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President Obama Re-Elected - Page 799

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Hey guys! We'll be closing this thread shortly, but we will make an American politics megathread where we can continue the discussions in here.

The new thread can be found here: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=383301
HunterX11
Profile Joined March 2009
United States1048 Posts
October 15 2012 20:40 GMT
#15961
On October 16 2012 05:11 JonnyBNoHo wrote:
Show nested quote +
On October 16 2012 04:30 Jormundr wrote:
On October 16 2012 00:45 DarK[A] wrote:
On October 15 2012 23:59 TheTenthDoc wrote:
On October 15 2012 23:42 DarK[A] wrote:
On October 15 2012 23:03 paralleluniverse wrote:
On October 15 2012 22:47 DarK[A] wrote:
Whatever you guys do, PLEASE watch the debates, and be sure to fact-check them.

I missed the first Presidential debate and just finished watching / reading the transcript from the VP debate last night.

From what I heard, Obama got demolished at the first Presidential debate. In my opinion, Biden started the VP debate very strong, but didn't keep pace and ended up falling behind after the first 30 minutes or so. Ryan won that debate, but by a closer margin than Romney allegedly won the first Presidential debate. While I believe he won through actual debate, others might say it was from Biden looking childish by laughing and cutting Ryan off with mockery literally somewhere between 80 and 90 times instead of offering an actual argument.

Fun Fact: Despite VP Biden painting the Romney/Ryan ticket in a negative light with regards to abortion (which is a non issue anyway, no politician will ever actually act on it - it's political suicide), Biden voted to overturn Roe v. Wade when he served as a Senator.

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=330491&currentpage=793#15849

Also, Ryan got absolutely demolished in that debate, he couldn't respond to any of the attacks made on him and Romney. The part on foreign policy, particularly on Iran and Afghanistan made Ryan look like he had no idea what's going on.


I guess that's your personal opinion and you're entitled to it.

Most of Biden's "attacks" on the Romney/Ryan ticket were gross misrepresentations of policies and quotes taken out of context. I would have liked to hear why after 4 years (2 of which with a Democratic majority so Obama could pass essentially anything he wanted to) we don't have the things we were promised, while we're spending trillions of dollars over our revenue. Taxing those 120,000 families making an average of $8 million annually at, say, a ridiculous 48% in this case would erase a mere 30% of our 2011 deficit ALONE. Or, in other terms, would run the federal government from 1/1/2011 to 2/15/2011.


If you don't think Ryan came off as incompetent regarding foreign policy when he was speaking nonsense about never using timelines because "they help our enemies" when they are an accepted fact of modern troop withdrawal in handover situations, being unable to present a single thing he and Romney would have done to stabilize the Middle East/Iran beyond "not what you guys did," not realizing virtually all our international allies including Afghans are on board with the withdrawal timetable, thinking it's bad to pull troops out of the most dangerous area in the world because it will put our troops in danger (this logic mandates total immediate withdrawal in reality), and not realizing that Iran is suffering under crippling sanctions, then you are in a strange place.

These weren't misrepresentations, these were things Ryan actually said live on national television during the debate.

Domestically everything is going to be pretty subjective because there are huge numbers of studies skewing things both ways (though I'd point out Ryan came off as a huge idiot for bashing the stimulus while requesting stimulus funds), but foreign policy? I'd have loved to see Huntsman in the chair instead, then we might have seen a competent discussion of foreign policy.

Edit: I mean, if you compare Ryan's thoughts on foreign policy to the foreign policy debate between Huntsman and Gingrich in the primaries, it's honestly depressing how little he knows and understands.


These Afghans on board with our withdrawal are the same ones turning rifles on foreign allies, right? Regardless of whether you think timelines help our enemies or not, do you think the Afghan forces are ready to completely take over security on their own? Ryan's point during that diatribe was to secure our gains. That is, NOT letting those thousands of military deaths be for absolutely nothing.


No, I don't think they will be ready to enforce our policies on their land in the next 5 years, the next 10 years, or even the next 25 years. I don't give a shit. We invaded a sovereign nation, shot a bunch of terrorists/extremists (as well as a bunch of civilians) and we are now somehow confused as to why there are still more and more people fighting against us.
PROTIP: When you invade someone's country and kill a bunch of people there will always be people who want to kill you in return.
I'm not making an argument for whether or not we can 'better' the country in 25 or 50 years. I'm not making an argument over whether or not the afghan government will have Taliban influences in it when we leave (I actually assume these influences never left). I'm saying that we never had any logical reason to go in and fight a guerrilla war alongside a frail and corrupt government against an enemy that bears no flag. The point is that our service men and women haven't been tasked with doing anything of a significant enough value to the United States or Afghanistan to justify the death toll. We are responsible for (by the lowest casualty count) 6 Afghan civilian deaths for every single person who died on 9/11. Explain to me what throwing away the lives of our soldiers is going to accomplish for us as a nation. Explain to me what this war on foreign soil is about, because I apparently don't understand the modern definition of defense and how it is so deeply intertwined with nation-building.

Now, if you believe that the war in Afghanistan was a bad solution that's fine, but you need to provide a better alternative. Sometimes bad solutions are all you have and simply pointing out their flaws is not enough.


Leaving Afghanistan now is another bad solution that is the better alternative to staying.
Try using both Irradiate and Defensive Matrix on an Overlord. It looks pretty neat.
DoubleReed
Profile Blog Joined September 2010
United States4130 Posts
October 15 2012 20:40 GMT
#15962
On October 16 2012 05:39 Jormundr wrote:
Show nested quote +
On October 16 2012 05:22 coverpunch wrote:
On October 16 2012 04:30 Jormundr wrote:
On October 16 2012 00:45 DarK[A] wrote:
On October 15 2012 23:59 TheTenthDoc wrote:
On October 15 2012 23:42 DarK[A] wrote:
On October 15 2012 23:03 paralleluniverse wrote:
On October 15 2012 22:47 DarK[A] wrote:
Whatever you guys do, PLEASE watch the debates, and be sure to fact-check them.

I missed the first Presidential debate and just finished watching / reading the transcript from the VP debate last night.

From what I heard, Obama got demolished at the first Presidential debate. In my opinion, Biden started the VP debate very strong, but didn't keep pace and ended up falling behind after the first 30 minutes or so. Ryan won that debate, but by a closer margin than Romney allegedly won the first Presidential debate. While I believe he won through actual debate, others might say it was from Biden looking childish by laughing and cutting Ryan off with mockery literally somewhere between 80 and 90 times instead of offering an actual argument.

Fun Fact: Despite VP Biden painting the Romney/Ryan ticket in a negative light with regards to abortion (which is a non issue anyway, no politician will ever actually act on it - it's political suicide), Biden voted to overturn Roe v. Wade when he served as a Senator.

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=330491&currentpage=793#15849

Also, Ryan got absolutely demolished in that debate, he couldn't respond to any of the attacks made on him and Romney. The part on foreign policy, particularly on Iran and Afghanistan made Ryan look like he had no idea what's going on.


I guess that's your personal opinion and you're entitled to it.

Most of Biden's "attacks" on the Romney/Ryan ticket were gross misrepresentations of policies and quotes taken out of context. I would have liked to hear why after 4 years (2 of which with a Democratic majority so Obama could pass essentially anything he wanted to) we don't have the things we were promised, while we're spending trillions of dollars over our revenue. Taxing those 120,000 families making an average of $8 million annually at, say, a ridiculous 48% in this case would erase a mere 30% of our 2011 deficit ALONE. Or, in other terms, would run the federal government from 1/1/2011 to 2/15/2011.


If you don't think Ryan came off as incompetent regarding foreign policy when he was speaking nonsense about never using timelines because "they help our enemies" when they are an accepted fact of modern troop withdrawal in handover situations, being unable to present a single thing he and Romney would have done to stabilize the Middle East/Iran beyond "not what you guys did," not realizing virtually all our international allies including Afghans are on board with the withdrawal timetable, thinking it's bad to pull troops out of the most dangerous area in the world because it will put our troops in danger (this logic mandates total immediate withdrawal in reality), and not realizing that Iran is suffering under crippling sanctions, then you are in a strange place.

These weren't misrepresentations, these were things Ryan actually said live on national television during the debate.

Domestically everything is going to be pretty subjective because there are huge numbers of studies skewing things both ways (though I'd point out Ryan came off as a huge idiot for bashing the stimulus while requesting stimulus funds), but foreign policy? I'd have loved to see Huntsman in the chair instead, then we might have seen a competent discussion of foreign policy.

Edit: I mean, if you compare Ryan's thoughts on foreign policy to the foreign policy debate between Huntsman and Gingrich in the primaries, it's honestly depressing how little he knows and understands.


These Afghans on board with our withdrawal are the same ones turning rifles on foreign allies, right? Regardless of whether you think timelines help our enemies or not, do you think the Afghan forces are ready to completely take over security on their own? Ryan's point during that diatribe was to secure our gains. That is, NOT letting those thousands of military deaths be for absolutely nothing.


No, I don't think they will be ready to enforce our policies on their land in the next 5 years, the next 10 years, or even the next 25 years. I don't give a shit. We invaded a sovereign nation, shot a bunch of terrorists/extremists (as well as a bunch of civilians) and we are now somehow confused as to why there are still more and more people fighting against us.
PROTIP: When you invade someone's country and kill a bunch of people there will always be people who want to kill you in return.
I'm not making an argument for whether or not we can 'better' the country in 25 or 50 years. I'm not making an argument over whether or not the afghan government will have Taliban influences in it when we leave (I actually assume these influences never left). I'm saying that we never had any logical reason to go in and fight a guerrilla war alongside a frail and corrupt government against an enemy that bears no flag. The point is that our service men and women haven't been tasked with doing anything of a significant enough value to the United States or Afghanistan to justify the death toll. We are responsible for (by the lowest casualty count) 6 Afghan civilian deaths for every single person who died on 9/11. Explain to me what throwing away the lives of our soldiers is going to accomplish for us as a nation. Explain to me what this war on foreign soil is about, because I apparently don't understand the modern definition of defense and how it is so deeply intertwined with nation-building.

Let me take a swing at this. What you're missing is what 9/11 represented to US foreign policy. The attack was planned from the dark and neglected corners of the world, so that these obscure conflicts that you would say America should not care are precisely the areas where terrorism has fomented most actively. There is large agreement that the best way to stop terrorism is to have a prosperous, stable, strong government that encourages democratic and free market values. Hence the active nation-building started by Bush and continued and expanded by Obama.

You seem unaware that it was last Friday that the Obama administration announced it was expanding the War on Terror to Mali (hunting down the terrorists who attacked the embassy in Benghazi). The US isn't committing ground forces, but we will be arming and funding a militia of mixed African countries to occupy the country. Not that Romney would do anything very different, at least he isn't saying so.

What I'm trying to say is that the people who are really lost on foreign policy right now are liberal isolationists who think America should disengage from the world and only expand our influence if people want it. You don't have a leg to stand on in this election. Obama isn't that at all, he's been arguably more interventionist than Bush, it's just that people stopped bitching and moaning about it because he's a Democrat and they've been so traditionally reluctant that we broadly assume that if he says someone needs to be harshly interrogated or killed by a drone or invaded, then he probably means it.

I fully understand that terrorism thrives in an uneducated populace guided by powerful religious and political leaders. It also thrives off of nationalism and blind hatred, two things we were GUARANTEED to inspire when we occupied the country. There was no benefit in committing to a large scale occupation of the country. I would be fine with bombing them over and over for 10 years. I would be fine with surgical strikes to take out perceived Al Qaeda cells and training camps. What I'm not in favor of is making our troops sit on the ground for 10 years with a target on their head to bolster an imagined 'freedom' for the people of a country 7000 miles away. I'm fully aware that neither candidate is anti war, and that no career politician would ever say "yeah we're just going to withdraw the troops immediately" because that would be political suicide.


...are you for real?
Jormundr
Profile Joined July 2011
United States1678 Posts
October 15 2012 20:50 GMT
#15963
On October 16 2012 05:40 DoubleReed wrote:
Show nested quote +
On October 16 2012 05:39 Jormundr wrote:
On October 16 2012 05:22 coverpunch wrote:
On October 16 2012 04:30 Jormundr wrote:
On October 16 2012 00:45 DarK[A] wrote:
On October 15 2012 23:59 TheTenthDoc wrote:
On October 15 2012 23:42 DarK[A] wrote:
On October 15 2012 23:03 paralleluniverse wrote:
On October 15 2012 22:47 DarK[A] wrote:
Whatever you guys do, PLEASE watch the debates, and be sure to fact-check them.

I missed the first Presidential debate and just finished watching / reading the transcript from the VP debate last night.

From what I heard, Obama got demolished at the first Presidential debate. In my opinion, Biden started the VP debate very strong, but didn't keep pace and ended up falling behind after the first 30 minutes or so. Ryan won that debate, but by a closer margin than Romney allegedly won the first Presidential debate. While I believe he won through actual debate, others might say it was from Biden looking childish by laughing and cutting Ryan off with mockery literally somewhere between 80 and 90 times instead of offering an actual argument.

Fun Fact: Despite VP Biden painting the Romney/Ryan ticket in a negative light with regards to abortion (which is a non issue anyway, no politician will ever actually act on it - it's political suicide), Biden voted to overturn Roe v. Wade when he served as a Senator.

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=330491&currentpage=793#15849

Also, Ryan got absolutely demolished in that debate, he couldn't respond to any of the attacks made on him and Romney. The part on foreign policy, particularly on Iran and Afghanistan made Ryan look like he had no idea what's going on.


I guess that's your personal opinion and you're entitled to it.

Most of Biden's "attacks" on the Romney/Ryan ticket were gross misrepresentations of policies and quotes taken out of context. I would have liked to hear why after 4 years (2 of which with a Democratic majority so Obama could pass essentially anything he wanted to) we don't have the things we were promised, while we're spending trillions of dollars over our revenue. Taxing those 120,000 families making an average of $8 million annually at, say, a ridiculous 48% in this case would erase a mere 30% of our 2011 deficit ALONE. Or, in other terms, would run the federal government from 1/1/2011 to 2/15/2011.


If you don't think Ryan came off as incompetent regarding foreign policy when he was speaking nonsense about never using timelines because "they help our enemies" when they are an accepted fact of modern troop withdrawal in handover situations, being unable to present a single thing he and Romney would have done to stabilize the Middle East/Iran beyond "not what you guys did," not realizing virtually all our international allies including Afghans are on board with the withdrawal timetable, thinking it's bad to pull troops out of the most dangerous area in the world because it will put our troops in danger (this logic mandates total immediate withdrawal in reality), and not realizing that Iran is suffering under crippling sanctions, then you are in a strange place.

These weren't misrepresentations, these were things Ryan actually said live on national television during the debate.

Domestically everything is going to be pretty subjective because there are huge numbers of studies skewing things both ways (though I'd point out Ryan came off as a huge idiot for bashing the stimulus while requesting stimulus funds), but foreign policy? I'd have loved to see Huntsman in the chair instead, then we might have seen a competent discussion of foreign policy.

Edit: I mean, if you compare Ryan's thoughts on foreign policy to the foreign policy debate between Huntsman and Gingrich in the primaries, it's honestly depressing how little he knows and understands.


These Afghans on board with our withdrawal are the same ones turning rifles on foreign allies, right? Regardless of whether you think timelines help our enemies or not, do you think the Afghan forces are ready to completely take over security on their own? Ryan's point during that diatribe was to secure our gains. That is, NOT letting those thousands of military deaths be for absolutely nothing.


No, I don't think they will be ready to enforce our policies on their land in the next 5 years, the next 10 years, or even the next 25 years. I don't give a shit. We invaded a sovereign nation, shot a bunch of terrorists/extremists (as well as a bunch of civilians) and we are now somehow confused as to why there are still more and more people fighting against us.
PROTIP: When you invade someone's country and kill a bunch of people there will always be people who want to kill you in return.
I'm not making an argument for whether or not we can 'better' the country in 25 or 50 years. I'm not making an argument over whether or not the afghan government will have Taliban influences in it when we leave (I actually assume these influences never left). I'm saying that we never had any logical reason to go in and fight a guerrilla war alongside a frail and corrupt government against an enemy that bears no flag. The point is that our service men and women haven't been tasked with doing anything of a significant enough value to the United States or Afghanistan to justify the death toll. We are responsible for (by the lowest casualty count) 6 Afghan civilian deaths for every single person who died on 9/11. Explain to me what throwing away the lives of our soldiers is going to accomplish for us as a nation. Explain to me what this war on foreign soil is about, because I apparently don't understand the modern definition of defense and how it is so deeply intertwined with nation-building.

