No? We just gonna sit around and let Nazi Germany 2.0 happen? Maybe waggle your finger a bit at them? Cool. Yeah. Okay. I love our leaders, they’re so commited to the freedom and wellbeing of their people.
God I wish the Red Army was here to save our asses like last time.
I find it really hard to argue that the US lost in Libya or Iraq.
Yeah it just depends on the goal stated, because war is politics. If the political goal in Iraq was overthrowing the government and getting oil, the US won. If it was ending resistance in the middle east, the US failed. If it was to create a chaotic region which can be used for profit and war for the coming centuries, the US won. Libya is almost exactly the same.
The US has several times achieved its material goal while failing its stated goal. They might do that in Iran, too, though I think it’ll be harder than Iraq was because Iran learned from the past decades and I’m unconvinced that the US did
Aren’t stated goals kind of irrelevant? The stated goal of invading Iraq was to rid them of imaginary WMDs. The US invaded to loot, destroy and destabilize. All those goals were achieved.
For sure but that’s my point. To throw it in conservatives faces to make yourself feel better, use the stated goals. But, to really understand the problem of the US in the world, the stated goals isn’t relevant and leads one astray in the analysis.
It’s honestly so disheartening watching people here throw out the Millennium challenge as some kind of end-all gotcha to own the libs.
The Millennium challenge result was only achieved by Red side forces assuming motorcycles could travel cross country at the speed of light unbothered by enemy actions (they can’t), tiny speedboats could carry 4 giant ridiculously heavy anti ship missiles (they can’t), the entire Blue fleet would place themselves on the shoreline (they wouldn’t), and that it is possible to use a world ending amount of chemical and biological weapons to render your entire country’s landmass uninhabitable and therefore impervious to ground invasion.
Like, yes we get it. The US “sucks” at war. However people here are acting like the US military industrial complex is some kind of paper mache figure to blow over when in reality, it produces weapons of unimaginable destructive capability en masse. The same weapons that are killing Palestinians today, right now.
This is the opposite of material analysis and is, frankly, reactionary - a mindset I’ve seen a disturbing number of times here lately.
Nearly every one than
I wouldn’t call it “winning” when your invasion leads to nothing but state collapse, formation of ISIS and US troops getting merced by IEDs. Regional instability may be an outcome the US can live with, but it wasn’t the military goal of the invasion, they wanted to turn Iraq into a regional ally like postwar Germany and they didn’t come anywhere close to that.
What’s the evidence for that being the goal of the invasion? The US invaded Iraq to loot the country and destabilize the region. What’s my evidence for this? It happened. It’s what they did.
I don’t see how any of these things are bad for the American ruling class.
IMO, they achieved their political goals in Libya (overthrowing Gaddafi, destroying Libya which further destabilized Africa by allowing ISIS a foothold into Africa) while Iraq is a very mixed bag. They overthrew Hussein, but now there’s greater Iranian presence within Iraq. Hussein might have had designs against the petrodollar, but he was also a check against Iranian influence within the region. Post-Hussein, Iraqi militias were launching drones against the Zionist entity while shouting “Labbayk ya Hussain” before the so-called ceasefire in Gaza. This would never happen under Hussein. I’m not sure to what extent a Hussein-led Iraq would agree to be part of the Axis of Resistance since Iran is such a key player. Overall, I would say that Iran probably benefited most from Syria with Assad and Iraq without Hussein.