Slashdot Mirror
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."
He's even more of a one than Raygun. Starting us down the path to thirty years of war proves he is a Republican. That is the way of their kind.
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! --
Now isn't that convenient to the business of war?
I thought we'd always been at war with Islamafrica.
If you've actually read his blog hughpickens.com, that now links to a wikipedia page, its pretty clear he is working for big oil. If his username was not enough to see his posts as self-promotion, reading his website should tell you that media and promotion are more than just a hobby for him
The United States.
but, they will clear the way for "i told you so" Hillary in 2016. Washington (AFP) - Former Pentagon chief Leon Panetta has denounced the White House... http://news.yahoo.com/obama-te...
N/T
Is this a technology site or some kind of political blog. What has happened?
They're ideological conflicts best solved in the marketplace of ideas.
Drop some nukes. Then it'll be a 30 second war.
Take the money saved on bombs and crashed V-22 Ospreys and use it to buy hospital beds for Ebola patients and mosquito-netting for potential malaria fatalities. You can scrub a conscience pretty clean with a couple billion dollars in cost savings!
Maybe we should ask Jordan Spears family if they thought dropping Little Boy was ethical? As the first American casualty of Gulf War III, his family's opinion on the subject is the one I care about! If people want american GI's dying in order to protect random strangers in the sandbox: let them send their sons and daughters and then pay for it out of their social security retirement.
Personally, I would rather see 100,000 Iraqi's or Syrians kill eachother(fighting a civil war started by the British half a century ago) than see a single American die protecting the status quo. Why are we investing so much time and money protecting border-lines drawn with less thought than I give to my morning breakfast BTW? So the CIA can continue playing puppet theater with 3rd world dictators?
The only reason ISIS collateral damage lives are perceived to be worth more than Malaria/Ebola victims is because Africa has no oil. We ignore the plight of thousands of African children dying from waterborne illnesses every day and all it takes is a couple of decapitations on Youtube to break our resolve to stop wasting money in the middle east?
How many American soldiers are going to die due to Pentagon budget cuts and unfunded mandates before people realize that if ISIS' butchers aren't working for Haliburton/KBR/Blackwater/Xe/Academi in-fact, they're effectively working for their shareholders in practice?
It's easy for him to bash the current Regime, especially that crack about pushing harder to keep troops in Iraq. They wanted us GONE. Hell, WE wanted us GONE.
Awful damned easy to be a Monday morning quarterback. Where was HE when the shit was getting ready to pile up?
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
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.
and he expects us to believe him!
I got to the chocolate box before you, that's why the hard ones have teeth marks.
"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.""
The problem is that Obama's head in stuck in 2003. In 2003 the al qaeda types were not in Iraq. However in 2006 they were and proto-ISIS was defeated by US troops and Sunni forces in the Anbar Awakening. And in 2011 Obama's head was so stuck in the 2003 anti-war rhetoric and politics he could not accept that the situation was now radically different in Iraq and that a residual US force was needed. Al qaeda had migrated out of Afghanistan, they were active and recruiting in Iraq. Obama just wanted to be out of Iraq completely, to be rid of it. The Iraqi's initial resistance to immunity for US forces was the perfect excuse. The Iraqis always start negotiations by refusing immunity and then as the US increases its offer the Iraqis agree to immunity. This happened in previous agreements, saying no to immunity is just a negotiating tactic.
Obama has said that the al qaeda types are the real enemy, the real fight, the guys we should have never taken our focus off of. And yet he is doing exactly this. We didn't go into Afghanistan for the Taliban, we went in after al qaeda. The Taliban merely inserted themselves into this fight by continuing to offer safe haven and protection to al qaeda after 9/11. If the al qaeda types are in Afghanistan that is where the fight is, if in Sudan that is where the fight is, if in Africa that is where the fight is, and if in Iraq that too is where the fight is. The mistakes of 2003 are irrelevant, the politics of 2003 is obsolete, if al qaeda is in Iraq that is where the fight is.
I think he's referring to the Thirty Years' War.
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
Pull out.
We've bankrupted our nation to pay for a war that was waged on false pretenses, bankrupted our nation, and corrupted our spirit. What more do we need to pay for a complete failure to accomplish anything other than creating political instability in both nations we invaded?
The bubonic plague was an important factor in the Thirty Years' War. Not exactly a good omen these days...