Let me take a swing at this. What you're missing is what 9/11 represented to US foreign policy. The attack was planned from the dark and neglected corners of the world, so that these obscure conflicts that you would say America should not care are precisely the areas where terrorism has fomented most actively. There is large agreement that the best way to stop terrorism is to have a prosperous, stable, strong government that encourages democratic and free market values. Hence the active nation-building started by Bush and continued and expanded by Obama.

You seem unaware that it was last Friday that the Obama administration announced it was expanding the War on Terror to Mali (hunting down the terrorists who attacked the embassy in Benghazi). The US isn't committing ground forces, but we will be arming and funding a militia of mixed African countries to occupy the country. Not that Romney would do anything very different, at least he isn't saying so.

What I'm trying to say is that the people who are really lost on foreign policy right now are liberal isolationists who think America should disengage from the world and only expand our influence if people want it. You don't have a leg to stand on in this election. Obama isn't that at all, he's been arguably more interventionist than Bush, it's just that people stopped bitching and moaning about it because he's a Democrat and they've been so traditionally reluctant that we broadly assume that if he says someone needs to be harshly interrogated or killed by a drone or invaded, then he probably means it.

I fully understand that terrorism thrives in an uneducated populace guided by powerful religious and political leaders. It also thrives off of nationalism and blind hatred, two things we were GUARANTEED to inspire when we occupied the country. There was no benefit in committing to a large scale occupation of the country. I would be fine with bombing them over and over for 10 years. I would be fine with surgical strikes to take out perceived Al Qaeda cells and training camps. What I'm not in favor of is making our troops sit on the ground for 10 years with a target on their head to bolster an imagined 'freedom' for the people of a country 7000 miles away. I'm fully aware that neither candidate is anti war, and that no career politician would ever say "yeah we're just going to withdraw the troops immediately" because that would be political suicide.


...are you for real?

Why yes, I would definitely prefer if we spent the last 10 years just using air strikes on afghan soil instead of wasting the lives of our troops and any afghani civilians near our troops! It turns out that when you spend I don't know, say about $600 billion per year on 'defense' you often come up with methods of waging war which are more efficient (from a patriotic loss of life standpoint) than marching your troops in and setting up bases.
Capitalism is beneficial for people who work harder than other people. Under capitalism the only way to make more money is to work harder then your competitors whether they be other companies or workers. ~ Vegetarian
JonnyBNoHo
Profile Joined July 2011
United States6277 Posts
October 15 2012 20:59 GMT
#15964
On October 16 2012 05:39 Jormundr wrote:
Show nested quote +
On October 16 2012 05:22 coverpunch wrote:
On October 16 2012 04:30 Jormundr wrote:
On October 16 2012 00:45 DarK[A] wrote:
On October 15 2012 23:59 TheTenthDoc wrote:
On October 15 2012 23:42 DarK[A] wrote:
On October 15 2012 23:03 paralleluniverse wrote:
On October 15 2012 22:47 DarK[A] wrote:
Whatever you guys do, PLEASE watch the debates, and be sure to fact-check them.

I missed the first Presidential debate and just finished watching / reading the transcript from the VP debate last night.

From what I heard, Obama got demolished at the first Presidential debate. In my opinion, Biden started the VP debate very strong, but didn't keep pace and ended up falling behind after the first 30 minutes or so. Ryan won that debate, but by a closer margin than Romney allegedly won the first Presidential debate. While I believe he won through actual debate, others might say it was from Biden looking childish by laughing and cutting Ryan off with mockery literally somewhere between 80 and 90 times instead of offering an actual argument.

Fun Fact: Despite VP Biden painting the Romney/Ryan ticket in a negative light with regards to abortion (which is a non issue anyway, no politician will ever actually act on it - it's political suicide), Biden voted to overturn Roe v. Wade when he served as a Senator.

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=330491&currentpage=793#15849

Also, Ryan got absolutely demolished in that debate, he couldn't respond to any of the attacks made on him and Romney. The part on foreign policy, particularly on Iran and Afghanistan made Ryan look like he had no idea what's going on.


I guess that's your personal opinion and you're entitled to it.

Most of Biden's "attacks" on the Romney/Ryan ticket were gross misrepresentations of policies and quotes taken out of context. I would have liked to hear why after 4 years (2 of which with a Democratic majority so Obama could pass essentially anything he wanted to) we don't have the things we were promised, while we're spending trillions of dollars over our revenue. Taxing those 120,000 families making an average of $8 million annually at, say, a ridiculous 48% in this case would erase a mere 30% of our 2011 deficit ALONE. Or, in other terms, would run the federal government from 1/1/2011 to 2/15/2011.


If you don't think Ryan came off as incompetent regarding foreign policy when he was speaking nonsense about never using timelines because "they help our enemies" when they are an accepted fact of modern troop withdrawal in handover situations, being unable to present a single thing he and Romney would have done to stabilize the Middle East/Iran beyond "not what you guys did," not realizing virtually all our international allies including Afghans are on board with the withdrawal timetable, thinking it's bad to pull troops out of the most dangerous area in the world because it will put our troops in danger (this logic mandates total immediate withdrawal in reality), and not realizing that Iran is suffering under crippling sanctions, then you are in a strange place.

These weren't misrepresentations, these were things Ryan actually said live on national television during the debate.

Domestically everything is going to be pretty subjective because there are huge numbers of studies skewing things both ways (though I'd point out Ryan came off as a huge idiot for bashing the stimulus while requesting stimulus funds), but foreign policy? I'd have loved to see Huntsman in the chair instead, then we might have seen a competent discussion of foreign policy.

Edit: I mean, if you compare Ryan's thoughts on foreign policy to the foreign policy debate between Huntsman and Gingrich in the primaries, it's honestly depressing how little he knows and understands.


These Afghans on board with our withdrawal are the same ones turning rifles on foreign allies, right? Regardless of whether you think timelines help our enemies or not, do you think the Afghan forces are ready to completely take over security on their own? Ryan's point during that diatribe was to secure our gains. That is, NOT letting those thousands of military deaths be for absolutely nothing.


No, I don't think they will be ready to enforce our policies on their land in the next 5 years, the next 10 years, or even the next 25 years. I don't give a shit. We invaded a sovereign nation, shot a bunch of terrorists/extremists (as well as a bunch of civilians) and we are now somehow confused as to why there are still more and more people fighting against us.
PROTIP: When you invade someone's country and kill a bunch of people there will always be people who want to kill you in return.
I'm not making an argument for whether or not we can 'better' the country in 25 or 50 years. I'm not making an argument over whether or not the afghan government will have Taliban influences in it when we leave (I actually assume these influences never left). I'm saying that we never had any logical reason to go in and fight a guerrilla war alongside a frail and corrupt government against an enemy that bears no flag. The point is that our service men and women haven't been tasked with doing anything of a significant enough value to the United States or Afghanistan to justify the death toll. We are responsible for (by the lowest casualty count) 6 Afghan civilian deaths for every single person who died on 9/11. Explain to me what throwing away the lives of our soldiers is going to accomplish for us as a nation. Explain to me what this war on foreign soil is about, because I apparently don't understand the modern definition of defense and how it is so deeply intertwined with nation-building.

Let me take a swing at this. What you're missing is what 9/11 represented to US foreign policy. The attack was planned from the dark and neglected corners of the world, so that these obscure conflicts that you would say America should not care are precisely the areas where terrorism has fomented most actively. There is large agreement that the best way to stop terrorism is to have a prosperous, stable, strong government that encourages democratic and free market values. Hence the active nation-building started by Bush and continued and expanded by Obama.

You seem unaware that it was last Friday that the Obama administration announced it was expanding the War on Terror to Mali (hunting down the terrorists who attacked the embassy in Benghazi). The US isn't committing ground forces, but we will be arming and funding a militia of mixed African countries to occupy the country. Not that Romney would do anything very different, at least he isn't saying so.

What I'm trying to say is that the people who are really lost on foreign policy right now are liberal isolationists who think America should disengage from the world and only expand our influence if people want it. You don't have a leg to stand on in this election. Obama isn't that at all, he's been arguably more interventionist than Bush, it's just that people stopped bitching and moaning about it because he's a Democrat and they've been so traditionally reluctant that we broadly assume that if he says someone needs to be harshly interrogated or killed by a drone or invaded, then he probably means it.

I fully understand that terrorism thrives in an uneducated populace guided by powerful religious and political leaders. It also thrives off of nationalism and blind hatred, two things we were GUARANTEED to inspire when we occupied the country. There was no benefit in committing to a large scale occupation of the country. I would be fine with bombing them over and over for 10 years. I would be fine with surgical strikes to take out perceived Al Qaeda cells and training camps. What I'm not in favor of is making our troops sit on the ground for 10 years with a target on their head to bolster an imagined 'freedom' for the people of a country 7000 miles away. I'm fully aware that neither candidate is anti war, and that no career politician would ever say "yeah we're just going to withdraw the troops immediately" because that would be political suicide.

Bombing the country over and over for 10 years and killing civilians in the process would certainly make them hate at least as much.
coverpunch
Profile Joined December 2011
United States2093 Posts
October 15 2012 20:59 GMT
#15965
On October 16 2012 05:34 Souma wrote:
Show nested quote +
On October 16 2012 05:22 coverpunch wrote:
On October 16 2012 04:30 Jormundr wrote:
On October 16 2012 00:45 DarK[A] wrote:
On October 15 2012 23:59 TheTenthDoc wrote:
On October 15 2012 23:42 DarK[A] wrote:
On October 15 2012 23:03 paralleluniverse wrote:
On October 15 2012 22:47 DarK[A] wrote:
Whatever you guys do, PLEASE watch the debates, and be sure to fact-check them.

I missed the first Presidential debate and just finished watching / reading the transcript from the VP debate last night.

From what I heard, Obama got demolished at the first Presidential debate. In my opinion, Biden started the VP debate very strong, but didn't keep pace and ended up falling behind after the first 30 minutes or so. Ryan won that debate, but by a closer margin than Romney allegedly won the first Presidential debate. While I believe he won through actual debate, others might say it was from Biden looking childish by laughing and cutting Ryan off with mockery literally somewhere between 80 and 90 times instead of offering an actual argument.

Fun Fact: Despite VP Biden painting the Romney/Ryan ticket in a negative light with regards to abortion (which is a non issue anyway, no politician will ever actually act on it - it's political suicide), Biden voted to overturn Roe v. Wade when he served as a Senator.

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=330491&currentpage=793#15849

Also, Ryan got absolutely demolished in that debate, he couldn't respond to any of the attacks made on him and Romney. The part on foreign policy, particularly on Iran and Afghanistan made Ryan look like he had no idea what's going on.


I guess that's your personal opinion and you're entitled to it.

Most of Biden's "attacks" on the Romney/Ryan ticket were gross misrepresentations of policies and quotes taken out of context. I would have liked to hear why after 4 years (2 of which with a Democratic majority so Obama could pass essentially anything he wanted to) we don't have the things we were promised, while we're spending trillions of dollars over our revenue. Taxing those 120,000 families making an average of $8 million annually at, say, a ridiculous 48% in this case would erase a mere 30% of our 2011 deficit ALONE. Or, in other terms, would run the federal government from 1/1/2011 to 2/15/2011.


If you don't think Ryan came off as incompetent regarding foreign policy when he was speaking nonsense about never using timelines because "they help our enemies" when they are an accepted fact of modern troop withdrawal in handover situations, being unable to present a single thing he and Romney would have done to stabilize the Middle East/Iran beyond "not what you guys did," not realizing virtually all our international allies including Afghans are on board with the withdrawal timetable, thinking it's bad to pull troops out of the most dangerous area in the world because it will put our troops in danger (this logic mandates total immediate withdrawal in reality), and not realizing that Iran is suffering under crippling sanctions, then you are in a strange place.

These weren't misrepresentations, these were things Ryan actually said live on national television during the debate.

Domestically everything is going to be pretty subjective because there are huge numbers of studies skewing things both ways (though I'd point out Ryan came off as a huge idiot for bashing the stimulus while requesting stimulus funds), but foreign policy? I'd have loved to see Huntsman in the chair instead, then we might have seen a competent discussion of foreign policy.

Edit: I mean, if you compare Ryan's thoughts on foreign policy to the foreign policy debate between Huntsman and Gingrich in the primaries, it's honestly depressing how little he knows and understands.


These Afghans on board with our withdrawal are the same ones turning rifles on foreign allies, right? Regardless of whether you think timelines help our enemies or not, do you think the Afghan forces are ready to completely take over security on their own? Ryan's point during that diatribe was to secure our gains. That is, NOT letting those thousands of military deaths be for absolutely nothing.


No, I don't think they will be ready to enforce our policies on their land in the next 5 years, the next 10 years, or even the next 25 years. I don't give a shit. We invaded a sovereign nation, shot a bunch of terrorists/extremists (as well as a bunch of civilians) and we are now somehow confused as to why there are still more and more people fighting against us.
PROTIP: When you invade someone's country and kill a bunch of people there will always be people who want to kill you in return.
I'm not making an argument for whether or not we can 'better' the country in 25 or 50 years. I'm not making an argument over whether or not the afghan government will have Taliban influences in it when we leave (I actually assume these influences never left). I'm saying that we never had any logical reason to go in and fight a guerrilla war alongside a frail and corrupt government against an enemy that bears no flag. The point is that our service men and women haven't been tasked with doing anything of a significant enough value to the United States or Afghanistan to justify the death toll. We are responsible for (by the lowest casualty count) 6 Afghan civilian deaths for every single person who died on 9/11. Explain to me what throwing away the lives of our soldiers is going to accomplish for us as a nation. Explain to me what this war on foreign soil is about, because I apparently don't understand the modern definition of defense and how it is so deeply intertwined with nation-building.

Let me take a swing at this. What you're missing is what 9/11 represented to US foreign policy. The attack was planned from the dark and neglected corners of the world, so that these obscure conflicts that you would say America should not care are precisely the areas where terrorism has fomented most actively. There is large agreement that the best way to stop terrorism is to have a prosperous, stable, strong government that encourages democratic and free market values. Hence the active nation-building started by Bush and continued and expanded by Obama.

You seem unaware that it was last Friday that the Obama administration announced it was expanding the War on Terror to Mali (hunting down the terrorists who attacked the embassy in Benghazi). The US isn't committing ground forces, but we will be arming and funding a militia of mixed African countries to occupy the country. Not that Romney would do anything very different, at least he isn't saying so.

What I'm trying to say is that the people who are really lost on foreign policy right now are liberal isolationists who think America should disengage from the world and only expand our influence if people want it. You don't have a leg to stand on in this election. Obama isn't that at all, he's been arguably more interventionist than Bush, it's just that people stopped bitching and moaning about it because he's a Democrat and they've been so traditionally reluctant that we broadly assume that if he says someone needs to be harshly interrogated or killed by a drone or invaded, then he probably means it.


You can't compare Obama to Bush in this regard. Obama does not step on nearly as many toes when he decides to take action and has been putting more responsibility on the rest of the world. Also, liberals are not generally isolationist in regards to foreign policy, that would be libertarians. Liberals just don't believe the U.S. should be propping up dictators, assassinating democratically-elected leaders, getting into wars under false pretenses, etc.

You know how naive that sounds from an objective standpoint, right? For one, you have no comment on whether Obama is more interventionist or whether that's a good thing, you're just agreeing with me that people don't get as huffy about it as they did with Bush.

Second, liberals aren't supposed to be isolationist AT ALL, they're supposed to be all about spreading our values to the world. Conservatives are supposed to be isolationist because a small government does not intervene abroad unless it's absolutely necessary to promote domestic peace. Hence things like the Peace Corps, soft power, encouraging women's/minority rights around the world - that conforms to liberal philosophy, or at least it should.

And third, it's just blind to say the US doesn't get its hands dirty in international politics. I don't fault Obama or any other US president for that. It's part of the job that the US has to cut deals with bad people, especially in the dirtier parts of the world where good and evil don't have a bright line. But don't tell me that liberals are too good to deal with those kinds of people while conservatives just play in the mud like pigs because that's just wrong.
NeMeSiS3
Profile Blog Joined February 2012
Canada2972 Posts
Last Edited: 2012-10-15 21:04:11
October 15 2012 21:00 GMT
#15966
On October 16 2012 05:50 Jormundr wrote:
Show nested quote +
On October 16 2012 05:40 DoubleReed wrote:
On October 16 2012 05:39 Jormundr wrote:
On October 16 2012 05:22 coverpunch wrote:
On October 16 2012 04:30 Jormundr wrote:
On October 16 2012 00:45 DarK[A] wrote:
On October 15 2012 23:59 TheTenthDoc wrote:
On October 15 2012 23:42 DarK[A] wrote:
On October 15 2012 23:03 paralleluniverse wrote:
On October 15 2012 22:47 DarK[A] wrote:
Whatever you guys do, PLEASE watch the debates, and be sure to fact-check them.

