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Home » More on the Syria and Afghan pullout: the questions to ask

More on the Syria and Afghan pullout: the questions to ask

The New Neo Posted on by

After the announcement of the Syria and Afghanistan pullout, some Trump-defenders have emerged. One is Rand Paul, who says:

I think the burden is really on Mattis and others who want perpetual war to explain why if there is no military solution we’re sending more troops. I think the onus is really on them to explain themselves…

I don’t think we have enough money to be paying to build and rebuild and build and rebuild Afghanistan. The President is right and I think the people agree with him. Let’s rebuild America. Let’s spend that money here at home…

The President [Obama] promised when we went into Syria, our goal was to wipe out ISIS. We took ninety-nine percent of the land, they’re on the run, can the people who live there not do anything? We spent trillions of dollars arming the entire Middle East, arming Afghan army, can they not do anything? Do we have to do everything? We defeated ISIS. But now you have the– the hawks in the administration and throughout Congress saying, “Oh, now we have to wait until Russia and Iran leave Syria.” Well, that was never our goal and it’s never going to happen. So those people are advocating for perpetual war…

They’re going to fight each other until the end of time. It’s all of them. It’s– it’s a inter-complicated mess that has to do with Sunni extremism versus Shia extremism, and also some other various battles in between. But if we wait until there’s potent– no potential for anybody fighting each other when we leave, we will be there forever.

A similar theme was sounded by Andrew Sullivan:

After 17 years, we’ve gotten nowhere, like every single occupier before us. But for that reason, we have to stay. These commanders have been singing this tune year after year for 17 years of occupation, and secretaries of Defense have kept agreeing with them. Trump gave them one last surge of troops — violating his own campaign promise — and we got nowhere one more time. It is getting close to insane.

Neoconservatism, it seems, never dies. It just mutates constantly to find new ways to intervene, to perpetuate forever wars, to send more young Americans to die in countries that don’t want them amid populations that try to kill them. If you want the most recent proof of that, look at Yemen, where the Saudi policy of mass civilian deaths in a Sunni war on Shiites is backed by American arms and U.S. It’s also backed by American troops on the ground — in a secret war conducted by Green Berets that was concealed from Congress. There is no conceivable threat to the U.S. from the Houthi rebels in Yemen; and there was no prior congressional approval. Did you even know we had ground troops deployed there?

There’s a great deal of food for thought there, both from Paul and from Sullivan. To tackle it in depth would require a book—and probably a lot of information I’m not privy to—but let me just take the obvious things that occur to me.

There are different criteria for going into a country and for staying in a country. Sometimes one administration decides to send troops for a certain purpose, and another administration (sometimes with a very different outlook on foreign affairs and on military intervention) comes into power. Does the mission continue? How to decide such a thing? Do we want our foreign policy to seesaw wildly based on whim? Are there any objective criteria that would transcend the vagaries of shifting politics? If so, what would such criteria be?

And what if the situation changes? It’s often referred to as “mission creep,” but what about the “creep” that occurs in the situation we might face? What is a cost-effective intervention both in terms of money and in terms of American lives and limbs sacrificed? How much is too much? Is it a question of money? Is it a question of number of troops? Is it a question of casualties? Is it a question of time?

I think that way too many people are ignoring the complexity of these matters and the extreme difficulty of coming up with answers. We prefer simple black or white solutions, and there aren’t any. The truth is that Islam is involved in a centuries-old civil war, but that war has also involved us directly when it spills over into terrorist activity by Muslims, activity which is somewhat connected to that civil war and somewhat independent of it.

There’s much much more to the complexity of the thing—including all the larger geopolitical ramifications (i.e. Russian involvement)—but that’s a little sample of what I mean.

When Andrew Sullivan writes about our troops on the ground in Yemen—the Green Berets that are engaged in a “secret war”—he includes a link to this NY Times article. How many of his readers will click on that link and read what the article says? Well, I did, and I discovered this:

…[L]ate last year, a team of about a dozen Green Berets arrived on Saudi Arabia’s border with Yemen, in a continuing escalation of America’s secret wars.

With virtually no public discussion or debate, the Army commandos are helping locate and destroy caches of ballistic missiles and launch sites that Houthi rebels in Yemen are using to attack Riyadh and other Saudi cities…

There is no indication that the American commandos have crossed into Yemen as part of the secretive mission.

