Your view seems ridiculous to me. I don't know what else to say.
That's because you have the knowledge depth of a kiddie pool on this stuff. You know enough to sound cool to your fellow snowflake friends...but you lat the historical knowledge depth to debate this with someone who knows more about it than you do.
The idea that our meddling in their politics is a small or non-factor is completely absurd.
Really? Why is that?
You seriously think that is why we haven't stopped extremism yet?
It's one of the reasons kid. We had successful ops going to root out al Qaeda right after 9/11 and thanks to Seymour Hersh and the NY Times broadcasting those covert ops on the front pages of the paper...the operations were blown. We had infiltrated their banking lines and their chatroom lines of communicating and financing operations. Someone leaked to the Times. They wrote the stories...they WH asked them to not publish the stories as they would jeopardize current anti terrorism missions...tey refused...the terrorists abandoned the way they'd been doing business and we lost their trail and had to start over.
How many years could we have cut off of stopping Islamic Terrorism had the Times not helped the terrorists evade detection?
Either way we are wasting our time, blood and treasure.
Says you. But then you wouldn't say that had you ever been down range and see how we've actually helped the people in Afghanistan and Iraq.
I was in the Army and went to basic training at Fort Jackson. My MOS was 25N and I worked closely with 25B.
Thanks for keeping my telephones running like they should for four years. I'm sure that was a strenuous job.
I don't know how else to emphasize that I don't really care if you don't believe me.
No one believes you because your so full of sh*t it's coming out your ears. Your spouting the same mindless platitudes that Occasional-Cortex is and you think it makes you sound smart and informed.
Here's a hint...it doesn't.
A long planned operation that killed 3000 people is a bit different than toppling the United States government.
Actually the planning training and execution didn't take that long.
I was just getting ready to say the same thing to you.
Actually if you'd ever been out in the real Army down range at a Forward Base or a platoon observation post...you'd know that my mindset isn't what's getting innocent people killed.
It's isolationist sheep like you that achieve that goal. Ask Chamberlain how kowtowing to a despot worked for Europe.
Look what happened in the Middle East when Obama recklessly and foolishly pulled forces out of Iraq and left them hanging. There wasn't an ISIS before he did that. Now Iran has closer ties to Iraq than we do and were the ones that liberated their country!
Russia is not going to invade the European Union. If that was actually a threat I'm sure they'd find places for us to set up our forces.
They already have invaded. They illegally annexed the Crimea...they've invaded the Ukraine. They are holding sailors and ships of the Ukrainian Navy illegally. Their missiles shot down a Boeing 777 killing everyone on board. They are coming onto foreign soil and conducting hits on political "enemies" and dissidents.
All of the places we used to have in Germany that we turned back over to their Government...Frau Merkel has seen fit to use them as refugee cams for the flood of military aged muslim men who are now in Germany. We almost didn't have a place to store maintain and operate a brigade sized combat team's worth of equipment from when Russia invaded the Ukraine. Only the quick thinking from LTG Hodges to stop the complete shutdown of Coleman Barracks helped us there.
Right now we are spending money to help poor countries like Estonia and some of the other baltic countries build ranges...motor pools and training areas where we can shoot move and communicate to try and make up for what we don't have in Europe anymore.
Russia IS an actual ongoing threat. But the EU is too cowed and their militaries are too cash strapped to do anything. Russia knows this.
They also know that we are the only ones that have caused them to take an operational pause in some of the things they are doing in Europe.
But at the same time if Putin decides to move forward...the units we have in Europe to stop him will make Task Force Smith look like a success.