I missed the first Presidential debate and just finished watching / reading the transcript from the VP debate last night.

From what I heard, Obama got demolished at the first Presidential debate. In my opinion, Biden started the VP debate very strong, but didn't keep pace and ended up falling behind after the first 30 minutes or so. Ryan won that debate, but by a closer margin than Romney allegedly won the first Presidential debate. While I believe he won through actual debate, others might say it was from Biden looking childish by laughing and cutting Ryan off with mockery literally somewhere between 80 and 90 times instead of offering an actual argument.

Fun Fact: Despite VP Biden painting the Romney/Ryan ticket in a negative light with regards to abortion (which is a non issue anyway, no politician will ever actually act on it - it's political suicide), Biden voted to overturn Roe v. Wade when he served as a Senator.

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=330491&currentpage=793#15849

Also, Ryan got absolutely demolished in that debate, he couldn't respond to any of the attacks made on him and Romney. The part on foreign policy, particularly on Iran and Afghanistan made Ryan look like he had no idea what's going on.


I guess that's your personal opinion and you're entitled to it.

Most of Biden's "attacks" on the Romney/Ryan ticket were gross misrepresentations of policies and quotes taken out of context. I would have liked to hear why after 4 years (2 of which with a Democratic majority so Obama could pass essentially anything he wanted to) we don't have the things we were promised, while we're spending trillions of dollars over our revenue. Taxing those 120,000 families making an average of $8 million annually at, say, a ridiculous 48% in this case would erase a mere 30% of our 2011 deficit ALONE. Or, in other terms, would run the federal government from 1/1/2011 to 2/15/2011.


If you don't think Ryan came off as incompetent regarding foreign policy when he was speaking nonsense about never using timelines because "they help our enemies" when they are an accepted fact of modern troop withdrawal in handover situations, being unable to present a single thing he and Romney would have done to stabilize the Middle East/Iran beyond "not what you guys did," not realizing virtually all our international allies including Afghans are on board with the withdrawal timetable, thinking it's bad to pull troops out of the most dangerous area in the world because it will put our troops in danger (this logic mandates total immediate withdrawal in reality), and not realizing that Iran is suffering under crippling sanctions, then you are in a strange place.

These weren't misrepresentations, these were things Ryan actually said live on national television during the debate.

Domestically everything is going to be pretty subjective because there are huge numbers of studies skewing things both ways (though I'd point out Ryan came off as a huge idiot for bashing the stimulus while requesting stimulus funds), but foreign policy? I'd have loved to see Huntsman in the chair instead, then we might have seen a competent discussion of foreign policy.

Edit: I mean, if you compare Ryan's thoughts on foreign policy to the foreign policy debate between Huntsman and Gingrich in the primaries, it's honestly depressing how little he knows and understands.


These Afghans on board with our withdrawal are the same ones turning rifles on foreign allies, right? Regardless of whether you think timelines help our enemies or not, do you think the Afghan forces are ready to completely take over security on their own? Ryan's point during that diatribe was to secure our gains. That is, NOT letting those thousands of military deaths be for absolutely nothing.


No, I don't think they will be ready to enforce our policies on their land in the next 5 years, the next 10 years, or even the next 25 years. I don't give a shit. We invaded a sovereign nation, shot a bunch of terrorists/extremists (as well as a bunch of civilians) and we are now somehow confused as to why there are still more and more people fighting against us.
PROTIP: When you invade someone's country and kill a bunch of people there will always be people who want to kill you in return.
I'm not making an argument for whether or not we can 'better' the country in 25 or 50 years. I'm not making an argument over whether or not the afghan government will have Taliban influences in it when we leave (I actually assume these influences never left). I'm saying that we never had any logical reason to go in and fight a guerrilla war alongside a frail and corrupt government against an enemy that bears no flag. The point is that our service men and women haven't been tasked with doing anything of a significant enough value to the United States or Afghanistan to justify the death toll. We are responsible for (by the lowest casualty count) 6 Afghan civilian deaths for every single person who died on 9/11. Explain to me what throwing away the lives of our soldiers is going to accomplish for us as a nation. Explain to me what this war on foreign soil is about, because I apparently don't understand the modern definition of defense and how it is so deeply intertwined with nation-building.

Let me take a swing at this. What you're missing is what 9/11 represented to US foreign policy. The attack was planned from the dark and neglected corners of the world, so that these obscure conflicts that you would say America should not care are precisely the areas where terrorism has fomented most actively. There is large agreement that the best way to stop terrorism is to have a prosperous, stable, strong government that encourages democratic and free market values. Hence the active nation-building started by Bush and continued and expanded by Obama.

You seem unaware that it was last Friday that the Obama administration announced it was expanding the War on Terror to Mali (hunting down the terrorists who attacked the embassy in Benghazi). The US isn't committing ground forces, but we will be arming and funding a militia of mixed African countries to occupy the country. Not that Romney would do anything very different, at least he isn't saying so.

What I'm trying to say is that the people who are really lost on foreign policy right now are liberal isolationists who think America should disengage from the world and only expand our influence if people want it. You don't have a leg to stand on in this election. Obama isn't that at all, he's been arguably more interventionist than Bush, it's just that people stopped bitching and moaning about it because he's a Democrat and they've been so traditionally reluctant that we broadly assume that if he says someone needs to be harshly interrogated or killed by a drone or invaded, then he probably means it.

I fully understand that terrorism thrives in an uneducated populace guided by powerful religious and political leaders. It also thrives off of nationalism and blind hatred, two things we were GUARANTEED to inspire when we occupied the country. There was no benefit in committing to a large scale occupation of the country. I would be fine with bombing them over and over for 10 years. I would be fine with surgical strikes to take out perceived Al Qaeda cells and training camps. What I'm not in favor of is making our troops sit on the ground for 10 years with a target on their head to bolster an imagined 'freedom' for the people of a country 7000 miles away. I'm fully aware that neither candidate is anti war, and that no career politician would ever say "yeah we're just going to withdraw the troops immediately" because that would be political suicide.


...are you for real?

Why yes, I would definitely prefer if we spent the last 10 years just using air strikes on afghan soil instead of wasting the lives of our troops and any afghani civilians near our troops! It turns out that when you spend I don't know, say about $600 billion per year on 'defense' you often come up with methods of waging war which are more efficient (from a patriotic loss of life standpoint) than marching your troops in and setting up bases.

Geez you really think war is simplistic as bombing areas of interest and problem solved?? Where were you during the past 20+ wars! You're a military genius.

T.T this would not solve anything and it wouldn't have to begin with.

It also thrives off of nationalism and blind hatred, two things we were GUARANTEED to inspire when we occupied the country. There was no benefit in committing to a large scale occupation of the country. I would be fine with bombing them over and over for 10 years.


And you think dropping bombs for 10 years straight is the solution to stop them from hating :D lol

Let's all just sit back, grab a thing of scotch and slightly giggle at his response
FoTG fighting!
DoubleReed
Profile Blog Joined September 2010
United States4130 Posts
October 15 2012 21:02 GMT
#15967
On October 16 2012 05:50 Jormundr wrote:
Show nested quote +
On October 16 2012 05:40 DoubleReed wrote:
On October 16 2012 05:39 Jormundr wrote:
On October 16 2012 05:22 coverpunch wrote:
On October 16 2012 04:30 Jormundr wrote:
On October 16 2012 00:45 DarK[A] wrote:
On October 15 2012 23:59 TheTenthDoc wrote:
On October 15 2012 23:42 DarK[A] wrote:
On October 15 2012 23:03 paralleluniverse wrote:
On October 15 2012 22:47 DarK[A] wrote:
Whatever you guys do, PLEASE watch the debates, and be sure to fact-check them.

I missed the first Presidential debate and just finished watching / reading the transcript from the VP debate last night.

From what I heard, Obama got demolished at the first Presidential debate. In my opinion, Biden started the VP debate very strong, but didn't keep pace and ended up falling behind after the first 30 minutes or so. Ryan won that debate, but by a closer margin than Romney allegedly won the first Presidential debate. While I believe he won through actual debate, others might say it was from Biden looking childish by laughing and cutting Ryan off with mockery literally somewhere between 80 and 90 times instead of offering an actual argument.

Fun Fact: Despite VP Biden painting the Romney/Ryan ticket in a negative light with regards to abortion (which is a non issue anyway, no politician will ever actually act on it - it's political suicide), Biden voted to overturn Roe v. Wade when he served as a Senator.

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=330491&currentpage=793#15849

Also, Ryan got absolutely demolished in that debate, he couldn't respond to any of the attacks made on him and Romney. The part on foreign policy, particularly on Iran and Afghanistan made Ryan look like he had no idea what's going on.


I guess that's your personal opinion and you're entitled to it.

Most of Biden's "attacks" on the Romney/Ryan ticket were gross misrepresentations of policies and quotes taken out of context. I would have liked to hear why after 4 years (2 of which with a Democratic majority so Obama could pass essentially anything he wanted to) we don't have the things we were promised, while we're spending trillions of dollars over our revenue. Taxing those 120,000 families making an average of $8 million annually at, say, a ridiculous 48% in this case would erase a mere 30% of our 2011 deficit ALONE. Or, in other terms, would run the federal government from 1/1/2011 to 2/15/2011.


If you don't think Ryan came off as incompetent regarding foreign policy when he was speaking nonsense about never using timelines because "they help our enemies" when they are an accepted fact of modern troop withdrawal in handover situations, being unable to present a single thing he and Romney would have done to stabilize the Middle East/Iran beyond "not what you guys did," not realizing virtually all our international allies including Afghans are on board with the withdrawal timetable, thinking it's bad to pull troops out of the most dangerous area in the world because it will put our troops in danger (this logic mandates total immediate withdrawal in reality), and not realizing that Iran is suffering under crippling sanctions, then you are in a strange place.

These weren't misrepresentations, these were things Ryan actually said live on national television during the debate.

Domestically everything is going to be pretty subjective because there are huge numbers of studies skewing things both ways (though I'd point out Ryan came off as a huge idiot for bashing the stimulus while requesting stimulus funds), but foreign policy? I'd have loved to see Huntsman in the chair instead, then we might have seen a competent discussion of foreign policy.

Edit: I mean, if you compare Ryan's thoughts on foreign policy to the foreign policy debate between Huntsman and Gingrich in the primaries, it's honestly depressing how little he knows and understands.


These Afghans on board with our withdrawal are the same ones turning rifles on foreign allies, right? Regardless of whether you think timelines help our enemies or not, do you think the Afghan forces are ready to completely take over security on their own? Ryan's point during that diatribe was to secure our gains. That is, NOT letting those thousands of military deaths be for absolutely nothing.


No, I don't think they will be ready to enforce our policies on their land in the next 5 years, the next 10 years, or even the next 25 years. I don't give a shit. We invaded a sovereign nation, shot a bunch of terrorists/extremists (as well as a bunch of civilians) and we are now somehow confused as to why there are still more and more people fighting against us.
PROTIP: When you invade someone's country and kill a bunch of people there will always be people who want to kill you in return.
I'm not making an argument for whether or not we can 'better' the country in 25 or 50 years. I'm not making an argument over whether or not the afghan government will have Taliban influences in it when we leave (I actually assume these influences never left). I'm saying that we never had any logical reason to go in and fight a guerrilla war alongside a frail and corrupt government against an enemy that bears no flag. The point is that our service men and women haven't been tasked with doing anything of a significant enough value to the United States or Afghanistan to justify the death toll. We are responsible for (by the lowest casualty count) 6 Afghan civilian deaths for every single person who died on 9/11. Explain to me what throwing away the lives of our soldiers is going to accomplish for us as a nation. Explain to me what this war on foreign soil is about, because I apparently don't understand the modern definition of defense and how it is so deeply intertwined with nation-building.

Let me take a swing at this. What you're missing is what 9/11 represented to US foreign policy. The attack was planned from the dark and neglected corners of the world, so that these obscure conflicts that you would say America should not care are precisely the areas where terrorism has fomented most actively. There is large agreement that the best way to stop terrorism is to have a prosperous, stable, strong government that encourages democratic and free market values. Hence the active nation-building started by Bush and continued and expanded by Obama.

You seem unaware that it was last Friday that the Obama administration announced it was expanding the War on Terror to Mali (hunting down the terrorists who attacked the embassy in Benghazi). The US isn't committing ground forces, but we will be arming and funding a militia of mixed African countries to occupy the country. Not that Romney would do anything very different, at least he isn't saying so.

What I'm trying to say is that the people who are really lost on foreign policy right now are liberal isolationists who think America should disengage from the world and only expand our influence if people want it. You don't have a leg to stand on in this election. Obama isn't that at all, he's been arguably more interventionist than Bush, it's just that people stopped bitching and moaning about it because he's a Democrat and they've been so traditionally reluctant that we broadly assume that if he says someone needs to be harshly interrogated or killed by a drone or invaded, then he probably means it.

I fully understand that terrorism thrives in an uneducated populace guided by powerful religious and political leaders. It also thrives off of nationalism and blind hatred, two things we were GUARANTEED to inspire when we occupied the country. There was no benefit in committing to a large scale occupation of the country. I would be fine with bombing them over and over for 10 years. I would be fine with surgical strikes to take out perceived Al Qaeda cells and training camps. What I'm not in favor of is making our troops sit on the ground for 10 years with a target on their head to bolster an imagined 'freedom' for the people of a country 7000 miles away. I'm fully aware that neither candidate is anti war, and that no career politician would ever say "yeah we're just going to withdraw the troops immediately" because that would be political suicide.


...are you for real?

Why yes, I would definitely prefer if we spent the last 10 years just using air strikes on afghan soil instead of wasting the lives of our troops and any afghani civilians near our troops! It turns out that when you spend I don't know, say about $600 billion per year on 'defense' you often come up with methods of waging war which are more efficient (from a patriotic loss of life standpoint) than marching your troops in and setting up bases.


Well, gee, I would prefer not bombing them for ten years over and over! What about that option??
DoubleReed
Profile Blog Joined September 2010
United States4130 Posts
Last Edited: 2012-10-15 21:07:46
October 15 2012 21:06 GMT
#15968
On October 16 2012 05:59 coverpunch wrote:
Show nested quote +
On October 16 2012 05:34 Souma wrote:
On October 16 2012 05:22 coverpunch wrote:
On October 16 2012 04:30 Jormundr wrote:
On October 16 2012 00:45 DarK[A] wrote:
On October 15 2012 23:59 TheTenthDoc wrote:
On October 15 2012 23:42 DarK[A] wrote:
On October 15 2012 23:03 paralleluniverse wrote:
On October 15 2012 22:47 DarK[A] wrote:
Whatever you guys do, PLEASE watch the debates, and be sure to fact-check them.

I missed the first Presidential debate and just finished watching / reading the transcript from the VP debate last night.

From what I heard, Obama got demolished at the first Presidential debate. In my opinion, Biden started the VP debate very strong, but didn't keep pace and ended up falling behind after the first 30 minutes or so. Ryan won that debate, but by a closer margin than Romney allegedly won the first Presidential debate. While I believe he won through actual debate, others might say it was from Biden looking childish by laughing and cutting Ryan off with mockery literally somewhere between 80 and 90 times instead of offering an actual argument.

Fun Fact: Despite VP Biden painting the Romney/Ryan ticket in a negative light with regards to abortion (which is a non issue anyway, no politician will ever actually act on it - it's political suicide), Biden voted to overturn Roe v. Wade when he served as a Senator.

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=330491&currentpage=793#15849

Also, Ryan got absolutely demolished in that debate, he couldn't respond to any of the attacks made on him and Romney. The part on foreign policy, particularly on Iran and Afghanistan made Ryan look like he had no idea what's going on.


I guess that's your personal opinion and you're entitled to it.

Most of Biden's "attacks" on the Romney/Ryan ticket were gross misrepresentations of policies and quotes taken out of context. I would have liked to hear why after 4 years (2 of which with a Democratic majority so Obama could pass essentially anything he wanted to) we don't have the things we were promised, while we're spending trillions of dollars over our revenue. Taxing those 120,000 families making an average of $8 million annually at, say, a ridiculous 48% in this case would erase a mere 30% of our 2011 deficit ALONE. Or, in other terms, would run the federal government from 1/1/2011 to 2/15/2011.