Come on slashdot libs, don't let me down ;)
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.
Reagan was a moderate Republican. People don't remember those much because just like the moderate Democrat they're pretty much extinct. Everything is extremism now.
True Reagan negotiated, compromised and made deals with Democrats. For example he made a compromise with Democrats on the budget, that new spending would be followed by budget cuts. Reagan got his new spending but the Democrats never got around to the budget cuts. And then the Democrats attacked Reagan for a growing deficit. Its things like this that contributed to the modern era of mistrust and extremism. Whether it was a trick by the Democratic leadership or simply a leadership that was ineffective and couldn't fulfill its promises I don't know.
We're basically involved in a World War.
Can't wait to read the book in a few centuries.
...for the Military Industrial Complex?
Just say'n....
in case you need it....
Obama's war is against the extremist's with help the the moderates who used to support the extremists but are being crushed by Assad and a sectarian government who wants a caliphate but Shia instead of Sunni.
any Questions class.
I doubt our POTUS has even the slightest idea what the hell to do. Electioneering and good old american naivete are getting him no where.
the deluge from self promoting hugh pickens continues
twist everything to be anti obama. this site is tanking
We resumed the hostilities suspended in 1992, because Saddam Hussein failed to fulfill his cease-fire obligations and our patience finally ran out. Yes, we should've done it earlier, but Bill Clinton was not the kind...
Yeah, the "sophisticated" (but impotent) Europe might be understanding it, but here in America we have a distinct dislike for mad dictators. Why, some of us even still subscribe to the doctrine of that previous adorable President from Chicago:
By withdrawing from Iraq too early, we failed the Iraqis. The fault, however, is not in invading in the first place, but in electing an incompetent "community organizer" to Presidency on account of his race — with a lunatic providing "foreign policy expertise"...
It is a shame, which Obama is finally beginning to rectify. Unfortunately, I doubt he'll succeed — not for lack of trying, but simply due to incompetence of a man, who never ran anything successful until his own election campaigns. Maybe, his spectacular failure will inoculate Americans against his kind of approach for a few decades — the way Jimmy Carter's presidency did in its time...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Military contractors are literally rubbing their hands together and preparing to grub money.
You are welcome on my lawn.
"We've always been at war with Eastasia"
-GO
...or rather gets the middle class and the poor pay for it.
as long as Arabs live on the Earth. Tell me I'm wrong.
30 years late, 30 years more. Then another 30 when that's all done.
When the say war, they mean "war".
The US has been at war for the last decade+, and what have US citizens faced? Rationing? Higher taxes? A draft? Anyone? Bueller?
Don't worry, his Nobel Peace Prize will solve everything.
'Leon Panetta .. says .. "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.'
Does Leon Panetta or anyone else in the US administration, not realize that everything they attempt in the Mid-East is bringing about the exact opposite of what they want. Every drone strike is recuiting a whole streetfull of 'terrorists'. It's called the law of unintended consequences.
Underestimating ISIS: An Indictment of Decades of Failed US Policy in the Middle East
ISIS members need to be killed. Full stop. However, clearly some of the moral blame for the situation also falls on the heads of both Jewish and Christian religious extremists currently on an imperialist holy crusade.
When Christan Taliban and torturing war criminal Bush invaded Iraq, for non-existent WMDs, it immediately destabilized the region. Iraq plunged into a civil war that could have been easily avoided by simply leaving Saddam intact It also polarized Muslims around the world (many of whom feel their religion is under threat by the religious extremists in America and Israel). Of course we all know the American government backed military conquest of Palestine has played a role in this mess. (hint: security does not require building settlements and expanding territory)
Unfortunately even secular Republicans and Democrat politicians are cowards afraid to take a principled stand against Christian, and Jewish religious extremists in our midst pushing this agenda. They just single out the Islamists as extremists (brown people unlike us white folk). Our local religious crazies get away with it because they play persecutions games to divert attention from the oppression of minorities in what they see as their homelands. They manipulate human rights language to silence criticism. (crocodile tears of antisemitism, islamophobia, etc)
And all this over whose invisible space unicorn is the "real" one. It would be funny if people weren't getting killed over this stupidity.
Nothing the the smell of fascist imperialist pig shit in the morning! You can see the dollar signs in their eyes as the drool of authoritarian greed drips from their corpulent jowls.
