The problem is that the long war war will be fought, and if not on foreign soil, we will bleed here.
While I do not doubt this, doesn't it make more sense to fight it strategically rather than just lashing out at whoever seems convenient at the moment?
For example, who exactly is our enemy? ISIS? Fine. We help Iran immeasurably by wiping out ISIS and probably facilitate a Sunni caliphate in the Middle East.
Iran? Well then, we help ISIS.
Both? Do we have the capability to fight two enemies who are fighting each other? Who fills the vacuum when it is over? And why would we want to, when they are doing the job for us?
It seems to me we should keep our powder dry, reinforce our defenses, closely monitor the situation and possibly act covertly to keep these two forces of evil killing each other for as long as possible. Instead, OPapaDoc is trying to turn Iran into an ally, a monumental mistake our children will pay dearly for.
Just wanting to kill Muslims is a kneejerk reaction that the media exploits to get our gander up for wars that do not end, to make sustainable a military industrial complex with an insatiable appetite for revenue. It all needs to be rethought.
People Like John McCain and Lindsey Graham, who continue to embrace the neocon world view, are in complete denial IMHO.
I don't consider wanting to go blow up Muslims in the aftermath of 9/11 any more of a knee jerk reaction than I see wanting to kill Japanese in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor a knee jerk reaction.
In your original post, or rather the one that caught my eye, you commented on the invasion on Iraq, calling it a waste of resources and politically costly.
My comments were about that specific war, not ISIS. We can discuss ISIS if you'd like, but that's a different subject.
In the aftermath of 9/11 the nation wanted war, not because we as a nation are a bunch of knee jerking neocons, but because our people had been massacred right in front of our eyes, and we knew, instinctively knew, that the ONE thing we could NOT do was nothing.
Had GWB made the "keep the powder dry and watch closely" argument as a reaction to the attacks of 9/11 he would have lost his re-election bid to a hawkish Democrat, if not been outright forced to resign.
The political costs of wars is great, but only if you lose them.
The Democrats politicized an invasion they themselves authorized in order to gain political power here. They voted to authorize the Iraqi invasion, then used the Iraqi invasion as a sledge hammer against Bush and the GOP. We let the do that.
The critique on the Iraqi war is not so much grounded on neocons or the "military industrial complex", but rather on the fact that we did not "win" the war.
So in effect, we lost the war twice. Once abroad and once here.
Understanding that, I have to ask myself if the question is whether the war, as a war, was a wasted effort because we didn't "win", or whether those critical of the war set the standard for what constituted "winning" the war so high that they were unattainable, and whether they did that for their own political purposes and gains.
One last thing... the cost of the war.
The US spent nearly $5 trillion on bailouts for failed financial institutions, and slightly less that that for the war.
That's a lot of money.
Of the two, I can justify the war cost more than the costs of the bailouts.