If you don't think Ryan came off as incompetent regarding foreign policy when he was speaking nonsense about never using timelines because "they help our enemies" when they are an accepted fact of modern troop withdrawal in handover situations, being unable to present a single thing he and Romney would have done to stabilize the Middle East/Iran beyond "not what you guys did," not realizing virtually all our international allies including Afghans are on board with the withdrawal timetable, thinking it's bad to pull troops out of the most dangerous area in the world because it will put our troops in danger (this logic mandates total immediate withdrawal in reality), and not realizing that Iran is suffering under crippling sanctions, then you are in a strange place.

These weren't misrepresentations, these were things Ryan actually said live on national television during the debate.

Domestically everything is going to be pretty subjective because there are huge numbers of studies skewing things both ways (though I'd point out Ryan came off as a huge idiot for bashing the stimulus while requesting stimulus funds), but foreign policy? I'd have loved to see Huntsman in the chair instead, then we might have seen a competent discussion of foreign policy.

Edit: I mean, if you compare Ryan's thoughts on foreign policy to the foreign policy debate between Huntsman and Gingrich in the primaries, it's honestly depressing how little he knows and understands.


These Afghans on board with our withdrawal are the same ones turning rifles on foreign allies, right? Regardless of whether you think timelines help our enemies or not, do you think the Afghan forces are ready to completely take over security on their own? Ryan's point during that diatribe was to secure our gains. That is, NOT letting those thousands of military deaths be for absolutely nothing.


No, I don't think they will be ready to enforce our policies on their land in the next 5 years, the next 10 years, or even the next 25 years. I don't give a shit. We invaded a sovereign nation, shot a bunch of terrorists/extremists (as well as a bunch of civilians) and we are now somehow confused as to why there are still more and more people fighting against us.
PROTIP: When you invade someone's country and kill a bunch of people there will always be people who want to kill you in return.
I'm not making an argument for whether or not we can 'better' the country in 25 or 50 years. I'm not making an argument over whether or not the afghan government will have Taliban influences in it when we leave (I actually assume these influences never left). I'm saying that we never had any logical reason to go in and fight a guerrilla war alongside a frail and corrupt government against an enemy that bears no flag. The point is that our service men and women haven't been tasked with doing anything of a significant enough value to the United States or Afghanistan to justify the death toll. We are responsible for (by the lowest casualty count) 6 Afghan civilian deaths for every single person who died on 9/11. Explain to me what throwing away the lives of our soldiers is going to accomplish for us as a nation. Explain to me what this war on foreign soil is about, because I apparently don't understand the modern definition of defense and how it is so deeply intertwined with nation-building.

Let me take a swing at this. What you're missing is what 9/11 represented to US foreign policy. The attack was planned from the dark and neglected corners of the world, so that these obscure conflicts that you would say America should not care are precisely the areas where terrorism has fomented most actively. There is large agreement that the best way to stop terrorism is to have a prosperous, stable, strong government that encourages democratic and free market values. Hence the active nation-building started by Bush and continued and expanded by Obama.

You seem unaware that it was last Friday that the Obama administration announced it was expanding the War on Terror to Mali (hunting down the terrorists who attacked the embassy in Benghazi). The US isn't committing ground forces, but we will be arming and funding a militia of mixed African countries to occupy the country. Not that Romney would do anything very different, at least he isn't saying so.

What I'm trying to say is that the people who are really lost on foreign policy right now are liberal isolationists who think America should disengage from the world and only expand our influence if people want it. You don't have a leg to stand on in this election. Obama isn't that at all, he's been arguably more interventionist than Bush, it's just that people stopped bitching and moaning about it because he's a Democrat and they've been so traditionally reluctant that we broadly assume that if he says someone needs to be harshly interrogated or killed by a drone or invaded, then he probably means it.


You can't compare Obama to Bush in this regard. Obama does not step on nearly as many toes when he decides to take action and has been putting more responsibility on the rest of the world. Also, liberals are not generally isolationist in regards to foreign policy, that would be libertarians. Liberals just don't believe the U.S. should be propping up dictators, assassinating democratically-elected leaders, getting into wars under false pretenses, etc.

You know how naive that sounds from an objective standpoint, right? For one, you have no comment on whether Obama is more interventionist or whether that's a good thing, you're just agreeing with me that people don't get as huffy about it as they did with Bush.

Second, liberals aren't supposed to be isolationist AT ALL, they're supposed to be all about spreading our values to the world. Conservatives are supposed to be isolationist because a small government does not intervene abroad unless it's absolutely necessary to promote domestic peace. Hence things like the Peace Corps, soft power, encouraging women's/minority rights around the world - that conforms to liberal philosophy, or at least it should.

And third, it's just blind to say the US doesn't get its hands dirty in international politics. I don't fault Obama or any other US president for that. It's part of the job that the US has to cut deals with bad people, especially in the dirtier parts of the world where good and evil don't have a bright line. But don't tell me that liberals are too good to deal with those kinds of people while conservatives just play in the mud like pigs because that's just wrong.


To your second point: why are so many republicans total hawks? Empirical evidence is just going against what you're saying.

Personally I don't think there is conservative foreign policy and liberal foreign policy. It just seems all over the place. I don't think isolationism makes any sense at all as a global superpower, and it's only going to make less sense as globalization continues.
coverpunch
Profile Joined December 2011
United States2093 Posts
October 15 2012 21:06 GMT
#15969
On October 16 2012 05:50 Jormundr wrote:
Show nested quote +
On October 16 2012 05:40 DoubleReed wrote:
On October 16 2012 05:39 Jormundr wrote:
On October 16 2012 05:22 coverpunch wrote:
On October 16 2012 04:30 Jormundr wrote:
On October 16 2012 00:45 DarK[A] wrote:
On October 15 2012 23:59 TheTenthDoc wrote:
On October 15 2012 23:42 DarK[A] wrote:
On October 15 2012 23:03 paralleluniverse wrote:
On October 15 2012 22:47 DarK[A] wrote:
Whatever you guys do, PLEASE watch the debates, and be sure to fact-check them.

I missed the first Presidential debate and just finished watching / reading the transcript from the VP debate last night.

From what I heard, Obama got demolished at the first Presidential debate. In my opinion, Biden started the VP debate very strong, but didn't keep pace and ended up falling behind after the first 30 minutes or so. Ryan won that debate, but by a closer margin than Romney allegedly won the first Presidential debate. While I believe he won through actual debate, others might say it was from Biden looking childish by laughing and cutting Ryan off with mockery literally somewhere between 80 and 90 times instead of offering an actual argument.

Fun Fact: Despite VP Biden painting the Romney/Ryan ticket in a negative light with regards to abortion (which is a non issue anyway, no politician will ever actually act on it - it's political suicide), Biden voted to overturn Roe v. Wade when he served as a Senator.

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=330491&currentpage=793#15849

Also, Ryan got absolutely demolished in that debate, he couldn't respond to any of the attacks made on him and Romney. The part on foreign policy, particularly on Iran and Afghanistan made Ryan look like he had no idea what's going on.


I guess that's your personal opinion and you're entitled to it.

Most of Biden's "attacks" on the Romney/Ryan ticket were gross misrepresentations of policies and quotes taken out of context. I would have liked to hear why after 4 years (2 of which with a Democratic majority so Obama could pass essentially anything he wanted to) we don't have the things we were promised, while we're spending trillions of dollars over our revenue. Taxing those 120,000 families making an average of $8 million annually at, say, a ridiculous 48% in this case would erase a mere 30% of our 2011 deficit ALONE. Or, in other terms, would run the federal government from 1/1/2011 to 2/15/2011.


If you don't think Ryan came off as incompetent regarding foreign policy when he was speaking nonsense about never using timelines because "they help our enemies" when they are an accepted fact of modern troop withdrawal in handover situations, being unable to present a single thing he and Romney would have done to stabilize the Middle East/Iran beyond "not what you guys did," not realizing virtually all our international allies including Afghans are on board with the withdrawal timetable, thinking it's bad to pull troops out of the most dangerous area in the world because it will put our troops in danger (this logic mandates total immediate withdrawal in reality), and not realizing that Iran is suffering under crippling sanctions, then you are in a strange place.

These weren't misrepresentations, these were things Ryan actually said live on national television during the debate.

Domestically everything is going to be pretty subjective because there are huge numbers of studies skewing things both ways (though I'd point out Ryan came off as a huge idiot for bashing the stimulus while requesting stimulus funds), but foreign policy? I'd have loved to see Huntsman in the chair instead, then we might have seen a competent discussion of foreign policy.

Edit: I mean, if you compare Ryan's thoughts on foreign policy to the foreign policy debate between Huntsman and Gingrich in the primaries, it's honestly depressing how little he knows and understands.


These Afghans on board with our withdrawal are the same ones turning rifles on foreign allies, right? Regardless of whether you think timelines help our enemies or not, do you think the Afghan forces are ready to completely take over security on their own? Ryan's point during that diatribe was to secure our gains. That is, NOT letting those thousands of military deaths be for absolutely nothing.


No, I don't think they will be ready to enforce our policies on their land in the next 5 years, the next 10 years, or even the next 25 years. I don't give a shit. We invaded a sovereign nation, shot a bunch of terrorists/extremists (as well as a bunch of civilians) and we are now somehow confused as to why there are still more and more people fighting against us.
PROTIP: When you invade someone's country and kill a bunch of people there will always be people who want to kill you in return.
I'm not making an argument for whether or not we can 'better' the country in 25 or 50 years. I'm not making an argument over whether or not the afghan government will have Taliban influences in it when we leave (I actually assume these influences never left). I'm saying that we never had any logical reason to go in and fight a guerrilla war alongside a frail and corrupt government against an enemy that bears no flag. The point is that our service men and women haven't been tasked with doing anything of a significant enough value to the United States or Afghanistan to justify the death toll. We are responsible for (by the lowest casualty count) 6 Afghan civilian deaths for every single person who died on 9/11. Explain to me what throwing away the lives of our soldiers is going to accomplish for us as a nation. Explain to me what this war on foreign soil is about, because I apparently don't understand the modern definition of defense and how it is so deeply intertwined with nation-building.

Let me take a swing at this. What you're missing is what 9/11 represented to US foreign policy. The attack was planned from the dark and neglected corners of the world, so that these obscure conflicts that you would say America should not care are precisely the areas where terrorism has fomented most actively. There is large agreement that the best way to stop terrorism is to have a prosperous, stable, strong government that encourages democratic and free market values. Hence the active nation-building started by Bush and continued and expanded by Obama.

You seem unaware that it was last Friday that the Obama administration announced it was expanding the War on Terror to Mali (hunting down the terrorists who attacked the embassy in Benghazi). The US isn't committing ground forces, but we will be arming and funding a militia of mixed African countries to occupy the country. Not that Romney would do anything very different, at least he isn't saying so.

What I'm trying to say is that the people who are really lost on foreign policy right now are liberal isolationists who think America should disengage from the world and only expand our influence if people want it. You don't have a leg to stand on in this election. Obama isn't that at all, he's been arguably more interventionist than Bush, it's just that people stopped bitching and moaning about it because he's a Democrat and they've been so traditionally reluctant that we broadly assume that if he says someone needs to be harshly interrogated or killed by a drone or invaded, then he probably means it.

I fully understand that terrorism thrives in an uneducated populace guided by powerful religious and political leaders. It also thrives off of nationalism and blind hatred, two things we were GUARANTEED to inspire when we occupied the country. There was no benefit in committing to a large scale occupation of the country. I would be fine with bombing them over and over for 10 years. I would be fine with surgical strikes to take out perceived Al Qaeda cells and training camps. What I'm not in favor of is making our troops sit on the ground for 10 years with a target on their head to bolster an imagined 'freedom' for the people of a country 7000 miles away. I'm fully aware that neither candidate is anti war, and that no career politician would ever say "yeah we're just going to withdraw the troops immediately" because that would be political suicide.


...are you for real?

Why yes, I would definitely prefer if we spent the last 10 years just using air strikes on afghan soil instead of wasting the lives of our troops and any afghani civilians near our troops! It turns out that when you spend I don't know, say about $600 billion per year on 'defense' you often come up with methods of waging war which are more efficient (from a patriotic loss of life standpoint) than marching your troops in and setting up bases.

Let's ask the related question then:

Are you happy with the Obama administration's expansion of drone strikes? Do you think it's legally and morally justified? And do you believe the Obama administration when it says civilian casualties have been minimal, if not zero?
oneofthem
Profile Blog Joined November 2005
Cayman Islands24199 Posts
Last Edited: 2012-10-15 21:21:28
October 15 2012 21:06 GMT
#15970
foreign policy is pretty difficult to make progress in, because the regulation has to come from yourself. i.e. recognizing that indiscriminate bombing is a serious crime and this is true even if it is in service of some interest of yours.

not to say that you have to be impartial. you just have to require an independent consideration of correct conduct. failing that, the clear and impartial representation of your own actions so you at least acknowledge the bad stuff.

to expand on this a little bit, moral intuitions are diverse in source. in the case of foreign policy, you have the rather reflexive idea of "what's good for us." this is rather easy to 'run', and in this mode of thinking you can derive a comprehensive strategy as well as justification for what you do. however, this does not mean it is thus justified or complete. in fact, the easier it is to adopt a tunnel vision, self interested position, the more perverse the situation and the harder to make progress. to make use of good language, it takes others as means to your end and completely ignores the rights and interests of other nations.

this objection is pretty commonplace but i think it is pretty weak or at least incomplete.

this is because, guess what, people in other nations and places are people too. breaking down the national level entities, you get a completely different set of intuitions. group level theory does not have the resources to be complete. but this is getting too far afield.
We have fed the heart on fantasies, the heart's grown brutal from the fare, more substance in our enmities than in our love
coverpunch
Profile Joined December 2011
United States2093 Posts
October 15 2012 21:11 GMT
#15971
On October 16 2012 06:06 DoubleReed wrote:
Show nested quote +
On October 16 2012 05:59 coverpunch wrote:
On October 16 2012 05:34 Souma wrote:
On October 16 2012 05:22 coverpunch wrote:
On October 16 2012 04:30 Jormundr wrote:
On October 16 2012 00:45 DarK[A] wrote:
On October 15 2012 23:59 TheTenthDoc wrote:
On October 15 2012 23:42 DarK[A] wrote:
On October 15 2012 23:03 paralleluniverse wrote:
On October 15 2012 22:47 DarK[A] wrote:
Whatever you guys do, PLEASE watch the debates, and be sure to fact-check them.

I missed the first Presidential debate and just finished watching / reading the transcript from the VP debate last night.

From what I heard, Obama got demolished at the first Presidential debate. In my opinion, Biden started the VP debate very strong, but didn't keep pace and ended up falling behind after the first 30 minutes or so. Ryan won that debate, but by a closer margin than Romney allegedly won the first Presidential debate. While I believe he won through actual debate, others might say it was from Biden looking childish by laughing and cutting Ryan off with mockery literally somewhere between 80 and 90 times instead of offering an actual argument.

Fun Fact: Despite VP Biden painting the Romney/Ryan ticket in a negative light with regards to abortion (which is a non issue anyway, no politician will ever actually act on it - it's political suicide), Biden voted to overturn Roe v. Wade when he served as a Senator.

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=330491&currentpage=793#15849

Also, Ryan got absolutely demolished in that debate, he couldn't respond to any of the attacks made on him and Romney. The part on foreign policy, particularly on Iran and Afghanistan made Ryan look like he had no idea what's going on.


I guess that's your personal opinion and you're entitled to it.

Most of Biden's "attacks" on the Romney/Ryan ticket were gross misrepresentations of policies and quotes taken out of context. I would have liked to hear why after 4 years (2 of which with a Democratic majority so Obama could pass essentially anything he wanted to) we don't have the things we were promised, while we're spending trillions of dollars over our revenue. Taxing those 120,000 families making an average of $8 million annually at, say, a ridiculous 48% in this case would erase a mere 30% of our 2011 deficit ALONE. Or, in other terms, would run the federal government from 1/1/2011 to 2/15/2011.


If you don't think Ryan came off as incompetent regarding foreign policy when he was speaking nonsense about never using timelines because "they help our enemies" when they are an accepted fact of modern troop withdrawal in handover situations, being unable to present a single thing he and Romney would have done to stabilize the Middle East/Iran beyond "not what you guys did," not realizing virtually all our international allies including Afghans are on board with the withdrawal timetable, thinking it's bad to pull troops out of the most dangerous area in the world because it will put our troops in danger (this logic mandates total immediate withdrawal in reality), and not realizing that Iran is suffering under crippling sanctions, then you are in a strange place.

These weren't misrepresentations, these were things Ryan actually said live on national television during the debate.

