Are you serious? The French share 95% of your values. Just because your and their media has chosen to focus on those 5% where they have differences with you it doesn't expand them from 5% to 100%.
What evidence is that that the occupation disrupted Al-Qaeda? It certainly gave the Northern Alliance victory in the Afghan Civil War, but that's what the Northern Alliance did and they've proven themselves more incompetent than the guys executing people with boom-boxes in sports stadiums.
Since all Al Qaeda needs to be "alive and well" is two guys in a room calling themselves "Al Qaeda," that is a pretty low bar to set. As for the Taliban joining with Karzai, for some definitions of "Taliban" that's not such a bad thing. If Afghanistan is going to hold together some people who call themselves "Taliban" are going to have to be integrated into the society. This has worked in Iraq and much more famously in Ireland and Northern Ireland.
In 1955 we'd won the Berlin Airlift, we'd gotten out of the Korean War without nuking the planet, and we shit-canned the British Empire out of existence. So far TWAT hasn't gotten us anything approaching those clear-cut results. We've got endless wars that kill us by 1,000 cuts.
Other than the USS Cole, the African Embassies, Kobar Towers, WTC 1.0, and the Beruit Marine Barracks? I am sure there were some other little ones sprinkled around that I am forgetting.
I think your further analysis is avoiding a lot of hard problems still to be faced in the Cold War and downplaying successes we've had so far with TWAT. Endless war seems to be ending in Iraq, and we are far from the death by 1000 cuts that the analogy is absurd.
None of those are major attacks. The US government's response to the Beirut Bombing was to skeedaddle, as opposed to staying in someone else's civil war propping up someone else's occupation. The USA started the Cold War as the only power with nukes, it had a complete and utter degree of hubris and invincibility and then Mao smashed that to ruins along the Yalu. The GWOT is not the same thing as the Cold War, and the Cold War itself was rather more complicated than people consider it to be (see: Soviet-Titoist feuding and the Sino-Soviet split, as well as pretty much any time the West tried to work together on anything).
Are you kidding me? Perhaps if we use 9/11 as the benchmark, yes those were not "major" attacks. But that is a incredibly silly yardstick by which to measure seriousness.
The GWOT is not the same thing as the Cold War
Of course not. As I have mentioned to you before, no historical analogy is perfect. The GWOT will be a long, low level, intermittently overt, mostly covert war that will be decided by economics and social change much more than military might. Kind of like the Cold War.
FWIW, I consider 9/11 equivalent to shoving a tack in someone's ass so they say ouch. It was not really major in anything except civilians and property damage. We lose six times that number to car accidents every year.
Cold War was mostly covert and low-intensity, eh? It seems to me all the proxy wars are a bit past covert.
You might want to open a history book or something. The United States has been in endless wars since it was founded.
Anyway, the Berlin Airlift didn't win the Cold War or liberate Eastern Europe from communist oppression. The United States is still involved with the Korean War, and North Koreans remain unliberated from communist oppression. The British Empire still exists, albeit in a more modest form than before, and in spite of Margaret Thatcher's valiant efforts, Britain is still not free of the socialist threat. Or were you joking when you cited these examples?
The USA did not liberate Eastern Europe in the first place, the Soviet Empire's collapse which was entirely unforeseen by the 1980s Far Rightists did. The 1980s Tea Partiers thought the USSR would go on forever, then in 1991 they were shown to be damn fools who had no idea of what they spoke.
"Things fall apart," wrote William Butler Yeats. "The centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned; the best lack all conviction, while the worst are filled with passionate intensity
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~M~
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In 1955 we'd won the Berlin Airlift, we'd gotten out of the Korean War without nuking the planet, and we shit-canned the British Empire out of existence. So far TWAT hasn't gotten us anything approaching those clear-cut results. We've got endless wars that kill us by 1,000 cuts.
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I think your further analysis is avoiding a lot of hard problems still to be faced in the Cold War and downplaying successes we've had so far with TWAT. Endless war seems to be ending in Iraq, and we are far from the death by 1000 cuts that the analogy is absurd.
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Are you kidding me? Perhaps if we use 9/11 as the benchmark, yes those were not "major" attacks. But that is a incredibly silly yardstick by which to measure seriousness.
The GWOT is not the same thing as the Cold War
Of course not. As I have mentioned to you before, no historical analogy is perfect. The GWOT will be a long, low level, intermittently overt, mostly covert war that will be decided by economics and social change much more than military might. Kind of like the Cold War.
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Cold War was mostly covert and low-intensity, eh? It seems to me all the proxy wars are a bit past covert.
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Anyway, the Berlin Airlift didn't win the Cold War or liberate Eastern Europe from communist oppression. The United States is still involved with the Korean War, and North Koreans remain unliberated from communist oppression. The British Empire still exists, albeit in a more modest form than before, and in spite of Margaret Thatcher's valiant efforts, Britain is still not free of the socialist threat. Or were you joking when you cited these examples?
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