Apparently president Obama blew this whole thing because he didn't leave residual troop in Iraq, but then the articles goes on to this - "emerging threats in Nigeria, Somalia, Yemen, Libya". How exactly would residual troops in Iraq deal with this? ISIS/L is coming from Syria and Libya. We made it pretty damn clear we didn't want to get into that mess, now that mess spilled over. You don't win this kind of war. You either let it be or you get Machiavellian and level the whole region.
X
Seriously. If we REALLY don't want to get involved with this bunch of wild-eyed, frothing at the mouth potato-heads for the next three decades, we have a really SIMPLE option.
Nukes. Plain and simple.
That and thermobaric bombs in mountainous regions to empty out caves.
Is this a POPULAR opinion? FUCK NO!
Would the military ever go for this? FUCK NO!
Would it create at least as many enemies as it destroys? Depends on how many we destroy...
Would it make the US universally hated and reviled? Uh, aren't we already?
Great, as a major result of this conflict the power of the war lords, tribes and rebel factions reduces and real nation states can born in the area, finally. All this at the marginal cost of three quarters of the population killed at many places.
For as long as Winston can recall, Oceania has been in a constant state of war – with whom it was at war is of neither importance nor consequence.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
Starting from when? Haven't we always been at war with Islam? Or was it communism? These things are so hard to keep straight. Luckily, I just got a new history book last week!
Obama up and left Iraq - yes it was on Bush's time table but also at the behest of the Iraqi government.
But then the idiot went in and destabilized Syria (like they did to Libya and Egypt) - this create a massive flood of weapons between the US supplying to the "rebels" and Russia to the Syrians (and a few other backers in the mix like Iran, Turkey, SA, etc).
So, now we have a power vacuum, a massive flood of arms and funds into a hostile region and we see the birth of ISIS.
We should have kept advisers to help out in Iraq (yes Im not a fan of it either) and we should NEVER have been trying to overthrow Asad (or Kadafi or the Egyptian government).
These are Obama's policies and they lead to the creation of ISIS.
Hope N Change
More likely 5 years of bad policy followed by bankruptcy. He wasn't right on everything but damn Ron Paul nailed foreign policy. Pull out of the Middle East, engage in trade, and stop trying to throw military force at problems. This can only end in economic collapse and death.
Jews control your country. Jews control your Congress. Jews control your 'Federal Reserve' and almost all of your banks. Jews control almost all of your media. Jews control almost all of your schools and colleges.
And JEWS are behind this '30 year war' bullshit, getting 'goyim' to fight the poor, innocent Jews' enemies...
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?
Would you like to enter a sweepstake on how many male soldiers, as opposed to female, die in action? I'm betting 100:1. Or maybe higher. But I bet any that do die will get huge coverage.
It's amazing, is it not, how appalled "society" is by violence against women, but violence against men is not only expected, but actively encouraged?
Our society is way off balance. We assume and expect men to perform all the dirty and dangerous jobs - soldiers, garbage men, oil drilling, you name it - and expect them to die to defend women under all circumstances.
But such responsibilities seem to garner no extra rights at all. Indeed, it looks like the reverse - divorces, for example, generally leave men poor (they usually lose significantly more than half the assets earned by the sweat of their brow - not their partners, and their future income is slashed ... even if the split was initiated by the female, as it usually is), utterly distraught - they usually lose decent access to their children (an event described by most people as "worse punishment than death"), and they are frequently accused of horrible crimes (claiming male on female domestic assault gets you free court representation in many places, so is embarrassingly common, with no vestige of punishment on the lying party should it be demonstrated untrue. Funnily enough, claiming it the other way (somewhat more common according to independent research [Harvard]) gets you nothing).
It seems to me, if we are to have a just and balanced society, either we perform ALL the same roles - nurse, teacher, CEO, soldier - and take the same risks, and are treated actually equally, or we should consider how else to balance things. (I love the "women get paid more than men" meme. Women control the spending of 75%+ of the worlds money - have you ever been to a shopping mall? Have you ever counted the number of shops devoted specifically to "women's stuff"? It's amazing).
One this is pretty certain, though. The mediaeval society seemingly sought by ISIS/ISIL/Daesh/wherever the heck these dopey folk want to call themselves this week is not a nice one. Especially for women. You'd think women would be lining up in droves to kill it off - but they don't, that's "men's work". Hmm, funny how that works out when push comes to shove.