Domestically everything is going to be pretty subjective because there are huge numbers of studies skewing things both ways (though I'd point out Ryan came off as a huge idiot for bashing the stimulus while requesting stimulus funds), but foreign policy? I'd have loved to see Huntsman in the chair instead, then we might have seen a competent discussion of foreign policy.

Edit: I mean, if you compare Ryan's thoughts on foreign policy to the foreign policy debate between Huntsman and Gingrich in the primaries, it's honestly depressing how little he knows and understands.


These Afghans on board with our withdrawal are the same ones turning rifles on foreign allies, right? Regardless of whether you think timelines help our enemies or not, do you think the Afghan forces are ready to completely take over security on their own? Ryan's point during that diatribe was to secure our gains. That is, NOT letting those thousands of military deaths be for absolutely nothing.


No, I don't think they will be ready to enforce our policies on their land in the next 5 years, the next 10 years, or even the next 25 years. I don't give a shit. We invaded a sovereign nation, shot a bunch of terrorists/extremists (as well as a bunch of civilians) and we are now somehow confused as to why there are still more and more people fighting against us.
PROTIP: When you invade someone's country and kill a bunch of people there will always be people who want to kill you in return.
I'm not making an argument for whether or not we can 'better' the country in 25 or 50 years. I'm not making an argument over whether or not the afghan government will have Taliban influences in it when we leave (I actually assume these influences never left). I'm saying that we never had any logical reason to go in and fight a guerrilla war alongside a frail and corrupt government against an enemy that bears no flag. The point is that our service men and women haven't been tasked with doing anything of a significant enough value to the United States or Afghanistan to justify the death toll. We are responsible for (by the lowest casualty count) 6 Afghan civilian deaths for every single person who died on 9/11. Explain to me what throwing away the lives of our soldiers is going to accomplish for us as a nation. Explain to me what this war on foreign soil is about, because I apparently don't understand the modern definition of defense and how it is so deeply intertwined with nation-building.

Let me take a swing at this. What you're missing is what 9/11 represented to US foreign policy. The attack was planned from the dark and neglected corners of the world, so that these obscure conflicts that you would say America should not care are precisely the areas where terrorism has fomented most actively. There is large agreement that the best way to stop terrorism is to have a prosperous, stable, strong government that encourages democratic and free market values. Hence the active nation-building started by Bush and continued and expanded by Obama.

You seem unaware that it was last Friday that the Obama administration announced it was expanding the War on Terror to Mali (hunting down the terrorists who attacked the embassy in Benghazi). The US isn't committing ground forces, but we will be arming and funding a militia of mixed African countries to occupy the country. Not that Romney would do anything very different, at least he isn't saying so.

What I'm trying to say is that the people who are really lost on foreign policy right now are liberal isolationists who think America should disengage from the world and only expand our influence if people want it. You don't have a leg to stand on in this election. Obama isn't that at all, he's been arguably more interventionist than Bush, it's just that people stopped bitching and moaning about it because he's a Democrat and they've been so traditionally reluctant that we broadly assume that if he says someone needs to be harshly interrogated or killed by a drone or invaded, then he probably means it.


You can't compare Obama to Bush in this regard. Obama does not step on nearly as many toes when he decides to take action and has been putting more responsibility on the rest of the world. Also, liberals are not generally isolationist in regards to foreign policy, that would be libertarians. Liberals just don't believe the U.S. should be propping up dictators, assassinating democratically-elected leaders, getting into wars under false pretenses, etc.

You know how naive that sounds from an objective standpoint, right? For one, you have no comment on whether Obama is more interventionist or whether that's a good thing, you're just agreeing with me that people don't get as huffy about it as they did with Bush.

Second, liberals aren't supposed to be isolationist AT ALL, they're supposed to be all about spreading our values to the world. Conservatives are supposed to be isolationist because a small government does not intervene abroad unless it's absolutely necessary to promote domestic peace. Hence things like the Peace Corps, soft power, encouraging women's/minority rights around the world - that conforms to liberal philosophy, or at least it should.

And third, it's just blind to say the US doesn't get its hands dirty in international politics. I don't fault Obama or any other US president for that. It's part of the job that the US has to cut deals with bad people, especially in the dirtier parts of the world where good and evil don't have a bright line. But don't tell me that liberals are too good to deal with those kinds of people while conservatives just play in the mud like pigs because that's just wrong.


To your second point: why are so many republicans total hawks? Empirical evidence is just going against what you're saying.

Personally I don't think there is conservative foreign policy and liberal foreign policy. I don't think isolationism makes any sense at all as a global superpower, and it's only going to make less sense as globalization continues.

Depends on the empirical evidence. The Republican Party has turned more hawkish because it likes funding the military. If you're charitable, on the basis that the US should maintain a strong global presence as its best deterrent. But some conservatives like Ron Paul come out strongly against the military for precisely the reasons I stated.

There may be a twist with the religious vote, depending on what they think about America's duty to proselytize around the world, and their shift from Democrat to Republican is IMO part of the reason why liberals are more isolationist and conservatives more interventionist than they were a couple generations ago.

Nobody is truly isolationist in the US. But the idea of pulling back and not doing anything about certain global conflicts is definitely an isolationist attitude.
Jormundr
Profile Joined July 2011
United States1678 Posts
October 15 2012 21:17 GMT
#15972
On October 16 2012 06:02 DoubleReed wrote:
Show nested quote +
On October 16 2012 05:50 Jormundr wrote:
On October 16 2012 05:40 DoubleReed wrote:
On October 16 2012 05:39 Jormundr wrote:
On October 16 2012 05:22 coverpunch wrote:
On October 16 2012 04:30 Jormundr wrote:
On October 16 2012 00:45 DarK[A] wrote:
On October 15 2012 23:59 TheTenthDoc wrote:
On October 15 2012 23:42 DarK[A] wrote:
On October 15 2012 23:03 paralleluniverse wrote:
[quote]
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=330491&currentpage=793#15849

Also, Ryan got absolutely demolished in that debate, he couldn't respond to any of the attacks made on him and Romney. The part on foreign policy, particularly on Iran and Afghanistan made Ryan look like he had no idea what's going on.


I guess that's your personal opinion and you're entitled to it.

Most of Biden's "attacks" on the Romney/Ryan ticket were gross misrepresentations of policies and quotes taken out of context. I would have liked to hear why after 4 years (2 of which with a Democratic majority so Obama could pass essentially anything he wanted to) we don't have the things we were promised, while we're spending trillions of dollars over our revenue. Taxing those 120,000 families making an average of $8 million annually at, say, a ridiculous 48% in this case would erase a mere 30% of our 2011 deficit ALONE. Or, in other terms, would run the federal government from 1/1/2011 to 2/15/2011.


If you don't think Ryan came off as incompetent regarding foreign policy when he was speaking nonsense about never using timelines because "they help our enemies" when they are an accepted fact of modern troop withdrawal in handover situations, being unable to present a single thing he and Romney would have done to stabilize the Middle East/Iran beyond "not what you guys did," not realizing virtually all our international allies including Afghans are on board with the withdrawal timetable, thinking it's bad to pull troops out of the most dangerous area in the world because it will put our troops in danger (this logic mandates total immediate withdrawal in reality), and not realizing that Iran is suffering under crippling sanctions, then you are in a strange place.

These weren't misrepresentations, these were things Ryan actually said live on national television during the debate.

Domestically everything is going to be pretty subjective because there are huge numbers of studies skewing things both ways (though I'd point out Ryan came off as a huge idiot for bashing the stimulus while requesting stimulus funds), but foreign policy? I'd have loved to see Huntsman in the chair instead, then we might have seen a competent discussion of foreign policy.

Edit: I mean, if you compare Ryan's thoughts on foreign policy to the foreign policy debate between Huntsman and Gingrich in the primaries, it's honestly depressing how little he knows and understands.


These Afghans on board with our withdrawal are the same ones turning rifles on foreign allies, right? Regardless of whether you think timelines help our enemies or not, do you think the Afghan forces are ready to completely take over security on their own? Ryan's point during that diatribe was to secure our gains. That is, NOT letting those thousands of military deaths be for absolutely nothing.


No, I don't think they will be ready to enforce our policies on their land in the next 5 years, the next 10 years, or even the next 25 years. I don't give a shit. We invaded a sovereign nation, shot a bunch of terrorists/extremists (as well as a bunch of civilians) and we are now somehow confused as to why there are still more and more people fighting against us.
PROTIP: When you invade someone's country and kill a bunch of people there will always be people who want to kill you in return.
I'm not making an argument for whether or not we can 'better' the country in 25 or 50 years. I'm not making an argument over whether or not the afghan government will have Taliban influences in it when we leave (I actually assume these influences never left). I'm saying that we never had any logical reason to go in and fight a guerrilla war alongside a frail and corrupt government against an enemy that bears no flag. The point is that our service men and women haven't been tasked with doing anything of a significant enough value to the United States or Afghanistan to justify the death toll. We are responsible for (by the lowest casualty count) 6 Afghan civilian deaths for every single person who died on 9/11. Explain to me what throwing away the lives of our soldiers is going to accomplish for us as a nation. Explain to me what this war on foreign soil is about, because I apparently don't understand the modern definition of defense and how it is so deeply intertwined with nation-building.

Let me take a swing at this. What you're missing is what 9/11 represented to US foreign policy. The attack was planned from the dark and neglected corners of the world, so that these obscure conflicts that you would say America should not care are precisely the areas where terrorism has fomented most actively. There is large agreement that the best way to stop terrorism is to have a prosperous, stable, strong government that encourages democratic and free market values. Hence the active nation-building started by Bush and continued and expanded by Obama.

You seem unaware that it was last Friday that the Obama administration announced it was expanding the War on Terror to Mali (hunting down the terrorists who attacked the embassy in Benghazi). The US isn't committing ground forces, but we will be arming and funding a militia of mixed African countries to occupy the country. Not that Romney would do anything very different, at least he isn't saying so.

What I'm trying to say is that the people who are really lost on foreign policy right now are liberal isolationists who think America should disengage from the world and only expand our influence if people want it. You don't have a leg to stand on in this election. Obama isn't that at all, he's been arguably more interventionist than Bush, it's just that people stopped bitching and moaning about it because he's a Democrat and they've been so traditionally reluctant that we broadly assume that if he says someone needs to be harshly interrogated or killed by a drone or invaded, then he probably means it.

I fully understand that terrorism thrives in an uneducated populace guided by powerful religious and political leaders. It also thrives off of nationalism and blind hatred, two things we were GUARANTEED to inspire when we occupied the country. There was no benefit in committing to a large scale occupation of the country. I would be fine with bombing them over and over for 10 years. I would be fine with surgical strikes to take out perceived Al Qaeda cells and training camps. What I'm not in favor of is making our troops sit on the ground for 10 years with a target on their head to bolster an imagined 'freedom' for the people of a country 7000 miles away. I'm fully aware that neither candidate is anti war, and that no career politician would ever say "yeah we're just going to withdraw the troops immediately" because that would be political suicide.


...are you for real?

Why yes, I would definitely prefer if we spent the last 10 years just using air strikes on afghan soil instead of wasting the lives of our troops and any afghani civilians near our troops! It turns out that when you spend I don't know, say about $600 billion per year on 'defense' you often come up with methods of waging war which are more efficient (from a patriotic loss of life standpoint) than marching your troops in and setting up bases.


Well, gee, I would prefer not bombing them for ten years over and over! What about that option??

Here are my views:
1. Our current position: Occupy Afghanistan. Doesn't help us economically, doesn't help us militarily, helps us politically (nationalism woo). Doesn't help the afghanis(as they will go right back to what they know). Helps Al Qaeda as our occupation is basically a giant fuckin' recruitment poster for them.
2. The median position I just proposed. Bomb them and use land deployment only for a key surgical strikes that cannot be made from the air(it makes sense from a military standpoint, assuming that there is value [I don't] in bombing these mountain tribes).
3. The position I assume you are referring to, which is not going to war in a country 7000 miles away. I agree. Unfortunately there's a vocal portion of our population which thinks that we should police the world. I argue that if we are to do so, we must minimize the death toll of american citizens.
Capitalism is beneficial for people who work harder than other people. Under capitalism the only way to make more money is to work harder then your competitors whether they be other companies or workers. ~ Vegetarian
Souma
Profile Blog Joined May 2010
2nd Worst City in CA8938 Posts
Last Edited: 2012-10-15 21:19:18
October 15 2012 21:17 GMT
#15973
On October 16 2012 05:59 coverpunch wrote:
Show nested quote +
On October 16 2012 05:34 Souma wrote:
On October 16 2012 05:22 coverpunch wrote:
On October 16 2012 04:30 Jormundr wrote:
On October 16 2012 00:45 DarK[A] wrote:
On October 15 2012 23:59 TheTenthDoc wrote:
On October 15 2012 23:42 DarK[A] wrote:
On October 15 2012 23:03 paralleluniverse wrote:
On October 15 2012 22:47 DarK[A] wrote:
Whatever you guys do, PLEASE watch the debates, and be sure to fact-check them.

I missed the first Presidential debate and just finished watching / reading the transcript from the VP debate last night.

From what I heard, Obama got demolished at the first Presidential debate. In my opinion, Biden started the VP debate very strong, but didn't keep pace and ended up falling behind after the first 30 minutes or so. Ryan won that debate, but by a closer margin than Romney allegedly won the first Presidential debate. While I believe he won through actual debate, others might say it was from Biden looking childish by laughing and cutting Ryan off with mockery literally somewhere between 80 and 90 times instead of offering an actual argument.

Fun Fact: Despite VP Biden painting the Romney/Ryan ticket in a negative light with regards to abortion (which is a non issue anyway, no politician will ever actually act on it - it's political suicide), Biden voted to overturn Roe v. Wade when he served as a Senator.

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=330491&currentpage=793#15849

Also, Ryan got absolutely demolished in that debate, he couldn't respond to any of the attacks made on him and Romney. The part on foreign policy, particularly on Iran and Afghanistan made Ryan look like he had no idea what's going on.


I guess that's your personal opinion and you're entitled to it.

Most of Biden's "attacks" on the Romney/Ryan ticket were gross misrepresentations of policies and quotes taken out of context. I would have liked to hear why after 4 years (2 of which with a Democratic majority so Obama could pass essentially anything he wanted to) we don't have the things we were promised, while we're spending trillions of dollars over our revenue. Taxing those 120,000 families making an average of $8 million annually at, say, a ridiculous 48% in this case would erase a mere 30% of our 2011 deficit ALONE. Or, in other terms, would run the federal government from 1/1/2011 to 2/15/2011.


If you don't think Ryan came off as incompetent regarding foreign policy when he was speaking nonsense about never using timelines because "they help our enemies" when they are an accepted fact of modern troop withdrawal in handover situations, being unable to present a single thing he and Romney would have done to stabilize the Middle East/Iran beyond "not what you guys did," not realizing virtually all our international allies including Afghans are on board with the withdrawal timetable, thinking it's bad to pull troops out of the most dangerous area in the world because it will put our troops in danger (this logic mandates total immediate withdrawal in reality), and not realizing that Iran is suffering under crippling sanctions, then you are in a strange place.

These weren't misrepresentations, these were things Ryan actually said live on national television during the debate.

Domestically everything is going to be pretty subjective because there are huge numbers of studies skewing things both ways (though I'd point out Ryan came off as a huge idiot for bashing the stimulus while requesting stimulus funds), but foreign policy? I'd have loved to see Huntsman in the chair instead, then we might have seen a competent discussion of foreign policy.

Edit: I mean, if you compare Ryan's thoughts on foreign policy to the foreign policy debate between Huntsman and Gingrich in the primaries, it's honestly depressing how little he knows and understands.


These Afghans on board with our withdrawal are the same ones turning rifles on foreign allies, right? Regardless of whether you think timelines help our enemies or not, do you think the Afghan forces are ready to completely take over security on their own? Ryan's point during that diatribe was to secure our gains. That is, NOT letting those thousands of military deaths be for absolutely nothing.


No, I don't think they will be ready to enforce our policies on their land in the next 5 years, the next 10 years, or even the next 25 years. I don't give a shit. We invaded a sovereign nation, shot a bunch of terrorists/extremists (as well as a bunch of civilians) and we are now somehow confused as to why there are still more and more people fighting against us.
PROTIP: When you invade someone's country and kill a bunch of people there will always be people who want to kill you in return.
I'm not making an argument for whether or not we can 'better' the country in 25 or 50 years. I'm not making an argument over whether or not the afghan government will have Taliban influences in it when we leave (I actually assume these influences never left). I'm saying that we never had any logical reason to go in and fight a guerrilla war alongside a frail and corrupt government against an enemy that bears no flag. The point is that our service men and women haven't been tasked with doing anything of a significant enough value to the United States or Afghanistan to justify the death toll. We are responsible for (by the lowest casualty count) 6 Afghan civilian deaths for every single person who died on 9/11. Explain to me what throwing away the lives of our soldiers is going to accomplish for us as a nation. Explain to me what this war on foreign soil is about, because I apparently don't understand the modern definition of defense and how it is so deeply intertwined with nation-building.

