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Title: Poland would like a permanent U.S. military base
Source:
HotAir
URL Source: https://hotair.com/archives/2018/05 ... e-permanent-u-s-military-base/
Published: May 28, 2018
Author: Jazz Shaw
Post Date: 2018-05-28 19:02:28 by Tooconservative
Keywords: None
Views: 9156
Comments: 100
The Polish offer reflects a long-standing desire in Warsaw to build closer security relations with the U.S. and put American boots on the ground. The push dates back to Poland’s entry into NATO in 1999, but has taken on added urgency in the wake of Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea region four years ago and aggressive posture toward the alliance. Coming just over a month before NATO leaders gather in Brussels for a summit, the Polish initiative is bound to anger Russia, and will be looked at with skepticism by European allies that want to improve relations with Moscow, such as Italy and at times Germany. The first, and strangest thing about this proposal is that it was already sent to Washington, but it came directly from the Polish Defense Ministry. That may not sound all that unusual since their Defense Department would obviously be involved in such planning, but Defense never even told their Foreign Ministry about it, nor did they consult with President Andrzej Duda. Much the same as with the United States government, Duda is Poland’s Commander in Chief. You’d think someone would mention it to him before they committed to spending $2B constructing a foreign military base on their own soil. Duda has had a fairly good relationship with President Trump thus far and, as a NATO ally, has taken a bit more of an adversarial approach toward Russia. But that complicates the picture even further. Poland is justifiably worried about the situation with Putin ever since the hostilities in Ukraine began. Poland shares a border with Ukraine and only has Belarus as a buffer between themselves and the Russian border. But given that things are a bit “tense” between us and the Russians at the moment, it makes entering into such an agreement even more complicated. And, of course, the Russians jumped on the story almost immediately expressing their disapproval. (Reuters) “When we see the gradual expansion of NATO military structures towards our borders…, this of course in no way creates security and stability on the continent,” Dmitry Peskov told reporters on a conference call on Monday. Do we really even need another base over there right now? We’re supposedly focusing on closing and consolidating bases in that region to tighten up the Defense budget. Even with the Poles kicking in a couple of billion, this is still going to cost us some cash and we already have a rotating military presence in their country anyway. We’ve supposedly been on track to close 15 more bases in Europe, including some in Germany, since 2015. Assuming we’re still moving forward with that plan, how do we justify a new base in Poland unless we want to officially ramp up the cold war yet again? We have a solid ally in Poland and cooperation with them probably isn’t a bad idea. But a permanent military base? The benefit to Poland on any number angles is obvious, but I’m not sure what it really does for us. Perhaps we should hold off until Duda has had a chance to make his official position known and set up a call with Trump to discuss this. Poster Comment: The Poles are begging Trump to Make Poland Great Again. I can't recall any of our allies offering to pay billions to build a new base for us to flock to. Maybe the Qataris did for our navy base but I don't recall that they paid either. I think the Poles are hoping to woo us out of Germany where Merkel has gotten more unfriendly and has an embarrassing military. Poland's military is scrappy with good equipment for the most part. Poland would like to be our new military hub in Europe instead of Germany.
Word has leaked out that Poland has delivered a proposal requesting a permanent American military base in their country and they’re willing to put up a couple of billion dollars to help make it happen. What should have been a fairly normal diplomatic request, however, has turned into a complicated mess before it could even be officially announced. Questions were immediately raised as to not only how or if this should happen, but even who came up with the proposal in the first place. (Politico) Poland wants a permanent U.S. military presence — and is willing to pony up as much as $2 billion to get it, according to a defense ministry proposal obtained by Polish news portal Onet. The Kremlin said on Monday that gradual NATO military expansion towards its borders did not improve security or stability in Europe as it commented on media reports Poland is seeking to secure a permanent U.S. military presence on its territory.
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#61. To: Tooconservative (#60)
You still need capable and hardy soldiers, and especially soldiers with the qualities of special forces fighters. You don't replace special forces so easily from a crop of overweight gender-bending tattoo freaks who hang out on Facebook all the time. Oh well. We're still not getting out of Afghanistan anytime soon. So the folks who grouse will have to keep on grousing.