But sending American ground forces to the border is a marked escalation of Western assistance to target Houthi fighters who are deep in Yemen…

A half-dozen officials — from the United States military, the Trump administration, and European and Arab nations — said the American commandos are training Saudi ground troops to secure their border. They also are working closely with American intelligence analysts in Najran, a city in southern Saudi Arabia that has been repeatedly attacked with rockets, to help locate Houthi missile sites within Yemen.

More at the link, but the main thrust of the article is that there are a dozen of these troops, their activities are designed to help the Saudis and hurt Iran, they are on the border and not in Yemen itself, and that the general policy (possibly minus the troops) was actually started under Obama and escalated ever-so-slightly under Trump. I can’t get my tonsils in an uproar about such a mission, which seems extremely limited in terms of mission creep and to be at least possibly cost-effective in limiting Iran somewhat (and by the way, Sullivan is very misleading when he says of Yemen that we have “troops deployed there”).

Sullivan adds that “I simply do not believe that the West has the knowledge, the will, or the ability to shape the extremely complicated and endlessly vicious politics of the Middle East.” I can’t argue with that; I don’t believe that we have that knowledge either.

But there’s a little matter of degree. Because we cannot “shape” the politics of the Middle East doesn’t mean we should have nothing to do with it and that refraining utterly from any action there would be better. The questions I’ve asked earlier in this post are the ones we should be asking, and trying to answer.

Sullivan adds “what’s astonishing this time is how the Democrats and much of the liberal Establishment now supports an unending occupation of yet another Middle Eastern country.” Nope, it’s not the least bit “astonishing.” It’s utterly predictable. If a great many Democrats are dedicated to the idea that whatever Trump does is bad and whatever he doesn’t do is good, their pro-intervention attitude makes perfect sense. If Obama had suggested such a pullout it would have been just fine with the Democrats, but since it’s Trump it’s terrible.

What’s needed is an objective analysis of the situation and the actions and alternatives to those actions, irrespective of party or who is president. Ha! Dream on, you say. And I’m afraid you’d be correct in saying that.

Comments

More on the Syria and Afghan pullout: the questions to ask — 35 Comments

  2. I’ve had it with commenters on so many blogs who are unwilling to consider the complexities of situations. In Syria, you can’t leave out Erdogan, who is now planning an attack on the Kurds there. Nor can you ignore the games that sleazebag has been playing with Germany. Life is very complicated and sometimes there are no good clean choices. Staying home will not protect us from cyber warfare.

  3. that the general policy (possibly minus the troops) was actually started under Obama

    I’d trace that back to Kennedy. IIRC, fighting such wars was the purpose of the Green Berets.

    For the rest, I have no idea what the general strategy is behind these moves. I don’t think it is all about campaign promises, there are clearly bigger things going on in the ME and Afghanistan, and very little reporting that is useful for evaluating them. The media has completely failed to keep us informed.

  4. The US has only 2000 troops in Syria, purportedly to fight the once-dreaded ISIL (in Obama-speak; ISIS to everyone else). They protect some Syrian Kurds, which everyone else wants to kill, and those folks ought to flee to Iraqi Kurdistan anyway.

    Syria has given Russia what it has always wanted: a warm-water (Mediterranean) naval base. Russia has also obtained a permanent air base in western Syria. The Syrian forces that matter are all allied:Turkey, Iran, Russia and Assad. It is stupid to have our tiny force in this geopolitical struggle.

    George W had it right: establish and keep a strong regional air and ground force in Iraq, but our evil and stupid Dems threw that away, just as they threw South Vietnam away to the Communists.

    It is now too late to change much. The Iranian crescent runs from the Pakistani border thru Shia-run Iraq to Syria. What a triumph by the mullahs!

  5. The media has completely failed to keep us informed.

    1. They don’t have the budget anymore.

    2. They don’t have the language skills.

    Recall Ben Rhodes remarks: Obama’s foreign policy was being covered by 27 year olds who know nothing. A crucial conduit in the manufacture of that foreign policy was Rhodes himself, who was a creative writing maven turned campaign factotum.

  6. Trump does know what he is doing. He has been visualizing, organizing, and successfully carrying out very complex projects successfully for decades. He lived in a world where projects were designed to be completed, work, and turn a profit.

    The media, which is totally focused on government, assumes, like government, that things are not supposed to ever complete. When encountering a Trump, government people sense great danger. The survival instinct is triggered. Faced with the need to actually make decisions that actually count, childish defense mechanisms erupt.

