US Politics Mega-thread - Page 3278

On August 15 2021 17:27 Salazarz wrote:
I would argue that the number of civilians your soldiers have killed due to lack of regulation on things like indiscriminate drone and air strikes is an orders of magnitude higher than the amount of casualties your side has taken in this war due to not being allowed to take flamethrowers for cave sweeping or something, but I guess you don't value those lives nearly as much as those of the brave heroes protecting the stripes and the stars so that doesn't bother you?

Invading a country and then talking about how 'collateral damage is part of war' while living in a country that has literally never in its history suffered any real 'collateral damage' is a lot more despicable than any politics. Not to mention that the said collateral damage (in this war, as well as prior ones) is literally the number one reason why your wars will never end. The number of Jihadist 'forced collaborators' is absolutely minuscule compared to the number of people who aren't just willing but eager to die to inflict any damage at all on the war machine that has razed their homes and killed their families.

It's like nobody in America has learned any lessons whatsoever from your 'peacekeeping' and 'war on terror.'

On August 15 2021 17:30 Liquid`Drone wrote:
When you say 'weren't allowed to do what we should've done', what do you mean specifically? You mean 'we should have broken the Geneva convention'?

The Nazi occupation of Europe also encountered resistance. They did not care about adhering to the Geneva convention. They'd do stuff like execute 10x+ the amount of civilians in a village for each German killed by resistance troops. People still resisted. If you don't want people to fight back against you, the easy solution is to stop occupying their lands.

I mean, maybe you're arguing for actual genocide. In that case, I'll grant you that it's possible to win/end a conflict. But it'd also make you a genuinely despicable human being. (Here, I am not saying that you are a despicable human being - this is contingent on you actually arguing for genocide, which I'm not yet convinced is the case, although it does sound like it. )

On August 15 2021 18:00 Jockmcplop wrote:
TIL that war is something that's carried out by people who genuinely think that the only reason they couldn't defeat a harmful extremist ideology was because they didn't have enough flamethrowers.

On August 15 2021 18:05 Purressure wrote:



You can go be a wise ass somewhere else. Besides you're wrong as we didn't have any at all, so there's that. If you'd actually try and have a genuine discussion you wouldn't ignore the rest of what I said so let this be the one and only reply you'll get from me. Not worth my time.

On August 15 2021 18:12 Simberto wrote:


Have you ever, at any point, considered that the solution to the problems in those countries may involve less tools for killing, not more?

Your approach of "kill lots of bad guys, stuff will be better afterwards" has spectacularly failed over two very expensive decades. And i highly doubt that giving you people more tools for killing people in specific situations would have made that any better.

On August 15 2021 17:49 Purressure wrote:



Talking about the means, the most effective solutions for certain situations. Not talking about genocide at all. The use of flamethrowers for example, when you know that in a specific cave there are 20 fighters hiding and waiting, why should we not use them? Because it's cruel? Welcome to war I'd say, war is ugly for everyone involved but not allowing us to use certain tools on SPECIFIC targets where you know you'll be hitting the enemy and not just a random place filled with civilians and adding a lot of unnecessary casualties is just stupid.

If I didn't care about the innocent I'd just act completely stupid and say "drop an x amount of nukes and leave them with all the misery that comes after" which is the last thing I'd advocate for, not even a fan of dronestrikes in urban areas so let alone using something that would indescriminately kill anything within a large radius. I can be harsh and cruel, but not insane.

What a lot of civies seem to misunderstand is the fact we actually have a lot of respect for those who actually fought us, however, the ones using children and making forced collaborators out of innocent civilians, those are the scum of the earth. Having a 12yo kid shooting at you forces you to not see him as a child but as an enemy soldier, not everyone can make that clear distinction between a child and an enemy soldier and those are the ones who go down a very dark hole that a lot of them don't come back from.

Anyhow, reading some comments here just make me shake my head and wonder what they think war actually is.


Are we perfect? No. Do I personally believe we should've gone to war? Yes, but not the way we did. Spending 20y in a foreign country only to pull out and in a matter of weeks seeing that the Taliban are just taking everything back is just proof that our approach was definitely not aimed for endured stability after we'd left. Anyone trying to bash me about decisions that were wayyy beyond my paygrade is below the belt and has no understanding of the matters that we have control over as mere pawns. It's not without reason I try to stay far away from the government and that's not just me, but many others share that same position. Am I disgruntled? Definitely, about a lot of things and whenever I get a guy trying to lecture me over the internet (not you btw) the only thing I can think is "you have no idea."

My apologies if I come off as aggressive and snapping back at times, but it's a very sensitive subject after all.

On August 15 2021 15:22 cLutZ wrote:


We can't win over Pakistan without abandoning India, which is our ally in the global game with China. Pakistan and India used to be one country, and are now mortal enemies over what essentially was an ethnic cleansing (which sort of has continued with Modi). A change in this situation would probably be worse, akin to WW1/WW2 where the classic German-British alliance was abandoned resulting in a situation where the balance was thrown off (the classic alliance was anti-French/Russian).

And that is merely geopolitical pragmatism. When it comes to worldview it is just as bad when you compare the Pakistani leadership to ours. We have leaders in State (capital S) that see a fundamentally different vision from what their people see as a functional state. They see us as a place that is coasting off of previous success and will soon fail due to decadence and tolerance, while our government thinks tolerance is a virtue.

On August 15 2021 18:29 Acrofales wrote:

What you say here is quite nuanced and very different from your earlier posts. You can go back through this thread and I doubt you'll find anybody arguing that the US handled Afghanistan well. There are various criticisms launched at every administration in the last 20 years.

However," there were no flamethrowers" is not one. The American government set the Afghans up terribly for any long term stability. But flamethrowers would not have made a difference in that. The problem wasn't that the US was inefficient at killing Afghans...

On August 15 2021 18:40 Purressure wrote:


Specific tools for specific scenarios would have made a difference in some degree, for some people the difference would've been nihil, for others it would've been the difference between going home alive or dead. Not arguing about those tools being helpful for long term stability at all.

On August 15 2021 18:43 Simberto wrote:


The best way to go home alive is to not join an organization with the sole purpose of killing people. (Or be one of their targets, i guess, but you can't really help that)

On August 15 2021 21:16 farvacola wrote:

I agree with your point that the role of the military isn’t as black and white as Simberto makes it out to be, but there is certainly a class of people who have been victimized by the US military in a way that they could never have avoided. The seemingly indiscriminate killing of innocents as part of drone bombing campaigns comes to mind, but there are other examples.

On August 15 2021 17:49 Purressure wrote:The use of flamethrowers for example, when you know that in a specific cave there are 20 fighters hiding and waiting, why should we not use them?

On August 15 2021 21:37 Dangermousecatdog wrote:
Why use flamethrowers when a bomb to collapse the cave is better and safer? You think that you can just saunter up to a cave and flamethrower it or something?

You don't know that 20 fighters are hiding and waiting in a specific cave, that's the point, real life isn't a hollywood movie. Why would they be in a cave instead of out in the open with the rest of the population? USA has already proven to happily bomb with drones (because drones are cheap and have high availability) with 90% civilian casualties. It's a large mountainous region, and the collobarist government set up under the American invaders are corrupt and refuse to compromise with local authorities.

On August 15 2021 22:14 Biff The Understudy wrote:
It’s a freakin tragedy for the Afghan people. It’s the first step from Biden that makes me actually really angry. I understand that there was no good option, but to just leave the people of Afghanistan to the wolves is inhuman. The suffering to come is incommensurable.