Apparently the Taliban are poisoning school girls, because girls aren’t supposed to get an education, or something like that. As someone who was initially supportive of both wars, and still believes it was ultimately the right thing to do, I’m starting to become of the opinion that these folks just aren’t all that interested in joining the modern world. My lack of regret is because it had to be tried. The specter of the Belmont Club’s three conjectures is still haunting.
20 thoughts on “A Real War on Women”
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The wars were wrong from the start, and its still wrong to continue them. They had nothing to do with terrorism, only increasing the warfare state.
Let’s support the troops by bringing them home.
So we weren’t attacked by a terrorist group on 9/11/2001 that was directly supported by the then government of Afghanistan? I imagined that I guess.
I think the justification for going into Iraq was debatable, but I was generally willing to accept the argument that:
1) Saddam was an asshole.
2) He violated the conditions of the cease fire from 1991 on a regular basis.
3) It was worth trying to offer the Arabs the chance to experiment with liberal democracy.
The WMD argument was compelling too, but in hindsight the intelligence on that was poor.
It still isn’t clear that the WMDs weren’t there. The attack by al-Qaeda scheduled for Amman, Jordan in 2004 involved nerve agents such as sarin, which were an Iraqi specialty. The nerve agents were trucked in from Syria–which Iraqi officials after the war say is where WMDs were shipped just before the invasion.
Let’s hope the Intelligence there was poor too. I’d hate to think about what’s going to happen to that stuff if it’s not.
I believe that the 15 tons of chemical and nerve agents to be used in Amman were actually seized by the Jordanian government.
Didn’t they also always delay UN inspectors whenever they came to check up on things? That doesn’t necessarily mean they had them, but it did make things suspicious.
My recollection is that after capture, Hussein told interrogators that he intentionally tried to give the impression that he had WMDs, not because of the U.S., but because of Iran. He wanted them afraid to invade.
Some of Hussein’s generals, after the war, told interrogators that while they did not have chemical weapons, adjoining brigades did. And the generals in charge of those brigades said the same thing. It would appear that the Iraqi government misled its own people about what weapons it had.
Small quantities of chemical weapons and nerve agents were recovered after the war, although degraded by age and unlikely to have been used–more likely, stuff left over from when Iraq did have a large WMD arsenal.
That terrorist group was also supported by your own government.* REMOVE THE BEAM FROM THINE OWN EYE BEFORE ATTENDING TO THE SPLINTER IN THY NEIGHBORS.
*1) Multiple FBI and a Pentagon investigation correctly identified the suspicious illegal alien Arab Muslim terrorists that they were looking for due to the known plot by Osama Bin Laden to launch a major terror attack against America, and all of these investigations were shut down on orders from above.
2) It was standard operating procedure to scramble fighter jets as soon as a jetliner deviated 2 or more miles off course. That was done 64 times in the year before 9/11. On 9/11 4 planes disappeared entirely for hours and 0 fighter jets were scrambled for 2+ hours.
3) YOUR government later claimed that there was no way they could have known and that there was nothing they could have done. This has been thoroughly refuted by the official documents released by the very same government.
YOUR government knew exactly who most of the hijackers were and they knew the general plan (massive terror attack) and they deliberately did nothing to stop it. This is irrefutable. You can deny it, but their own facts prove it.
The wars abroad have NOTHING to do with STOPPING terrorism. The truth is they serve the exact opposite purpose. Saddam and the Taliban were evil, but they were fifth and sixth rate types of evil, very little fish compared to the big shark you endorse.
The goal wasn’t “liberal democracy” – a far more accurate phrase is “globalist totalitarianism”.
I agree. Don’t you have a park to occupy? These claims have been pretty thoroughly refuted. Do you think our government is this competent at what they do?
1) So what?
2) So what?
3) Worth the blood and treasure expended? No way. They want democracy, they can get it themselves like everyone else had to. And it was never clear that they wanted democracy anyway.
The WMD argument was never compelling, as none of what was purported held up under any scrutiny.
I was in favor of going into Afghanistan, as the bastards who literally attacked us were there, but it was always clear to me that Iraq was an overreach and would turn into a clusterfudge.
Have you asked yourself why any sane person would take the U.S. to war if they believed that there was a way to avoid it? Wars are hideously expensive, in blood, in treasure, and above all, in political consequences. Democracies have to win wars in the first three years, or be seen as likely to win, or there will be horrible consequences for the politicians in charge.
Like losing your majority in Congress in 2006, and then the Presidency in 2008?
Exactly. And I am pretty darn sure that Bush knew that there were risks like this. Even wars that you win decisively and quickly, as happened with his father.
If we had actually won the Gulf War like we did the last war we actually WON, namely WWII, there wouldn’t have been a need to go back.
Winning a war is when they associate resisting the victor with death, not an excuse to extort foreign aid.
Our military can and does win any battle they fight. Our country no longer has the will to win a war, and shouldn’t try until that trend is reversed.
Since reversing that trend will take a second Revolution, followed by a second “exile of the Tories” involving the hard-core Left, I’m not holding my breath.
As a Veteran and current instructor of our Soldiers, please allow me to tell you that we don’t need your support. We’ll come home when the mission is complete.
Also, “warfare state”? Don’t you have a park to occupy?
The subjugation of women has a ripple effect in sustaining the ignorance of a culture. In these cultures, the primary caregiver of children of girls AND boys–the ones who might eventually get a couple years of schooling–are women. There’s pretty compelling evidence out there that the amount of information you’re exposed to by age 3 determines in many ways your lifelong knowledge levels. So by insuring your kids are tended to by utterly deprived and ignorant illiterates means you’ve perpetuated the ignorance and underachievement for another generation–for boys as well as girls. Can you imagine the impact on U.S. society if all women here were suddenly illiterate and without any work skills or knowledge beyond cooking? We didn’t even go that far back in the bad old days when women were considered their husbands’ property.
Women were not considered their property. Feme coverture meant that married women owned no real estate themselves, and unmarried women could not make contracts or otherwise own much except under their father. There were significant legal restrictions on women, although often less severe in practice in America than they the formal state of the law indicated.
Well, if by “these folks” you mean Afghanis, then by the very fact that there are girls in schools in the first place means that they are somewhat interested in joining the modern world. If by “these folks” you mean the Taliban, then of course not, but it’s always been clear that they were not interested in that.
I really just don’t think Afghani culture or their brand of Islam is compatible with western-style liberal democracy, and I don’t think there’s much we can do about that.
There is something that we can do about it, but the costs would be very high, and willpower no longer exists. The West no longer has any confidence in the value of its civilization.
1) I’m strongly opposed to the occupy movement.
2) You just mis-characterized me in order to dismiss me without addressing my argument.
3) If you have a refutation of the evidence that is posted on the White House and Congress and other .gov websites that documents the foreknowledge of the general plan and of the specific locations names appearances and actions of the hijackers – I would love to see it. If you can refute my claim that after 9/11/01 the Bush administration claimed to have had no idea such a thing was coming or that they could have done any such thing – please, show me a source in which they admitted to having forewarning and foreknowledge.
4) Did you mean incompetent? If so I agree.