So come on women - how about some SheForShe activity? Go fight the bastards and let the males take a break. Leave the kids - single fathers do a much better job in bringing up children anyway - lower rates of drug taking, teenage pregnancy, truancy, check the figures.
After all, that's what "society" seems to expect the fathers to do.
"Cats like plain crisps"
The battle against overly authoritarian shitheads is not a 30-year battle. It is likely an eternal battle (for moderate values of the concepts of "battle" and "eternity").
(There is no Islamic State in the west, but there are other examples one could name. For example: despite mountains of evidence to the contrary there are still hundreds of millions of people in the western world who think that sending drug addicts to prison is a great idea.)
It is also not a battle that can be successfully fought by anyone who does not picture themselves having their great grandchildren live in the region, because only those who do will have the stamina to keep fighting forever. Americans or Europeans can't be responsible for fighting the battle for a Middle east free of The Islamic State, or whatever other pretentious banner these guys will be fighting under next year.
Americans aren't really hatted, only your government and the top 1%.
Panetta's history is leading incredible levels of brutality on the premis that this would make the US better liked. He attributes the failure of that to insufficient brutality.
You shouldn't be suprised he thinks Obama's minor efforts at looking civilized have made things " more difficult". I won't read his book, but somebody tell me if he recommends nuking the whole area
Congress or the Republican Teapublicans specifically have made our entire government look weak. Our enemies see that we can not get anything accomplished and that this congress will oppose anything the president wants to do as proof that they can act with impunity in other areas of the world. It's not just bad policy decisions by the executive branch. Also for the record Iraq would not agree to a SOF agreement which means our troops would be subject to Iraqi justice not the UCMJ and I doubt there's any president that would agree to leave our troops there with that kind of agreement hanging over their heads.
OMFG, can they STFU already with this war on terrorism propaganda bullshit it's been 13 years of this damn crap please give it a fucking rest already for crying out loud. How stupid does this government think the U.S people are? ISIS(brainwashed, useless, failed in society fucking idiots) is financed by the U.S, UK, Saudi, Turkey, UAE, etc... CRIMINALS, All governments run by nothing but FUCKING CRIMINAL IDIOTS!
So now it's gonna be 30 years of no constitutional protection for the people. This would make Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and the Bush's very proud. Sociopaths.
It will take 30, 100, or 300, whatever is needed before the whole region is incorporated into the U.S economy and complies with U.S policies. That is what America's War On The World - conveniently named "War On Terror" - is all about.
... to prevent you from one day from waking up and asking yourself what news you've been missing over the las few years.
In Master of Magic, I farm fame by pulling back and not defeating the enemy completely. If they run out of mana, I'll meet with them and give them large amounts of gold so that I merely banish them instead of defeating them. This seems to me what Obama did so that he could have his Syrian war. Maybe he'll even get to declare marshal law if enough terrorists made it through the intentionally porous border.
The region was "perpetually fucked up" long before GWB. Nor did he lie to the American people about that situation. Weapons of mass destruction are a clear and present danger. Did you read today's news about an explosion at an Iranian nuke plant? When that nation's leaders promise that Jihad will not end until America is destroyed, then it's not too hard to guess why they want nukes. Meanwhile, in another of today's news stories, we hear that when a prominent world leader sounds this same warning on a national news show, his comments are censored by the news organization. No, the pushing of sand happens only when you bury your head.
"Leon? Now that you're retiring, could you help drum up some job security for the rest of us? Say for the next 30 years?"
If you have a distinct dislike for mad dictators why do you keep invading countries and installing them?
Come on, Us has been at war in middle east for 50 ears: help a coup in Iran, help jihadists against russians in Afghanistan, help Iraq against Iran (more forward 30 years), help jihadists against Syria, help Iraq against jihadists...
These guys want a forever war.
Back in 2006, then outgoing network news anchor Ted Koppel wrote a New York Times editorial stating the obvious: The Iraq war is about oil. And though the Bush Administration at the time had vociferously denied this fact, two years before that even former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neil had said the same during a CBS interview.
So now Panetta's saying it will be a thirty year war. Prepare ourselves for lost treasure, spilled blood, and the tears of war over this nearly indefinite period that compares in length to England's old The War of Roses. All to control a declining resource that's causing serious global environmental harm to boot.