    Trump almost certainly does see the big picture. He needs a cabinet that understands that. The new Secretary of Defense, an actual mechanical engineer, a success in the world that actually makes things that have to work, may be such a person. Pompeo, who although a West Point grad, majored in engineering, is also such a person. This may be the combination needed to make actual progress.

  7. “Recall…”

    Well, um, yes, but we’re missing something here.

    One might want to consider—to “recall”—Rhodes’s undeniable coup de grace—his pride and his joy: the glorious, ultra-high-decibel “echo chamber” that this fraudulent marionettist so masterfully conceived, orchestrated, and deployed to manipulate the enthusiastically compliant, sycophantic (and essentially sick) drooling idiots in the media, who, hanging onto his every word, hypnotized by his every gesture, eagerly repeated, amplified and spread (like oh-so-valuable night soil) the hallucinogenic message until the Obama/Rhodes/Kerry/Brown/Power hashish-dream policy of allying with the Mullahs drowned out everything else by the sheer noise of its nonsensical audacity, reverberating with a vibrant fantasy life of its own in the Candy Land of Obama’s Narrative….

    File under: Total Recall(?)

  8. Syria has given Russia what it has always wanted: a warm-water (Mediterranean) naval base.

    That has been ongoing at Tartus since 1971. Russia even used to have several more naval bases in the region. Also recall that Russia was heavily involved in the planning of the Syrian attack on the Golan Heights in the Yom Kippur war. Russian involvement in Syria is nothing new.

  9. And Americans should die so Putin doesn’t get to bask in a naval base (so far from his support it would be useless in an actual war)?

    Russia and the Soviets before have wasted extraordinary amounts of money trying to get such clients, only for it to be entirely wasted money. Did the billions poured into Vietnam help the Soviets? Afghanistan? Ethiopia? Libya? Egypt? All wasted money.

    Let them pour their money into vanity projects. Don’t be a fool and do the same because you feel slighted that American power is being diminished. Once you lose the urge to compete and look at the cost-benefit coolly the urge to intervene drops hugely.

    Americans should not die so militarists can feel good.

  10. Over two years ago, when Obama was still in office, I watched a 2 hour presentation by Brett McGurk on C-SPAN. He definitely has the neo-con religion. He detailed how, once ISIS was neutered, the rebuilding process could take place and order would be restored. He knew many Muslim leaders who were eager to restore order to north eastern Syria – allies for rebuilding and eventual local control. (That’s always the dream. That local leaders can be found who grasp democratic principles and will apply them wisely.) The one thing he was right about was that it would take a long time. (At that time ISIS was still quite powerful.) He estimated 20 years as I recall. He saw all the suffering of the Syrian people up close and personal. Like a well-intentioned person looking at homeless encampments here in the U.S., he is motivated to do something to help them. Even if it’s wrong, it feels good to try to help. (So many progressive programs are like that.)

    I used to believe that bringing these Muslim countries into the modern world was a project that might work I no longer believe that. If they didn’t have such huge oil reserves, we could just ignore them. Yes, we are now self sufficient in oil, but many other countries in Europe, Africa, South America and Asia depend on that oil. So, they can’t be ignored. And there’s the issue of our support for Israel. For many reasons, both religious and practical, we cannot abandon them. Which also keeps us engaged.

    We need a policy that keeps the oil flowing, deters jihadis, resists the temptation for nation building,and keeps us out of the Muslim civil wars. Not too much to ask, is it? 🙂 Trump may envision a way to accomplish that. I don’t. 🙁

  11. I saw some guy on Fox who was perhaps a base commander in the ME, and after Trump’s decision to withdraw from Syria, he said these Army bases in the Syrian desert have no strategic value.

    What does have strategic value, in my limited opinion, are air bases. I always thought that Bush’s (43) desire to re-invade Iraq was about establishing a sizeable air base, which would likely require an Army presence to protect it. We used to rely on our NATO ally Turkey and its Incirlik air base for its ability to stage attacks into the ME. Under Ataturk, Incirlik was reliable, but now under a more militant Erdogan, they let us use it as long as we don’t attack anything important. So Bagdad or nearby could have been the replacement until 0bama f’d it up. (BTW, if that was the primary reason for re-invading Iraq, it was insufficient.)

    The USS Cole was bombed when I used to hang out with some of the lower level Navy officers. One told me that that particular port in Yemen was a standard stop for Navy vessels, and a desirable one, but everyone tried to stay on their toes knowing that the U.S. was not well liked there, in general.

