human?

And keep in mind, viewing someone as human means looking at what their intentions were, and respecting them if they were good. Again, the soldiers are legally not criminals in any sense of the word (non-criminal homicide), and I'd feel that it's unfortunate that whatever mental illness they had led them to believe it was right, despite the lack of evidence because the Boston Marathoners hadn't sought to kill them in the first place, so they had no real evidence (when evidence suggests the US military is in the right, as above). Furthermore, they do undeniably kill bad people (Saddam Hussein - he also tried to hide behind his women at the end), so honoring that is something.

Maybe if you knew what a crime actually was you'd stop calling them criminals.

If I did something irresponsible, then no I shouldn't spared, and by proportion of how irresponsible I was. I cost a man his life because I couldn't bother to read a dosage label? Sounds like I do deserve some prison time.

Nah, he said to give him that much, it's just he was wrong about it - it's happened before, and you should be criminally liable for following his advice when he was in immense pain? You have a harsh justice with very little room for forgiveness... 7 years minimum jail for manslaughter because a man begged you to pull out a bullet and in doing so he bled out and died?

Right tell that to the Japanese-American victims of internment (imprisonment without the remotest due process of law) or the victims of McCarthy era assaults on free-speech and press where it was illegal to support communism. Tell them just how vigilantly this country protects basic human rights. Quite of few of these people are still alive, and during the evaporation of the cold war and disillusionment by post-baby-boomers, we have been making a lot of claims back on these rights. But the new millennium and 9/11 saw some more scrambling to take more rights away once again. That's what the tongue-in-cheek reference to sedition laws was about it in the OP. It's all but formally illegal to renounce the military worship. You're a commie d***bag and should just leave the country if you 'don't like it', I know this because I've been told many times, and if you're not behind the troops you should stand in front of them, and there is near 24-hour circle-jerk for the troops-athon on every news station, not to mention basically two federal holidays. There are few things that are more unacceptable to say than that you do not support the troops or don't think they are heroes. And even that isn't some sort of indictment. So basically, the conversation and any challenge to militarized system where no wrong can be done, is shut down.

Right tell that to Jews in death camps of the human and pitiable Nazis because they sent them there with express intent to kill them that you feel so bad for several quotes above. The Japanese-Americans are clearly bigger victims for losing the freedom of speech for a few years than the Jews for losing their lives forever, which is why you say the US is just as bad as Nazi Germany.

The Japanese-Americans received some restitutions (not enough), McCarthy era victims needed it, and just so you know, nowadays people would just sue and the Supreme Court would rule on it - they've been upholding the Constitution despite unpopularity surrounding their decisions - racism was stopping that earlier (no reversal on Plessy yet) and communism's violent aspect was a lot more prominent back then (we must kill the proletariat), and the right to free speech does NOT protect the right to hate speech actions, which is what the speech about the proletariat fell under (some destruction occurred, so that put them on edge for future violations), at least in the minds of the higher ups (it also fell under the "you can't try to actively encourage violence" part that came with rallies). And just because people don't like what you say, doesn't mean you can't say it - you've repeatedly insulted my intelligence (often inaccurately) but you and I have both retained the right to speak, a testament to that protection being better affirmed today.

There is a difference between empire-crafting aggression and self-defense. I never said there shouldn't be a military and measures for defending ourselves. But to reduce the foreign policy and behavior of the American government and its military over the last century or more, to "well sometimes we make woopsy-daisy here or there" and "Hey, the troops are stupid and doing wrong but shouldn't we be soooo grateful for how daring and well-intentioned they are?'. It's a little dishonest and probably even condescending toward the troops. If I were in the military I would rather be told that what I'm doing is wrong and therefor I am wrong, than be patronized and have someone say "Well yeah it's wrong but how could he have known any better? Gold star for effort for you young man!"

It's not empire-crafting aggression - it's stabilizing.

Spoiler

Kagan 7, Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace [Robert “End of Dreams, Return of History” Policy Review http://www.hoover.org/publications/policyreview/8552512.html#n10]
Finally, there is the United States itself. As a matter of national policy stretching back across numerous administrations, Democratic and Republican, liberal and conservative, Americans have insisted on preserving regional predominance in East Asia; the Middle East; the Western Hemisphere; until recently , Europe; and now, increasingly, Central Asia.This was its goal after the Second World War, and since the end of the Cold War, beginning with the first Bush administration and continuing through the Clinton years, the United States did not retract but expanded its influence eastward across Europe and into the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Caucasus. Even as it maintains its position as the predominant global power, it is also engaged in hegemonic competitions in these regions with China in East and Central Asia, with Iran in the Middle East and Central Asia, and with Russia in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Caucasus. The United States, too, is more of a traditional than a postmodern power, and though Americans are loath to acknowledge it, they generally prefer their global place as “No. 1” and are equally loath to relinquish it. Once having entered a region, whether for practical or idealistic reasons, they are remarkably slow to withdraw from it until they believe they have substantially transformed it in their own image. They profess indifference to the world and claim they just want to be left alone even as they seek daily to shape the behavior of billions of people around the globe. The jostling for status and influence among these ambitious nations and would-be nations is a second defining feature of the new post-Cold War international system. Nationalism in all its forms is back, if it ever went away, and so is international competition for power, influence, honor, and status. American predominance prevents these rivalries from intensifying — its regional as well as its global predominance. Were the United States to diminish its influence in the regions where it is currently the strongest power, the other nations would settle disputes as great and lesser powers have done in the past: sometimes through diplomacy and accommodation but often through confrontation and wars of varying scope, intensity, and destructiveness. One novel aspect of such a multipolar world is that most of these powers would possess nuclear weapons. That could make wars between them less likely, or it could simply make them more catastrophic. It is easy but also dangerous to underestimate the role the United States plays in providing a measure of stability in the world even as it also disrupts stability. For instance, the United States is the dominant naval power everywhere, such that other nations cannot compete with it even in their home waters. They either happily or grudgingly allow the United States Navy to be the guarantor of international waterways and trade routes, of international access to markets and raw materials such as oil. Even when the United States engages in a war, it is able to play its role as guardian of the waterways. In a more genuinely multipolar world, however, it would not. Nations would compete for naval dominance at least in their own regions and possibly beyond. Conflict between nations would involve struggles on the oceans as well as on land. Armed embargos, of the kind used in World War i and other major conflicts, would disrupt trade flows in a way that is now impossible. Such order as exists in the world rests not only on the goodwill of peoples but also on American power. Such order as exists in the world rests not merely on the goodwill of peoples but on a foundation provided by American power. Even the European Union, that great geopolitical miracle, owes its founding to American power, for without it the European nations after World War ii would never have felt secure enough to reintegrate Germany. Most Europeans recoil at the thought, but even today Europe’s stability depends on the guarantee, however distant and one hopes unnecessary, that the United States could step in to check any dangerous development on the continent. In a genuinely multipolar world, that would not be possible without renewing the danger of world war. People who believe greater equality among nations would be preferable to the present American predominance often succumb to a basic logical fallacy. They believe the order the world enjoys today exists independently of American power. They imagine that in a world where American power was diminished, the aspects of international order that they like would remain in place. But that’s not the way it works. International order does not rest on ideas and institutions. It is shaped by configurations of power. The international order we know today reflects the distribution of power in the world since World War ii, and especially since the end of the Cold War. A different configuration of power, a multipolar world in which the poles were Russia, China, the United States, India, and Europe, would produce its own kind of order, with different rules and norms reflecting the interests of the powerful states that would have a hand in shaping it. Would that international order be an improvement? Perhaps for Beijing and Moscow it would. But it is doubtful that it would suit the tastes of enlightenment liberals in the United States and Europe. The current order, of course, is not only far from perfect but also offers no guarantee against major conflict among the world’s great powers. Even under the umbrella of unipolarity, regional conflicts involving the large powers may erupt.War could erupt between China and Taiwan and draw in both the United States and Japan. War could erupt between Russia and Georgia, forcing the United States and its European allies to decide whether to intervene or suffer the consequences of a Russian victory. Conflict between India and Pakistan remains possible, as does conflict between Iran and Israel or other Middle Eastern states. These, too, could draw in other great powers, including the United States. Such conflicts may be unavoidable no matter what policies the United States pursues. But they are more likely to erupt if the United States weakens or withdraws from its positions of regional dominance. This is especially true in East Asia, where most nations agree that a reliable American power has a stabilizing and pacific effect on the region. That is certainly the view of most of China’s neighbors. But even China, which seeks gradually to supplant the United States as the dominant power in the region, faces the dilemma that an American withdrawal could unleash an ambitious, independent, nationalist Japan. In Europe, too, the departure of the United States from the scene — even if it remained the world’s most powerful nation — could be destabilizing. It could tempt Russia to an even more overbearing and potentially forceful approach to unruly nations on its periphery. Although some realist theorists seem to imagine that the disappearance of the Soviet Union put an end to the possibility of confrontation between Russia and the West, and therefore to the need for a permanent American role in Europe, history suggests that conflicts in Europe involving Russia are possible even without Soviet communism. If the United States withdrew from Europe — if it adopted what some call a strategy of “offshore balancing” — this could in time increase the likelihood of conflict involving Russia and its near neighbors, which could in turn draw the United States back in under unfavorable circumstances. It is also optimistic to imagine that a retrenchment of the American position in the Middle East and the assumption of a more passive, “offshore” role would lead to greater stability there. The vital interest the United States has in access to oil and the role it plays in keeping access open to other nations in Europe and Asia make it unlikely that American leaders could or would stand back and hope for the best while the powers in the region battle it out. Nor would a more “even-handed” policy toward Israel, which some see as the magic key to unlocking peace, stability, and comity in the Middle East, obviate the need to come to Israel ’s aid if its security became threatened. That commitment, paired with the American commitment to protect strategic oil supplies for most of the world, practically ensures a heavy American military presence in the region, both on the seas and on the ground. The subtraction of American power from any region would not end conflict but would simply change the equation. In the Middle East, competition for influence among powers both inside and outside the region has raged for at least two centuries. The rise of Islamic fundamentalism doesn’t change this. It only adds a new and more threatening dimension to the competition, which neither a sudden end to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians nor an immediate American withdrawal from Iraq would change. The alternative to American predominance in the region is not balance and peace. It is further competition. The region and the states within it remain relatively weak. A diminution of American influence would not be followed by a diminution of other external influences. One could expect deeper involvement by both China and Russia, if only to secure their interests. 18 And one could also expect the more powerful states of the region, particularly Iran, to expand and fill the vacuum. It is doubtful that any American administration would voluntarily take actions that could shift the balance of power in the Middle East further toward Russia, China, or Iran. The world hasn’t changed that much. An American withdrawal from Iraq will not return things to “normal” or to a new kind of stability in the region. It will produce a new instability, one likely to draw the United States back in again. The alternative to American regional predominance in the Middle East and elsewhere is not a new regional stability. In an era of burgeoning nationalism, the future is likely to be one of intensified competition among nations and nationalist movements. Difficult as it may be to extend American predominance into the future, no one should imagine that a reduction of American power or a retraction of American influence and global involvement will provide an easier path.