Let me take a swing at this. What you're missing is what 9/11 represented to US foreign policy. The attack was planned from the dark and neglected corners of the world, so that these obscure conflicts that you would say America should not care are precisely the areas where terrorism has fomented most actively. There is large agreement that the best way to stop terrorism is to have a prosperous, stable, strong government that encourages democratic and free market values. Hence the active nation-building started by Bush and continued and expanded by Obama.

You seem unaware that it was last Friday that the Obama administration announced it was expanding the War on Terror to Mali (hunting down the terrorists who attacked the embassy in Benghazi). The US isn't committing ground forces, but we will be arming and funding a militia of mixed African countries to occupy the country. Not that Romney would do anything very different, at least he isn't saying so.

What I'm trying to say is that the people who are really lost on foreign policy right now are liberal isolationists who think America should disengage from the world and only expand our influence if people want it. You don't have a leg to stand on in this election. Obama isn't that at all, he's been arguably more interventionist than Bush, it's just that people stopped bitching and moaning about it because he's a Democrat and they've been so traditionally reluctant that we broadly assume that if he says someone needs to be harshly interrogated or killed by a drone or invaded, then he probably means it.


You can't compare Obama to Bush in this regard. Obama does not step on nearly as many toes when he decides to take action and has been putting more responsibility on the rest of the world. Also, liberals are not generally isolationist in regards to foreign policy, that would be libertarians. Liberals just don't believe the U.S. should be propping up dictators, assassinating democratically-elected leaders, getting into wars under false pretenses, etc.

You know how naive that sounds from an objective standpoint, right? For one, you have no comment on whether Obama is more interventionist or whether that's a good thing, you're just agreeing with me that people don't get as huffy about it as they did with Bush.

Second, liberals aren't supposed to be isolationist AT ALL, they're supposed to be all about spreading our values to the world. Conservatives are supposed to be isolationist because a small government does not intervene abroad unless it's absolutely necessary to promote domestic peace. Hence things like the Peace Corps, soft power, encouraging women's/minority rights around the world - that conforms to liberal philosophy, or at least it should.

And third, it's just blind to say the US doesn't get its hands dirty in international politics. I don't fault Obama or any other US president for that. It's part of the job that the US has to cut deals with bad people, especially in the dirtier parts of the world where good and evil don't have a bright line. But don't tell me that liberals are too good to deal with those kinds of people while conservatives just play in the mud like pigs because that's just wrong.


Of course I didn't say whether or not more interventionism was good or bad as that had nothing to do with the issue at hand. I don't perceive foreign policy as black or white and neither does the rest of the world. There's a difference between intervening when you have the support of the rest of the world and intervening when you don't have that support. If you wanted to know my personal opinion, I loved the fact that we intervened during the Arab Spring. I don't, however, enjoy propping up murderous tyrants and assassinating leaders that were fairly democratically elected.

Second, I'm not sure you're justified in defining what liberals are supposed to be about or not. As mentioned above, foreign policy, like most things in this world, is not black and white.

Third, I never said the U.S. doesn't get its hand dirty in international politics nor do I mind if the situation calls for it. Where in the world did you get that from? Is the world perceived through your eyes consisting of two colors?
Writer
DoubleReed
Profile Blog Joined September 2010
United States4130 Posts
October 15 2012 21:19 GMT
#15974
On October 16 2012 06:11 coverpunch wrote:
Show nested quote +
On October 16 2012 06:06 DoubleReed wrote:
On October 16 2012 05:59 coverpunch wrote:
On October 16 2012 05:34 Souma wrote:
On October 16 2012 05:22 coverpunch wrote:
On October 16 2012 04:30 Jormundr wrote:
On October 16 2012 00:45 DarK[A] wrote:
On October 15 2012 23:59 TheTenthDoc wrote:
On October 15 2012 23:42 DarK[A] wrote:
On October 15 2012 23:03 paralleluniverse wrote:
[quote]
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=330491&currentpage=793#15849

Also, Ryan got absolutely demolished in that debate, he couldn't respond to any of the attacks made on him and Romney. The part on foreign policy, particularly on Iran and Afghanistan made Ryan look like he had no idea what's going on.


I guess that's your personal opinion and you're entitled to it.

Most of Biden's "attacks" on the Romney/Ryan ticket were gross misrepresentations of policies and quotes taken out of context. I would have liked to hear why after 4 years (2 of which with a Democratic majority so Obama could pass essentially anything he wanted to) we don't have the things we were promised, while we're spending trillions of dollars over our revenue. Taxing those 120,000 families making an average of $8 million annually at, say, a ridiculous 48% in this case would erase a mere 30% of our 2011 deficit ALONE. Or, in other terms, would run the federal government from 1/1/2011 to 2/15/2011.


If you don't think Ryan came off as incompetent regarding foreign policy when he was speaking nonsense about never using timelines because "they help our enemies" when they are an accepted fact of modern troop withdrawal in handover situations, being unable to present a single thing he and Romney would have done to stabilize the Middle East/Iran beyond "not what you guys did," not realizing virtually all our international allies including Afghans are on board with the withdrawal timetable, thinking it's bad to pull troops out of the most dangerous area in the world because it will put our troops in danger (this logic mandates total immediate withdrawal in reality), and not realizing that Iran is suffering under crippling sanctions, then you are in a strange place.

These weren't misrepresentations, these were things Ryan actually said live on national television during the debate.

Domestically everything is going to be pretty subjective because there are huge numbers of studies skewing things both ways (though I'd point out Ryan came off as a huge idiot for bashing the stimulus while requesting stimulus funds), but foreign policy? I'd have loved to see Huntsman in the chair instead, then we might have seen a competent discussion of foreign policy.

Edit: I mean, if you compare Ryan's thoughts on foreign policy to the foreign policy debate between Huntsman and Gingrich in the primaries, it's honestly depressing how little he knows and understands.


These Afghans on board with our withdrawal are the same ones turning rifles on foreign allies, right? Regardless of whether you think timelines help our enemies or not, do you think the Afghan forces are ready to completely take over security on their own? Ryan's point during that diatribe was to secure our gains. That is, NOT letting those thousands of military deaths be for absolutely nothing.


No, I don't think they will be ready to enforce our policies on their land in the next 5 years, the next 10 years, or even the next 25 years. I don't give a shit. We invaded a sovereign nation, shot a bunch of terrorists/extremists (as well as a bunch of civilians) and we are now somehow confused as to why there are still more and more people fighting against us.
PROTIP: When you invade someone's country and kill a bunch of people there will always be people who want to kill you in return.
I'm not making an argument for whether or not we can 'better' the country in 25 or 50 years. I'm not making an argument over whether or not the afghan government will have Taliban influences in it when we leave (I actually assume these influences never left). I'm saying that we never had any logical reason to go in and fight a guerrilla war alongside a frail and corrupt government against an enemy that bears no flag. The point is that our service men and women haven't been tasked with doing anything of a significant enough value to the United States or Afghanistan to justify the death toll. We are responsible for (by the lowest casualty count) 6 Afghan civilian deaths for every single person who died on 9/11. Explain to me what throwing away the lives of our soldiers is going to accomplish for us as a nation. Explain to me what this war on foreign soil is about, because I apparently don't understand the modern definition of defense and how it is so deeply intertwined with nation-building.

Let me take a swing at this. What you're missing is what 9/11 represented to US foreign policy. The attack was planned from the dark and neglected corners of the world, so that these obscure conflicts that you would say America should not care are precisely the areas where terrorism has fomented most actively. There is large agreement that the best way to stop terrorism is to have a prosperous, stable, strong government that encourages democratic and free market values. Hence the active nation-building started by Bush and continued and expanded by Obama.

You seem unaware that it was last Friday that the Obama administration announced it was expanding the War on Terror to Mali (hunting down the terrorists who attacked the embassy in Benghazi). The US isn't committing ground forces, but we will be arming and funding a militia of mixed African countries to occupy the country. Not that Romney would do anything very different, at least he isn't saying so.

What I'm trying to say is that the people who are really lost on foreign policy right now are liberal isolationists who think America should disengage from the world and only expand our influence if people want it. You don't have a leg to stand on in this election. Obama isn't that at all, he's been arguably more interventionist than Bush, it's just that people stopped bitching and moaning about it because he's a Democrat and they've been so traditionally reluctant that we broadly assume that if he says someone needs to be harshly interrogated or killed by a drone or invaded, then he probably means it.


You can't compare Obama to Bush in this regard. Obama does not step on nearly as many toes when he decides to take action and has been putting more responsibility on the rest of the world. Also, liberals are not generally isolationist in regards to foreign policy, that would be libertarians. Liberals just don't believe the U.S. should be propping up dictators, assassinating democratically-elected leaders, getting into wars under false pretenses, etc.

You know how naive that sounds from an objective standpoint, right? For one, you have no comment on whether Obama is more interventionist or whether that's a good thing, you're just agreeing with me that people don't get as huffy about it as they did with Bush.

Second, liberals aren't supposed to be isolationist AT ALL, they're supposed to be all about spreading our values to the world. Conservatives are supposed to be isolationist because a small government does not intervene abroad unless it's absolutely necessary to promote domestic peace. Hence things like the Peace Corps, soft power, encouraging women's/minority rights around the world - that conforms to liberal philosophy, or at least it should.

And third, it's just blind to say the US doesn't get its hands dirty in international politics. I don't fault Obama or any other US president for that. It's part of the job that the US has to cut deals with bad people, especially in the dirtier parts of the world where good and evil don't have a bright line. But don't tell me that liberals are too good to deal with those kinds of people while conservatives just play in the mud like pigs because that's just wrong.


To your second point: why are so many republicans total hawks? Empirical evidence is just going against what you're saying.

Personally I don't think there is conservative foreign policy and liberal foreign policy. I don't think isolationism makes any sense at all as a global superpower, and it's only going to make less sense as globalization continues.

Depends on the empirical evidence. The Republican Party has turned more hawkish because it likes funding the military. If you're charitable, on the basis that the US should maintain a strong global presence as its best deterrent. But some conservatives like Ron Paul come out strongly against the military for precisely the reasons I stated.

There may be a twist with the religious vote, depending on what they think about America's duty to proselytize around the world, and their shift from Democrat to Republican is IMO part of the reason why liberals are more isolationist and conservatives more interventionist than they were a couple generations ago.

Nobody is truly isolationist in the US. But the idea of pulling back and not doing anything about certain global conflicts is definitely an isolationist attitude.


The mainstream of the Republican party is not libertarian. Ron and Rand Paul are outliers on a like a million billion issues.
DoubleReed
Profile Blog Joined September 2010
United States4130 Posts
Last Edited: 2012-10-15 21:25:38
October 15 2012 21:25 GMT
#15975
On October 16 2012 06:17 Jormundr wrote:
Show nested quote +
On October 16 2012 06:02 DoubleReed wrote:
On October 16 2012 05:50 Jormundr wrote:
On October 16 2012 05:40 DoubleReed wrote:
On October 16 2012 05:39 Jormundr wrote:
On October 16 2012 05:22 coverpunch wrote:
On October 16 2012 04:30 Jormundr wrote:
On October 16 2012 00:45 DarK[A] wrote:
On October 15 2012 23:59 TheTenthDoc wrote:
On October 15 2012 23:42 DarK[A] wrote:
[quote]

I guess that's your personal opinion and you're entitled to it.

Most of Biden's "attacks" on the Romney/Ryan ticket were gross misrepresentations of policies and quotes taken out of context. I would have liked to hear why after 4 years (2 of which with a Democratic majority so Obama could pass essentially anything he wanted to) we don't have the things we were promised, while we're spending trillions of dollars over our revenue. Taxing those 120,000 families making an average of $8 million annually at, say, a ridiculous 48% in this case would erase a mere 30% of our 2011 deficit ALONE. Or, in other terms, would run the federal government from 1/1/2011 to 2/15/2011.


If you don't think Ryan came off as incompetent regarding foreign policy when he was speaking nonsense about never using timelines because "they help our enemies" when they are an accepted fact of modern troop withdrawal in handover situations, being unable to present a single thing he and Romney would have done to stabilize the Middle East/Iran beyond "not what you guys did," not realizing virtually all our international allies including Afghans are on board with the withdrawal timetable, thinking it's bad to pull troops out of the most dangerous area in the world because it will put our troops in danger (this logic mandates total immediate withdrawal in reality), and not realizing that Iran is suffering under crippling sanctions, then you are in a strange place.

These weren't misrepresentations, these were things Ryan actually said live on national television during the debate.

Domestically everything is going to be pretty subjective because there are huge numbers of studies skewing things both ways (though I'd point out Ryan came off as a huge idiot for bashing the stimulus while requesting stimulus funds), but foreign policy? I'd have loved to see Huntsman in the chair instead, then we might have seen a competent discussion of foreign policy.

Edit: I mean, if you compare Ryan's thoughts on foreign policy to the foreign policy debate between Huntsman and Gingrich in the primaries, it's honestly depressing how little he knows and understands.


These Afghans on board with our withdrawal are the same ones turning rifles on foreign allies, right? Regardless of whether you think timelines help our enemies or not, do you think the Afghan forces are ready to completely take over security on their own? Ryan's point during that diatribe was to secure our gains. That is, NOT letting those thousands of military deaths be for absolutely nothing.


No, I don't think they will be ready to enforce our policies on their land in the next 5 years, the next 10 years, or even the next 25 years. I don't give a shit. We invaded a sovereign nation, shot a bunch of terrorists/extremists (as well as a bunch of civilians) and we are now somehow confused as to why there are still more and more people fighting against us.
PROTIP: When you invade someone's country and kill a bunch of people there will always be people who want to kill you in return.
I'm not making an argument for whether or not we can 'better' the country in 25 or 50 years. I'm not making an argument over whether or not the afghan government will have Taliban influences in it when we leave (I actually assume these influences never left). I'm saying that we never had any logical reason to go in and fight a guerrilla war alongside a frail and corrupt government against an enemy that bears no flag. The point is that our service men and women haven't been tasked with doing anything of a significant enough value to the United States or Afghanistan to justify the death toll. We are responsible for (by the lowest casualty count) 6 Afghan civilian deaths for every single person who died on 9/11. Explain to me what throwing away the lives of our soldiers is going to accomplish for us as a nation. Explain to me what this war on foreign soil is about, because I apparently don't understand the modern definition of defense and how it is so deeply intertwined with nation-building.

Let me take a swing at this. What you're missing is what 9/11 represented to US foreign policy. The attack was planned from the dark and neglected corners of the world, so that these obscure conflicts that you would say America should not care are precisely the areas where terrorism has fomented most actively. There is large agreement that the best way to stop terrorism is to have a prosperous, stable, strong government that encourages democratic and free market values. Hence the active nation-building started by Bush and continued and expanded by Obama.

You seem unaware that it was last Friday that the Obama administration announced it was expanding the War on Terror to Mali (hunting down the terrorists who attacked the embassy in Benghazi). The US isn't committing ground forces, but we will be arming and funding a militia of mixed African countries to occupy the country. Not that Romney would do anything very different, at least he isn't saying so.

What I'm trying to say is that the people who are really lost on foreign policy right now are liberal isolationists who think America should disengage from the world and only expand our influence if people want it. You don't have a leg to stand on in this election. Obama isn't that at all, he's been arguably more interventionist than Bush, it's just that people stopped bitching and moaning about it because he's a Democrat and they've been so traditionally reluctant that we broadly assume that if he says someone needs to be harshly interrogated or killed by a drone or invaded, then he probably means it.

I fully understand that terrorism thrives in an uneducated populace guided by powerful religious and political leaders. It also thrives off of nationalism and blind hatred, two things we were GUARANTEED to inspire when we occupied the country. There was no benefit in committing to a large scale occupation of the country. I would be fine with bombing them over and over for 10 years. I would be fine with surgical strikes to take out perceived Al Qaeda cells and training camps. What I'm not in favor of is making our troops sit on the ground for 10 years with a target on their head to bolster an imagined 'freedom' for the people of a country 7000 miles away. I'm fully aware that neither candidate is anti war, and that no career politician would ever say "yeah we're just going to withdraw the troops immediately" because that would be political suicide.


...are you for real?

Why yes, I would definitely prefer if we spent the last 10 years just using air strikes on afghan soil instead of wasting the lives of our troops and any afghani civilians near our troops! It turns out that when you spend I don't know, say about $600 billion per year on 'defense' you often come up with methods of waging war which are more efficient (from a patriotic loss of life standpoint) than marching your troops in and setting up bases.