    We used Riyadh’s air bases during the first gulf war, but if I remember correctly, it was a big deal at the time. The Saudis let the U.S. stage a major air assault out of Riyadh, Wow! So I don’t know if we could call that a reliable option for the future.

    So air base support in Turkey, Iraq, Saudi Arabia are all iffy or dead. It’s pretty limited flying out of Italy and using a couple aircraft carriers.

  12. The M.E. is a “complicated”, “intractable” problem simply and solely because our society’s moral standards are not reality based but instead are based in an illusionary idealism.

    Whether Marxist-socialist, libertarian-isolationist, neocon-interventionist, catholic-just war, etc, all are based to one degree or another on disconnection from basic aspects of our external and internal reality.

    The world is as it is and human nature is fixed beyond our ability to change it.

    The result of that babel of opinions is a debilitating lack of societal consensus and our consequent inability to deal effectively with the M.E., Russia and China is, as predictable as a Kabuki play.

    So, America will stumble along until reality once again blows up in our face and then survival will demand that we deal with the manifested mortal threat of a new reality.

    At some point within the next 30 years, I fully expect another Pearl Harbor ‘surprise’. Systemic problems allowed to linger get bigger until a tipping point is reached.

  13. I used to believe that bringing these Muslim countries into the modern world was a project that might work I no longer believe that.

    J.J.: Yeah. I thought it was worth a shot in 2003. And it might have worked, as our long-term involvement in post-WW2 Germany and Japan did, if Obama hadn’t simply and arbitrarily withdrawn from Iraq.

    I still don’t discount the value of foreclosing the various futures with Hussein running wild, as well as firing a serious shot across the bow of jihadism.

    It’s difficult to make a case based on what the Iraq War prevented. But I do maintain the war had its benefits and those who categorically deny them are intellectually dishonest.

    However, given the inevitable Democrat response to sabotage American wars, I say, no more. I’ve been for an Afghan pullout since Obama hamstrung a realistic budget early in his administration.

    Furthermore, it’s increasingly clear little can be done for Muslim countries. By nature Islam is a totalitarian, supremacist ideology which will always be at war with the West. We are Dar al-Harb, the “House of War,” to Muslims. For them that won’t change until we are subjugated and they are a patient people.

    If that could change, I think it would have by now.

  15. Yeah. I thought it was worth a shot in 2003. And it might have worked, as our long-term involvement in post-WW2 Germany and Japan did, if Obama hadn’t simply and arbitrarily withdrawn from Iraq.” huxley

    I too thought it was viable in 2003. Time and experience have proven otherwise.

    “Furthermore, it’s increasingly clear little can be done for Muslim countries. By nature Islam is a totalitarian, supremacist ideology which will always be at war with the West. We are Dar al-Harb, the “House of War,” to Muslims. For them that won’t change until we are subjugated and they are a patient people.”

    Which is why, had Obama fully backed Bush’s policies in Iraq it still would have failed. Muslim societies, to establish long term stability have but two options; ruthless “strong men” or theocracies. And even strong men have to pretend to be respectful of Islam. Neither strong men nor theocracies look with favor upon democracy.

    “I do maintain the war had its benefits”

    Perhaps but thanks to a inimical Left and treasonous democRats, it failed in its most important goal, which was to send a message to the rogue nations that provided logistical support and, to the enabling nations who blocked effective sanctions from being imposed upon the rogue nations… that providing support to the terrorist networks would now carry unacceptable consequence.

  16. Daniel Greenfield: “The abstract ideas on which our nation-building is based are not strategies. They’re values. And too many administrations, Democrat and Republican, have built wishful thinking strategies around values. Ideas and values are expressions of belief. Strategies are flexible plans based on real opportunities.”

    Just so. Too many of our leaders (John McCain was one, Lindsay Graham is another) want to do good, when they should want to protect our vital interests. They keep looking at the nation building successes – Germany Japan, and South Korea – and thinking it can be done cheaply and repeatedly. You can do nation building, but it requires a commitment to unconditional defeat of the enemy followed by a long term occupation. Nothing we have done since Korea indicates we have the political will for such enterprises.

    I see many people decrying our pullout from Afghanistan as a catastrophe because women in some areas of the country have been going to school since our occupation. If the Taliban take over (which they undoubtedly will), that will end. Yes, that’s horrible but is it in our national interests to see to it that Afghani women can go to school? The real concern is that jihadi training camps will sprout up and become a threat to us as they were back in the 1990s. That’s a national interest. Maybe we can concoct a strategy to deal with that with air power.

