You yanks REALLY need to lose this one. Your noses need to be rubbed in it. You need to feel the SHIT you put the rest of us though. And you need to get seriously angry at the Israelis and rub THEIR noses in it. You need a big enough shock to CHANGE.
(Like I know most of the people on Lemmy are not Republican idiots. I’m obviously not talking about you personally, but about the «general public opinion» in the US, especially the Republican idiots.)
In Afghanistan, Trump unconditionally surrendered to the Taliban, but left Biden to complete the withdrawal. Before that, Iraq was either a loss or a stalemate, depending on what the poorly articulated objectives actually were.
The wars were won in both cases. Decisively.
Hearts and minds were not won, in either case. There is a good question whether the nationbuilding could even theoretically have succeeded, given how tribal and divided the countries were. IMO it was stupid to try in the first place, especially in Afghanistan.
Every $10 increase in crude translates to roughly 24 cents per gallon at the pump. So we’re looking at 25 to 45 cents per gallon — baked in, structural, not going away when the war ends, not going away when the headlines fade, not going away ever.
Can we stop with this narrative that this is somehow a bad thing?
The price of oil has been too low. calculate the cost if externalities, and the price should be close to infinity.
Just stop oil.
Food prices are still tied to fossil fuel prices. This will cause a lot of very real pain, among the poorest in the world.
So yes, we need to get to net zero carbon. But there has to be a more humane way than unplanned cold turkey.
That time has passed. It was supposed to be a slow transition since 1970s.
Now the only option is to just stop now.
And most of the world’s food is produced locally. For those few heavily industrialized countries that chose to centralize their food systems to be dependent on fossil fuels, they have enough wealth to give free food to their poor populations.
And most of the world’s food is produced locally.
…With imported nitrogen fertilizer made from fossil fuel. And with farm machines burning imported oil. And transported even to local market using imported fuel.
While somehow Biden get’s blamed for the fiasco, Trump did order the full withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, essentially a surrender to the Taliban, though he did keep their US bank account held treasury.
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No one wins when people start shooting at each other. There are only different degrees of losing. There is no glory in war, only suffering of the poor for the rich.
Gotta argue. The winner here is the 3d side that sells these people guns.
Nixon had the decency to resign, Trump will drive us all 6ft under without any hesitation.
Nixon was not decent. The difference was that a Senator (Goldwater) told Nixon point blank that he was getting impeached and the senate had the votes to convict and remove.
Like most government officials “retirement” is getting fired.
They also didn’t have Faux “News”, hate radio, or the Internet back then, either.
What’s so fucked up is that POS of a FCC chairman just celebrated making it even worse than it already was for truth.
Fox was started precisely because the moneybags never wanted a Republican president held to account again.
I’m pretty sure Trump would give the order to launch the nukes and kill us all in that situation.
That’s why he’s firing the top military people. They won’t follow illegal (and reprehensible) orders, so he knows they won’t bomb blue states.
absurd claim even as a die-hard cynic.
He won’t nuke his top money makers, California and NY pay for half of the US military already
Trump 100% does not think that way.
Man bankrupted casinos, he has failed upwards most of his life and I don’t doubt he’d try some shit on CA and NY if he thought he could get away with it. It’s not their economies stopping him, its knowledge he might have to face consrquences if he did something too excessive, and as his brain liquifies I find myself wondering how long before he thinks the odds are okay.
I have to hope the people with access would refuse to obey these illegal orders.
By that point, if Americans STILL think they can vote and avoid violence then the American public really us beyond hope.
I genuinely think he’s by far the most likely president in this country’s history to launch ICBMs if he knows he is fucked. Which was a conclusion myself and any non-moron also came to in 2015.
He is really old now. A good cold, covid, a peanut or even a strong fart could do him in.
I think this article forgets how Trump effectively surrendered Afghanistan to the Taliban the last time around.
Also, calling Iraq a win is really stretching things.
