Braddock wrote:
Flaming_Maniac wrote:
There was no other choice, barring invading a different ME country after Afghanistan.
Was the invasion botched, both in presenting it to the people and in politics getting in the way of military action, definitely, even to the point of setting us backward in the goals that led to the invasion. However, the fact at the time was not opening up another front in the Middle East was not an option.
I don't follow you. How was there 'no other option' exactly? What has this second front in the Middle East achieved in the name of US security or financial interests?
In my opinion, the entire invasion of the ME was to show the Islamic extremists the strength of the U.S. to prevent further attacks. After we successfully armed, and then proceeded to piss off a lot of people in Afghanistan in the tail end of the Cold War, the U.S. could not be seen as a sleeping giant to the rest of Islam. The people we trained knew they could strike the U.S. to make us look weak to their bretheren halfway across the world from the U.S., making us look like incompetent has-beens.
What are the two choices after that? Do the short-term sensible thing, nothing, because on paper the U.S. has far more to lose in a conventional military attack half-way across the world than to gain? The problem is once the blood is in the water, recruitment to these terror organizations would only increase when people see how weak the U.S. really is, people who want to see the only world super power left, who twenty years ago just screwed over their area of the world, crumble.
So the only option was to have a strong show of strength in the ME, and the only real influence on where was what would sound the most plausible to the American people. Al-Queda is a baseless organization (lol irony) that can operate from anywhere, with little contact from superiors, so there is no way to really strike one place and expect a significant result against the organization itself. The special forces teams sent very shortly after 9/11 had just about the best effect against them possible, conventional attacks are nearly useless.
As we have found out they are, for the most part, counterproductive, because of the inspiring effect they have on the enemy. The U.S. is vastly technologically superior in every way, has the advantage of armor, air support, better recon, etc., but the fact is when it's one on one, a U.S. soldier with his M16 and a freedom fighter with his trusty AK, the odds are pretty much even. By no stretch of the imagination could the resistance ever completely "beat" the U.S. in a military sense, but as the world sees the U.S. bleed, more join the war against us and we become more and more demoralized on the homefront.
Which is why the U.S. is put in a painful position. We can't just "win" in the usual sense, there has to be a decisive victory. Once any hope of that was gone in Afghanistan...move right on to the next one. Obviously the whole ordeal has become rather counterproductive, but that's how I see it, and honestly I don't know if reacting any differently would have made things better.
It's a shitty situation in the shitty world, all we can do is do the best we can, and whining about it after the fact doesn't help. If anyone has a really good idea of what we should have done from December 2001-present, or really good analysis of exactly where we went wrong, great, lets learn from history. Saying "The Iraq war is bad, pull out, GWB looks like a monkey" is not productive at all.