    Anyway, we are dealing with a religious belief that is dangerous to the entire West. Better to recognize that it’s in our national interest to face that problem squarely and not with any hope of making the lives of benighted Muslims better.

  17. Global Homoists believe — as a creed — that all of mankind is virtually the same genetically — so what’s the big deal?

    It’s upon this epic fad that the Diversity Cult lives.

    For you must keep two totally opposing nostrums in your brain:

    We’re all the same — but we must celebrate our differences.

    Here and there, in California, Mexicans have settled for so long and in such numbers that they’ve re-created Mexican local politics.

    When you see the corruption and disfunction is coupled to DNA and culture — you are both disheartened and brought to earth.

    The true reason Mexico is Mexico remains Mexicans.

    This is something that every Peace Corps volunteer runs into.

    My Nephew found that he couldn’t stop the locals from using their living room as a sty, nor from using the nearest puddle as a drinking ‘fountain.’

    The Eagle Scout with a college education and IQ >120 found himself out voted — ‘out cultured’ by those with nothing going on and IQs<75.

  18. Tommy Jay:
    A minor historical point is that Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder and driver of a secular Turkish state, died in 1938, well before NATO and the associated Incirlik airbase.

    blert: very sound points.

    Merry Christmas to all!

  19. The real concern is that jihadi training camps will sprout up and become a threat to us as they were back in the 1990s. That’s a national interest.

    Once Afghanistan is free of foreign control the Afghanis will go back to what they always do — fight each other. The biggest threat to a militant isn’t the distant foreign powers, it’s the local powers that don’t agree. To set up a Caliphate you need to conquer the local area, and terrorism simply doesn’t achieve that, no matter how outrageous.

    Once the Taliban controls an area it gets itself into all sorts of issues that cripple its religious drive. They have to rule the area, which means set up functioning economic and political systems. That is something they cannot do effectively, since they are driven by extremism, so they end up losing support in the conquered areas and rapidly become broke.

    Then it breaks apart in internal feuds as the more sensible try to institute policies that work and the extremists try to stay true. You get left with a political state that spouts extremism, but actually is a corrupt authoritarian mess under more or less military government. Almost all revolutions go this way, regardless of the original driving ideology (Franco’s Spain, Burma, etc) and take decades to pull themselves out (or not, in the case of Cuba, Saudi Arabia etc).

    The Jihadi camps were no problem to the US when it was the USSR intervening in the area (indeed the US funded them). They’ll be no problem to the US once it withdraws totally.

  20. Chester:

    And yet OBL (he who was fed to the fishes) chose to operate under the Taliban and gave us 9/11/01. Nice fairy tale you have there, I guess it makes sense in your world.

  22. om

    I must chuckle at the knuckleheads that keep reporting that America is energy independent// oil neutral…

    And that we don’t need to worry about OPEC output and its flows.

    Heh. Cracks me up every last time.

    1) We’re NOT energy neutral. We still import a LOT of crude oil. We’re still shooting through 20,000,000 bbls per day while pumping about 12,500,000 bbls per day.

    2) Fortunately, many of those imports come from Canada, Mexico and Venezuela. So, yeah, our imports from AOPEC ( that’s Arab OPEC to you civilians ) are quite modest.

    3) Our ramping exports of light, sweet fracked crude ( the only kind fracking can produce — any thing heavy won’t flow in such tight strata ) are sweet. But they’re largely taking market share away from Nigeria and Libya. Both have raging civil wars// unrest that’s causing production and exports to ebb and flow something chaotic.

    4) It’s also true that, because of EPA rules on middle distillate (that’s #2 Diesel fuel to you civilians ) America is now exporting an astonishing amount of ‘dirty’ Diesel. ( Those refiners behind the curve are forced to dump their stuff overseas. )

    5) The demand for Ultra Low Sulfur middle distillate is still on the up-trend as now even the maritime consumer is being forced to use it. Failure to do so would mean failure to anchor in port!

    6) The BIG CHANGE is that AOPEC is assured of running a perpetual cash flow deficit from this point forward. That’s what happens with an exponentially increasing population and flat crude oil exports — and with a broken cartel.

    In sum: America has to keep an eye on AOPEC — and keep it in its kennel.