Unless you consider how beneficial these wars were for the Israel first politicians and lobbies
Also Afghanistan. Also Vietnam.
The headline said “since Nixon.” The US lost the Vietnam war while Tricky Dick was president.
Mission Accomplished, babyyyyyyyy!!!
Winning a battle is easy, winning an occupation is close to impossible.
Most people seem to have decided that one is on Biden for some reason, including Biden.
Trump set it up to look that way.
Which is really weird considering wasn’t he literally following the timeline Trump set out? A timeline that was almost certainly concocted to screw over the Democrat if Trump lost and that Trump wouldn’t have actually stuck to if he won?
Trump wouldn’t have actually stuck to if he won?
Funny how you say that…
It is on Biden, he didn’t have to stick to Trump’s controversial deal with the Taliban, he could have had a spine and given a statement about how he supports bringing the troops home but that leaving Afghanistan in the hands of the Taliban will only put them at more risk in the future and how Trump made a fool of us by dealing with them. But no, every liberal has to treat Biden like he has no agency, like he didn’t continue negotiating with the Taliban and eventually gave the final withdrawl orders leaving locals who helped the US to fend for themselves.
But no, every liberal has to treat Biden like he has no agency, like he didn’t continue negotiating with the Taliban and eventually gave the final withdrawl orders leaving locals who helped the US to fend for themselves.
So I didn’t go into everything in my comment because I was specifically only commenting on that one aspect. But I’m actually mad at Biden because I know he had agency in the process and didn’t have to hang all those interpreters out to dry, or leave a ton of fully functional hardware for the Taliban to use. I’m not trying to excuse Biden for his actions, I’m saying it’s weird that he chose to step on the landmine that Trump left for him rather than do anything to make leaving not a disaster and then just chose to eat the criticism after.
Like I’m glad that he did actually leave rather than staying and occupying Afghanistan forever. But I agree with what was said in that other comment that basically it was a no-win situation and Biden chose the worst possible way he could have left.
This thread is full of the most absolutely bizarre takes imaginable.
The war in Afghanistan was a complete failure from start to finish and was only ever about making more money for arms manufacturers and oil companies. At literally any point in the decades long occupation, the best thing to do would be to immediately withdraw. The decision to withdraw was one of the best policy decisions any president has made in my lifetime (an admittedly low bar). I was hoping and praying for that decision for literally 20 years of my life. Personally, I’d tend to credit Biden with it since he was the one who actually followed through and accepted the political fallout from all the psychopathic hawks in the media.
And I come in here and the two sides are, “Biden good because [incredibly good and necessary decision] was actually Trump’s fault!” vs “Biden bad because [incredibly good and necessary decision] was Biden’s fault!”
How on earth has everyone in here come to this conclusion that if we prolonged the war even another 20 years, we could accomplish something we completely and utterly failed to do in that time? Even our own puppet government was telling us to leave. If you want to blame someone for losing the war, blame Bush, because the war was already lost within the first year at most. I literally cannot comprehend how anyone could look at that situation and want us to stay unless they were directly profiting from it.
Rationally, I know that liberals are bloodthirsty warmongerers who worship Khorne and want to build mountains of skulls and all, but like aren’t you supposed to keep up some kind of pretence of not just wanting to turn a country into a perpetual slaughterhouse?
liberals are bloodthirsty warmongerers who worship Khorne
Excuse me? It’s spelled “Koɿ n”.
It was a no-win situation. If he stayed, the Republicans who pretended to care about war being a bad thing would have raked him over the coals about throwing out future FIFA peace prize recipient Donald Trump’s flawless exit strategy.
And we see that when he went through with it anyway what a fucking mess it was, and they blamed him for it imploding anyway.
I’m of the firm opinion that we could have occupied Afghanistan for a century and the result upon exiting would have resulted in the exact same outcome. There were perhaps better ways to do a drawdown that wouldn’t result in leaving billions of dollars worth of military hardware, vehicles and munitions behind for the Taliban to sieze and use for themselves, but it still eventually had to happen and we got what we got.