Geopolitical realities mean that if we didn't intervene there would likely be significantly more conflict. You mischaracterized me, as I think a lot has been done rather well, considering alternative realities. But everyone makes errors - to claim the US never should or should be harshly punished for it really IS making a distinction between the US and other countries... and when something's wrong, they try to fix it. But we shouldn't hate them for making an error the first time when they have to enacted a course correction - that's simply counterproductive.

Three hours of writing later, I can say that my original prediction

Based on the flaming rhetoric you use, this debate is far from presented as "open-minded, constructive, and respectful" - it much more approximates ad-homs, "I'm right you're wrong and stupid" and epistemological claims as an attempt to automatically debunk counter-arguments, which is the opposite of open-minded, constructive, and respectful.

has been verified thus far. Now for round 3 I suppose...

 

[#HBC | Acrostic]

Thor must be bored waiting for Ragnarok to happen.

 

[~ Gheb ~]

Geopolitical realities mean that if we didn't intervene there would likely be significantly more conflict.

This doesn't actually have to a lot to do with the subject at hand but I'd still like to comment on it because it's completely wrong. It's dangerous to think along these lines because it's the same lie that neocon interventionists use to justify their fascits pro-war propaganda. The truth is that there's not a single incident where the intervention of US troops on foreign soil has NOT caused mostly death and despair - often for decades to come.

 

[#HBC | Acrostic]

This doesn't actually have to a lot to do with the subject at hand but I'd still like to comment on it because it's completely wrong. It's dangerous to think along these lines because it's the same lie that neocon interventionists use to justify their fascits pro-war propaganda. The truth is that there's not a single incident where the intervention of US troops on foreign soil has NOT caused mostly death and despair - often for decades to come.

We had an obligation to fight in Iraq after 9/11 since that was obviously a power hungry country that had lost touch with its core values when they decided to support al-Qaeda.

 

[~ Gheb ~]

Are we talking about the same al-Qaeda that managed to organize itself only through massive support of the pakistanian secret service and -- you name it -- the CIA in the 80s? Looks like Iraq wasn't the only power hungry country that had lost touch with its core values.

 

[Thor]

This doesn't actually have to a lot to do with the subject at hand but I'd still like to comment on it because it's completely wrong. It's dangerous to think along these lines because it's the same lie that neocon interventionists use to justify their fascits pro-war propaganda. The truth is that there's not a single incident where the intervention of US troops on foreign soil has NOT caused mostly death and despair - often for decades to come.

Did you read a single line of the article by Kagan, or do you just thoroughly disagree with it? I'm curious what exactly you think is in error.

It's spelled "fascist", and that's a word that's lost meaning anyway - it's not a term but an insult - it's not fascism in the slightest, unless you count fascism as being toward a military, not a person, which is an incorrect definition (or I guess possibly a valid definition that's much different from what I know the precise definition to be), although I understand what you try to say in that case.

People die yes, but how many would die if we didn't try to moderate? I don't know either, but I posit it as a question of what the likely alternatives are...

 

[#HBC | Acrostic]

@ ~ Gheb ~ how could you ignore the article in the spoiler written by Kagan.

 

[Thor]

I apologize if I came across as rude or whatever, I just don't know if people read that stuff or not, and it's a sizable chunk of text considering you just say (paraphrased/simplified) "it's a fascist neo-con line of thought! Here is truth claim" contrary to the evidence presented in the article.

 

[~ Gheb ~]

I've read the article and it simply postulates that only the USA as world power #1 can bring 'good' stability and that a multipolar world can not. But that reflects little more than Kagan's personal opinion. It has nothing to do with facts or evidence. Furthermore, it was written 7 [seven!] years ago - before the global financial crisis came but after the EU had ran past the USA as the world's strongest economic zone. Now, it is forecasted that China will have taken that spot by the end of the year, which to all intents and purposes means that the USA has already lost its status as the global superpower par excellence for good. The increasing cooperation between China and Russia will only serve to enhance that development. The fact that their recently finished trading arrangement over russian natural gas is covered 100% by Rubel and Renminbi is most likely the beginning of the end of the petrodollar.

