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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."
Because Saddam Hussein got up in the UN and said he was going to attack the US. It may have been bluster with nothing behind it, but the US isn't going to let that go.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Please, be more specific. Do you think, our involvement in the First World War was "screwing the world"? How about the Second? I bet, you don't lament those...
How about Korea? Possibly not that war either. But certainly Vietnam — right? Even though there are no perceptible differences in our reasons and motivations for it (preventing yet another country from falling into Communism — the most murderous school of thought known to man so far).
Yes, because our enemies (including internal ones) weren't sitting on their hands — exploiting the slightest missteps into major propaganda brouha-ha. War is hell, and no occupying army is particularly pleasant to the occupied population, but the US is better than most — and improving.
None of it means, however, we should not have picked the fight, nor that we should not do it again in similar circumstances.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Sometimes you just have to ignore the vegetarian, hippie, anti-war, pro-peace, unrealistic, drug-using, unemployed protestor dumbfucks to shup and and stay in Iraq. Too bad Obama felt like he had to live up to that ridiculously undeserved Nobel peace prize. He now caused the biggest, longest, worst war in the last couple decades. Can they take away Nobel peace prizes?