Forbidden Donut

Yay more number 2's. It's actually pretty cool that we're this good at it. I think it might have been a mistake to go into Syria for that one. It's starting to give us the appearance of complete disregard for the sovereignty of other nations if there's a guy we call a terrorist in there. I think it can get a bit dangerous. Syria was really upset about it. I also don't know that either of those guys (maybe Mullah Omar...) was worth civilian casualties.

This makes us look reckless:


(I like how instead of saying how much of a shame it is that those civilians were killed you posit that they Syrian government is lying about it.)

Let me be the first to say: I am 100% these incursions into sovereign nations without their consent. If China sent special armed forces into northern California to take out what they perceive to be a terrorist threat, we would have World War III on our hands.

Our founding fathers would be rolling over in their graves if they hadn't already died, again, from all of the stupid shit we do.

If only we'd covered their bodies in magnets and made their coffins from a coil of wire... If only.

Also, a quick and dirty Google for Abu Ghadiya turns up only this story and reactions. If this guy is really as critical as they are now making him out to be... why have I never heard of him... ever. (And why hasn't the internet either?)

do the search again and there are plenty of stories. just because i am ahead of the information curve doesnt mean im wrong ;x
http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/200..._in_syria_d.php





-> and now we killed the guy getting those 20 a month into iraq = there will be even fewer coming in

And we only had to invade a foreign sovereign nation to do it! We should change our motto to "The United States of America: Fuck the Little Guys."

I'd say they are both pretty negative news stories.

Gov! There is no binding international court that can get Syria to turn over terrorists to Iraq for justice. What did the US do when the Barbary pirates were messing with our shipping 1780s-1800s? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Barbary_War - yes it was sort of a declared war so that is a distinction.

That article is from yesterday man. If you can find any publication that mentions this guy's name prior to this week I'll be a little more impressed. edit: by this story. I didn't mean to imply that you were less than impressive.

As I interpret it now, we completely pissed off most of the countries we've been trying to make friends with for 6 years in a matter of 20 minutes. All it took was flying a couple choppers in and shooting some of their children. Go figure. Then because we realized that might've not been the best move, we talk up the guy we got as super important. First I read that he was responsible for hundreds of insurgents getting into the country (I'm sure that won't happen any more...). Then I read that he was about to carry out an attack on our forces in Iraq (while we were chasing him apparently).

If this is a war of numbers, this doesn't make sense because we pissed off Syria, Iraq, Iran, and even Israel is less than pleased. If it's a war of ideas, this makes even less sense because the people we had more or less on our side are now asking some serious and legitimate questions about our presence in their lives. If it's a war of principle and we did indeed take out 8 civilians (a woman, 4 children and presumably 3 men) to get one baddy, then we are just as bad as the terrorists. Accomplishing our goals by any means necessary, where the ends justify the means.

Yes! We declared war on those states, and we went to war. The distinction is monumental.

And aside from my mostly constitutional stance on the matter, you've expressed my personal feelings on the matter fairly clearly. We can do all sorts of awful things -- kill countless of hundreds of thousands if not millions of innocent people in our quest -- and we justify them all with our wildly good intentions. On a political level, I think the issue of civilian deaths is fairly unimportant, but it's personally a travesty that my government also happens to be one of the worst terrorist organizations in the world today.

To be fair, I don't necessarily think that would've been an appropriate course of action in this circumstance. Declaring a THIRD war to get one guy I hadn't heard of before today seems foolish. Not that you were advocating that of course, I'm just stating the obvious.

We should have a VERY short list of high value targets and we should outright tell nearby nations that if this guy crosses into your shit we will follow. This current set up makes it really easy to play up a guy's importance as after the fact justification. If we can avoid shooting civilians that'd probably make people more willing to let us look around in their country. As it is,the world has an absolutely abysmal opinion of our military. Probably because everywhere we have a base the instance of rape increases and every time we cross a border civilians start dying.

edit: clearly I think the civilian deaths are more than just a shame. The ability of our military to function effectively in their roles (primarily training and policing at the moment) they have to have the respect of the people they are teaching. By either killing or inviting accusations of the killing of civilians they undermine their ability to function effectively elsewhere and they reduce our overall clout on the world stage in matters completely unassociated with our military. IMO of course. Notanexpert.