And yet, here we are seven years later and the stability of the world is in no more danger than it was before. In fact the crisis in ukraine and in syria shows us that Russia and China's increased power in opposition to the USA and its european underlings has had a massively stabilizing effect and has stifled any even remotely realistic chance of an international intervention that could have led to WWIII. So with the knowledge we have seven years later it's fair to say that in hindsight, Kagan was wrong on just about all accounts.

And while 'fascist' would clearly be way too harsh a description for Kagan's world view, he is still considered a 'neoconservative foreign-policy theorist' according to his wikipedia article. Suffice it to say that most neoconservative writers, publishers and politicians are also lobbyists for the US military industry so it should be pretty clear which way the wind is blowing for these kind of people.

People die yes, but how many would die if we didn't try to moderate? I don't know either, but I posit it as a question of what the likely alternatives are...

Slaughtering ten thousands of people through drone attacks in Jemen, Lybia and Pakistan ... killing and torturing civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan ... supporting ISIL and al-Qaeda in Syria ... deporting people into the infamous concentration camp at guantanamo bay ... is called 'moderating' now?

 

[Claire Diviner]

If one doesn't support the war, then that's fine. I personally don't support it either. But to not support the troops is rather neglectful, since it really isn't their choice to go to war and kill civilians and/or enemy soldiers/militia. Sure, they technically have the choice to go against orders, but ironically at the cost of their own freedom with jail time for treason, etc.. In all honesty, we ought to support the troops, if not for what they're doing, then certainly for them to come home. If you want to blame anyone, blame the government and other positions of power who decided to play world police, meddling in other countries and helping other countries, all the while, the U.S. neglects to help themselves despite the inner turmoil our own country faces.

 

[#HBC | Acrostic]

Claire raises a good point. We can't abandon our troops when it wasn't their choice to be contracted into combat. The draft forced them into fighting the current war. When you get drafted it's not like you can switch nationalities or seek political asylum. It'd be suicide if people were to defy the government simply because they didn't believe in the war itself. Maybe half a century from now we'll have the political awareness to stand up to the government, however it's hard to image us making that kind of stance right now.

 

[Rabbattack]

The thing that really bugs me is the word "God" in the pledge. I would rather escape the country than go to war. They are killers and that is fact, but a country needs a military or others nations will take advantage of that and attack. It is only necessary to get involved in another countries affairs if they are hurting our nations economy or people. Ruining a country in order to make yours better is wrong, you might as well let both countries stay the way they are. Blah Blah Blah. I don't know what I'm saying. World peace for every nation on earth and other worlds. Yay, yay. Happy happy joy joy. Fun for all hugs and kisses for mommy! i m having a greood time dbeifnsidufnvsijvnsvnjmofv.

I gave up explaining or contributing to this conversation, so here is a picture of...

 

[Kadano]

Claire raises a good point. We can't abandon our troops when it wasn't their choice to be contracted into combat. The draft forced them into fighting the current war. When you get drafted it's not like you can switch nationalities or seek political asylum. It'd be suicide if people were to defy the government simply because they didn't believe in the war itself. Maybe half a century from now we'll have the political awareness to stand up to the government, however it's hard to image us making that kind of stance right now.

In my opinion, if your government forces you to fight in a war, it’s a **** government you should at the very least boycott.
The fact that tyrannic regimes were only possible to exist because of how few people refused to take part in it and follow orders taught me that conforming just for the sake of conforming is unforgivable. I understand my approach to these topics is probably very different from USA citizens, who haven‘t been through the process of coping that your country produced a dictator that’s now considered as the prime evil of history.

Only non-conformists can be heroes. Doing what you are being told, killing others in the process and being killed in the end … that is the opposite of heroism.

 

[Rabbattack]

In my opinion, if your government forces you to fight in a war, it’s a **** government you should at the very least boycott.
The fact that tyrannic regimes were only possible to exist because of how few people refused to take part in it and follow orders taught me that conforming just for the sake of conforming is unforgivable. I understand my approach to these topics is probably very different from USA citizens, who haven‘t been through the process of coping that your country produced a dictator that’s now considered as the prime evil of history.

Only non-conformists can be heroes. Doing what you are being told, killing others in the process and being killed in the end … that is the opposite of heroism.

Good one, I agree 100%. I'm serious, if I was forced to go to war I would run for my life to Canada.

 

[Claire Diviner]

At the end of the day, what makes a "hero" is all about perspective. Some people see the U.S. troops as heroes, while others don't. Some people see sports stars as heroes, while others don't. Etc, etc.. In reality, "hero" is a word created by the powerful and used to influence their governed people to see certain persons or groups as such; for example, most citizens in the U.S. - as stated before - sees their troops and even Obama as heroes and Al-Qaeda as villains, while to a country, like Afghanistan, some of the citizens there may see Al-Qaeda as heroes and the U.S. troops as tyrants. In the end, what makes a hero - in my eyes (and this is coming from my personal opinion) - are those who fight for their own freedom without infringing on the lives and freedom of others. The U.S., ironically, while a free country, is also extremely flawed by a government seeking control of their citizens, what with the wire-tapping of citizens and such, not to mention they have a bad habit of policing the world, so I can't think of any real superpower to label "heroes", as the lot of them appear villainous in one form or another to a variety of people.

 

[Sucumbio]

I agree that "hero" is entirely subjective, but I believe the OP's intent was to (though in a most passive aggressive way) attempt to insight an argument against men and women blindly signing up to do the US government's bidding, while also chastising civilians who look up to these individuals. And though it grieves me to do so, I am forced to agree on at least one point - that since WWII, the US really hasn't had any need to engage in "war," at least at the level that it has. The Korean War, Vietnam War, Iraq War (both of them) they're all really just police actions that for all intents and purposes helped more to keep the funding going for the DOD rather than actually saving the world from hostiles bent on world domination. This said, I must point out that there is an inherent contradiction in the OP's goal, which is fundamentally rooted in its premise. Without the freedom we enjoy here in the US, the OP, why this very forum may not exist in whole or in part, and largely such posts would result in serious consequences. Therefore, I think it unfair to so arrogantly detest these sorts of things while at the same time benefiting from them. In other words I am in no way saying that today's soldiers fight and die to protect your right to badmouth them. That's part of the lie of which you speak.

There are plenty of organizations that actively try to deter the US government from recruiting soldiers at public places, especially those that are mostly peopled by children (such as high schools, malls, etc.) Depends on where you are, too. In some parts of the country not only is it painfully the opposite of this, but the mere thought of sharing the ideas said in the OP would be seen as seditious.

 

[Thor]

In my opinion, if your government forces you to fight in a war, it’s a **** government you should at the very least boycott.
The fact that tyrannic regimes were only possible to exist because of how few people refused to take part in it and follow orders taught me that conforming just for the sake of conforming is unforgivable. I understand my approach to these topics is probably very different from USA citizens, who haven‘t been through the process of coping that your country produced a dictator that’s now considered as the prime evil of history.
Only non-conformists can be heroes. Doing what you are being told, killing others in the process and being killed in the end … that is the opposite of heroism.