    This is best done via trade policy — not military policy.

    MBS is obviously aware of the above — and is trying to turn KSA culture around before it totally cracks up.

    Seeing the WaPo howl about a MB activist — it’s pathetic.

    Agent K was about as dangerous as young Adolf or Osama.

    MBS had to de-platform him the hard way.

  23. As usual, Sullivan is wrong. Many people have conquered Afghanistan: Alexander, followed by the Greco-Bactrians, the Scythians, Parthians, Kushans, Persians, and Mongols. Of course, all those conquerors’ counterinsurgency strategy was very different from ours. Not “Hearts and Minds,” but “Join or Die.” Alexander only had to wipe out a couple of uprisings before the Afghans got the message.

    If we’re not going to use that strategy, or take over the whole damn country and occupy it for 50 years, then I agree the mission there can be ended. As long as we retain the capability and the willingness to send in CIA Special Activities Division and Special Forces with their laser pointers, and use our B-52s as educational devices (the same way Alexander used his troops against Spitamenes), a pullout would not be fatal.

    The Middle East, however, is a different story, because of one word — oil. Thank the Donald, we no longer have to depend on their oil. But between Russia, the Gulf Arabs, and Iran, they are still supplying half the world with oil and natural gas. We simply can’t allow the jihadis or the nascent Caliph and/or nascent Czar to control that resource. (One of the reasons to continue aiding the Syrian Kurds is that the Iraqi Kurds control much of Iraq’s oil-producing region.)

    Just as Cicero and J.J. saw, when I didn’t see “American Military Government” signs going up all over Iraq after our victory, I knew that the pooch had already been screwed.

    As I wrote in an earlier post, we are not engaged in our nation’s longest war, and the Special Forces troops we have in a hundred places around the world are not the 18- and 19-year-olds who stormed Normandy and Guadalcanal; they are mature, long-service professional soldiers, serving on the frontier, like the Roman Legionaries in Britain or on the Rhine, the Cavalry and 9th and 10th Infantry on our Western Frontier, or the Légion étrangère running around Francophone Africa for the last couple of centuries. We should have the same attitude toward those Green Beanies as the French have toward the Foreign Legion — Don’t ask, don’t tell. And don’t pull them out.

  24. Richard Saunders: That sounds sensible. It threads the needle between being the world’s policeman and an isolationist.

  25. Several here lump all Mideast Muslims into the same pot, but that is wrong.
    Obviously there are Sunni and Shia, who have been chronic enemies over the past 1200 years or so, and over what? The chain of succession to the Caliphate after the death of the prophet Mohamed (PBUH!).

    Look again at Iraq: Sunni (Baghdad, oil-less), Shia, adjacent to Iran and rich in oil; and Kurdistan in the north, also rich in oil. The Kurds are still Muslims! These three groups are variously at each other’s throats, and there exists a variety of other Islamic sects. GHW Bush’s grave error was to not take Baghdad and then divide Iraq into three countries along those lines, with the balance of power resting with the conquering US.

    See Syria: Assad’s Alewite sect is remarkably small; the various Syrian “rebel” groups, all Muslim, are trying to conquer one another while also fighting Assad. There is no unity of effort there.

    Islam is delusional, insanely violent and murderous. Which is why we really must not let more Muzzies enter the USA. We have been growing our own jihadis in nice PC places like Minneapolis, thanks be to our State Dept under Clinton, which “rescued” Somalis from Kenyan refugee camps, akin to importing smallpox virus out of sympathy for that poor virus, because it needs more humans to feed on.

  26. the Special Forces troops we have in a hundred places around the world are not the 18- and 19-year-olds who stormed Normandy and Guadalcanal; they are mature, long-service professional soldiers, serving on the frontier, like the Roman Legionaries

    Yes but the guys in Afghanistan are those 18 and 19 year old troops. The SF guys were there soon after 911 but they were taken over by the Big Army which told them to “shave and get into uniform.” There went the effective SF war. Read Dakota Meyer’s book on how long it took to get artillery to respond when the guys were ambushed. It was hours while permission was punted up layers of bureaucracy,

    “Imperial Grunts” is about the real SF troops but they are not in Afghanistan.