There's nothing at stake there really, other than national pride. At what point do you finally admit that you have no real interests in some backward country? I also think that Pakistan will never let us have a victory there. They have their own primary geostrategic outlook and they have a stake in keeping Afghanistan as it is currently due to their overarching concern over war with India. To ever fix Afghanistan, you'd have to invade Pakistan as well and then invade/occupy Waziristan and the other border tribal areas. IOW, an operation much bigger than even Vietnam was. And one more likely to fail. Until we face that, we'll keep throwing away lives in Af-Pak for no good reason. And I don't believe you can retain quality military personnel in a fight that they know you don't intend to actually win.
Maybe. I look at it differently, but given the "Kill 'em all, let God sort 'em out" "Napalm the ashes" approach I took above, I can't really talk seriously on this subject on this thread. My actual "if I were President" position is...I would have to see the actual intelligence, all of the secret stuff that I don't know and can't glean from the news. Afghanistan is an odd deployment, in an odd place. I have pretty good - not absolute, but pretty good - confidence in our intelligence/national security folks to have good assessments of what is going on in an essentially non- political theater like Afghanistan. (I have considerably less confidence in them on a central theater such as Ukraine, where they all have such deep- seated animus to the IDEA of making peace with Russia that I think it severely clouds their professional judgment and the intelligence they give is biased and unreliable - and that they themselves don't realize it, because they are such "true believers".) IN Afghanistan and Somalia I think they have pretty good intel. I suspect that, given Obama's campaigning to get out, then his actual escalation and entrenchment there, and given Trump's silence on the place, that there are very good, strong, rational reasons why partisans of far poles both realize we need to stay. Nor do I get the sense that there's a Vietnam-style "bamboozle the people" campaign going on with regards to Afghanistan. I suspect that by sitting there as we are that there are some very important things getting done that fit importantly into our overall security posture. Now, if I were Deckard, I'd go negative and think that it has to do with clandestine profits on the opium trade being used to fund black ops all over the place. I expect that there is SOME of that going on, but that that is not the reason why we persist under W, then Obama, and now Trump. So, my ACTUAL position is that I do not have enough real information to fully understand why we are dug in there. I don't believe it to be merely a matter of pride. I don't see Obama or Trump as being Nixonian figures, and I don't see Obama in particular doubling down there so hard MERELY over matters of national pride. So, I think that the reason we're in Afghanistan is an unknown unknown that I don't have access to, but that the President does, and that successive Presidents have taken a rational decision to remain, one they do not articulate because the reasons themselves are at least partially clandestine. Therefore, I cannot say in truth exactly what I would do about Afghanistan. I don't have the information to make a real assessment. That's an actual answer - not a glib "Kill 'em all" answer. That is what I would actually do, were I President. Were I running for President, until I see the inside data and understand what, exactly we are doing there at a clandestine level, I can't form an opinion.
It's a bad deployment in a completely pointless place. There can be no victory there because there is nothing to win. Not for us. There wasn't anything there worth Britain's or Russia's efforts to conquer it either. It's an annoying place but that is no reason to try to garrison that graveyard of empires.
I know you truly believe that. I have no basis on which to form such a strong judgment. I need to see the facts that drive our decision, and given that those are Top Secret, unless God starts talking to me about such things (these are not the things God and I talk about, if you're wondering), then there isn't any way I'm going to know. So I'm either going to have to form a judgment that I know is uninformed, or I'm going to just have to trust the national leadership. In this case, I do trust the national leadership. W, Obama and Trump - three vastly different men from three different poles of the political universe - all maintained the deployment. I believe there's an actual reason for that, and I also believe that I will never know the reason for sure, not for many years. For now, I give the Trump Administration the benefit of the doubt. Whatever changed Obama's mind seems to have likewise influenced Trump's. Both of those men are pretty smart, in my estimation, and I think they probably made the right call so far.
Then why can't they articulate a reason for us to be there? Churchill and FDR never had much problem telling us why we needed to fight the Nazis or the Nips. Maybe you're way too trusting.