Someone's gotta fight or we all lose, when the other guys are getting ready to take what they want by force, be it one's life or control or whatever.
It's how life works, and it sucks awful. Because if no one fights the war and some dictatorship takes over your country, guess what - you're getting arrested for stuff like that.
And the US has "conscientious objector" status for a reason - Rabbattack would qualify as a pacifist I'm pretty sure, you could I'm sure for stuff, etc. Most countries don't give people that luxury.
"Conforming just for the sake of conforming" happens all over the place - it's called middle school and (to a lesser extent) high school, and I managed to avoid it (which is why I have no friends). But it's not "unforgivable" because it's a pack mentality wired into humanity (evolutionary psychology claim). It does have very undesirable side effects though, and there are times not to give in, for sure. But it's also possible you conform to a company decision to conform, despite disagreeing, and the company was right - I don't think your conformity was "unforgivable" especially since it actually led to a good outcome.
A conformist can be a hero, it just doesn't occur too much. Eisenhower conformed to standards very well in the military - while he was exceptionally talented, this does not mean he did not conform to standards, and he was considered by many a hero. Admittedly, many heroes (Nelson Mandela, MLK Jr., others) were very non-conformist, because they saw a wrong and sought to fix it.
"Doing what you are being told, killing others in the process and being killed in the end... that is the opposite of heroism"... so those who fought against Nazi Germany in WWII and worked to free people from concentration camps when they ended up finding them is the opposite of heroism? You've made a blanket statement, and there are times it's simply false - we simply remember in history all the negatives and accentuate them.
EDIT: Noted Gheb_01's post.

I've read the article and it simply postulates that only the USA as world power #1 can bring 'good' stability and that a multipolar world can not. But that reflects little more than Kagan's personal opinion. It has nothing to do with facts or evidence. Furthermore, it was written 7 [seven!] years ago - before the global financial crisis came but after the EU had ran past the USA as the world's strongest economic zone. Now, it is forecasted that China will have taken that spot by the end of the year, which to all intents and purposes means that the USA has already lost its status as the global superpower par excellence for good. The increasing cooperation between China and Russia will only serve to enhance that development. The fact that their recently finished trading arrangement over russian natural gas is covered 100% by Rubel and Renminbi is most likely the beginning of the end of the petrodollar.

And yet, here we are seven years later and the stability of the world is in no more danger than it was before. In fact the crisis in ukraine and in syria shows us that Russia and China's increased power in opposition to the USA and its european underlings has had a massively stabilizing effect and has stifled any even remotely realistic chance of an international intervention that could have led to WWIII. So with the knowledge we have seven years later it's fair to say that in hindsight, Kagan was wrong on just about all accounts.

And while 'fascist' would clearly be way too harsh a description for Kagan's world view, he is still considered a 'neoconservative foreign-policy theorist' according to his wikipedia article. Suffice it to say that most neoconservative writers, publishers and politicians are also lobbyists for the US military industry so it should be pretty clear which way the wind is blowing for these kind of people.

Entire last paragraph = ad hom so I don't even care.
The article's old, but it talks about other regions of the world... India-Pakistan? Japan-China? You've applied hindsight to a few key areas that support your point, but we don't know how these areas would've acted... I don't either...

Spoiler

Zhang* and Shi** 11. (Both MA candidates at Columbia University. *Yuhan, researcher @ Carnegie Endowment for international peace and **Lin, consultant for the World Bank. “America’s decline: A harbinger of conflict and rivalry.” January 22nd, 2011)
Paul Kennedy was probably right: the US will go the way of all great powers — down. The individual dramas of the past decade — the September 2001 terrorist attacks, prolonged wars in the Middle East and the financial crisis — have delivered the world a message: US primacy is in decline. This does not necessarily mean that the US is in systemic decline, but it encompasses a trend that appears to be negative and perhaps alarming. Although the US still possesses incomparable military prowess and its economy remains the world’s largest, the once seemingly indomitable chasm that separated America from anyone else is narrowing. Thus, the global distribution of power is shifting, and the inevitable result will be a world that is less peaceful, liberal and prosperous, burdened by a dearth of effective conflict regulation. Over the past two decades, no other state has had the ability to seriously challenge the US military. Under these circumstances, motivated by both opportunity and fear, many actors have bandwagoned with US hegemony and accepted a subordinate role. Canada, most of Western Europe, India, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Singapore and the Philippines have all joined the US, creating a status quo that has tended to mute great power conflicts. However, as the hegemony that drew these powers together withers, so will the pulling power behind the US alliance. The result will be an international order where power is more diffuse, American interests and influence can be more readily challenged, and conflicts or wars may be harder to avoid. As history attests, power decline and redistribution result in military confrontation. For example, in the late 19th century America’s emergence as a regional power saw it launch its first overseas war of conquest towards Spain. By the turn of the 20th century, accompanying the increase in US power and waning of British power, the American Navy had begun to challenge the notion that Britain ‘rules the waves.’ Such a notion would eventually see the US attain the status of sole guardians of the Western Hemisphere’s security to become the order-creating Leviathan shaping the international system with democracy and rule of law. Defining this US-centred system are three key characteristics: enforcement of property rights, constraints on the actions of powerful individuals and groups and some degree of equal opportunities for broad segments of society. As a result of such political stability, free markets, liberal trade and flexible financial mechanisms have appeared. And, with this, many countries have sought opportunities to enter this system, proliferating stable and cooperative relations. However, what will happen to these advances as America’s influence declines? Given that America’s authority, although sullied at times, has benefited people across much of Latin America, Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans, as well as parts of Africa and, quite extensively, Asia, the answer to this question could affect global society in a profoundly detrimental way. Public imagination and academia have anticipated that a post-hegemonic world would return to the problems of the 1930s: regional blocs, trade conflicts and strategic rivalry. Furthermore, multilateral institutions such as the IMF, the World Bank or the WTO might give way to regional organisations. For example, Europe and East Asia would each step forward to fill the vacuum left by Washington’s withering leadership to pursue their own visions of regional political and economic orders. Free markets would become more politicised — and, well, less free — and major powers would compete for supremacy. Additionally, such power plays have historically possessed a zero-sum element. In the late 1960s and 1970s, US economic power declined relative to the rise of the Japanese and Western European economies, with the US dollar also becoming less attractive. And, as American power eroded, so did international regimes (such as the Bretton Woods System in 1973). A world without American hegemony is one where great power wars re-emerge, the liberal international system is supplanted by an authoritarian one, and trade protectionism devolves into restrictive, anti-globalisation barriers. This, at least, is one possibility we can forecast in a future that will inevitably be devoid of unrivalled US primacy.

More recent article on what a future without US leadership likely looks like. I don't really feel like elaborating more as I'm sure you can read.

Slaughtering ten thousands of people through drone attacks in Jemen, Lybia and Pakistan ... killing and torturing civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan ... supporting ISIL and al-Qaeda in Syria ... deporting people into the infamous concentration camp at guantanamo bay ... is called 'moderating' now?

I was referring more to general disputes between countries and providing defenses to places like Taiwan and the like... the support of AL-Qadea in Syria is laughable and a terrible choice, I'm less informed about drones than I should be, and I'm wondering where the military got the permission to torture civilians - deaths are probably cross-fire and errors, which are a testament to how publicized collateral damage is and how much respect civilians get under I-law. It's also problematic,, and I don't know quite enough about how the civilians are divided to comment more (I think there's a Sunni/Shiite conflict in Iraq, so I have no idea if even more civilians would die if we left... or if they've resolved that... and Afghanistan has Taliban and Karzai, women's rights hurrah, but I don't know how that's valued and how the war effort is going as of now).

 

[Overtaken]

Sorry, I was busy the last few days but I haven't forgotten (Yes, I know, you all spent the last few days hot and bothered thinking 'whoah, where is Overtaken, he still hasn't responded to that thread). Anyway, I'm going to respond to Thor here but try to reel in and focus the discussion a bit. I'll not be responding to every single last sentence, but the majority of it. If I do skip something you feel was cogent, let me know and I will respond to it subsequently.