Who here notices that this 30 year timeline dovetails in nicely with the UN's IPCC's Special Report on Renewable Energy Sources and Climate Change Mitigation
So a thirty year war to control world oil that ends at just about the same time global deployment of renewable systems are predicted to offset world energy needs. Huh.
Let's not forget that as a result of Iranian Revolutionaries seizing the American Embassy in Tehran and holding 52 hostages for 444 days, the Ayatollah and everything Iranian were pretty much roundly despised by 99.9% of all Americans. So, yes, if someone was messing with Iran, we really didn't give a damn. By the way, you may have noticed the little asterisk-footnote about how several of the former hostages fingered one Mr Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as being involved with the evil affair. He later became President of Iran.
Funny, how the same enemy propaganda, that implanted this "napalm-burned villages" nonsense into your brain, didn't supply any ammunition for you to also attack our participation in Korean war — which was no picnic either, and where plenty of civilians (innocent and otherwise) perished too. That's my point — wars are never pretty, but that so many people are focused on our "atrocities" in Vietnam, but rarely if ever mention Korea, is proof, their anger is due to deliberate propaganda efforts, rather than anything especially outrageous (by war standards) having taken place.
But I'll answer your pity question anyway. The worst figures, that the US military is accused of, is 150K killed Vietnamese. It seems a reasonable cost to prevent something like the 20 million killed by Stalin (10-15% of the USSR) or 2 million victims of Khmer Rouge (about 40% of Cambodians, which a reasonable and knowledgeable person could have anticipated from a Communist takeover).
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Thirty years, are you kidding me? This has been going on since 636 and the The Battle of Yarmouk:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Yarmouk
George F. Nafziger, in his book Islam at war, describes the battle as:
“ Although Yarmouk is little known today, it is one of the most decisive battles in human history...... Had Heraclius' forces prevailed, the modern world would be so changed as to be unrecognizable.[5]
And don't forget this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Lepanto 7 October 1571
And this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Vienna 11 and 12 September[11] 1683 Imagine that September 11, 1683
I wouldn't want to be the one to tell some mother, "I regret that your son is one of four thousand Americans who gave their lives in Iraq because Saddam celebrated when 9-11 happened."
You say that as if several innocent people haven't just had their heads publicly removed by a psycho taking the name of John Lennon in vain. Imagine there's no terrorism. Let me take you down. Yeah, yeah, yeah... Love the Hair Peace, bro.
It worked back then, but nowadays we have giant 3D concrete makerbots that can print the wall just as fast as they blow it up. Gihad THAT you MOTHERFUCKERS
We deserve this crap because we as a nation are not willing to got to WAR.
WE have to understand that when we went over there that we should have said you are our friends or our enemies and if you are our enemy you die.
Collateral damage is something that you just can't think about.
For the people that complain that we go over there for oil, yea we do. But, do you drive a car ... or use anything plastic if the answer is yes then you need to STFU. Additionally we don't take it over when we are done, but maybe we should instead of making our enemies(or at best Frenimies) and mega corps even richer (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Exxon i am looking at you).
Your analogy sucks dude. For it to be correct, the Titanic would've had to plow right through the iceberg and make it to NYC in record time. Barrack Obama did not inherit a wreck of lifeboats and bodies floating in the water. He got the actual ship, arriving heroically in port. If it's wrecked now, it's because he crashed it, and the Dems all cheered as he was doing so. But their grip on reality has always been rather tenuous. I mean, they expect us to believe that Benghazi was caused by a stupid YouTube video.
If we treat this as a war, we will be fighting, killing and destroying for 30 years changing little. Most of the death and destruction will happen to the civilian population. We need to treat this as a battle for the hearts and minds of the Muslim world. We have to change attitudes and how they treat each other. Break the cycle of tit for tat, I kill you because you killed my father/brother. This will take a generation or more.
Tonights live broadcast of USAFU:
The world.