Sources today are saying that 7 men were killed in the raid, 2 others wounded, one of which was a woman. I love how every attack initially only women and children are killed, especially since a construction site is the number one hangout for women and children. I mean really, the type of people that get sent in for this type of attack are the highest trained soldiers in the world; not really prone to shooting up random targets. I'd put money on the fact that every one of those people killed or injured in the attack was anything but an innocent bystander.

Personally, I think sovereignty is a privilege, not a right. If Syria can't do anything but funnel fighters from their country to Iraq, then they aren't respecting Iraq's sovereignty.

If Canada was letting fighters just waltz into the US across the border, we'd have every right to send people into Canada and do something.

Mark this down as a win for the good guys.



Now let the flaming begin.

Do you enjoy being a jingoistic, hyper-patriotic cheerleader, or do you just get paid well? Sovereignty is a privilege now? If a country is incapable of policing its borders that privilege should be revoked? Do I get that right? We have drug dealers, gang members, and illegal immigrants and weapons flowing pretty freely back and forth across our southern border. Maybe Canada should shoot some civilians while they take out one of those guys for us.

What sources are you reading? Searching for something about 7 men getting killed turned up one article that says the Syrian government said we killed kids, and the local government says it was 7 men. Hardly definitive, and you're certainly cherry picking. That article also said this:


to which you said:


USA!USA!USA!USA!USA!USA!USA!USA!USA!USA!USA!USA!USA!USA!USA!USA!

America, fuck yeah!

This kind of shit really pisses me off alot. I just re-read my post to phey and it sounds a little more condescending than intended. Well I guess I did intend to be a bit douche-bagy... but not quite that dialed in.

In all seriousness though, Phey, has our military ever done something it should regret? Can it?

Our military has done many, many things that it and we should regret. There are things they have done that were absolutely horrendous, but often times necessary. Look back at World War II. The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and even worse, the fire bombing of countless Japanese cities caused some of the most violent, horrific and massive episodes of death this world has ever seen. Was it something to be proud of? No. Was it something that in the was probably necessary, I would say yes. It's also one of those things we will never really know the answer to. It was war, and war is terrible.

The current wars we fight are obviously very different. There is no single power that you can point to that you can defeat and claim victory like in WWII. States are no longer the enemy in so much as part of the populace is. Where you see states become enemies is in their unwillingness to do anything. Doing nothing but ideally sitting by and watching when you are capable of doing something makes you just as guilty as actively participating.

I regret many things that have occurred in this war. Abu Graid would obviously be the event at the forefront. The wrong building being targeted, civilians being killed, maybe approaching other countries differently diplomatically are all things that could have been handled better. Hindsight is 20/20 however. It's easy for people to sit on the sidelines and comment on things after the fact, especially when they don't always have the full picture.

Yes, I have regrets. I know that nothing is perfect, but I think that yo have to look at the big picture. It's so easy to focus on the negatives and it's so rare that we ever get to hear or speak on the positives.

Go back to WWII. Compare small events between the two. There are numerous instances of German POWs being killed off out of anger. Citizens being persecuted against for simply being a citizen of an Axis country. But how many people look back at the war now and nitpick all the bad little things. You won't find many people that don't look back at the war as a whole and count it as a success. Now Germany and Japan are two of the most powerful economies in the world, and to a degree, two of largest allies.