So, over all it seems like one of the biggest points of contention between us is what is basically, "the relativity of a nation's identity and narrative". In other words, it seems universal a habit of nations to extoll their own righteousness, excuse or plain ignore their wrongs, then conversely exaggerate their 'enemy's wrongs and of course, ignore and debase their motives, goods and perspective. When you post a few opinion-pieces of some conservative, American professors, you're naturally going to think "Oh, yes, that makes me comfortable with the idea of not just accepting, but celebrating, mass-murder, torture, incarcerating people and denying them rights, and invasions of countries that have never attacked us." When you set all of the slants and biases to 11, you could even find yourself saying "Hey the world is a sticky place and doing what's ultimately right requires a couple ugly things here and there." But those 'ugly things' are of course euphemised, rationalized away if they have to be because those noisy liberals are rattling the cage. But what comes with this is a refusal, sometimes utter, to grant the same benefit, if even just the benefit of the doubt, to the other people. It doesn't even cross your mind I suspect that some of the people our troops are combating have reason to believe as well and validly as you do, that the mass-murders committed by people more similar to them, such as the perpetrators of 9/11, were fighting the righteous cause. If instead you had posted articles written by certain conservative Muslim scholars, or the words of Al-Qaeda themselves, you would hear a story of people motivated to liberate themselves from western imperialism and all of the death and oppression it has brought with it, and the reluctant conclusion that an unfortunate but necessary means to this end would be the casualties of the WTC. But what I'm saying here is really just framework of the larger thesis, and maybe you could even agree with me on this. But obvious the main disagreement otherwise would be facts and evaluating who, if anyone, was and is objectively and ethically in the right.

Very briefly, I just want to say that you slightly jumped to some conclusions about my stance on the holocaust topic. I do of course, as I said, overall believe that it was exaggerated. I do not believe that nothing at all happened and all the pictures were photo-shopped, I'm not that extreme on the issue. Also, I would like to emphasis that I never stated nor even implied that any thing made what Nazi Germany did "OK". I oppose tyranny and fascism in all of its forms. I'll make another thread on it I'm sure, but for now I just want to point out this: You experienced some sort of physiological, perturbed sickening at the mere glancing mention that a historic account we have been taught might be exaggerated. I know we are talking about death and all, but if I had said "The amount of people Ghangis Khan killed is probably exaggerated", would you have had such an emotional reaction? Maybe the mere thought of any detail the Allied sources of information pertaining to the holocaust being inaccurate is that unacceptable to you, or it's more because you thought I was trying to absolve Hitler of any wrong doing, but either way it should not incite such a reaction. It's a testament to just how powerful and effective the system of propaganda we have here in the US really is. It reminds me of things I've read about North Koreans who have escaped, accounting for how difficult it is to come to terms with accepting that all they've been told is a lie. They describe these feeling of sickness, strikingly similar to how you've just described your own, when they think about Kim-Ill Sung not being a demi-god and Pyongyang not being the center of the universe.

Ok. The next big thing is: are soldiers heroic just for believing that what they are doing is right, even when it isn't and they had no excuse of ignorance? I know you mentioned this, and your reply seemed to mostly argue that the US was/is right, so their ignorance and blind obedience is I guess coincidentally 'right' and 'heroic' by extension. But how do you support this? Couldn't it be said that soldiers who are ignorantly and uncritically fighting are wrong regardless?

So as far as whether or not the US is right in these recent conflicts. To answer this properly, I say we would have to begin with the first wrong we committed in that region nearly a century ago now, and that was supporting the British mandate of the Ottoman Empire. Along the Treat of Versailles, WW1 saw some of the most major imperialist maneuverings of European powers. It had been a long, long pervasive and ingrained attitude by such powers, even the supposedly 'enlightened' European ones, that winning a conflict gave you some sort of right to control a people and/or its resources, even if it was a morally neutral conflict. That mandate was the primary entry of modern westerns into the region, and with it came Zionism. And it's not as though the Brits negotiated this mandate in any way for the benefit of the local population, they weren't there to liberate them and spread democracy. It was indeed completely constructed around allowing the Ottoman's and their Sultan to retain power over the domestic populace. Britain (as well as France) wanted to be able control immigration into the region, for their own benefit. So fast forward three decades, and the British-powered mandate ushers in several waves of Jewish immigration into the holy land, which is unsurprisingly unwelcomed by the local Palestinians. After several Arab revolts and a second WW, the real fun begins in the late 40s with of course, the forced establishment of Israel as a state. This is where America began its less passive support and more direct involvement. This is the principal cause of 9/11. To me, it would be like China coming here to the US and forcing us to relinquish half of our land to allow for a Native American state, entirely against our will. Who would be right in that scenario and would you be among the people revolting against it? Oh yes, Natives do have a few backwoods, impoverished reservations where one in a million of them will make a living off duty-free casinos and tobacco. But this is more analogous the loose and scattered Jewish settlements that existed in Palestine pre-1948. So we doubled down on our wrongful support of the de-facto conquest of Palestine, and didn't feel our job was done just yet. Follow along the next 50 years and we start dabbling in regime puppetiering and supporting militant insurrections just because the Corporate Emperors here felt threatened by the mere existence of an idea that suggested we should have no Corporate Emperors (read: Marxism, Cold War) Go figure. Speaking of which, on your implicit defense of McCarthyism; people were being imprisoned, fired, blacklisted and subpoenaed over basically any wild or unfounded accusation or suspicion that they were communists of any sort, peaceful Marxist or full-fledged Stalin supporter alike. Even homosexuality was targeted for assumed connections to leftism. It was some 20 years where thought-crime was real. I was bad. Anyway, the Gulf War (a.k.a. Operation Liberate a Region From a Dictator who is Allied with the Soviets and not Us!) acts as a sort of culmination of Cold War tension and just adds fuel to inferno.

This is where we obviously roll into 9/11, Afghanistan, and Iraq pt.II. We've already discussed these quite a bit, so I have only little bit to add. From the above paragraph it should be abundantly clear why someone would think that they would be in the right to attack the US, and England too. Was it right to attack innocent civilians? Not even a little. I understand they envisioned the attacks as a necessary evil to unite the Muslim world against western imperialism. But it didn't make it right, it didn't even work or make sense. As it turns out, the vast majority of Muslims aren't particularly interested in starting WW3 for Palestine's sake, no matter how sympathetic they may be. They certainly did a great job making 3,000 martyrs and sending G.W. a invitation to start the next conflict, which Lil' Bush and his industry partners didn't seem to mind as they made billions off of it. The correct decision for an ethically and humanly minded people would have been to immediately cut all military aid to Israel, withdrawal occupation from the region, sever allegiances with our horde of puppet dictators, push for the 2-state solution with sincerity and get it passed and done in the UN, apologize for our wrongful decisions in the past and then, rectify ourselves by calling on leaders of the region to assist in a covert and intelligence based hunt of the conspirators of the WTC attacks to bring them to justice, then finally commit ourselves vocally, signing an international resolution even if possible, to abstain completely from aggression and favoritism based on economic and military self-interest.

So all in all, I'm summarizing these last hundred years of history not to insult your intelligence, but to show you how I interpret these events. I simply fail to see anywhere in this where we have been in the right. It's been a non-stop cycle of war for profit's sake and peace for letting the new wave of obedient and unquestioning soldiers graduate high-school's sake.

