Is the US military a global insurgency?

Discussion in 'World Events' started by desi, Sep 18, 2012.

  1. desi Valued Senior Member

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    The US seems to be keen on sending its military to countries all over the word for various reasons. Are these hostile actions a global insurgency that needs to be stopped or something else?
     
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  3. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    Something else.
     
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  5. quadraphonics Bloodthirsty Barbarian Valued Senior Member

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    "Seems" to whom, exactly? A talking weasel?

    This is the US military that recently withdrew from Iraq, and is currently packing up it's luggage in Afghanistan, that we're talking about?

    You didn't say anything about "hostile actions." You only mentioned "various reasons." Seems like you're looking to skip over the meat of the issue, and jump directly to the (prejudicial) conclusion that you want to stump for. It's not very impressive.
     
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  7. Read-Only Valued Senior Member

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    Yeah, not impressive in the least. Either the OP has his head in sand or has been listening to someone with a warped mentality. In any case, he certainly has a VERY twisted version of reality. <shrug>
     
  8. quadraphonics Bloodthirsty Barbarian Valued Senior Member

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    Well, perspective is one thing, but we'd have to get past the point that the OP doesn't appear to be looking to meaningfully engage. It's a plea for a circle jerk, or maybe the usual bait for a stilted flamewar. The particular contents of the viewpoint in question don't really matter when the OP is not looking to have a useful interaction in the first place.
     
  9. Read-Only Valued Senior Member

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    Thanks. I haven't bothered to read any of his posts before (and won't bother anymore either) so I was unaware of his attitude. When I read the leading post my impression was he was some sort of misguided kid asking a legitimate question.
     
  10. desi Valued Senior Member

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    Seems to be to the people who find themselves at the pointy ends of the US soldiers guns.

    It is the US military that recently invaded Iraq and Afghanistan after a dozen or so Saudi Arabians committed terrorism on US soil. Then there is Libya and Egypt where the US military played a role in deposing their governments as well. Syria and Iran seem to be other places where the US is sabre rattling.

    The US military uses bombs and bullets to kill people and break things. The people that they do that to usually consider those to be hostile actions when they are directed at them.
     
  11. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    That sounds like how you would explain international politics to a three year old. Grow up! Most Afghans don't even know that 9/11 happened or where, they are illiterate and ignorant simple farmers.
     
  12. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Which is why they regard our soldiers as insurgents. They have no idea why these men are in their country shooting at people.

    Neither do I. As desi said, 9/11 was a Saudi operation. Roughly 90% Saudi money, 100% Saudi planning, 75% Saudi personnel, and Osama was a member-by-marriage of the Saudi royal family. No one would have faulted us for threatening to bomb Riyadh. And considering that only a fool would think that King Abdullah did not know exactly where Osama was at every moment, if we had done that his head would have arrived in a cold pack on a FedEx truck at the White House service entrance within 36 hours.

    But King Abdullah is one of the Bush family's buddies in the petroleum industry, so they had to deflect the blame to somebody else. So they lied about Saddam having WMDs (the U.N. had already determined that he had none, but had not published their findings yet), and overthrew the Iraqi government, the only secular, pro-Western government in the entire region. And they pretended that Afghanistan was a modern, functional country (our own President Carter created the Taliban!) so Osama must have had the blessings of the people and the government in order to live there, and they used that as an excuse to make Afghanistan even more dysfunctional than it already was.

    They punished the Iraqis and the Afghanis for something the Saudis did--something the average Afghani didn't even know about. And in the process they destroyed what little stability the region ever had. Iraq now has a Shiite government like Iran, so the Sunni-Shiite rivalry could easily erupt into a regional war--with Israel's nukes just across the border on one side and Pakistan's nukes just across the border on the other side.

    If we had simply laid the blame where it belonged, on Saudi Arabia, this would be over. Osama would have been dead eleven years sooner, it would not have cost three trillion dollars (which we borrowed from China and bankrupted our government), and we could still wear shoes in our airports. Oh yeah, and we would not have motivated Al Qaeda to move their headquarters into Pakistan: a country with a weak government that cannot govern large regions of its territory, a population that doesn't like us, and nuclear weapons.

    I don't know how many O's to put in the word stoooooooooooopid to describe the post-9/11 debacle. It's like the Keystone Kops were running the country.
     
  13. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    I don't know what's stupider, Desi's statements or yours. You don't get to impune the Saudis just because Osama was born there. He was operating out of Afghanistan with Taliban help. His relatives rejected him and cooperate with US authorities.
     