I enjoyed serving with the Polish Army in Iraq. Unfortunately, two weeks after I left my first deployment a Major I befriended was KIA by an IED. Two of his soldiers caught up with me in Kuwait to deliver the bad news. Good guy and good officer. Took care of his troops well. We are already rotating out brigade combat teams every 9 months or so, so perhaps having a permanent base there might actually cut some costs.
Frankly we are there to stop Al Queda and the Taliban from retaking Afghanistan and using it as a base of operations against Pakistan. If you can't believe that, then by us being there, it breaks up a geopolitical monopoly Iran could exploit on the cheap. Don't think that Sunni-Shia divide is actually something Iran cannot overcome. ;) If that is unbelievable then just think how much Russia hates having US combat troops so close in their sphere of influence.
Af-Pak is only about 10-15% Shi'a, the rest are Sunni. I just saw these numbers. There were no Christian churches at all and just 1 Jew in the country. Don't hang around the Bear's den. It's a bad idea.
I am kind of amused that Poland is bold enough to try to take advantage of Merkel's bad relationship with Trump and her weak military and attempts to foist all those migrants on to the resisting eastern EUros. And they just forthrightly offer him a business deal. Poland: "You give us base, we give you $2B American. Okay?" Trump must love the offer, even if the Pentagon probably isn't so thrilled that allies might bid to get bases sited in their country. Can you imagine Trump out on the campaign trail: "Ya know, those Poles are terrific at standing up to Merkel trying to force them to take in her overflow of refugees. And Poland, a great little country, very classy military, made me an offer to pay us $2 billion to put a base in Poland. Yeah, no president ever made a deal like that before, getting paid to put our base in their country. Looking at this, you realize how our past presidents have made terrible deals on trade, on NATO, on lots of things but I intend to fix all those bad deals." It really would be astonishing if Trump actually took their deal. Or bid them up to $2.5B and then accepted the deal. LOL
EU plans to reduce subsidies to Eastern Europe by tens of billions.
Oh? And they are ready to live with the consequences? We'll see.
You mean like Protestants and Catholics? Perhaps, but Al Queda and the Taliban are rabid fundamentalists, who see Shia as fake Muslims.
What can they do?
President Trump makes Shia Wahhabis look bad. He needs to get with the program, grow a beard, and fire his tailor! Who is Pope Francis to judge?
I thought Donald was the best bacha bazi dancer in that chorus line. His sense of rhythm is...unique. That sword they gave him does look funny. Like a child's plastic sword. It wiggles way too much as Trump is swaying, looks non-metallic.
Deadly enemies. The Wahhabis don't even like other Sunnis much, they loath the Shi'a.
Washington Examiner: Top US commander says secret talks are underway to end Afghan war, 5/30/18 “I call this talking and fighting,” Nicholson said. “We've seen this in other conflicts, such as Colombia, where the two sides were talking about peace at the same time that they were fighting each other on the battlefield.” Nicholson said while the Taliban has not acknowledged the peace plan proposed by Afghan President Ashraf Ghani in February, privately there is a “robust dialogue” going on within the Taliban, and some meetings between the Afghan government and mid- and senior-level Taliban leaders. “I think what you’re seeing right now is a lot of the diplomatic activity and dialogue is occurring off the stage and it's occurring at multiple levels,” Nicholson said. “We see outreach from Taliban fighters, who are tired of fighting, who are concerned about the effect of this continued fighting on their country.” . . . Meanwhile, U.S. Forces-Afghanistan says the U.S. wiped out more that 70 senior Taliban leaders in a 10-day stretch between May 17-26. The largest of the precision strikes came on Thursday, when U.S. long-range artillery rockets targeted a high-level meeting of Taliban commanders, killing more than 50 people, including the deputy shadow governor of Helmand, multiple Taliban district governors, intelligence commanders and key provincial-level leadership from Kandahar, Kunduz, Herat, Farah, Uruzgan, and Helmand provinces, according to a U.S. Forces-Afghanistan news release. I suppose it is possible that we finally wore out the Taliban and can make a withdrawal. We have killed a huge number of their leaders, really disrupting their internal clan politics. It can't be easy to get fighters to volunteer to take leadership jobs that come with a Tomahawk missile aimed at your back, ready to wipe you out from above at any moment. Very demoralizing.
