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Former Department of Defense Chief Expects "30 Year War"
HughPickens.com writes Susan Page writes at USA Today that Leon Panetta, former head of the CIA and Secretary of the Department of Defense, says Americans should be braced for a long battle against the brutal terrorist group Islamic State that will test U.S. resolve. "I think we're looking at kind of a 30-year war," says Panetta, one that will have to extend beyond Islamic State to include emerging threats in Nigeria, Somalia, Yemen, Libya and elsewhere. Panetta also says that decisions made by President Obama over the past three years have made that battle more difficult — an explosive assessment by a respected policymaker of the president he served. Not pushing the Iraqi government harder to allow a residual US force to remain when troops withdrew in 2011, a deal he says could have been negotiated with more effort "created a vacuum in terms of the ability of that country to better protect itself, and it's out of that vacuum that ISIS began to breed." It is no surprise to Panetta that the assessment in his new book "Worthy Fights: A Memoir of Leadership in War and Peace" is drawing White House ire. "Look, I've been a guy who's always been honest," Panetta says. "I've been honest in politics, honest with the people that I deal with. I've been a straight talker. Some people like it; some people don't like it. But I wasn't going to write a book that kind of didn't express what I thought was the case."
ISIL is both financed and given logistics support from primarily three countries that are "supposedly" allies of the US UK etc.
Turkey.
UAE
and Saudi Arabia.
Nuke those and ISIL dies.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
God damn it. Why the fuck did the US invade Iraq in 2003?. Hussein was a madman but he kept a lid on things.
BTW I'm not American so my kids aren't going to be fighting in Iraq, its the US young service men and women I feel sorry for.
The world is way to political lately. Or rather, it's way too loaded with propaganda. I haven't seen anything even resembling "news" lately. The older ones around here might remember what that was, "news". It was when you got information about stuff happening.
Now, you still hear about what's happening, but not straight. Just like you can't get straight black coffee anymore without someone dumping some kind of syrup in for flavoring, it has become near impossible to get information without the addition of what you should think about it. News has turned into opinion gradually and we're now essentially where opinion is all that's left.
It is actually to a point comical when you can turn on, say, Fox News, watch it for a while, then switch over to RT and see the SAME pictures shown with exactly opposite captions. Here our benevolent soldiers crush the oppression of that other side, and on the other side the evil invasion force assaulted the gallant defense militia that protects the poor innocent civilians. It's really awesome entertainment... well, it could be if it wasn't such an insult to the intellect of the viewer. And if it wasn't real.
It would be a blast as a soap.
The information age is over. The age of lies has started.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Obama is behaving like a politician unable to get his head out of the political dogma of the 2003 left. Unable to see the world has changed and the 2003 dogma obsolete. See http://news.slashdot.org/comme... for an explanation.
I like to think of it as a square. The top half of the square is the authoritarian, war is peace, big government, power hungry thieves. Those people are in it for personal power, and everyone else be damned. The bottom half of the square are the idealists who genuinely want to do what's best for the country and the people.
Somehow, the media has managed to slice this square though, not into top and bottom halves, but into left and right halves. As a result, regular people who identify themselves as Democrat, point to the upper right corner of the square and see authoritarian, power hungry scoundrels, and yell: "Evil Republicans!". Meanwhile, regular people who identify themselves as Republican, look at the top left and identify the authoritarian, power hungry scoundrels they see as: "Evil Democrats!". Each unable to see that the "misguided people in their party who are wrong on *some* issues" are just as bad the set of scoundrels they criticize.
Just notice how often big controversial issues are brought up (and their often suspicious timing - like trying to fast track immigration reform the week after the Snowden leaks), and how often those issues are actually solved (hint: never - they're far too convenient for demagogueing the other side ["we wanted to pass Issue A, but the other side wouldn't let us" vs. "Issue A be damned, but they included issue B in the bill which they wont budge on which will end America as we know it!"]).
Saddest part is that because the battle lines are so clearly (mis-)drawn in people minds, they don't listen to the people they "hate". Thus almost all information they get about the people they "hate" they find out from non-neutral 3rd parties. These 3rd parties, use their role to aide the authoritarian scumbags in painting the idealists in the opposing parties as the anti-christ (effectively flipping top and bottom of the other side in their follower's minds).
A coalition government containing: Ralph Nader, Bernie Sander, Ron Wyden, Sarah Palin, Justin Amash and Glenn Beck would oddly be more unified in purpose, more functional, and more for the people than one composed of "moderate centrists" like John McCain, John Kerry, George Bush, and Barack Obama.
The problem with the USA right now is the square is very top heavy.
Planning a 30 year war with Eastasia now is only the authoritarians following Orwell's 1984 instruction manual.
WWI was a pointless battle between imperial powers and we should have stayed the hell out of it. The Pacific battle of WWII would not have happened if we hadn't played the empire game in the Pacific, stealing Hawaii and threatening Japan with Perry's "black ships"; the European theater was a straight-up result of WWI.
We should never have been in Korea or Vietnam. Or Iraq or Afghanistan. Or the Philippines or Cuba or Puerto Rico or Guam.
Our history since the Civil War shows that the founders were 100% right about the temptations of a standing army: once you've got one, you want to use it.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
But I was curious about the opinion of Europeans and Leftist Americans — they don't think all wars are wrong...
For someone who likes to use the word "communism" a lot, you sure don't seem to be well acquainted with its writings. Communists called WW1 a mindless imperialist massacre long before that became, essentially, the prevailing view - in fact, before it even began.
The more emotional argument is analogous to interfering, when you see somebody being beaten by thugs — no law requires you to interfere. Except honor...
Your honor seem to be quiet about using other thugs, though. Do the people massacred on the stadium in Chile in the name of fighting communism - most of them for nothing more than words - weigh up on your consciousness at all?