  14. quadraphonics Bloodthirsty Barbarian Valued Senior Member

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    The key planners were from Yemen, Kuwait and Egypt, in point of fact.

    Moreover, nothing that you have cited there amounts to evidence that this was a "Saudi operation" in the sense of government involvement.

    Yes, they would have. And they would have been right to do so. Threatening to attack a country which we had zero evidence of any involvement would have pissed off a lot of people and alienated various allies - which is exactly what happened when we went about threatening and attacking another Arab country with no evidence barely a year after 9/11. I guess you must have slept through those years, or something.

    This is both stupid and offensive. You really think the King wouldn't have rounded that guy up in a New York minute if he'd had the capabilities? That he'd have even allowed the attack - which caused a major blow to the crucial relationship between him and his most important ally - in the first place? That it was just a matter of motivating him sufficiently with threats of insane punishment?

    You're just spouting inane, ugly conspiracy theories here, without any basis in fact.

    You think that Saddam Hussein's government was "pro-Western?" In 2003?

    Also, you apparently think that Turkey does not exist or is not "in the region" or something. Or Egypt under Mubarak, for that matter.

    The only "pretense" there was that the Taliban was in control of the country, and was allied with Al Qaeda and facilitating their activities. Nobody has ever accused the average Afghan on the street of having democratically endorsed that state of affairs.

    And your canard about Carter creating the Taliban is not only inane, but has been corrected here repeatedly in the past. Seems that you're committed to this fantasy narrative for some reason, though.
     
  15. desi Valued Senior Member

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    1,616
    My first post was aimed at a 12 grade reading level...

    Then why is the US in Afghanistan? That is sort of the point of this thread. The US military is all over the place shooting foreign nationals for specious reasons.
     
  16. desi Valued Senior Member

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    1,616
    Maybe you're right. Just because most of the hijackers were Saudi citizens doesn't mean Saudi Arabia had anything to do with it. By that logic we would have invaded China after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
     
  17. desi Valued Senior Member

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    The nationality of most of the hijackers means nothing to you?

    We did just that to Iraq.

    The King of Saudi Arabia has public schools there where people are taught to hate Americans so they won't blame their government for their problems. He walks a thin line taking money from the US on one hand and teaching Saudi children to hate on the other.

    You're spouting apologist rhetoric for Saudi Arabia and the US military without any basis in fact. If you do have facts please quote a source or ten.

    The US is fighting Afghan citizens. The Taliban was deposed years ago. Cops and soldiers the US has trained have attacked our troops. We are not welcome there. Maybe we should support the troops and bring them home.

    The CIA trained the guys who fought the Soviets. Many of them were in the Taliban. Carter or Reagan or both played that game. The good news is we beat the Soviets. The bad news is we're losing in Afghanistan like the Soviets did.
     
  18. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Not to mention that at the time, Saudi sources provided about 90% of the funding for anti-Western terrorist organizations in Muslim countries. Of course, now that we've managed to piss off the world's entire Muslim population, today a considerable amount of that funding is coming from private citizens in Nigeria, Indonesia and other countries outside the Middle East with Muslim majorities or large Muslim populations. Even in the USA!

    I'll give you Turkey, sorry 'bout that. But Egypt... well okay, Egypt too I suppose. Also Jordan, although it hardly counts as a "major" country.
     
  19. superstring01 Moderator

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    Libya, huh?

    Libya was initially a European operation that was scuttled even before it got off the ground because the French, Italian and British miltary machines were so completely incapable of handling a nation of less than 10 million people off their shore that they came--hat in hand--to the USA to pick up where they left off. This was, I remind you, after Qadaffi & Co. were slaughtering people in what was going to end up being a Syrian-esque civil war. While life isn't perfect for Libyans, they were careening towards a prolonged conflict that would have seen orders-of-magnitude-more dead than died during the insurgency that toppled Qadaffi and-- not to be forgotten-- this insurgency started long before the US military planes started patrolling the skies (and not really that many of them and not a single foot-soldier).

    So, you were talking military and now you're . . . segueing into political pressure? Are you retarded? It seems like you're desperately trying to bolster your list of "militarily interfered-with nations" by including nations that were not--in fact--interfered with by the US military. But that fact wasn't good enough for you, so you expanded your little list to include a nation who's leader was being forced to step down by MASSIVE international pressure by likes of: Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia, the EU, Japan, Australia and Canada, and then have "conveniently" tried to associate it with US Military actions in other nations.

    Seems?

    Did you just watch a TV program that made you all angry-wangry?

    No shit Sherlock! That's what bombs and bullets are for.