Ok, then there is this last bit about American peace-keeping I'll address. It's funny how it seems to be the logic all power-bent dictators and emperors and popes like to use to justify their conquests. What is not exactly jiving with me though, it that this "1. conquer 2. unify 3. ???? 4. peace!" logic is a tad self-defeating by its nature. I mean, conquer the whole world, making war and ruining stability all along the way, for the sake of protecting the world from war and promoting stability? Sounds like every bit of peace gained from this method comes at the equivalent cost of war or conflict anyway. No, this is no proper way to conduct things. Respect and humility, value of philosophy, and communism. The sooner we identify with being human before all else, before religion, before nationality, before culture, the sooner we treat one other with equal regard and allow everyone equal power and a comfortable share of the luxuries our technology and wisdom has reaped, reject rulers no matter which name they go by, be it 'king', 'president', 'CEO', 'his holiness', the sooner real peace will be realized. Until then, I can't award the title of "hero" to the kings and rulers, the exploiters and marauders, and neither to the flock that so willingly supports them.

 

[Sucumbio]

So all in all, I'm summarizing these last hundred years of history not to insult your intelligence, but to show you how I interpret these events. I simply fail to see anywhere in this where we have been in the right. It's been a non-stop cycle of war for profit's sake and peace for letting the new wave of obedient and unquestioning soldiers graduate high-school's sake.

Do you deny that the United States has helped save countless innocent civilians with minimal collateral damage in any of the military actions listed here?

Spoiler

The Vietnam conflict continues to be the touchstone for both the military and policy makers committed to avoiding future foreign military "quagmires." As the United States made the seemingly inexorable transition from being advisors to undertaking covert operations, bombing and deploying ground troops, the strategy of "incremental escalation" emerged as the military's bête noire. Military frustrations during the "war without fronts" were heightened by diplomatic and humanitarian constraints on operations in North Vietnam. Protest and resistance at home and abroad underlined the pitfalls of pursuing prolonged, costly and divisive wars alone. And the ultimate defeat of South Vietnam in 1975 strengthened the resolve of those who would avoid "unwinnable" limited wars in the future.

Sandstorms and equipment malfunctions caused the cancellation of the surprise attempt to rescue over sixty American hostages held by revolutionary students at the U.S. embassy in Tehran. Failure turned deadly when eight Americans were killed after a helicopter and a transport plane collided at a remote desert staging area. The disaster reflected military disarray and lack of preparedness and, after Ronald Reagan took office, helped launch the largest peacetime defense build-up in the nation's history.

Twice during the early 1980s the United States deployed troops to Lebanon to deal with the fall-out from the Israeli invasion. In the first deployment, U.S. marines helped oversee the withdrawal of the PLO from Beirut. In the second deployment, 1,800 marines were sent as part of a multinational force after Israel's Lebanese allies massacred civilians in the Palestinian refugee camps. Given a vague mandate to restore order, support the weak Lebanese government, and work for the withdrawal of all foreign forces, the troops slowly became entangled in the Lebanese civil war. On October 23, 1983, a truck bomb exploded at the vulnerable marine headquarters, killing 241 marines -- the largest loss of life in a military operation since Vietnam. For the military, Beirut becomes a symbol of ill-considered political objectives and poorly-defined rules of engagement.

Within days of the Beirut disaster, President Reagan ordered the invasion of Grenada, following the overthrow of Marxist President Maurice Bishop. Planners sought to protect 600 American students on the Caribbean island, and head off the possibility of another hostage scenario only two years after the freeing of the Iran hostages. In addition, the Reagan administration sought to use the invasion to eliminate Cuban and Soviet influence in Grenada. U.S. forces faced greater than expected resistance and took significant casualties. Though later cited as a model for similar actions, the operation also pointed up serious problems, including inadequate intelligence, poor communications, and inter-service rivalries.

Following a bomb attack on a West Berlin discotheque frequented by American servicemen, the Reagan administration launched a punitive raid on Libya, the suspected sponsor of the bombing. Planes from aircraft carriers and Britain targeted sites allegedly associated with the training and support of terrorist activities. The raid was also part of a larger struggle with Libya throughout the 1980s over its support for international terrorism and its claims over the Gulf of Sidra. Though its long-term utility was debated, the attack was evidence of the Reagan administration's increasing willingness to use military force in pursuit of certain discrete, limited goals -- despite the Weinberger doctrine.

Involving over 27,000 U.S. troops, the Panama invasion was, up to that time, the largest American military operation since the Vietnam War. Dubbed "Operation Just Cause," the intervention's stated goals were the protection of the Panama Canal and the lives of 35,000 Americans in Panama, as well as the promotion of democracy and an end to drug trafficking. The powerful surprise attack quickly overwhelmed the Panamanian defense forces and resulted in the capture of its leader, Manuel Noriega.

To force Iraq out of Kuwait, George Bush formed a large and diverse international coalition and deployed over a half-million U.S. personnel to the Persian Gulf region as part of an allied force. The success of Operation Desert Storm set a new high-water mark for the military and underscored the principle of committing overwhelming force to clear and achievable objectives. Both allied and popular support was largely maintained throughout the campaign. In this way, the Gulf War appears to validate the military doctrine espoused by Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin Powell.

More on the Persian Gulf War.

Toward the end of the Bush administration, the United States sent approximately 25,000 troops to Somalia to assist the United Nations with the distribution of famine relief supplies. By the time Bill Clinton took office in 1993, U.S. troop levels had been vastly reduced, largely replaced with forces operating under the UN flag. However as UN clashes with local "warlords" increased, American troops became engaged in policing and wider peacekeeping operations. After 18 U.S. Rangers were killed in a firefight in Mogadishu on October 3, 1993, the United States briefly reinforced its troops but retreated from the more ambitious "nation-building" agenda previously outlined by Secretary of Defense Les Aspin. Criticized for having made decisions that may have contributed to the disaster, Aspin resigned two months later.

More on the firefight in Mogadishu.

After negotiations and sanctions failed, Clinton sent U.S. troops to Haiti to restore ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power and to head off a potential wave of Haitian refugees. A last-minute deal, brokered by former President Jimmy Carter, allowed the troops to go ashore unopposed by the Haitian military and police. Most U.S. troops withdrew within a year, though several hundred remained to pursue a wide agenda of peacekeeping, humanitarian and engineering activities. While Clinton administration officials consistently hailed the intervention as a model effort to restore democracy and promote stability abroad, political, economic and social conditions gradually eroded. In March 1999, the U.S. commander responsible for the remaining military personnel reportedly recommended ending the five-year military presence on the island due to continuing instability.

Following the deadly bombing of a Sarajevo marketplace, NATO forces launched the largest military action in the alliance's history. Two weeks of NATO air strikes, combined with a strong Croat-Muslim offensive on the ground, pushed Bosnian Serbs to the negotiating table. In November, all the warring parties met in Dayton, Ohio and agreed to a peace settlement. The airstrikes, painstakingly approved after years of negotiations with allies and the military, appear to support the position that limited military attacks can be useful diplomatic tools.

Citing Serb atrocities and ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, the U.S. and NATO unleashed air attacks on Serbia after the failure of the "mini-Dayton" peace talks held in Rambouillet, France. President Clinton outlines no "exit strategies" and warns that air strikes will continue as long as necessary. From the start, the Clinton administration ruled out sending U.S. ground troops to the Balkans, though debate over the utility of air power alone repeatedly revives the issue. Vast floods of refugees spill into neighboring countries, threatening to enlarge the crisis and sparking criticism of the lack of contingency planning by NATO.