Brain fart. I meant to type Suni Wahhabis.
Saw this one at AoS.
Because the reason itself is secret.
A fundamentally un-American idea, that the citizens should tolerate wars whose reasons to drag on for over a decade are that the cause of the war is "secret". It's illegitimate to have secret wars or wars where you lie about your war objectives. You've abandoned democracy entirely at that point.
This is how you cross from the Republic to the Empire, Rubicon River.
It's illegitimate to have secret wars or wars where you lie about your war objectives. You've abandoned democracy entirely at that point. I'm a French aristocrat and a (bastard) Dutch Royal. "Democracy" is a system of choosing leaders to me, not an ideal that inspires passion for its own sake. I want good, effective, intelligent leadership that fulfills my moral imperative. I think that can come just as easily, maybe more easily, from a Catholic absolute monarch as from a democracy. If I were to pick the one single element of national government that is most likely to be correlated with a stable, peaceful land - whatever the culture - it would be monarchy. When I look at Europe, the Americas and Asia, I see this borne out, albeit imperfectly. That said, history has bequeathed us a democratic republic, so that's what I live and that's what we have to work with. When it comes to the reason we're in Afghanistan, I think it probably has to do with aspects of anti-terror security and surveillance of Russian and Chinese and Iranian and Pakistani activities, and that all of those reasons are clandestine. I don't think that the public would have anything useful to say on the matter, but that the exposure to the public of the fact of it by a vote would focus attention on it and make the efforts themselves less successful. I don't know this for sure, but it is the feeling of it. The war there is not very expensive or bloody for us anymore - our current casualties there are comparable to the casualties experienced by domestic law enforcement in the US, so I consider the losses to be acceptable on an "in perpetuity" basis. You're an ideologue about democracy. I think it would have been better for the British monarchy to have reasonably settled the issues with the American colonies and for us to be the Dominion of America. But history belongs to the victors, and we have what we have. The Constitutional structure we have works ok, so I'm not interested in changing the system. That said, that there are things that have to be kept secret from the public because of the broader national security interests is obvious to me, and I am not outraged by it the way you are. It does not press any sensitive ideological button for me. I'm a lawyer. I don't think businesses would operate as well, or the legal system, without professional secrecy. And while I don't like excessive secrecy in government, I think that a high level of secrecy when it comes to tracking down and killing bad guys is necessary for us to be able to do it. And I was there at Ground Zero on 9/11 and directly experienced what happens when those sorts of efforts fail. So "fundamentally un-American?" There are those who say the same thing about Catholicism. In that case, I am "fundamentally un-American". So what? There are shitty and stupid things about America that I don't like, and would change if I could. National security secrecy is not one of them. Law enforcement secrecy, on the other hand, I would absolutely eviscerate. Terrorists who bring down buildings in Manahattan need to be spied on, and maybe tortured, to prevent that. The government has to have the power to do that in secret. But stopping people from smoking pot and snorting crack is not an important enough national goal to permit the intolerable level of police intrusion into private life that we have. I would rather legalize all drugs and accept the death toll on an ongoing basis than allow the level of internal police power and aggressiveness we currently experience. I don't think that level of police aggression and obsession with Prussian-style police authority is anti-American - I think it is quintessentially American - and one of the shittiest and worse features of the American character, something about America and Americanism that I would like to see erased. I don't like wars that drag, but law enforcement and its casualties drag on forever until the end of time, and that's about the level of loss we're currently sustaining in Afghanistan, which means that really we're just policing it. Cops get killed in Kansas, and they get killed in Kabul. That's the price of maintaining authority. Oh well. I find it acceptable, and I don't draw an ideological line between doing it over there or doing it here, or any of the Anglo-Saxon nonsense about posse this or standing that. It's all guns pointed at people by men in uniform who serve the sovereign. It's not different, not really. The question to me is: does the REASON we're pointing guns at people to make them obey make sense? To stop terrorists, yes, that makes sense. To stop gays from parading? No, that makes no sense. I don't see the government lying much about the war objective. They say it's the "War on Terror". That's right, grosso modo. It's not that expensive, and I think the government officials doing it know what they are doing, in this case. It makes sense to me. The war on pot is insane.