    ~String
     
  20. quadraphonics Bloodthirsty Barbarian Valued Senior Member

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    Not in terms of imputed state culpability, no.

    Yeah, that is exactly what the quote you responded to there was describing. Do try to keep up.

    So do lots of governments. That doesn't add up to evidence that the Saudi government was behind the September 11 attacks.

    My post was a simple exercise in fact. Pointing out that wild conspiracy theories are just that is not "apologetics" for the targets of such, outside the fevered imaginations of conspiracy theorists anyway. Empty bluster about a lack of fact on my part is just that, and does not impress. Moreover, I reject the implication that I need to source observations of simple, obvious reality that any adult with a basic grasp on the situation has long understood. You're trafficking in extraordinary claims, so the onus is on you to supply extraordinary evidence for them.

    Relevance to anything I've said?

    And yet, still exists as a geopolitical force with command structure, funding, troops, military organization and even control of certain territories.

    Which is to say that if the goal is preventing the Taliban from using Afghanistan to facilitate AQ activities, then leaving the country to the Taliban hardly accomplishes that. Was there supposed to be some actual point to your statement there?

    So what?

    The polls I've seen have shown long-standing and strong approval for the US invasion - and strong disapproval of the Taliban - amongst the Afghan population:

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...t-do-they-now/2012/03/07/gIQAf0gQSS_blog.html

    If you've got some newer ones, by all means post them. A few incidents with infiltrators shooting US troops does not define Afghan popular sentiment. As far as I can tell, the war is less popular in the West than in Afghanistan itself.

    Isn't that what we are already setting about doing? What is your point, and what does it have to do with anything I've said?

    So what?

    There was no "Taliban" at that time. The state with the most responsibility for creating the Taliban has always been Pakistan.

    All national leaders everywhere, at every time, have played at geopolitics. There is no way not to.

    The Soviets beat themselves, we just helped them through the door.

    In what sense? The damage to the Soviet Union was not particularly about their loss of control over Afghanistan. The USA lost much worse in Vietnam than either of these Afghan examples, and so what?
     
  21. The Marquis Only want the best for Nigel Valued Senior Member

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    Well, no.

    The US Military is a force directed by a legitimate government (yes, I know) to attack and occupy what it is told to. The reasons for US soldiers being in the military are varied, but most would appear to be economic. They're just soldiers.
    Insurgent forces have far more personal reasons for being a part of whatever military or para-military they belong to.

    The "winners" of any war tend to be those who really believe in what they are fighting for. This is, to a large degree, why the US don't win their wars anymore.
    They don't care enough. That free education or three square a day doesn't really stand up when confronted with a true believer prepared to die for his beliefs.

    The down side of all of this, of course, is that if the US military were to stay at home and concentrate only on those things it really does care about, as opposed to those things it's told to care about, there would be a very real danger that those things it did care about would no longer exist, because it didn't care about them enough until it was too late.

    Those who care, win.
     
  22. kris Registered Member

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    Here is an official DoD document outlining domestic and international US military deployments: http://siadapp.dmdc.osd.mil/personnel/MILITARY/history/hst1112.pdf

    The document states there are approximately 180,000 troops deployed internationally, not including approximately 50,000 in Iraq under Operation New Dawn and approximately 100,000 in Afghanistan under Operation Enduring Freedom.

    Interesting, but no proof of wrong doings in numbers alone.

    The real issue with claiming insurgency is that it depends on what constitutes a legitimate government or authority.

    The de facto arbiter of these decisions seems to be the UN.

    Interestingly, in the case of the Iraq war, the then United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan said in September 2004 that: "From our point of view and the UN Charter point of view, it [the war] was illegal."

    Make no mistake though, there are plenty of word games, misdirections and blatant deception on all sides of the debate when it comes to such highly-charged matters. Proceed with caution.
     
  23. quadraphonics Bloodthirsty Barbarian Valued Senior Member

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    Operation New Dawn is over - there are no US troops in Iraq. Likewise, troop levels in Afghanistan are down to about 62,000, and set to hit zero in 2014.

    Sure.

    Let's note that the USA is basically a status-quo power. This is unsurprising, given that the world order is dominated by America in the first place. Why would the USA want to wage an 'insurgency' against a world order that already features predominant US power? The USA was an insurgent power early in its history, and arguably up through the world wars, but since then it's been a different ball game.

    Also, the phrasing of the OP asks whether the US military - not the USA as a whole - is an insurgency. The answer to that seems to be an unequivocable "no," as said military is not acting in opposition to the governing authorities in question, but as an arm of such. All of those US troop deployments invoked in the OP exist to prop up the existing order, not to revise it.
     

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