Should I stay or should I go? POLITICAL op/ed

[Rev. Rye]

Are we sure North Korea’s really that much of a threat? Even when they threatened to nuke America a few years ago, it ended the same way it always does when North Korea’s saber-rattling threatens to hit something: China swoops in and plays “good cop” to whatever nation They threatened and settled it for the time being. China is all they have in terms of allies, they’re too poor to be self-sufficient in any way, and even they’ve decided that If they attack another nation and it wasn’t defensive, North Korea is on its own and its days are numbered. And for all their bluster and insanity, it looks like they know this.

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Afganistan was a case of winning the war (crippling Al Qaeda and the Taliban) but failing to establish a Liberal democracy there and Afghanistan's people will suffer for that failure. I hope we get a good number of them out of there epically the Women as their futures look particularly bleak.

Frankly, the root of that issue is simple: once an army’s enemy becomes a bunch of guerrilla forces with more legitimacy than the army, and literally anyone can become part of said groups, the army doesn’t have a fucking prayer. This has played out throughout history, and, if the entire history of America’s military interventions since 1945 wasn’t enough of an illustration, here’s a film called The Battle of Algiers. If you have any interest in our forever wars or Islamist terrorism beyond just waving a flag around, you need to watch this yesterday:





It’s in HD quality, it has English subtitles, and unless you’re in Belgium, France, New Caledonia, Switzerland, Korea, Germany, Luxembourg, or the French South Antarctic Lands, you have no excuse. The FLN are the ideological grandparents of all the Islamic groups they fight. The French gave the fight against the FLN their all, and they lost not because they’re cheese eating surrender monkeys (they were about the furthest thing from it), but because the decentralized nature of the FLN made it that fucking powerful. You can take out a major FLN cell, but all you’re going to do is make the people you’re supposed to protect hate you even more, and give the rebels more legitimacy. Once the population thinks the guerrilla groups are the lesser evil, defeat is almost guaranteed. There’s really only two ways out of this trap: A) you cut your losses, or B) you commit genocide. But, frankly, even with the ghastly moral prospect of a huge Afghan genocide aside, America’s pissed off so much of the Middle East that I fear the only way we can really get the job done is to commit a massive genocide against the entire region. I know that for a lot of conservatives, their pocket rocket is going off and getting all gooey at the thought, but such an option is objectively horrible, and even the Trump administration knew this would be a horrible thing.

So our options are basically to just keep doing what we’re doing and keep getting what we’re getting or getting the fuck out. And the latter’s the only option that makes sense.