Well, gee, I would prefer not bombing them for ten years over and over! What about that option??

Here are my views:
1. Our current position: Occupy Afghanistan. Doesn't help us economically, doesn't help us militarily, helps us politically (nationalism woo). Doesn't help the afghanis(as they will go right back to what they know). Helps Al Qaeda as our occupation is basically a giant fuckin' recruitment poster for them.
2. The median position I just proposed. Bomb them and use land deployment only for a key surgical strikes that cannot be made from the air(it makes sense from a military standpoint, assuming that there is value [I don't] in bombing these mountain tribes).
3. The position I assume you are referring to, which is not going to war in a country 7000 miles away. I agree. Unfortunately there's a vocal portion of our population which thinks that we should police the world. I argue that if we are to do so, we must minimize the death toll of american citizens.


So you would literally just take out the leaders, and then let whatever take control during the power vacuum? That's not exactly a long term solution. That's not even a month-term solution.

If we're going to go in at all, then at the very least we can help support the local afghan people and set things up so that they can actually get on their feet. What makes you say that the afghanis will go right back to what they know? That seems like a random assertion. I'm not sure why people have this very static view of the world.
Jormundr
Profile Joined July 2011
United States1678 Posts
October 15 2012 21:28 GMT
#15976
On October 16 2012 06:06 coverpunch wrote:
Show nested quote +
On October 16 2012 05:50 Jormundr wrote:
On October 16 2012 05:40 DoubleReed wrote:
On October 16 2012 05:39 Jormundr wrote:
On October 16 2012 05:22 coverpunch wrote:
On October 16 2012 04:30 Jormundr wrote:
On October 16 2012 00:45 DarK[A] wrote:
On October 15 2012 23:59 TheTenthDoc wrote:
On October 15 2012 23:42 DarK[A] wrote:
On October 15 2012 23:03 paralleluniverse wrote:
[quote]
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=330491&currentpage=793#15849

Also, Ryan got absolutely demolished in that debate, he couldn't respond to any of the attacks made on him and Romney. The part on foreign policy, particularly on Iran and Afghanistan made Ryan look like he had no idea what's going on.


I guess that's your personal opinion and you're entitled to it.

Most of Biden's "attacks" on the Romney/Ryan ticket were gross misrepresentations of policies and quotes taken out of context. I would have liked to hear why after 4 years (2 of which with a Democratic majority so Obama could pass essentially anything he wanted to) we don't have the things we were promised, while we're spending trillions of dollars over our revenue. Taxing those 120,000 families making an average of $8 million annually at, say, a ridiculous 48% in this case would erase a mere 30% of our 2011 deficit ALONE. Or, in other terms, would run the federal government from 1/1/2011 to 2/15/2011.


If you don't think Ryan came off as incompetent regarding foreign policy when he was speaking nonsense about never using timelines because "they help our enemies" when they are an accepted fact of modern troop withdrawal in handover situations, being unable to present a single thing he and Romney would have done to stabilize the Middle East/Iran beyond "not what you guys did," not realizing virtually all our international allies including Afghans are on board with the withdrawal timetable, thinking it's bad to pull troops out of the most dangerous area in the world because it will put our troops in danger (this logic mandates total immediate withdrawal in reality), and not realizing that Iran is suffering under crippling sanctions, then you are in a strange place.

These weren't misrepresentations, these were things Ryan actually said live on national television during the debate.

Domestically everything is going to be pretty subjective because there are huge numbers of studies skewing things both ways (though I'd point out Ryan came off as a huge idiot for bashing the stimulus while requesting stimulus funds), but foreign policy? I'd have loved to see Huntsman in the chair instead, then we might have seen a competent discussion of foreign policy.

Edit: I mean, if you compare Ryan's thoughts on foreign policy to the foreign policy debate between Huntsman and Gingrich in the primaries, it's honestly depressing how little he knows and understands.


These Afghans on board with our withdrawal are the same ones turning rifles on foreign allies, right? Regardless of whether you think timelines help our enemies or not, do you think the Afghan forces are ready to completely take over security on their own? Ryan's point during that diatribe was to secure our gains. That is, NOT letting those thousands of military deaths be for absolutely nothing.


No, I don't think they will be ready to enforce our policies on their land in the next 5 years, the next 10 years, or even the next 25 years. I don't give a shit. We invaded a sovereign nation, shot a bunch of terrorists/extremists (as well as a bunch of civilians) and we are now somehow confused as to why there are still more and more people fighting against us.
PROTIP: When you invade someone's country and kill a bunch of people there will always be people who want to kill you in return.
I'm not making an argument for whether or not we can 'better' the country in 25 or 50 years. I'm not making an argument over whether or not the afghan government will have Taliban influences in it when we leave (I actually assume these influences never left). I'm saying that we never had any logical reason to go in and fight a guerrilla war alongside a frail and corrupt government against an enemy that bears no flag. The point is that our service men and women haven't been tasked with doing anything of a significant enough value to the United States or Afghanistan to justify the death toll. We are responsible for (by the lowest casualty count) 6 Afghan civilian deaths for every single person who died on 9/11. Explain to me what throwing away the lives of our soldiers is going to accomplish for us as a nation. Explain to me what this war on foreign soil is about, because I apparently don't understand the modern definition of defense and how it is so deeply intertwined with nation-building.

Let me take a swing at this. What you're missing is what 9/11 represented to US foreign policy. The attack was planned from the dark and neglected corners of the world, so that these obscure conflicts that you would say America should not care are precisely the areas where terrorism has fomented most actively. There is large agreement that the best way to stop terrorism is to have a prosperous, stable, strong government that encourages democratic and free market values. Hence the active nation-building started by Bush and continued and expanded by Obama.

You seem unaware that it was last Friday that the Obama administration announced it was expanding the War on Terror to Mali (hunting down the terrorists who attacked the embassy in Benghazi). The US isn't committing ground forces, but we will be arming and funding a militia of mixed African countries to occupy the country. Not that Romney would do anything very different, at least he isn't saying so.

What I'm trying to say is that the people who are really lost on foreign policy right now are liberal isolationists who think America should disengage from the world and only expand our influence if people want it. You don't have a leg to stand on in this election. Obama isn't that at all, he's been arguably more interventionist than Bush, it's just that people stopped bitching and moaning about it because he's a Democrat and they've been so traditionally reluctant that we broadly assume that if he says someone needs to be harshly interrogated or killed by a drone or invaded, then he probably means it.

I fully understand that terrorism thrives in an uneducated populace guided by powerful religious and political leaders. It also thrives off of nationalism and blind hatred, two things we were GUARANTEED to inspire when we occupied the country. There was no benefit in committing to a large scale occupation of the country. I would be fine with bombing them over and over for 10 years. I would be fine with surgical strikes to take out perceived Al Qaeda cells and training camps. What I'm not in favor of is making our troops sit on the ground for 10 years with a target on their head to bolster an imagined 'freedom' for the people of a country 7000 miles away. I'm fully aware that neither candidate is anti war, and that no career politician would ever say "yeah we're just going to withdraw the troops immediately" because that would be political suicide.


...are you for real?

Why yes, I would definitely prefer if we spent the last 10 years just using air strikes on afghan soil instead of wasting the lives of our troops and any afghani civilians near our troops! It turns out that when you spend I don't know, say about $600 billion per year on 'defense' you often come up with methods of waging war which are more efficient (from a patriotic loss of life standpoint) than marching your troops in and setting up bases.

Let's ask the related question then:

Are you happy with the Obama administration's expansion of drone strikes? Do you think it's legally and morally justified? And do you believe the Obama administration when it says civilian casualties have been minimal, if not zero?

I'm not saying that I'm happy with our war mongering. I'm saying that at the very least I would prefer fewer losses on our side. Asking if our actions are legally or morally justified is a poor question. Can you justify an offensive war? Of course I don't believe the government is achieving all these air strikes with zero civilian losses. Since you seem to be painting me as a democrat, I would like to point out that I don't support either side, I just enjoy debating the really shitty talking points that people come up with in american political discourse.
Capitalism is beneficial for people who work harder than other people. Under capitalism the only way to make more money is to work harder then your competitors whether they be other companies or workers. ~ Vegetarian
coverpunch
Profile Joined December 2011
United States2093 Posts
October 15 2012 21:29 GMT
#15977
On October 16 2012 06:17 Souma wrote:
Show nested quote +
On October 16 2012 05:59 coverpunch wrote:
On October 16 2012 05:34 Souma wrote:
On October 16 2012 05:22 coverpunch wrote:
On October 16 2012 04:30 Jormundr wrote:
On October 16 2012 00:45 DarK[A] wrote:
On October 15 2012 23:59 TheTenthDoc wrote:
On October 15 2012 23:42 DarK[A] wrote:
On October 15 2012 23:03 paralleluniverse wrote:
On October 15 2012 22:47 DarK[A] wrote:
Whatever you guys do, PLEASE watch the debates, and be sure to fact-check them.

I missed the first Presidential debate and just finished watching / reading the transcript from the VP debate last night.

From what I heard, Obama got demolished at the first Presidential debate. In my opinion, Biden started the VP debate very strong, but didn't keep pace and ended up falling behind after the first 30 minutes or so. Ryan won that debate, but by a closer margin than Romney allegedly won the first Presidential debate. While I believe he won through actual debate, others might say it was from Biden looking childish by laughing and cutting Ryan off with mockery literally somewhere between 80 and 90 times instead of offering an actual argument.

Fun Fact: Despite VP Biden painting the Romney/Ryan ticket in a negative light with regards to abortion (which is a non issue anyway, no politician will ever actually act on it - it's political suicide), Biden voted to overturn Roe v. Wade when he served as a Senator.

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=330491&currentpage=793#15849

Also, Ryan got absolutely demolished in that debate, he couldn't respond to any of the attacks made on him and Romney. The part on foreign policy, particularly on Iran and Afghanistan made Ryan look like he had no idea what's going on.


I guess that's your personal opinion and you're entitled to it.

Most of Biden's "attacks" on the Romney/Ryan ticket were gross misrepresentations of policies and quotes taken out of context. I would have liked to hear why after 4 years (2 of which with a Democratic majority so Obama could pass essentially anything he wanted to) we don't have the things we were promised, while we're spending trillions of dollars over our revenue. Taxing those 120,000 families making an average of $8 million annually at, say, a ridiculous 48% in this case would erase a mere 30% of our 2011 deficit ALONE. Or, in other terms, would run the federal government from 1/1/2011 to 2/15/2011.


If you don't think Ryan came off as incompetent regarding foreign policy when he was speaking nonsense about never using timelines because "they help our enemies" when they are an accepted fact of modern troop withdrawal in handover situations, being unable to present a single thing he and Romney would have done to stabilize the Middle East/Iran beyond "not what you guys did," not realizing virtually all our international allies including Afghans are on board with the withdrawal timetable, thinking it's bad to pull troops out of the most dangerous area in the world because it will put our troops in danger (this logic mandates total immediate withdrawal in reality), and not realizing that Iran is suffering under crippling sanctions, then you are in a strange place.

These weren't misrepresentations, these were things Ryan actually said live on national television during the debate.

Domestically everything is going to be pretty subjective because there are huge numbers of studies skewing things both ways (though I'd point out Ryan came off as a huge idiot for bashing the stimulus while requesting stimulus funds), but foreign policy? I'd have loved to see Huntsman in the chair instead, then we might have seen a competent discussion of foreign policy.

Edit: I mean, if you compare Ryan's thoughts on foreign policy to the foreign policy debate between Huntsman and Gingrich in the primaries, it's honestly depressing how little he knows and understands.


These Afghans on board with our withdrawal are the same ones turning rifles on foreign allies, right? Regardless of whether you think timelines help our enemies or not, do you think the Afghan forces are ready to completely take over security on their own? Ryan's point during that diatribe was to secure our gains. That is, NOT letting those thousands of military deaths be for absolutely nothing.


No, I don't think they will be ready to enforce our policies on their land in the next 5 years, the next 10 years, or even the next 25 years. I don't give a shit. We invaded a sovereign nation, shot a bunch of terrorists/extremists (as well as a bunch of civilians) and we are now somehow confused as to why there are still more and more people fighting against us.
PROTIP: When you invade someone's country and kill a bunch of people there will always be people who want to kill you in return.
I'm not making an argument for whether or not we can 'better' the country in 25 or 50 years. I'm not making an argument over whether or not the afghan government will have Taliban influences in it when we leave (I actually assume these influences never left). I'm saying that we never had any logical reason to go in and fight a guerrilla war alongside a frail and corrupt government against an enemy that bears no flag. The point is that our service men and women haven't been tasked with doing anything of a significant enough value to the United States or Afghanistan to justify the death toll. We are responsible for (by the lowest casualty count) 6 Afghan civilian deaths for every single person who died on 9/11. Explain to me what throwing away the lives of our soldiers is going to accomplish for us as a nation. Explain to me what this war on foreign soil is about, because I apparently don't understand the modern definition of defense and how it is so deeply intertwined with nation-building.

Let me take a swing at this. What you're missing is what 9/11 represented to US foreign policy. The attack was planned from the dark and neglected corners of the world, so that these obscure conflicts that you would say America should not care are precisely the areas where terrorism has fomented most actively. There is large agreement that the best way to stop terrorism is to have a prosperous, stable, strong government that encourages democratic and free market values. Hence the active nation-building started by Bush and continued and expanded by Obama.

You seem unaware that it was last Friday that the Obama administration announced it was expanding the War on Terror to Mali (hunting down the terrorists who attacked the embassy in Benghazi). The US isn't committing ground forces, but we will be arming and funding a militia of mixed African countries to occupy the country. Not that Romney would do anything very different, at least he isn't saying so.

What I'm trying to say is that the people who are really lost on foreign policy right now are liberal isolationists who think America should disengage from the world and only expand our influence if people want it. You don't have a leg to stand on in this election. Obama isn't that at all, he's been arguably more interventionist than Bush, it's just that people stopped bitching and moaning about it because he's a Democrat and they've been so traditionally reluctant that we broadly assume that if he says someone needs to be harshly interrogated or killed by a drone or invaded, then he probably means it.


You can't compare Obama to Bush in this regard. Obama does not step on nearly as many toes when he decides to take action and has been putting more responsibility on the rest of the world. Also, liberals are not generally isolationist in regards to foreign policy, that would be libertarians. Liberals just don't believe the U.S. should be propping up dictators, assassinating democratically-elected leaders, getting into wars under false pretenses, etc.

You know how naive that sounds from an objective standpoint, right? For one, you have no comment on whether Obama is more interventionist or whether that's a good thing, you're just agreeing with me that people don't get as huffy about it as they did with Bush.

Second, liberals aren't supposed to be isolationist AT ALL, they're supposed to be all about spreading our values to the world. Conservatives are supposed to be isolationist because a small government does not intervene abroad unless it's absolutely necessary to promote domestic peace. Hence things like the Peace Corps, soft power, encouraging women's/minority rights around the world - that conforms to liberal philosophy, or at least it should.

And third, it's just blind to say the US doesn't get its hands dirty in international politics. I don't fault Obama or any other US president for that. It's part of the job that the US has to cut deals with bad people, especially in the dirtier parts of the world where good and evil don't have a bright line. But don't tell me that liberals are too good to deal with those kinds of people while conservatives just play in the mud like pigs because that's just wrong.


Of course I didn't say whether or not more interventionism was good or bad as that had nothing to do with the issue at hand. I don't perceive foreign policy as black or white and neither does the rest of the world. There's a difference between intervening when you have the support of the rest of the world and intervening when you don't have that support. If you wanted to know my personal opinion, I loved the fact that we intervened during the Arab Spring. I don't, however, enjoy propping up murderous tyrants and assassinating leaders that were fairly democratically elected.

Second, I'm not sure you're justified in defining what liberals are supposed to be about or not. As mentioned above, foreign policy, like most things in this world, is not black and white.

Third, I never said the U.S. doesn't get its hand dirty in international politics nor do I mind if the situation calls for it. Where in the world did you get that from? Is the world perceived through your eyes consisting of two colors?

I thought you were making the argument of black and white by saying "Liberals just don't believe the U.S. should be propping up dictators, assassinating democratically-elected leaders, getting into wars under false pretenses, etc.", implying that conservatives (or Bush) believe something different. My point is actually the exact opposite of what you're saying, that everyone is kind of in the same mud. The point of my post comparing Obama to Bush (which you said I shouldn't do) is that Obama has continued and extended almost all of Bush's foreign policy.