Note, I am not arguing for or against each of these examples, I am really just referencing them as a comprehensive list so that we may identify which actions are worth mentioning (as in there are others that are not mentioned because they either were too small or did not technically fall under the act of Congress/Presidential privilege).

What I mean by pointing this out is to show that not EVERY military action is SOLELY for the purpose of what you've identified as modern-day colonialism. Sometimes we really do need to intervene simply because we have the means to do so when other nations do not. Do I think our military is way too big? Yes, I believe it is. I believe the US wastes a LOT of money on military expenditure. Especially when you consider the fact that despite all that money spent, all the man hours spent, all the lives lost, all the lies... 9/11 STILL HAPPENED and there was nothing we could do about it (and yeah, it's been said that the Bush administration dropped the ball and had warning from the Clinton administration and yada yada, it could have been prevented, whatever... it wasn't prevented, so shame on us.)

So essentially, where you see we've never been in the right since WWII (I assume you at least agree our involvement in WWII was warranted and necessary) I see that we've -sometimes- been in the right, and other times, no plainly not, such as Vietnam. I do see where you're coming from but you exaggerate a few points to the extent that it hurts your overall argument, and so I am just pointing out this instance.

Carry on, blokes

 

[Kadano]

Someone's gotta fight or we all lose, when the other guys are getting ready to take what they want by force, be it one's life or control or whatever.

Who are “the other guys”? If you are referring to Osama Bin Laden and the likes, as Overtaken wrote, the attacks of 2001-09-11 were not unprovoked¹ and I don’t think they would have happened if the USA had stopped and apologized for their imperialist ways.
I fail to see any nation or group that would attack and take from the USA if the USA were to stop fighting. Even native Americans, who could easily argue for the righteousness of them taking their ancestral lands back to go back to their original way of living, are imho too disillusioned and cautious to risk another conflict with white men.

¹“And as I looked at those demolished towers in Lebanon, it entered my mind that we should punish the oppressor in kind and that we should destroy towers in America in order that they taste some of what we tasted and so that they be deterred from killing our women and children.”
In 2006, he offered a long-term truce to USA forces if they act on their citizens’ will and call back their troops, which imho was in line with his previous argumentation. The USA rejected with the words “we don’t negotiate with terrorists” – however, it is easy to see that for Bin Laden, his terrorism was only a response to the terrorism done by the USA he had witnessed, so this is nothing more than the usual USA hypocrisy.
I do not condone “counter-terrorism” or whatever it is called. But that’s just what Bush did and what Obama continued to do, so I don’t think that they are in any way better, ethically speaking, than Bin Laden.

"Conforming just for the sake of conforming" happens all over the place - it's called middle school and (to a lesser extent) high school, and I managed to avoid it (which is why I have no friends). But it's not "unforgivable" because it's a pack mentality wired into humanity (evolutionary psychology claim).

I admit, “unforgivable” was bad wording. Conforming to democratic processes can be totally fine in cases like your company decision example, where doing so doesn’t require giving up one’s principles. However, in these cases, it isn’t done “just for the sake of conforming” (in German, we have Mitläufertum, and I don’t know a better-fitting translation), but for reasons like maximizing company profits (which would go down if its members couldn’t agree on how to do things).

"Doing what you are being told, killing others in the process and being killed in the end... that is the opposite of heroism"... so those who fought against Nazi Germany in WWII and worked to free people from concentration camps when they ended up finding them is the opposite of heroism? You've made a blanket statement, and there are times it's simply false - we simply remember in history all the negatives and accentuate them.

If what one is being told is the same action one’s conscience tells one to do, I don’t have any problem with it and agree that such a person may be considered as a hero. However, I don’t attend a higher level of heroism to an apathetic / opportunist USA soldier who simply follows his orders and ends up freeing people from concentration camps in theprocess than to a German nazi soldier with the same mindset who, for example, guards the concentration camps staff

 

[Thor]

It appears I misunderstood much of what you tried to say. I will just say a little about this quote then.

Who are “the other guys”? If you are referring to Osama Bin Laden and the likes, as Overtaken wrote, the attacks of 2001-09-11 were not unprovoked¹ and I don’t think they would have happened if the USA had stopped and apologized for their imperialist ways.
I fail to see any nation or group that would attack and take from the USA if the USA were to stop fighting. Even native Americans, who could easily argue for the righteousness of them taking their ancestral lands back to go back to their original way of living, are imho too disillusioned and cautious to risk another conflict with white men.

The US currently doesn't have "other guys" but some countries like Japan and Taiwan have fears of North Korea/China and so they have this situation - I was making a statement that's broader than just the US (some in Ukraine may also feel this way with regards to Russia). I think there was some extreme fear based on the long-term offer, and the US perceived it as a sign of weakness instead of a chance to try to set things peacefully (and feared that they would continue plotting and then attack again, and we'd have to start from square 1 again). I can't say these are the best sentiments, and retrospectively it was a bad choice, but at the time, that decision was tough, though it was probably influenced by very biased groups.

I will say that Bin Laden gives a very polarizing speech - he states that because innocents died, he should kill innocents in kind - "that they taste some of what we tasted" - I disagree with this sentiment, because killing more who are innocents doesn't right the wrong, it just leaves even more bodies of those who should never have died at all. But if it could be done over again, I can assume many would've left the war right then...

 

[Hyperstorm]

Definitely give them credit for risking their lives. But let's not pretend everything they do is for the betterment of society.

 

[FirestormNeos]

There's a difference between a Hero and a Victim.

Heroes risk their lives for the betterment of something.

Victims are tricked into risking their lives by society's failure to distinguish the difference between these two things.

 

[bound_for_earth]

There's a difference between a Hero and a Victim.

Heroes risk their lives for the betterment of something.

Victims are tricked into risking their lives by society's failure to distinguish the difference between these two things.

perfect exactly what was on my mind

 

[Budget Player Cadet_]

They are not heroes, they are not defending anyone's freedom, and I do not universally, or even majorly, 'support' them.

Welcome to left-wing sentiment, ca. the last 10 years. This idea is neither revolutionary nor particularly hard to find examples of, partially because it's so blindingly straightforward.

I'm only joking. As we know, afterall, the power of the corporate media to essentially create and lead a societal black-mail against anyone who opposes Big Brother, renders crude laws rather needless.

Which is why you can run into pieces like these:
http://www.salon.com/2014/11/09/you...lling_soldiers_heroes_deadens_real_democracy/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/28/chris-hayes-uncomfortable-soldiers-heroes_n_1550643.html
http://www.theatlantic.com/national...erans-by-taking-them-off-the-pedestal/281316/
http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/12/the-tragedy-of-the-american-military/383516/

...And many more in the mainstream press. And keep in mind that in the case of Chris Hayes, it's not the "corporate media" shouting him down - it's his viewers saying, "Hang on, we're not comfortable with that". Indeed, the reason we see so little that isn't deferent to the troops isn't because the media is pushing the narative, it's because we won't let them do otherwise. When people say they don't like troops being heroes, the response is immediate and virulent from us.

I cannot even watch the 'progressive' main-stream media, such as the Daily Show, without constant demand to basically worship the military, as though I ought to be grovelling at their feet for being so benevolent as to allow me to live. You'll lose your job, and probably receive (so appropriately) death-threats from 'freedom-loving patriots' for stating, on air, that you so much as 'hesitate' to call fallen American soldiers 'heroes'.

And yet somehow, Chris Hayes still has his job.