What about the profits?
If the single most important function of the state is a defense of the realm, defensive or offensive, and you deliberately withhold information or willfully deceive the voters, you are an enemy of the very idea of a meaningful democracy where voters can make some kind of informed choice. As with a surprising number of devout Catholics, you are fundamentally a monarchist. And don't really bother to hide it. It isn't unusual to see this same sort of argument offered by various writers over at National Review over the decades, the Revolution was a mistake, we'd be so much better off to have remained British subjects, yada-yada. No new ground is being covered with this kind of argument really.
Like Canada or New Zealand. Them nasty tyrannies.
They try to make it look like the Mississippi or the Ruhr. It actually is a lot closer to a quaint provincial creek. Caesar's horse probably didn't even get his knees wet crossing it.
Compared to America? Yes, they are clearly tyrannical and imposing such limits on civil liberties in recent decades that they are morphing into a soft police state of the Left.
I don't think there's much in the way of profit coming to the US out of Afghanistan. Sure, a little heroin money to fund CIA black ops to keep Congress - and maybe even in the President - in the dark. That's not ok, but what're you really gonna do? Boys will be boys. I don't think that some back shop US intelligence agencies are controlling the world's opiod trade through Afghanistan. Deckard might have an article on that, but I wouldn't believe it no matter who printed it, except maybe the New York Times? Afghanistan ain't a profit center. We're there for security, intelligence and grand strategic military reasons, and it costs us a lot.
I'm not just a monarchIST, I'm an uncrowned monarch, full stop. My name is even "Crown". The Crown is amused.
How much?
(2) It isn't unusual to see this same sort of argument offered by various writers over at National Review over the decades, the Revolution was a mistake, we'd be so much better off to have remained British subjects, yada-yada. No new ground is being covered with this kind of argument really. (1) If. (2) My argument is not the same as theirs. They've generally got a hard on for the English. They're ethnic Anglophiles, and base their view on cultural affinity. But my favorite battles in history are Patay and Cartagena de las Indias. I'm a Francophile and an Hispanophile. I wish that the French had won the last French and Indian War and taken New York, as opposed to losing Quebec, and I wish that Napoleon had conquered England (and Russia). So you see, for me, culture's got nothing to do with my view of the American Revolution. To me, it's all about right and wrong, as God revealed it. It's wrong to murder people. Full stop. God forbade it, and he did not grant a war exception, or a tax revolt exception, or "because we really wanna run the show" exception. The American Revolution broke out mostly because a certain percentage of Americans did not want to pay taxes - and that was rendered an invalid reason to kill people by Jesus Christ himself. "Taxation without representation is tyranny." That may be true, but God did not grant men the right to kill "tyrants". Of course he didn't grant "tyrants" the right to kill people either - and you can't really become a tyrant without killing people. The chain of American history, starting in 1607, is a series of disagreeable and often immoral acts to establish government in a land and dominate it. The British colonial empire was built on violence and greed, just as the Roman Empire, and every other empire, was. Now, the current generation is not guilty of the crimes of their fathers, but it is responsible for what IT does. The Americans resisted authority, and the British marched to take guns. And they came together at Lexington. Were the colonists right to take up arms and square off against the British to shoot them? No. The Americans fired first, the British fired back. The identical situation can be imagined today, when tax resisters line up with arms and face off against federal agents, also armed. And the tax resisters fire first. Who is right? The answer to this question is answered by imagining the same situation in ancient Jerusalem, in the Spring of 33 AD, with Roman soldiers lined up on one side of the square, and Jewish zealots taunting them on the other side, and urging the Jews to not pay taxes to the Roman heathens. And in between the ranks up steps the Son of God, who turns to the Jewish side, holds up a Roman coin, and says "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesars, and render unto God the things that are God's." So then, going back to Lexington Green. People who don't want to pay taxes are lined up, and the red coated police are lined up. Jesus holds up a groat with King George's head on it and says "Render unto George the things that are George's." Match, set, point. Americans: pay your fucking taxes. He reminds them "Render unto God the things that are God's" - and the most basic thing that is God's is life, and the utter