IMO a lot of it is just partisanship. If Obama says cut the military, Republicans say fund the military. If Obama says raise taxes, Republicans say cut taxes. The same kinds of shenanigans were played with Bush, where Democrats often opposed his policies just because they came from Bush. That's why it's so strange that people can accuse Bush of a war crime for killing someone with a drone, but Obama does it and the same people think it's okay.
coverpunch
Profile Joined December 2011
United States2093 Posts
October 15 2012 21:35 GMT
#15978
On October 16 2012 06:28 Jormundr wrote:
Show nested quote +
On October 16 2012 06:06 coverpunch wrote:
On October 16 2012 05:50 Jormundr wrote:
On October 16 2012 05:40 DoubleReed wrote:
On October 16 2012 05:39 Jormundr wrote:
On October 16 2012 05:22 coverpunch wrote:
On October 16 2012 04:30 Jormundr wrote:
On October 16 2012 00:45 DarK[A] wrote:
On October 15 2012 23:59 TheTenthDoc wrote:
On October 15 2012 23:42 DarK[A] wrote:
[quote]

I guess that's your personal opinion and you're entitled to it.

Most of Biden's "attacks" on the Romney/Ryan ticket were gross misrepresentations of policies and quotes taken out of context. I would have liked to hear why after 4 years (2 of which with a Democratic majority so Obama could pass essentially anything he wanted to) we don't have the things we were promised, while we're spending trillions of dollars over our revenue. Taxing those 120,000 families making an average of $8 million annually at, say, a ridiculous 48% in this case would erase a mere 30% of our 2011 deficit ALONE. Or, in other terms, would run the federal government from 1/1/2011 to 2/15/2011.


If you don't think Ryan came off as incompetent regarding foreign policy when he was speaking nonsense about never using timelines because "they help our enemies" when they are an accepted fact of modern troop withdrawal in handover situations, being unable to present a single thing he and Romney would have done to stabilize the Middle East/Iran beyond "not what you guys did," not realizing virtually all our international allies including Afghans are on board with the withdrawal timetable, thinking it's bad to pull troops out of the most dangerous area in the world because it will put our troops in danger (this logic mandates total immediate withdrawal in reality), and not realizing that Iran is suffering under crippling sanctions, then you are in a strange place.

These weren't misrepresentations, these were things Ryan actually said live on national television during the debate.

Domestically everything is going to be pretty subjective because there are huge numbers of studies skewing things both ways (though I'd point out Ryan came off as a huge idiot for bashing the stimulus while requesting stimulus funds), but foreign policy? I'd have loved to see Huntsman in the chair instead, then we might have seen a competent discussion of foreign policy.

Edit: I mean, if you compare Ryan's thoughts on foreign policy to the foreign policy debate between Huntsman and Gingrich in the primaries, it's honestly depressing how little he knows and understands.


These Afghans on board with our withdrawal are the same ones turning rifles on foreign allies, right? Regardless of whether you think timelines help our enemies or not, do you think the Afghan forces are ready to completely take over security on their own? Ryan's point during that diatribe was to secure our gains. That is, NOT letting those thousands of military deaths be for absolutely nothing.


No, I don't think they will be ready to enforce our policies on their land in the next 5 years, the next 10 years, or even the next 25 years. I don't give a shit. We invaded a sovereign nation, shot a bunch of terrorists/extremists (as well as a bunch of civilians) and we are now somehow confused as to why there are still more and more people fighting against us.
PROTIP: When you invade someone's country and kill a bunch of people there will always be people who want to kill you in return.
I'm not making an argument for whether or not we can 'better' the country in 25 or 50 years. I'm not making an argument over whether or not the afghan government will have Taliban influences in it when we leave (I actually assume these influences never left). I'm saying that we never had any logical reason to go in and fight a guerrilla war alongside a frail and corrupt government against an enemy that bears no flag. The point is that our service men and women haven't been tasked with doing anything of a significant enough value to the United States or Afghanistan to justify the death toll. We are responsible for (by the lowest casualty count) 6 Afghan civilian deaths for every single person who died on 9/11. Explain to me what throwing away the lives of our soldiers is going to accomplish for us as a nation. Explain to me what this war on foreign soil is about, because I apparently don't understand the modern definition of defense and how it is so deeply intertwined with nation-building.

Let me take a swing at this. What you're missing is what 9/11 represented to US foreign policy. The attack was planned from the dark and neglected corners of the world, so that these obscure conflicts that you would say America should not care are precisely the areas where terrorism has fomented most actively. There is large agreement that the best way to stop terrorism is to have a prosperous, stable, strong government that encourages democratic and free market values. Hence the active nation-building started by Bush and continued and expanded by Obama.

You seem unaware that it was last Friday that the Obama administration announced it was expanding the War on Terror to Mali (hunting down the terrorists who attacked the embassy in Benghazi). The US isn't committing ground forces, but we will be arming and funding a militia of mixed African countries to occupy the country. Not that Romney would do anything very different, at least he isn't saying so.

What I'm trying to say is that the people who are really lost on foreign policy right now are liberal isolationists who think America should disengage from the world and only expand our influence if people want it. You don't have a leg to stand on in this election. Obama isn't that at all, he's been arguably more interventionist than Bush, it's just that people stopped bitching and moaning about it because he's a Democrat and they've been so traditionally reluctant that we broadly assume that if he says someone needs to be harshly interrogated or killed by a drone or invaded, then he probably means it.

I fully understand that terrorism thrives in an uneducated populace guided by powerful religious and political leaders. It also thrives off of nationalism and blind hatred, two things we were GUARANTEED to inspire when we occupied the country. There was no benefit in committing to a large scale occupation of the country. I would be fine with bombing them over and over for 10 years. I would be fine with surgical strikes to take out perceived Al Qaeda cells and training camps. What I'm not in favor of is making our troops sit on the ground for 10 years with a target on their head to bolster an imagined 'freedom' for the people of a country 7000 miles away. I'm fully aware that neither candidate is anti war, and that no career politician would ever say "yeah we're just going to withdraw the troops immediately" because that would be political suicide.


...are you for real?

Why yes, I would definitely prefer if we spent the last 10 years just using air strikes on afghan soil instead of wasting the lives of our troops and any afghani civilians near our troops! It turns out that when you spend I don't know, say about $600 billion per year on 'defense' you often come up with methods of waging war which are more efficient (from a patriotic loss of life standpoint) than marching your troops in and setting up bases.

Let's ask the related question then:

Are you happy with the Obama administration's expansion of drone strikes? Do you think it's legally and morally justified? And do you believe the Obama administration when it says civilian casualties have been minimal, if not zero?

I'm not saying that I'm happy with our war mongering. I'm saying that at the very least I would prefer fewer losses on our side. Asking if our actions are legally or morally justified is a poor question. Can you justify an offensive war? Of course I don't believe the government is achieving all these air strikes with zero civilian losses. Since you seem to be painting me as a democrat, I would like to point out that I don't support either side, I just enjoy debating the really shitty talking points that people come up with in american political discourse.

Sorry if you think that I'm trying to push you into the Democratic corner. But you made the assertion that you would be happier if US foreign policy involved more airstrikes and fewer boots on the ground (give me some rope here). So the natural extension is whether you're happy that Obama has expanded drones to several different countries and used them instead of boots on the ground, particularly as a way to avoid high-profile or expensive occupation projects.

Hey, the answer might very well be "yes", probably with a lot of caveats. But I think it's an important issue that gets far too little attention because everyone is too scared of leveling any criticism at Obama for fear that they'll be seen as a Romney voter.
sam!zdat
Profile Blog Joined October 2010
United States5559 Posts
October 15 2012 21:36 GMT
#15979
On October 16 2012 05:22 coverpunch wrote:There is large agreement that the best way to stop terrorism is to have a prosperous, stable, strong government that encourages democratic and free market values.


Here's your problem.

Undoubtedly, having stable and strong governments is desirable.

But there is a limitation to how much of American ways of doing things one can shoehorn onto another culture, even assuming that they are the "best" things. You must keep in mind the context. We must think - to what extent are we imposing such liberal ideas for their good, and to what extent for our good? Might that be some of the source of the hostility toward us?

Sensitivity to cultural context is a strategic imperative regardless of one's philosophical position on value judgments, whether pluralist relativist universalist what have you. The US's total disdain for and active hostility towards other cultural, social, political, religious traditions, despite its lip-service toward multiculturalism domestically, is a major problem.
shikata ga nai
Souma
Profile Blog Joined May 2010
2nd Worst City in CA8938 Posts
October 15 2012 21:40 GMT
#15980
On October 16 2012 06:29 coverpunch wrote:
Show nested quote +
On October 16 2012 06:17 Souma wrote:
On October 16 2012 05:59 coverpunch wrote:
On October 16 2012 05:34 Souma wrote:
On October 16 2012 05:22 coverpunch wrote:
On October 16 2012 04:30 Jormundr wrote:
On October 16 2012 00:45 DarK[A] wrote:
On October 15 2012 23:59 TheTenthDoc wrote:
On October 15 2012 23:42 DarK[A] wrote:
On October 15 2012 23:03 paralleluniverse wrote:
[quote]
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=330491&currentpage=793#15849

Also, Ryan got absolutely demolished in that debate, he couldn't respond to any of the attacks made on him and Romney. The part on foreign policy, particularly on Iran and Afghanistan made Ryan look like he had no idea what's going on.


I guess that's your personal opinion and you're entitled to it.

Most of Biden's "attacks" on the Romney/Ryan ticket were gross misrepresentations of policies and quotes taken out of context. I would have liked to hear why after 4 years (2 of which with a Democratic majority so Obama could pass essentially anything he wanted to) we don't have the things we were promised, while we're spending trillions of dollars over our revenue. Taxing those 120,000 families making an average of $8 million annually at, say, a ridiculous 48% in this case would erase a mere 30% of our 2011 deficit ALONE. Or, in other terms, would run the federal government from 1/1/2011 to 2/15/2011.


If you don't think Ryan came off as incompetent regarding foreign policy when he was speaking nonsense about never using timelines because "they help our enemies" when they are an accepted fact of modern troop withdrawal in handover situations, being unable to present a single thing he and Romney would have done to stabilize the Middle East/Iran beyond "not what you guys did," not realizing virtually all our international allies including Afghans are on board with the withdrawal timetable, thinking it's bad to pull troops out of the most dangerous area in the world because it will put our troops in danger (this logic mandates total immediate withdrawal in reality), and not realizing that Iran is suffering under crippling sanctions, then you are in a strange place.

These weren't misrepresentations, these were things Ryan actually said live on national television during the debate.

Domestically everything is going to be pretty subjective because there are huge numbers of studies skewing things both ways (though I'd point out Ryan came off as a huge idiot for bashing the stimulus while requesting stimulus funds), but foreign policy? I'd have loved to see Huntsman in the chair instead, then we might have seen a competent discussion of foreign policy.

Edit: I mean, if you compare Ryan's thoughts on foreign policy to the foreign policy debate between Huntsman and Gingrich in the primaries, it's honestly depressing how little he knows and understands.


These Afghans on board with our withdrawal are the same ones turning rifles on foreign allies, right? Regardless of whether you think timelines help our enemies or not, do you think the Afghan forces are ready to completely take over security on their own? Ryan's point during that diatribe was to secure our gains. That is, NOT letting those thousands of military deaths be for absolutely nothing.


No, I don't think they will be ready to enforce our policies on their land in the next 5 years, the next 10 years, or even the next 25 years. I don't give a shit. We invaded a sovereign nation, shot a bunch of terrorists/extremists (as well as a bunch of civilians) and we are now somehow confused as to why there are still more and more people fighting against us.
PROTIP: When you invade someone's country and kill a bunch of people there will always be people who want to kill you in return.
I'm not making an argument for whether or not we can 'better' the country in 25 or 50 years. I'm not making an argument over whether or not the afghan government will have Taliban influences in it when we leave (I actually assume these influences never left). I'm saying that we never had any logical reason to go in and fight a guerrilla war alongside a frail and corrupt government against an enemy that bears no flag. The point is that our service men and women haven't been tasked with doing anything of a significant enough value to the United States or Afghanistan to justify the death toll. We are responsible for (by the lowest casualty count) 6 Afghan civilian deaths for every single person who died on 9/11. Explain to me what throwing away the lives of our soldiers is going to accomplish for us as a nation. Explain to me what this war on foreign soil is about, because I apparently don't understand the modern definition of defense and how it is so deeply intertwined with nation-building.

Let me take a swing at this. What you're missing is what 9/11 represented to US foreign policy. The attack was planned from the dark and neglected corners of the world, so that these obscure conflicts that you would say America should not care are precisely the areas where terrorism has fomented most actively. There is large agreement that the best way to stop terrorism is to have a prosperous, stable, strong government that encourages democratic and free market values. Hence the active nation-building started by Bush and continued and expanded by Obama.

You seem unaware that it was last Friday that the Obama administration announced it was expanding the War on Terror to Mali (hunting down the terrorists who attacked the embassy in Benghazi). The US isn't committing ground forces, but we will be arming and funding a militia of mixed African countries to occupy the country. Not that Romney would do anything very different, at least he isn't saying so.

What I'm trying to say is that the people who are really lost on foreign policy right now are liberal isolationists who think America should disengage from the world and only expand our influence if people want it. You don't have a leg to stand on in this election. Obama isn't that at all, he's been arguably more interventionist than Bush, it's just that people stopped bitching and moaning about it because he's a Democrat and they've been so traditionally reluctant that we broadly assume that if he says someone needs to be harshly interrogated or killed by a drone or invaded, then he probably means it.


You can't compare Obama to Bush in this regard. Obama does not step on nearly as many toes when he decides to take action and has been putting more responsibility on the rest of the world. Also, liberals are not generally isolationist in regards to foreign policy, that would be libertarians. Liberals just don't believe the U.S. should be propping up dictators, assassinating democratically-elected leaders, getting into wars under false pretenses, etc.

You know how naive that sounds from an objective standpoint, right? For one, you have no comment on whether Obama is more interventionist or whether that's a good thing, you're just agreeing with me that people don't get as huffy about it as they did with Bush.

Second, liberals aren't supposed to be isolationist AT ALL, they're supposed to be all about spreading our values to the world. Conservatives are supposed to be isolationist because a small government does not intervene abroad unless it's absolutely necessary to promote domestic peace. Hence things like the Peace Corps, soft power, encouraging women's/minority rights around the world - that conforms to liberal philosophy, or at least it should.

And third, it's just blind to say the US doesn't get its hands dirty in international politics. I don't fault Obama or any other US president for that. It's part of the job that the US has to cut deals with bad people, especially in the dirtier parts of the world where good and evil don't have a bright line. But don't tell me that liberals are too good to deal with those kinds of people while conservatives just play in the mud like pigs because that's just wrong.


Of course I didn't say whether or not more interventionism was good or bad as that had nothing to do with the issue at hand. I don't perceive foreign policy as black or white and neither does the rest of the world. There's a difference between intervening when you have the support of the rest of the world and intervening when you don't have that support. If you wanted to know my personal opinion, I loved the fact that we intervened during the Arab Spring. I don't, however, enjoy propping up murderous tyrants and assassinating leaders that were fairly democratically elected.

Second, I'm not sure you're justified in defining what liberals are supposed to be about or not. As mentioned above, foreign policy, like most things in this world, is not black and white.

Third, I never said the U.S. doesn't get its hand dirty in international politics nor do I mind if the situation calls for it. Where in the world did you get that from? Is the world perceived through your eyes consisting of two colors?

I thought you were making the argument of black and white by saying "Liberals just don't believe the U.S. should be propping up dictators, assassinating democratically-elected leaders, getting into wars under false pretenses, etc.", implying that conservatives (or Bush) believe something different. My point is actually the exact opposite of what you're saying, that everyone is kind of in the same mud. The point of my post comparing Obama to Bush (which you said I shouldn't do) is that Obama has continued and extended almost all of Bush's foreign policy.

IMO a lot of it is just partisanship. If Obama says cut the military, Republicans say fund the military. If Obama says raise taxes, Republicans say cut taxes. The same kinds of shenanigans were played with Bush, where Democrats often opposed his policies just because they came from Bush. That's why it's so strange that people can accuse Bush of a war crime for killing someone with a drone, but Obama does it and the same people think it's okay.


The reason I said you couldn't really compare Bush with Obama is because their situations were inherently different. Whereas Bush actually got us into the War in Afghanistan, Obama had to make do with what was laid in his lap. I won't defend Obama though. He's been much worse in terms of unwarranted wire-tapping and the like. But it's hard to compare the two situations as if their actions were made under the exact same conditions. And you're right, a lot of it is partisanship. But not everything is, and that's the part that separates us all.
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