Democracy can’t be given to someone else. It must be hard fought for and won by the people themselves, or it’s value will never become apparent to them.
I agree, and think you summarized it well. There was no win, and somehow Biden chose the worst way possible, leave the Taliban with billions of military equipment and abandoning everyone who helped the US, despite NOT sticking to Trump’s original timeline so be couldn’t even use that excuse.
He was under massive pressure to pull out because everyone was tired of this costly losing occupation, and he fucked up the pullout. That’s on him.
he didn’t have to stick to Trump’s controversial deal with the Taliban
Trump had already given away anything that would given Biden bargaining power. It was a deliberate setup.
Don’t mention any decency from Biden. It’ll ruin the narrative.
He’s never been anything but a silver spoon total loser. He’s not even a skilled criminal. Fucking bush league in every measure.
He expected to lose the first election. He wanted to be able to use it as proof that the system was against him, to fire up the Fox News rubes and jumpstart his new TV network. He basically wanted to lose, and instead he won.
It’s amazing. He’s such a failure he failed at failing.
This is a very dark replay of the plot of The Producers.
Nah, even the bushes were better at this than him
The BIGGEST Loser!!!
nobody loses as good as me, I’m not saying but everyone else is saying it. the best loser, the BIGGLIEST loser. Arnold Palmer, now he was a great loser, you know they say he had a really big penis, I never saw it myself it’s what people tell me, tremendous dong and tremendous loser.
thank you for your attention to this matter.
That’s an insult to Bushes and shrubbery.
Piece is quite brutal against US. Worth read.
a) This headline forgets W losing Afghanistan
b) Fuck Nixon, but Eisenhower deserves the blame for Vietnam (admittedly one of the reasons he did that was because he thought it would give him political cover to shut McCarthyism down, but still)
Eisenhower deserves the blame for Vietnam
Eisenhower sent a small number of “advisors.” JFK sent more. The big escalation happened under Johnson, who was furious at how the Pentagon outmaneuvered him.
Nixon continuing horrible foreign policy doesn’t absolve him. Also he conspired with Hanoi to sabotage LBJ which is straight up treason and extended the war another five years
he conspired with Hanoi to sabotage LBJ
Oh, c’mon. Next you’ll be telling me Reagan conspired with Iran to sabotage Carter!
Also Trump losing Afghanistan
admittedly one of the reasons he did that was because he thought it would give him political cover to shut McCarthyism down
I want to learn more about that. Got a recommendation?
Name one we have won since WWII?
That really comes down to what you mean by “war” and “won”.
We won the Korean war by achieving our strategic objectives- we bombed NK back to the stone age, and effectively isolated them from the rest of the world.
Our wars in Central America achieved their objectives- US trained death squads raped and murdered the local populations into submission; US corporations have been free to dominate ever since.
On the list of 80+ countries we have invaded since WWII, I would say well over half of these misadventures have achieved their strategic objectives.
When you leave with the same kind of people in charge as there were when you arrived then you lost. The ‘strategic objectives’ started to revolve around how much money you could fleece from the US government and it made every conflict a loss.
Desert Storm, but outside of that they’ve all been unsuccessful.
Did we really win? We went in there and killed a bunch of people but even today the country hates us. The truth is the US hasn’t won a war since WWII. In order to really win you have to make peace with the population after you take over. The US doesn’t do that anymore. We just kill and create more enemies.
If the goal of Desert Storm was to get Iraq to withdraw out of Kuwait, then it could be considered a success. There was no intent to make friends with the Iraqi people or remove Saddam from power. That was the second Bush’s mess.
Its been pointed out multiple times over the years that they stopped the conflict at a hundred hours for a media headlines. They didn’t finish the job so they didn’t achieve any real victory. So baby bush used afghanistan as a excuse to go in to disrupt the entire region again so oil companies could make more money in iraq to keep saddam hussein from moving to the euro. Its never as cut and dried as stated objectives. Its always about who makes the money. Its been that way since korea and Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us.