commandment not to kill. But the colonists are no more interested in paying their taxes than the Jews were, so they shoot, and the British are the typical violent armed martinets, accustomed to bullying, and they shoot back. And the war is on. More shooting, on and on. Tough to see where the justification comes for the American side. When the British finally turned the Indians on the frontier settlers, that was arguably the point where the British lost their moral right to win, and then both sides were just wrong, killing their way until might made law. The Americans had a shot, in 1776, of making a just cause out of the air. Declaring all men created equal, with God-given rights, COULD HAVE BEEN a transformative moment, where a reason was given that I would say could justify the killing and ongoing war. But then the Americans made is perfectly clear, by their immediate actions and inactions regarding black slavery, that they were simply hypocrites, mouthing platitudes about God and equality they did not believe themselves. Once the British began to free slaves who assisted them, the moral pendulum swung back to them. Then the French Navy showed up - YAY! - and the British fleet was defeated and the British Army surrendered to the French and American armies. Once we get to that point, all of the good/evil calculation goes out of it, and the Franco-American victory was good because America became a country, and France stripped the British of their then-empire, both in America and British India of the time (Pondicherry, which became French and stayed that way until about 1970, when the French gave it to Nehru and it joined India). Was the war justified? No. Not at all. But given it was going to be fought, ultimately my side: the French and the Americans, won, so that works out better for me. Still, the war was not justified. Would it have been "better" for the US to remain under the British Crown? It would have been more moral. But since immorality is the order du jour, then no. It was better that England was brought down many notches. Had England prevailed, they would have preserved America, and become the dominant power in Europe as well, and then the whole bloody world would have been dominated by the English. Far better that England was broken and kept a middle-sized power, and that in the end it was the Americans, who are not English, dominate Europe and the world. Better the Americans, who are from everywhere and who merely speak English, than the English, certainly.
Dunno. I don't like it. But I don't KNOW if it's true either. I merely suspect it. And it's not a thing that is important enough to give up the strategic position we have there.
LOL!!! You should speech write for Trump. You have him down pat.
Considering the Wahhabis are Sunni.... But I digress. Trying to arrange President Trump do a gig with these gentlemen:
Is the guy with the red drum Chuck Norris' baby?
LOL love it.
At another site the Aussies, Canucks and New Zealanders all ask Americans why doesn't your government put a halt to hate speech and take away guns. The usual answers are "last time someone told us to shut up and tried to take our guns we fought a revolution."
They place no value on the freedoms guaranteed by the First or Second Amendments. Our friends are shallow. They don't actually share our values.
And the military and public have limits to what they'll tolerate in the way of real killing robots on the ground.
#62. To: Vicomte13 (#61)
#63. To: Tooconservative (#62)
(Edited)
There's nothing at stake there really, other than national pride.
#64. To: Vicomte13 (#63)
Afghanistan is an odd deployment, in an odd place.
#65. To: Tooconservative (#64)
It's a bad deployment in a completely pointless place.
#66. To: Vicomte13 (#65)
W, Obama and Trump - three vastly different men from three different poles of the political universe - all maintained the deployment.
#67. To: Tooconservative (#0)
The Poles are begging Trump to Make Poland Great Again. I can't recall any of our allies offering to pay billions to build a new base for us to flock to. Maybe the Qataris did for our navy base but I don't recall that they paid either. I think the Poles are hoping to woo us out of Germany where Merkel has gotten more unfriendly and has an embarrassing military. Poland's military is scrappy with good equipment for the most part. Poland would like to be our new military hub in Europe instead of Germany.
#68. To: Tooconservative (#66)
Then why can't they articulate a reason for us to be there? Churchill and FDR never had much problem telling us why we needed to fight the Nazis or the Nips. Maybe you're way too trusting.
#69. To: redleghunter (#68)
(Edited)
Frankly we are there to stop Al Queda and the Taliban from retaking Afghanistan and using it as a base of operations against Pakistan. If you can't believe that, then by us being there, it breaks up a geopolitical monopoly Iran could exploit on the cheap. Don't think that Sunni-Shia divide is actually something Iran cannot overcome. ;)
If that is unbelievable then just think how much Russia hates having US combat troops so close in their sphere of influence.