At the current burn rate, the US will be officially insolvent fairly shortly (of course it has been technically insolvent for some time), depending when creditors finally pull the plug. After the regime in Washington collapses, this will leave behind the various messes of past failed US foreign policies in the middle east. I'm sure in the long term, nobody in the middle east will actually _want_ to live under an Islamic state, but letting them discover that through experience will just take much longer, each time America terrorises one of their countries, creating a whole new bunch of fanatics, and another vicious cycle of violence, far worse that the original violence the 'intervention' was originally supposed to address. Look for example at the number of deaths under Saddam in Iraq - a tiny number, compared to the bloodbath that resulted from the US destruction of the whole fabric of Iraqi infrastructure, and tearing apart of the whole country. ISIL was armed by America and its allies, and funded by America and its allies, to fight the Syrian government, just like racist Israel. Without US funding, one can only imagine that hundreds of thousands of ethnically cleansed Palestinian refugees may wish to return to their land, and may have a fighting chance of doing so, once the occupier regime weakens. Even with the malignant influence of US foreign policy gone, we are now guaranteed a vile legacy from western involvement in the region, that will last for many decades to come. Religion takes time to die out. You can't stamp it out with air strikes. The only way to do so, is a ground level
... and the reason is why lies well within the scope of the neocon policy makers of the last couple of decades. I just started reading the book Dirty Wars from Jeremy Scahill - a real eye opener. ISIL/ISIS fits perfectly - 30 years of war means 30 years of spending tax money towards the military/industrial complex.
Do a google news search for "ISIS" and "ISIL" for 1990 to 2013. Absolutely nothing.
Now we're being told that they're the biggest threat to America and the world. We didn't know about them last year?
How do people not realize this is a completely manufactured threat basically on par with Saddam's supposed nukes?
This "war" with ISIS, a threat created by the US Government to justify more spending on its corporate partners, will go on for as long as US voters remain a bunch of apathetic morons.
Of course, the US Government in its self-preservationist and power-hungry attitude has destroyed the education system so that US voters will remain stupid forever, so I just don't see a way out.
I think we should have realized by now that evil exists all the time. Weather its locally, Nationally, or somewhere in the World. Stop dreaming that some day there will be a Utopia that will come upon all of us. That somehow we will all of a sudden live peacefully together. You have two choices with evil, allow it to enter your space and then fight hard to stop it. Or seek it out and fight it before it gets to you. Religion is not evil, Muslims are not evil. People are evil, and sometimes use religion and other religious teachings in a incorrect way. Cleansing Earth of a group of people based on their religious beliefs is just plain evil. This is what ISIS is doing. But defeating them, will not be the end of evil. Not today, not ever.
so I see your profound wisdom on the matter.
And I don't mean ISIS.
The Chinese Intelligence apparatus funding the Jihad groups in order to keep the West occupied in Small Wars while China grows it's military to exceed the West. Though I guess I shouldn't have said that out loud and in open source but it's not like anyone with two brain cells can't make the assumption.
Aren't there continuous low-grade wars in 1984 to keep the people scared?
Because I "trust" a former head of CIA and DoD when it comes to claims on war since I am certain he stands to gain "nothing" from the cost of war. Why not just ramp it up to 100, heck 1000 years? How can anyone hear this crap and think "it's just how it is"? We have government employees that are so corrupt they believe their own bullshit.
ISIS is merely aping what we in the civilised west do.
Apache Helicopter incident, for example. ISIS haven't shot kids and laughed about it on a recording, have they? So *from their perspective* they are entirely the good guys.
If the governments even gave a token attempt to prosecute such atrocities, we could at least point to that despite failing to live up to our expectations, WE AT LEAST WERE TRYING.
As it is, we're persecuting people who dared show evidence of our own governments' atrocities.
From my POV, as from theirs, my government and yours are as bad, and worse BECAUSE WE PRETEND WE DON'T DO IT.
If we send those who do wrong in our name to defend themselves in court, we justify actions against ISIS and remove the available justifications to recruit new fodder.
That, however, requires our leaders to admit error, so I don't hold out any hope of this happening.
Whilst you xtians have people stoning to death men for being accused of being gay in christian africa, you have NO MORAL STANCE on what the silent majority of merely another moronic cult called "religion" says in the name of the voices in your heads you INSIST are the Words Of God(tm).
Commit ALL US forces to the middle east. Full mother-fucking mobilization Tell the troops shoot at anything that does not surrender, bomb the shit out of anything suspected as enemy location. Drop trillions of pounds of explosives by way of carpet bombing. Any country in the middle east complains, they are added to the enemy list and all their cities carpet bombed for 30 days.
Do it right and it's a 1 year war, will it have a LOT of civilian casualties? yup. But that is what war is about.
