Yeah I called this one in real time right as I watched the planes hit the towers. Knew we'd kill hundreds of thousands of people in the middle east before we had to pull out defeated. I didn't quite expect it to take 20 years though.
Then protested Iraq and they cheered our freedom of speech, then rolled tanks into Baghdad anyway and the WMDs weren't there, just like Scott Ritter told them. That worked out well.
Really should have listened to us when it came to Kuwait in 1991 as well. The towers might still be standing.
I eagerly await the mental tap dancing and 'splaning that results in us being the hopelessly geopolitically naive ones, when the other side of the argument has been wrong for a solid 30 years straight.
Hell, if you zoom out from the Middle East, you can go all the way back to Vietnam. (I don't know much about Korea.) That's over six decades of being wrong--sixty years of belligerence with nothing to show for it but a horrific body count and whole generations turned against us.
Yeah I was just sticking with events in my lifetime, I just wasn't alive much for Vietnam, and wasn't very concerned with politics right after I was born.
Someone reminded me about Reagan sending weapons to Afghanistan to fight the Taliban, which I do remember (and Carter boycotting the Olympics).
>>>That's over six decades of being wrong--sixty years of belligerence with nothing to show for it but a horrific body count
The problem with this argument is we have no way of definitively proving it one way or the other. If Communist Vietnam hadn't spent 10 years and a million lives dislodging the US, could Communism have overtaken SE Asia? Would Vietnam have had the military experience necessary to depose the Khmer Rouge after that regime killed ~25% of Cambodia's population? How many excess deaths would you be counting if Thailand's Communist insurgency had eventually turned into a Khmer Rouge clone (itself having copied the worst excesses of Mao's Cultural Revolution)? https://www.cia.gov/static/e73ecdedf076611c592b1d8397cbe61a/...
Bottom line: Hindsight is 20/20. Don't assume that the outcome we have is the worst one possible and therefore all has been for naught. That said.....hold people accountable for shit decision-making, and there definitely has been that in spades.
Then protested Iraq and they cheered our freedom of speech, then rolled tanks into Baghdad anyway and the WMDs weren't there, just like Scott Ritter told them. That worked out well.
Really should have listened to us when it came to Kuwait in 1991 as well. The towers might still be standing.
I eagerly await the mental tap dancing and 'splaning that results in us being the hopelessly geopolitically naive ones, when the other side of the argument has been wrong for a solid 30 years straight.