#70. To: redleghunter (#67)
(Edited)
#71. To: Tooconservative (#70)
#72. To: A Pole (#71)
EU plans to reduce subsidies to Eastern Europe by tens of billions.
#73. To: redleghunter (#68)
Don't think that Sunni-Shia divide is actually something Iran cannot overcome. ;)
#74. To: Tooconservative (#72)
"EU plans to reduce subsidies to Eastern Europe by tens of billions." And they are ready to live with the consequences?
#75. To: A Pole, Fake Muslim Donald (#73)
(Edited)
Al Queda and the Taliban are rabid fundamentalists, who see Shia as fake Muslims.
#76. To: hondo68, Liberator (#75)
(Edited)
#77. To: hondo68 (#75)
Shia Wahhabis
#78. To: redleghunter, Vicomte13 (#68)
Frankly we are there to stop Al Queda and the Taliban from retaking Afghanistan and using it as a base of operations against Pakistan.
In a briefing for reporters at the Pentagon, Gen. John Nicholson, the commander of U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan, cited “intensified dialogue” along with what he said was a 30 percent drop in the levels of violence as evidence President Trump's new Afghan strategy was working to drive at least some Taliban members to the bargaining table.
#79. To: Tooconservative (#77)
they loath the Shi'a.
#80. To: hondo68 (#79)
#81. To: Tooconservative (#66)
Then why can't they articulate a reason for us to be there?
#82. To: Vicomte13 (#81)
Because the reason itself is secret.
#83. To: Tooconservative (#82)
It's illegitimate to have secret wars or wars where you lie about your war objectives. You've abandoned democracy entirely at that point.
#84. To: Tooconservative (#82)
A fundamentally un-American idea, that the citizens should tolerate wars whose reasons to drag on for over a decade are that the cause of the war is "secret".
#85. To: Vicomte13 (#84)
all of those reasons are clandestine
#86. To: Vicomte13 (#84)
I don't think that the public would have anything useful to say on the matter, but that the exposure to the public of the fact of it by a vote would focus attention on it and make the efforts themselves less successful.
#87. To: Tooconservative, Vicomte13 (#86)
Revolution was a mistake, we'd be so much better off to have remained British subjects, yada-yada
#88. To: A Pole (#83)
This is how you cross from the Republic to the Empire, Rubicon River.
#89. To: A Pole (#87)
Like Canada or New Zealand. Them nasty tyrannies.
#90. To: A Pole (#85)
What about the profits?
#91. To: Tooconservative (#86)
As with a surprising number of devout Catholics, you are fundamentally a monarchist. And don't really bother to hide it.
#92. To: Vicomte13 (#90)
Sure, a little heroin money
#93. To: Tooconservative (#86)
(1) If the single most important function of the state is a defense of the realm, defensive or offensive, and you deliberately withhold information or willfully deceive the voters, you are an enemy of the very idea of a meaningful democracy where voters can make some kind of informed choice.
#94. To: A Pole (#92)
How much?
#95. To: Tooconservative (#70)
Can you imagine Trump out on the campaign trail: "Ya know, those Poles are terrific at standing up to Merkel trying to force them to take in her overflow of refugees. And Poland, a great little country, very classy military, made me an offer to pay us $2 billion to put a base in Poland. Yeah, no president ever made a deal like that before, getting paid to put our base in their country. Looking at this, you realize how our past presidents have made terrible deals on trade, on NATO, on lots of things but I intend to fix all those bad deals."
#96. To: hondo68 (#75)
President Trump makes Shia Wahhabis look bad. He needs to get with the program, grow a beard, and fire his tailor! Who is Pope Francis to judge?
#97. To: redleghunter (#96)
#98. To: Tooconservative (#80)
#99. To: Tooconservative (#89)
Like Canada or New Zealand. Them nasty tyrannies. Compared to America? Yes, they are clearly tyrannical and imposing such limits on civil liberties in recent decades that they are morphing into a soft police state of the Left.
#100. To: redleghunter (#99)
At another site the Aussies, Canucks and New Zealanders all ask Americans why doesn't your government put a halt to hate speech and take away guns.
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