For all intents and purposes, post-WWI America is essentially an alternative sort of nationalist state. Similar to Nazi Germany in a number of ways, such as the expectancy of compliance and acceptance of the power-structure's demands and decisions. There is no fundamental sense of skepticism ingrained in our psyche, rather a sense of retaliation and incredible embarrassment for daring to question the motives and ethical merits of the military and its decisions. There is immense social-value of the 'state', and all of its symbols, the flag, the uniform, etc. There is also an ever-present, never understood, dehumanized, abstract 'enemy', always lurking in the shadows, threatening to do immeasurable harm to anyone and at any time.

Not only has this not been universally true throughout American history, I can't even think of a time other than immediately after 9/11 where this was even close to the norm. Our trust in the government has dwindled since the 60s. In fact, from my experience in Europe, America is one of the countries with the most distrust of its authorities and government. Citation, please?

What we did in the US is actually convince ourselves quite thoroughly that it is indeed the citizens and the soldier who are above all else. 'Nation' in our context will only ever mean either "the government", which in a brilliant move convinces us is some loathsome bureaucracy, a veritable paper-mache pariah to absorb all internal conflict and blame, so easily, all the while maintaining perfect incumbency through the devilishly subversive illusion of power given to us through the two-party system,

Perfect incumbency? Were you awake for the last 8 years? If you want to claim that politics in America hasn't changed significantly in direction and issues, you're simply wrong. The claim is not tenable, and I'd like to see you try. The two-party system is slow, disappointing, and has serious issues that need to be solved. It is not a dictatorship.

or, it will refer to abstract, symbolic artifacts that are constantly attributed to the mythology of our national identity; "Freedom", "God's favor", "Democracy", "Righteousness", etc. We have to contrive of some notion of how we are not only fundamentally different from other people, but actually superior.

You're not making very much sense here. Care to translate this from "Loaded tirade" to "english"?

But this leads me back to the topic at hand. This is a package of 21st century fascism, wrapped up in a star spangled banner and nothing cushions and secures it from challenge of its authority better than equating such a challenge to defaming and delegitimizing the 'patriot soldier heroes'. We now have no choice but to accept these outrageous wars (or to call them what they truly are: colonial conquests) because we would have to transitively accept that your brother, your friend, your child, whomever it may be that is in the military, are murders, mercenaries.

Bull****. Not only is this reflexive "support the troops" rhetoric a notion that was not used before the "war on terror", it's also one that was widely rejected by the political left. You want a list of people who called that out? It's gonna get pretty long. Also, you do know that the protests against the Iraq war were massive, right? You're painting this picture of Americans as docile sheeple that simply does not match up to any reality this country has faced.

I simply can't fathom what goes through the minds of the anti-war 'left' or 'progressives' in this country when they speak against the Iraq war, for example, and recognize that it is clearly an unjustified act, yet simultaneously fall into the same pit, that the one sacred pit that no one may ever, ever violate, and dare believe, let alone speak it out-loud, that the people executing the unjustified acts of mass murder and invasion, might be anything less than demi-god supermen heroes and benevolent protectors of all things good in the universe.

It's called "not punching down". You think the grunt on the ground has a particularly large amount of say in the matter of what he's doing? No. Barring desertion and refusing their orders (mind you, both of these are highly illegal unless the order itself violates the law, and no, the war itself being a load of **** does not qualify), there's not a whole lot they could do. They were powerless, despite having guns. Meanwhile, the people actually responsible, the people calling the shots? They were savaged for it. The Bush Administration went down as one of the worst presidential administrations in history because of their responsibility for this.

So, to conclude in short, despite what we are constantly told, it's simply not the case that any soldier, anywhere in this world right now, is "fighting for" or "defending" anyone's freedom, whether they earnestly believe that they are or not.

2004 called, it wants its slogans back. Probably should have warned it about Hurricane Katrina. Seriously, nothing that you're saying here (except for the crazy stuff about fascism) is particularly new or hard to figure out. It's pretty darn clear to anyone who doesn't get drip-fed FOX News, and has been a significant part of mainstream left-wing thought since pretty much the start of the Iraq war.

I Am I just nutty conspiracy theorist? Full of s*** and trying to be 'edgey'? Or do you agree that we are psychologically strong-armed into complacency by the industrial war complex?

Your post is split pretty much straight down the middle between "things everyone figured out 10 years ago" and "things that are wrong and kinda crazy but everyone also got in their heads 10 years ago".

 

[Budget Player Cadet_]

I'll make another thread on it I'm sure, but for now I just want to point out this: You experienced some sort of physiological, perturbed sickening at the mere glancing mention that a historic account we have been taught might be exaggerated. I know we are talking about death and all, but if I had said "The amount of people Ghangis Khan killed is probably exaggerated", would you have had such an emotional reaction?

Of course not. Because Genghis Khan's murders aren't the subject of countless conspiracy theories by mass-murder apologists. What did you expect? People hear something like that and immediately think, "Oh great, a holocaust denier". Because, for the most part, they're the only people seriously arguing that.

It's a testament to just how powerful and effective the system of propaganda we have here in the US really is.

No, it's a testament to how certain groups "owning" an argument can poison that argument. Are the figures of the holocaust wrong? Probably not - there's been extensive scholarly research into the subject. Would it matter if it was 2 million instead of 6 million? No. The only people who really care are, almost without fail, the people trying to absolve the nazis of wrongdoing.

Follow along the next 50 years and we start dabbling in regime puppetiering and supporting militant insurrections just because the Corporate Emperors here felt threatened by the mere existence of an idea that suggested we should have no Corporate Emperors (read: Marxism, Cold War) Go figure.

For someone who complains so much about the whitewashing of history, you sure do whitewash the threat that the communist block presented. This was not merely an ideological conflict.

 

[M15t3R E]

I'm in the military myself- Navy to be specific. You may be surprised to know that many of us harbor the same sentiments. No, we are no longer defending our own freedoms. We are defending our foreign assets and, arguably, the freedoms of the people who live over there.

 

[FirestormNeos]

Getting angry at Vietnam vets is like getting angry at a toddler for something their parents made them do. Or at a game dev for something their employer made them put in the game.

Or anyone who was made to do something by higher ups.

 

[ansossy]

I think Bill Gates or Al Gore is more of a hero than some soldiers who just went through some fight with millions of dollars in training and aid and heavy weapons support at their request.

 

[#HBC | Red Ryu]

I have a lot of friends on the military, 80% of my friends left high school to go into it for one reason or another.

I am biased On this topic on that front but I would not say that they aren't heroes is kinda wrong in some respects.

A lot of it if perspective and events that trigger things to happen.

World police might be another thing all together but I sincerely hope that people suggest we should have not taken action. Especially after how the U.S. Got forced into after some affairs after being attacked.

 

[Claire Diviner]

World police might be another thing all together but I sincerely hope that people suggest we should have not taken action. Especially after how the U.S. Got forced into after some affairs after being attacked.

Oh, but of course. When attacked, the U.S. isn't supposed to just sit there and take it. Though to be fair, the Iraq war was seen by many (myself included) as an unneeded conflict, since Bin Laden was the main target, and Saddam Hussein really had nothing to do with 9/11.

Regardless of how one feels about any of the post 9/11 wars, the result is the same; hate the leader, not the troops. It's why I am a supporter of our troops, if at least to get home safe and sound, even if I am not a fan of any war decisions.

 

[Budget Player Cadet_]

Oh, but of course. When attacked, the U.S. isn't supposed to just sit there and take it.

It would have been a better response. When you're dealing with non-governmental terrorist sources, the issue of how to respond is a difficult and complex one, and sometimes "doing nothing" is the best course of action.