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You had best be serving or served over seas.

I'm guessing we only have one, maybe two vets posting here.

National fucking hero.

If destruction exists, we must destroy everything.
Shuruppak Yuratuhl
Slaad Shrpk Breizh

depending on whether or not you count slaughtering countless civilians heroic.

It is if you don't like doing it.

Sherman was morally superior to other men of his time in that he didn't sugarcoat war or see it as a glorious endeavour. He didn't seek to embellish his image by parading around with white gloves (metaphorically speaking). He was willing to end the war and save the Union at the cost of getting his hands dirty.

Aestu of Bleeding Hollow...

Nihilism is a copout.

Yes, Kosovo was a genocide, but one needs to take it in context. These losers have been fighting each other since the beginning of time. One day the Serbs pick on the Albanains, the next, the Hungarians oppress the Croats, on and on it goes. The only person who was ever able to bring some sort of order and stability to that region was Tito and everyone hated him for it and bitched about how he obliterated their beloved national identity as a people whose region literally means "made into fail" in English.

These people, just like the Libyans, just need to be left alone and given time to develop and mature, just like all the other nations that have gone through the difficult process of becoming a stable, modern nation. What is needed cannot easily be imposed by outsiders and certainly not quickly or cheaply.

The reason a nuke hasn't been blown up on American soil is simply that it's not that easy. On paper, making a bomb is cake. In practice, not so much. It requires big, expensive equipment and a vast infrastructure to prepare both the fuel and the mechanism - yellowcake, the chemical means to refine it, clean rooms, centrifuges, so on. Countries like South Africa, Brazil and Iraq made serious efforts at making bombs and even with all their resources they were still unable to succeed.

There are these thrillers about disgruntled Soviets selling nukes to Arabs but the truth is that they have no means of communication and nothing to offer each other. Any such deal would take place over enormous distances and pass through so many potentially compromising hoops that it just can't be. And, thus far, it hasn't.

Nuclear terrorism is simply not a big deal. If you want to kill a lot of people there's far better ways to go about it than blowing up a nuke off the coast of LA. Besides, the point of terrorism is TERROR, not a body count. It would be far easier, for example, to poison the gasoline supply with magnesium, or dump a jar of mercury into the local water treatment plant, or hell just go buy a Kalashnikov at a gun show and mow down a crowd at Times Square, or even just run people over with an SUV.

There's a lot of easy ways to kill people. By and large it just doesn't come to pass because the terrorists are few in number, isolated from society, and far from America. They are also marginalized by their own status as fanatics. Think of this: these guys have been in the terrorism business for a decade, two, three, and how many tricks do they turn? How many acts of terror have they committed? Why isn't every day 9-11? The answer is...because in the final analysis these guys are pretty marginal. Scary, yes, crazy, yes, dangerous, yes, but marginal.

When we start having hundreds of stateside terrorism deaths on a daily basis, then we'll start talking about nuclear terrorism. People like to talk about wild and crazy stuff like that because it's easier and more grandiose than the gritty business that is real-world terrorism.

Conventional military means are not relevant to the war on terror. The war on terror is more like the war on drugs than it is Vietnam or the World Wars - it is a complex and long-term campaign that must be addressed by police actions and social change to remove the causes of terrorism and knock out individual terrorists. In that sense, our global military presence is useless at best and a liability at worst.

I don't agree with your contention that American military bases are "welcome" or get us good PR. The only good PR that comes from American bases is the money they bring to a region and if that is the goal then there are far easier and more efficient ways to realize that benefit. The countries that agree to host American bases are invariably the most marginal, the ones that will do anything for American largesse, and never the countries that are in a position to say no. Okinawa. Poland. Ukraine. The Okinawans have been wanting us gone for decades and the only reason the base is still there is how much the Japanese hate the Okinawans.

Aestu of Bleeding Hollow...

Nihilism is a copout.

The Savannah campaign was brutal but it was not a war crime or an attempt at genocide. The damage done by the army was to logistics and infrastructure. Railroad lines, cattle, crops, telegraph lines, and bridges were destroyed or taken and the people suffered, but as I said that's not unusual in a civil war. Sherman didn't shell towns full of southern civilians, there was no attempt to cause unjustifiable death to innocents (though I am sure some innocents died, again such is simply the way of war). He most certainly did not "slaughter countless civilians".

Dvergar /
Quisling

But the fact remains we DIDN'T and we DON'T intervene in every one. Our leaders seem to arbitrarily decide upon which conflicts we should involve ourselves in. Ask yourself why this might be.



This comment seems pretty naïve to me. You're just drinking the political Kool-Aid. Our leaders would have you believe that we are entering certain conflicts to "make the world a better place." If that were totally true, however, wouldn't we stop every genocide? No, in reality, we enter conflicts that we as a country (or our leaders) can profit from, either financially, through influence, or simply by strengthening alliances (Quid pro quo).

Remember Iraq? We went in there to oust an evil dictator and destroy his "weapons of mass destruction" (make the world a better place). Well, Iraq is still a hell-hole with thousands of civilian casualties yearly and a dysfunctional government, oh...and those WMDs never were found. We did secure some oil fields however - I guess that makes the world a better place?


No, I'm not okay with involving ourselves with other country's conflicts selectively. I don't like that Americans are dying for, and taxpayer dollars are being spent on these types of interventions at the behest of leaders with ulterior motives.

If you feel so strongly about "making the world a better place" through military intervention - enlist now. Otherwise, you are a hypocrite.

If this were Utopia, I'd say hell yes, let's stop all genocides, let's spread liberty and freedom throughout the world. This isn't Utopia, and as such, we must be logical and practical. Continuing to plunge ourselves into further national debt, costing American lives, and building missiles and tanks while our country's educational, social, and economic infrastructures continue to suffer is ludicrous.

If this were Utopia, there'd be no genocides for us to stop.

If destruction exists, we must destroy everything.
Shuruppak Yuratuhl
Slaad Shrpk Breizh

Wishing for utopia is like wishing for a bigger dick.

just dont bother, its not happenin.

Not true, I got an e-mail today that it is medically possible. I just had to give them all my bank account information and they're sending me some pills!

Shit, gimme link

RETIRED.
[armory loc="US,Bleeding Hollow"]Mayonaise[/armory]
[armory loc="US,Bleeding Hollow"]Jerkonaise[/armory]

I haven't laughed so hard in a while, perhaps it's just because I've been up forever.

I said I believe we should have intervened, regardless of whether we did or didn't, we should. We didn't because Darfur and Rwanda aren't strategically or economically important to America, and I believe we need to be involved in these kinds of issues. I believe we are a better country and a better people then the kind that just sits around and watches innocent civilians get raped, disfigured, and slaughtered.



I stand by what I said. However, I'm not sure where someone who's answer is "stick your head in the sand and hope everything turns out ok" gets off calling someone else naive.



I never said we had to enter all conflicts and try to change every country. You do know there are shades beyond black and white, right? I didn't even say we needed to dispose dictators



Not at all part of what I said, you clearly just took the 'make the world a better place' and decided to assume a great number of things. You should avoid that. You should also go back and actually read what I've said in this thread.



Again completely missed the issue. Diplomacy should always be preferable to military action, I would much prefer to keep our troops at home or on a base than having to fight, but that just isn't the reality of the world. I don't need to have served in order to have a say in the way our military is used. You do know you voted to give a guy who never served the position of commander-in-chief?



We don't need to turn our backs on the world (and have it bite us in the ass) in order to solve our domestic problems.

Dvergar /
Quisling