Either go in Full bore war, or just let the middle east eat it's self.
I'm for letting it just eat it's self.
I believe that 30 year figure can be significantly shortened if our level of motivation is high enough. Take, for example, the Hoover Dam. It was built in 5 years. Or the first Transcontinental Railroad which was built in 6 years. If these projects were undertaken today, they'd probably take several times longer or quite possibly they'd never get built at all because of the quagmire of bureaucracy. Look at Boston's Big Dig which took 15 years to complete.
The war on terror or southern border control or even California's high-speed rail project could be completed very quickly but people would have to be willing to cut through the bullsh*t to get them done.
We invade and / or bomb half the planet typically as a knee jerk reaction to something that's happened ( or invented as an excuse ).
Hell, for that matter, that's pretty much how America as a whole works. All of our laws, our entire way of life is based on reactionary thinking vs any premeditated thought process.
The short version is: American policy makers don't think of what their actions will bring beyond the short term ( read that: election period ). No one sits back and considers what the consequences might be a bit further down the road. Some can see it, but they're usually not in any position to make the decisions.
People like Panetta are paid to promote the interests of the military-industrial complex. The "complex" are businesses that make money by diverting tax payer revenue into military related activities. Watch/read President Eisenhower's farewell speech (it's very short and should be required reading for every school kid); if this claim hadn't come from the former 5-star general and president, I wouldn't have believed it.
Whichever countries are supplying these dicks with arms is really who the free world is at war with. Iran and Russia seem logical partners.
I was a young House staffer in the 1980s when Panetta was Chairman of the House Budget Committee. I admired him as a person and a leader.
My impression is that he's become more and more part of the "deep state" in recent years. I've lost a lot of respect for him.
As Secretary of Defense, Panetta whined about defense spending cuts like a hysterical high school girl. He should have stepped up and confronted the Pentagon's bloat, corruption and mismanagement.
Finally, it is disloyal and unprofessional of Panetta to write a book this "honest" while Obama is still in office -- that would be true no matter which persons or parties were involved. Yes, Panetta will sell more books because he's criticizing a sitting president instead of a former one. Does Panetta need the extra money that bad? Or is he setting himself up to be invited to be a Vice Presidential nominee? (That's wild speculation.)
Finally, I agree that Obama doesn't fight his political foes enough. But Obama has been a tiny bit restrained on foreign wars, and that's wisdom, not weakness. I don't welcome Panetta's 30 years war. Among other things, the US cannot afford it financially. The US should restrain itself from so many foreign wars instead of borrowing trillions more that undermines our national economic security.
Leon Panetta IMO makes the same mistake that POTUS Chaney and vPOTUS Rove made in the GWB Whitehouse. Fear based analysis of your enemy is a flawed analysis.
Our enemy can be Sunni-wahhabist, Shia-shurh, Al-Qaeda, Taliban, ISIS ... or Russian, China, French, German hate-fanatics and terrorist .... Fear is the most lethal and dangerous weapon in their arsenal. Politicians, clerics, wannabes ... in the USA, that stress fear, are all chicken-little screaming for falling clouds.
The greatest military powers that have existed in the world for the past 200 years have not ended US or destroyed The Constitution of US, and very few have been able to injure US. Our enemies have great puffery as do our Politicians, clerics, wannabes ... in the USA, but actually they seek to rule US by fear. FEAR is just a four phucking letter word that has no value to US and our leadership, but does impress foolish enemies of US.
USA Politicians, clerics, wannabes ... need to grow-up and become leaders for US or they need to shut-the-phuck-up.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
This dude is nothing more than a rightwing political hack. And his delusional fantasy of a 30 year war is absurd - because you have to ask; after 13 years, and somewhere between $4-$6 Trillion dollars; and a wrecked economy, who, exactly is going to PAY for this 30-year-war?
It's too expensive. We can't pay. The cartel of private banks who run the FED are no longer interested in running the printing presses to continue paying for this shit: they made that fact abundantly clear in 2008. Until Corporate America ponies up the cash (ie: pay your taxes, bitches), our budget for building bombs, planes, and other expensive disposable toys, is about zero.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Of course, the US could try getting out of the war. But most likely that would just result in the war being relocated from the Levant to the mainland US. Oh dear. What a pity. never mind.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"