Or are you not going to spend the next few years preparing to be a teacher and then go to Afghanistan for a few more years?

Thankfully Uncle Sam will be there holding down the fort for the half a decade or more you're going to need to get your humanitarian rocks off.

The USA military crushed the legal government of Afghanistan in a cake walk.

Prove it.

It's good to see that you have real arguments and not just mockery and establishment nut-hugging.

n/t

You're right, I don't care about your hubris or your intervention excuses. The simple fact of the matter is that we could leave, for good, at any time, and nothing is stopping us except for people like you, and others like you, who don't want us to leave and are working hard to ensure that we stay and complete this nation-building experiment. For "humanitarian" reasons.

If I were the war party I'd be toasting and boasting about how useful idiots like you are assets to the Military Industrial Complex. Even when the idiots claim to oppose the very same complex, or protest against specific perceived misdeeds, they will still give praise when it is necessary to provide the punch behind their humanitarian do-gooding.

You ideology is flawed and intellectually bankrupt, and you've said nothing to counter that, only increase my certainty of it with your obfuscating. All your interventionist "power" comes from the use of coercive force by the one doing the intervening, period, and so all of these bullshit humanitarian arguments mean dick because they are implicitly backed by US Military Power, which completely undermines all of your peaceful "humanitarian" feel-good bullshit.

It has nothing to do with semantics or any of the myriad of documents and facts on the ground you love to clutter everything up with, it has nothing to do with "reading more" (the typical fallacy you throw those that disagree with your). I've read plenty. It comes down to your flawed coercive ideology, how you choose to embody it (as a do-gooding "humanitarian"), and how your perceptions are ultimately exploited by the Establishment to gin of support for its racketeering and global domination scams.

In fact you've been calling for escalation and Pakistani sovereignty violating and civilian mass-murdering air strikes for quite a while. Drones killing women children from the sky, praising Kind David Petreaus for his "vision", some fucking "humanitarian" you are. That is the problem with all you do-gooders, you want to do all the do-gooding while ignoring all the unintended consequences (unless said consequence is perceived as good, then it will be praised, as we saw earlier, and used in moral math equations).

I have repeatedly stated that I didn't think the effort should be controlled by the military, I still think that.

Too fucking bad. That's the entire point, you and others like you will never be in control of the Empire. But you'll go along with its plan anyway because of all the perceived goodness you feel you can bring. And the way you apologize for and downplay the Militarist American Empire while claiming to be some kind of antiwarrior is just disgusting btw. But blind interventionists such as yourself always seem to miss the ironic, little things, such as military power undermining all of your bullshit humanitarian ideals. The Empire gets to continue the killing and you get left holding the bag and making excuses. Real smart move, smart guy.

You think about a lot of things. You should think more.

Your response is thought-provoking, unlike the tiresome mud slinging and personal attacks by some of the otherwise intelligent posters.

Well thanks.

If I still had my old job, I could sling a lot more mud. As it is, the recession has obliged me to restrict my writing, so I try to make it count more.

What planet do you observe us from? You say the most inane things I have ever heard.

The USA military crushed the legal government of Afghanistan in a cake walk. We had demonized the legal government of Afghanistan for some time, almost as if we knew the excuse was coming to crush them. Regardless, we sure thought we were dealing with the legal government of Afghanistan when we demanded that they turn over bin Laden to us even though we were offering no proof at all that he did 9-11.(*)

Since then, we or our proxies have had military control of the country. That is commonly referred to as war or occupation. If we are not occupying the damn place; then why are Americans being killed there and a f'ing fortune being spent there?

And if we are not at 'war' or 'occupying' the place, then why do military experts refer to the war in Afghanistan? Are they all in possession of a vastly inferior knowledge compared to your vision of reality? Every damn one of them?

Do you not understand that every people want the right of self-determination? Does freedom not mean any damn thing to you at all? Is liberty a completely foreign concept. Do you want to remake the whole world in your vision as the French nation wanted to do after their revolution?(**)

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(*) I can say that right? It is not a post on that forbidden topic.

(**) I will be out for a while due to pressing matters, but I will be very glad to pound this theme all summer with you.

If you can't do it here, how in Horace's name (to borrow your phrase) can you expect it to work on a global basis?

BECAUSE RON PAUL SAYS SO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Can you not read? I never asked for isolationism.

No, I can't read. Stay classy, heur-ur.

No, you did not ask for isolationsim, but you did not specify non-invervention either. Since it was specified in many other posts, I won't argue the point. However, let us look at what you did say:

The first solution is to dismantle the Empire and stop pretending that only "supper smart" Americans can run the world. Bring all the troops (yes every damn one) home and leave the world alone. Be friends with all, and trade freely with all.

You're suggesting the U.S. can implement and maintain successful foreign policy throughout the world based on "be friends with all" and you can't even operate on the same basis here in UT with other bright and generally well-intended people? If you can't do it here, how in Horace's name (to borrow your phrase) can you expect it to work on a global basis?

Thanks for the links.

I had actually included something more that I deleted because I didn't want it to be based so much in the past. But there is a lot to indicate that out of a sense of survival, Vietnamese didn't really teach the next generation about the full extent of the war. There are a few articles I've read in that regard, will link to them, if I remember where I saw them.

Along those same lines, many Japanese Americans that I've met in my life, or have listened to speak about their experiences--people who were interned as children or whose parents were interned have a very ambivalent attitude about the experience. One of these, whose parents were interned, confided in me that her parents were encouraged by the US government not to speak very deeply of the experience to their children. And not to even teach their children Japanese language or traditions; as a result, there is almost a complete lack of collective memory of that period in time among Japanese Americans of subsequent generations.

So I think one element that's not explored in the debate about whether the world hates us or loves us, is how the experiences of the past are taught to subsequent generations.

Did the Vietnamese and Cambodians teach--out of a need for their own sanity and a wish to move on from horrible times--their children little or nothing? Are those countries that have the most antagonism towards us, the ones that we meddle with most frequently over a long period of time--such as the Middle East and Latin America? And how clear are those feelings, positive or negative? And maybe even more importantly, how durable?