  27. Cicero on December 25, 2018 at 11:20 pm at 11:20 pm said:
    “GHW Bush’s grave error was to not take Baghdad and then divide Iraq into three countries along those lines, with the balance of power resting with the conquering US.”
    * * *
    People make fun of Joe Biden, and with good reason, but IIRC, he suggested this very division back in the beginning, and in hindsight perhaps that was one thing he was right about.
    We cannot build up a nation that is not, inherently, a single nation; Iraq was never more than an imperial coalition imposed by other countries.

    WIkipedia: “The country today known as Iraq was a region of the Ottoman Empire until the partition of the Ottoman Empire in the 20th century. It was made up of three provinces, called vilayets in the Ottoman language: Mosul Vilayet, Baghdad Vilayet, and Basra Vilayet. In April 1920 the British Mandate of Mesopotamia was created under the authority of the League of Nations. A British-backed monarchy joining these vilayets into one Kingdom was established in 1921 under Faisal I of Iraq. The Hashemite Kingdom of Iraq gained independence from the UK in 1932. In 1958, the monarchy was overthrown and the Iraqi Republic created.”

  28. I will be happy to take this as a good portent, however.

    https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/25/world/iraq-christmas-holiday/index.html

    “The Iraqi Cabinet approved a law to mark Christmas Day, December 25, as an official holiday across the country “on the occasion of the birth of Jesus Christ,” according to a statement released by the Iraqi government.

    The Cabinet voted on an amendment to the national holidays law in the country that Christmas Day is a holiday for all Iraqis, and not only for the Christian community, as it had been for decades.
    “Happy Christmas to our Christian citizens, all Iraqis and to all who are celebrating around the world,” the Iraqi government said on Twitter.
    Before the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, there were about 1.4 million Christians in the country. However, their numbers have dwindled to roughly 300,000 after hundreds of thousands fled the country following violence and attacks by various armed groups over the years.”

  29. Geoff, those three links are great. Especially the second one from Daniel Greenfield who is incisive as always no matter the subject.

  30. Back when I used to have at it on the mailing list of a liberal Episcopalian church, one priest, who was also a big Landmark (est’s successor) fan, kept going on about empowering stories of dialog. He mentioned an inspiring interview with a Christian bishop in Turkey speaking of how well Christians and Muslims were getting along there.

    Good grief. What we now call Turkey was the heart of the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Byzantine Empire. Constantinople was its capital. Since Muslims conquered Constantinople, it is now Istanbul.

    A region, which had been overwhelmingly Christian, has seen its Christian population shrink to 0.13% today. The famous cathedral, Hagia Sophia, was converted to a mosque.

    I guess that’s what getting along with Muslims is all about.

  31. AesopFan: I’d be curious to know the backstory to the Iraq/Christmas announcement.

    I’m cynical enough to suspect there was Trump pressure behind the scenes, rather than good-hearted ecumenicism on the part of the Iraqi government.

  33. Having deployed to a number of those countries I am very skeptical of policies that just say ‘get out’ with no real policy to take their place. We will still have to deal with Islam and we have no policy to do that.

  34. The famous cathedral, Hagia Sophia, was converted to a mosque.
    I guess that’s what getting along with Muslims is all about.

    It was being converted too a museum ten years ago when I was there. When workmen took down the huge panels covered with calligraphy Quran phrases, they found that workmen in the 15th century had carefully protected the Byzantine mosaics under the panels. They probably expected a reconquest.

    I don’t know what has happened since I was there but it was not a mosque then.

    I am very skeptical of policies that just say ‘get out’ with no real policy to take their place.

    We need to talk about the policy that keeps them there. I wonder about the level of analysis that keeps them there 20 years,.

  35. Reality can be a VERY ugly thing.

    Immediately upon the occupation of Nazi Germany the US Army compelled all to view the horrors of the SS — Easter Sunday, April 1, 1945 — filmed where they occurred — in the camp just down the road.

    There was stomach content all over the floor. Being a buck private, my Father had the esteemed duty of re-directing all smilling Krauts back in for a second — even third — viewing. The toughest nuts: teen aged girls. (!!!)

    As you might imagine, the Germans soiled their Easter finest. All over town, clothes were being burned that afternoon. Thus, Nazi ardor went up in smoke.

    Talk about connecting with reality.

    &&&&

    So long as our MSM pimps themselves out to the jihadi states (KSA&Qatar) the American nation will remain in a stupor.

    Our top academics have pimped themselves out, particularly so.

    (Yale, Harvard, on down the list — all lean against lamposts.)

    We still permit the king of Saudi Arabia to pervert our First Amendment.

    For Islam IS a state sponsored religion.

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