2016 Elections

[Hatshepsut]

The fact that we can't even identify who we're killing the majority of the time (unidentified deaths are something like 28:1 for every intended target)...

I'd like to know where you got this factoid.

Neither the Air Force nor CIA release much information about the drone strike program. I'm sure the friendly public relations staffs of Islamic groups in the region gladly offer their own estimates and wouldn't be surprised if the New America Foundation willingly consumes this information at face value (see Coll in New Yorker 11/24/14). I'm not even going to bother trying to research the contradictory claims flying around on the topic because it's not worth the time.

During World War II air bombardment campaigns that flattened cities and killed hundreds of thousands of civilians were run day after day over enemy territories. Indiscriminate bombing continued to a lesser extent in Korea and Vietnam. If you've missed out on developments in the last 70 years, I might say there has been a major change in tactics since then, enabled in part by the advent of precision-guided munitions.

Like it or not, we live in a world where we have enemies. And where failure to answer their actions is taken as a sign of weakness. You may prefer to live in a world where Islamic State rules all of Iraq, Syria, and Libya as a caliphate, launching terror missions at will from a secure base, but I don't. Odds are we're going to have to send troops into this region again before it's over. It's not just Obama's fault as is so easily shouted. This stuff's been going on a long time and, yes, we've made a lot of mistakes and selfish blunders, but we're committed. Also in case you may not be aware, it's not a judicial matter. The courts do not have oversight regarding a president's conduct of a war.

[Polaris]

If you want to see how hypocritical Hillary Clinton supporters are, go to Huff Post and read a thread by a liberal on a Clinton article....100% chance some douchebag Blue Dog will come along and attack their liberal ideals because Clinton doesn't support them.

[Silver]

You cannot provide the link?

[Brian37]

Lets not stupidly throw the word "hypocrite" around. I hate the GOP not because they are a rival party, political pluralism certainly is better than one party fascism. But saying someone is a hypocrite merely because there are competing ideas within the same party, either party is bullshit, they both do it. That is why we have primaries.

GOP is the party of the right wing and the 1%. They have hijacked the government for the past 30 years. Democrats have the right ideas, but have sucked at having a backbone and we have far too much voter apathy.

Outside that, even within the same parties we cant be blind loyalists. No different than when PC atheists demand political correctness. It is not a good idea to set up scripts as to how to be a "true this" or "true that".

[Hatshepsut]

Lets not stupidly throw the word "hypocrite" around...

Indeed. Even a monster like Hitler can be quite true to his beliefs.

@Nestor Which is why I shouldn't use second-person address ("you") toward other posters as in my last post. The opponents of the War on Terror/Bush Iraq invasion policies are sincere and they happen to be right about a lot of their stuff. I view the drone strikes as legitimate because we are at war with al-Qaeda and Islamic State. They kill many fewer innocent parties than alternatives like the Tomahawk cruise missiles Bill Clinton fired into the Sudan. Although it would be better if we sought permission from governments or validated our plans with the UN as Bush the senior did in 1991.

But hardly everything we've done in this war is justified. We have resorted to torture, a practice universally seen as reprehensible, in contravention of the Geneva accords. We have a program of indefinite detention at Gitmo, claiming in doublespeak that the "enemy combatants" are POWs (to deny them trial), then that they are criminals (to deny POW status). Obama promised to close Gitmo. Sure, we had a right to capture and question them and hold them for some time, but there's no way to construe this as forever, given that full combat in Afghanistan and Iraq had ended by May 2003. They should have been released or put up on charges a long time ago. These things have grievously stained our international reputation, and unnecessarily at that.

[downbeatplumb]

....your vote speaks louder than your voice. Not voting is a vote for the candidate you don't like.


There was also Bill's, "Wags the Dog", in Kosovo. He involved us in a conflict to draw attention away from the Monica Blow-inski scandal.

So you are in favour of standing by and letting acts of atrocity occur that can be prevented by UN backed intervention.

It seems strange how right wing americans view any act by democrats. If they go to war it is covering something up or war mongering. If they don't they are weak indecisive.
The literally can't win.

[Mudhammam]

@Hatshepsut - Those are the statistics from the human rights group Reprieve

Research published by Reprieve in 2014 suggested that U.S. drone strikes in Yemen and Pakistan have had an unknown person to target casualty ratio of 28:1 with one attack in the study having a ratio of 128:1 with 13 children being killed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_ca...te_note-30
"41 men targeted but 1,147 people killed: US drone strikes – the facts on the ground"
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/...-kill-1147
You can't just pretend like U.S. military intervention isn't the primary cause for the existence of groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda. The former are, after all, former members of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, which consisted of Ba'ath party loyalists in Saddam's regime... A regime we also propped up in the 80s before completely destabilizing the region with Dubya's invasion. If American leaders were at all serious with preventing terrorism instead of the political expediency that comes by engaging in business deals with shady figures and always having some 'uncovered plot' or 'dead bad buy' to boast about they would immediately stop hailing dictators like the royal Saudi family or "the President and Mrs. Mubarak" as personal "friends" (Hillary's words in 2009). What do we expect to occur when we go into Muslim nations and establish rulers who treat their people with absolutely no dignity? Do you actually wonder why Muslims around the world view the U.S. as "the Great Satan"? If you think we can solve political crises around the world by dropping bombs and killing people (usually innocent people) the result you can only expect is perpetual war... and that never works out in the long run for the country on the constant offensive.

[Pizza]

The U.S has been at war for how many years now? Is it working yet?

[Brian37]

The U.S has been at war for how many years now? Is it working yet?

Our foreign policy has pretty much sucked since the ink was dry on the Constitution. I think Jon Stewart had a clip on his show if I remember correctly that showed there wasn't much more than a combined 20 years in total not concurrent but total where we were not in some war.

One could only argue we need to stop allowing those polices to keep being handed like a baton to the next guy. You can also argue even  with that that some presidents despite that did a much better job of minimizing conflict. JFK  and Cuba, Reagan and Russia. And Obama while he hasn't gotten everything right, is certainly trying to avoid what Bush did.

[Anomalocaris]

The U.S has been at war for how many years now? Is it working yet?

Our foreign policy has pretty much sucked since the ink was dry on the Constitution. I think Jon Stewart had a clip on his show if I remember correctly that showed there wasn't much more than a combined 20 years in total not concurrent but total where we were not in some war.

One could only argue we need to stop allowing those polices to keep being handed like a baton to the next guy. You can also argue even  with that that some presidents despite that did a much better job of minimizing conflict. JFK  and Cuba, Reagan and Russia. And Obama while he hasn't gotten everything right, is certainly trying to avoid what Bush did.

Do you count Cold War as being continuously at war?  If not, then there were about 15 years within the Cold War when we weren't in any shooting war. 

---

....your vote speaks louder than your voice. Not voting is a vote for the candidate you don't like.


There was also Bill's, "Wags the Dog", in Kosovo. He involved us in a conflict to draw attention away from the Monica Blow-inski scandal.

So you are in favour of standing by and letting acts of atrocity occur that can be prevented by UN backed intervention.

It seems strange how right wing americans view any act by democrats. If they go to war it is covering something up or war mongering. If they don't they are weak indecisive.
The literally can't win.

He is in favor of claiming everything the right wing does while in power or out to be righteous, and everything anyone else does while in power is wrongeous.