In short, yes, our military has done things I regret. But overall the good that our military has done for both this country, and other parts of the world makes it a great example of what a military should be and that good far outweighs the regrets.

damn you ANunes for making me do all this extra work to prove he was important! ;x
In the longwarjournal article I posted it sort of assumed he was already deemed highly important. It cited http://www.ustreas.gov/press/releases/hp845.htm which is a US Treasury document dated Feb 2008 that identified Abu Ghadiya and his network as highly important:

It also identified his 2 cousins and 1 brother as being in his network and those 3 were also killed in the raid in Syria. One cousin:
The brother:

The other cousin:


And here is an NPR article that swizzles you: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.p...toryId=96226582



And yes if people in Mexico were constantly planning to blow shit up in the US and sneaking into the country to do it, then I would be fine surgically invading Mexico's sovereignty to kill/capture them. We probably do it already against drug cartels in South America that cause tons of violence in the US. Also, assuming we killed civilians vilifies your countrymen before you know the whole story. I don't know it either and it is very possible some of our men acted irresponsibly...but in the end I trust our system to prosecute them accordingly if they did such a thing.

The wars we fight in now are "different" only because we wanted to go to war and didn't have a legitimate excuse to do so. You can't wage a physical war against natural ideologues. We might as well said "we're going to war against sex, and they have sex in the middle east, so we can invade your country whenever you want if we see someone having sex in it." They're only different because we stopped weighing rational possibility into the should-we-kill-people-to-get-our-way scenario.

What do you mean hindsight? People aren't just reacting after shitty events. We've been upset about this since before we went to war in the first place. We choose to ignore all of the evidence to the contrary and do whatever the hell we want to do, and then after we realize that all of that evidence to the contrary was correct, we say "oh well...if only we had known!" There comes a point where the expression "hindsight is 20/20" is replaced by "we're just not as fucking smart as we think we are, and we almost always let our own pride and ego get in the way of rational decision-making."

Your reasoning behind supporting WWII are retarded, by the way. We caused it, we had to do the cleanup, and millions upon millions of people paid for it with their lives, and we call that a success? If I pressure a guy to jump off a building, and then right before he jumps I desperately try to get him to stop, but he ends up jumping anyway, only in war can I claim my actions a success when I got the blood cleaned off the sidewalk. World War II was an atrocity. It wasn't a good war. There was nothing redeemable about it. It was an awful awful awful war that should never have happened, but all of us super-smart people let our ego and pride get in the way of good decision-making.

Overall, I'd agree with you that our soldiers are a shining example of what soldiers should be. But as a whole, our military is just the iron fist for the stupid and naive, and it's our gleaming soldiers and the innocent people that they try to protect that pay the price in blood.



What if it were China?

Gov, I wholeheartedly agree with this quote of yours: "It was an awful awful awful war that should never have happened, but all of us super-smart people let our ego and pride get in the way of good decision-making." Yes, our ego and pride made us punish Germany too heavily after WWI, but once we mess up, what do we need to do to stop what we caused? How could WWII have ended (in a good way) without us stepping in at some point to right the wrong? And yes every decision should be made rationally while limiting the effects of ego and pride. Surgically striking China to weed out some threat is a dumb idea unless you are 100% sure they will not know it was us or unless the possible threat is greater than China's probable reaction if they do know.


oh based on that analysis, we struck the bad terrorists in Syria and Pakistan because they were a bigger threat than any possible reaction those two countries could have had. Yes this means we can bully nations that cant threaten us, but Im not losing sleep over it.

I'm not saying that it would have been prevented had we not been stupid in the first place, I'm pointing out that we have this horrible tendency to ignore causation to support our illusions of both justice and success. Pheylan did it just now by calling WWII a success, and we do the same thing every single day when talking about our imaginary "war on terror."

So what you're saying is...doing the wrong thing is only OK when you don't get caught [or the victim is too small and weak to retaliate, like Syria].

I had an awful day until now. Thank you contributors. (Not being sarcastic. My day seriously sucked)

I don't necessarily see it as the wrong thing but yeah it is okay. and sorry ebola?