Put simply the US isn’t interested in winning wars so they haven’t since WWII. They are interested in putting a lot of money in to as few pockets as they can. Stated objectives are a joke when the truth is its always about who makes the money. There is no way you are going to convince me otherwise. The US doesn’t win wars anymore. We go in and murder people. Creating more enemies so some fat rich degenerates whose only skill is a utter lack of decency make a lot of money off of the death and destruction.
The US hasn’t won a war since WWII.
Yeah, that was the objective of Desert Storm: to force Iraq back to within its own borders.
Bush Jr thought that was too narrow a goal and when he found a convenient though irrational excuse in 9/11, killed half a million Iraqi civilians in a pointless bloodbath. By comparison, the homicidal maniac Saddam and his regime killed a few thousand Iraqi civilians during his entire time in power (not counting the war of aggression against Iran, which led to about half a million casualties on each side).
I think the ones making the wars would consider it a win if they make a lot of money.
In almost every war, the US extracted a lot of money/resources, not to mention the killings made by military industries
Winning a war means a enemy is no longer a enemy. Its that simple.
That’s all very idealistic, but in real life, containment is often a legitimate war aim. And if you’re invaded, ending the invasion is often victory. Wars are not fought to make people stop being your enemy, and there are only a few rare cases of post-war reconstruction where that has been achieved.
So we are back at the US hasn’t won a war since WWII.
Has America actually ever won a war since Gulf War 1?
I would amend that to “since WWII”, and the answer would still be no.
The “global war on terror” ended with a rather dramatic raid that killed bin laden. And the war part of Gulf war 2 was an obvious victory.
But winning a peace is a fuckton harder. And we haven’t done that since Vietnam.
And the war part of Gulf war 2 was an obvious victory.
Really? What were the objectives? Kill a bunch of civilians and hand Saddam over to a lynch mob? Because the end state in Iraq was collapse, chaos and a massive increase in Iranian influence.
You nailed it in one.
Wars are fought to knock down opponents. No war has ever had an actual goal of “make that country happy”.
As I said before, the war part of Gulf War 2 was a resounding success that ended the Bathist tyranny in Iraq. That chaos replaced it was not a failure of war fighting which might have been solved by more bullets and bombs, but rather a failure of the post-war peace.
If Gulf war 2 was a “loss” because it led to chaos and civil war, then WW1 was the biggest loss in history since its end led directly to.tne Nazis. Which i suppose is a reasonable philosophy., except that it would utterly neuter statements about the USA not winning many wars with “nobody else does either.”
The “global war on terror” ended with a rather dramatic raid that killed bin laden.
No, they executed an accused without a trial or prosecution. In India, they had a multiyear fair trial before the terrorist was executed. Difference between democracy and not a democracy.
No, they executed an accused without a trial or prosecution.
Binladen got what he deserved, and there was little chance that it was safe to capture him and transport him back to the US for trial.
Or rather any trial would be unconstitutional as it would rely heavily on “evidence” gained by torture. To save itself the embarrassment, America did what it always does and kill with impunity.
Well of course he got what he deserved. But they’re was no trial though. There was also no Trial for Kissinger, Bush. There won’t be one for Nethanyahu, Biden, Trump, etc too.
Like on their own? If so, then not even Gulf War 1 counts, b/c they were part of the UN coalition. I think maybe the invasion of Panama?
What else happened to Nixon?
He got to resign with a presidential pension/benefits and enjoy a full pardon for all his crimes. Personally, I don’t think “retiring early and people generally don’t think highly of you” is an appropriate amount of justice to be served.
Wait. We pay pensions to presidents?
They’re all war criminals! How much do they continue to burden tax payers?!?
Does Iraq count as a W?
Not the second time around, unless the only objective was to enrich Halliburton.
It certainly counts as a Dubbya. I wouldn’t call it a win.