Alright. Working under the premise that it is not wrong, let's assume Canada discovered that a terrorist who was funneling explosives into their country was hiding in a specific spot in the state of Washington, but they were pursuing him for awhile and knew that he'd quickly move on and they'd most certainly lose him, and they conveniently had the means nearby to take him out. We'll give them more credit than we can take for ourselves and assume they contacted us first to let us know that the strike was about to happen. In the strike, the terrorist is killed and only 7 innocent Americans died in what for all accounts was a precise attack. That's cool, right?

yeah that would suck but we wouldnt go to war over it. the difference is that if we have a person planning to commit atrocities against other countries within our borders and that other country asks us to arrest them on legitimate grounds then we will do it. syria wont even come close to complying to other countries' requests as evidenced by them refusing to hand over this guy when the Iraqi government requested it. in your canada situation, if canada could prove killing this guy right then prevented a nuclear attack or something on their country then we could stomach the fallout of dead civilians..we would do the same thing in Canada if it was desperately necessary. weighing how big the attack can be before we allow dead civilians to prevent it is extremely difficult and i dont want to try it.

edit: im sorry, you specifically indicated it was for funneling explosives. in that case we would not stand for such an attack on our soil =\, but I still think the issue of having the willingness to heed their internationally lawful requests is important enough to distinguish us attacking Syria vs Canada attacking us.

.

The idea is that this isn't black/white. It's not about answering the hypothetical so much as accepting that this might be a tad fucked up for us to be doing. Then you can ask yourself if this is really 100% "we kick ass" or maybe 50% "we kick ass" and 50% "maybe we're war criminals?"

Temper your cheer leading with a bit of skepticism. It's totally healthy. You've shown an ability to be a skeptic when it came to Obama... why not everything?

Okay, you have a point. But in the same way, you should temper your blame US troops for war crimes first attitude by considering other alternatives like the terrorist bastards killed their own families to make it look like we did it, etc.

While I totally agree with the point of your post, I did want to say one thing about the last part: if it were highly improbable that we would kill innocent civilians in a precision strike like this, what you say would probably hold a lot more merit. But this "precision" strike was a highly explosive bomb dropped from an unmanned aircraft. Even if the attack was so precise that it hit the target on the forehead, the explosion and subsequent shrapnel doesn't stop when it gets out of his personal space.

Occam's Razor would like a word with you. Please meet him outside.

Option 1:
A bomb dropped from a plane killed more people than we wanted to. Which is unfortunate and perhaps condemnable activity while inside the borders of a sovereign nation (even outside of sovereign nations if you ask me but I'm tempering that opinion with reality)

Option 2:
We hit one man with a bomb. Syria, who has previously felt no need to be uppity with us during our war in their next door neighbor's country, then requested that some of their population in the area surgically attacked by Americans kill themselves or their families. These people comply within hours of the attack. Nobody sees or notices that this occurred.

Not all possibilities warrant equal consideration. As much as I respect our TROOPS, our military is a pretty awful organization.

I may have missed something, but the attack in Syria, as far as I have read, didn't involve any missiles or bombs. It was a strike of 4 Army Blackhawk helicopters, whose only armament are machine guns. Two of which landed and deployed a group of Special Operations soldiers who assaulted the building.

These aren't the type of soldiers that shoot at anything that moves. These are the most highly trained soldiers in the world. Like I said before, in all likelihood, 99% of the people that were killed or injured in that attack had a weapon of some kind. High ranking officials don't go places alone; they have body guards. They also don't go into hideouts where the people they are staying with aren't on their side. Trying to say that the people killed were all innocent victims is laughable.

Eh, a simple mixup between the events in Pakistan and Syria (this topic is about both). The same still applies.

And assuming they aren't is evil.

The attack in Pakistan killed 20. I've yet to see a report that said any of those people were civilians. From what I can tell, all the people killed were inside the compound that got killed.