What has Obama done right?Follow

Terrorism is pretty negligible, though. I mean, I know we're trying to make a big deal out of it, but the reality is that modern terrorists are pretty awful at their jobs. I could single-handedly out terrorist al qaeda.

The world is a dangerous place. Collectivly, being omnivores we all have the instinct of a predetor, but even worse, the instint of a preditor coupled with the drive of a hunter-gatherer ingrained deep in our psyche. We take what we need, and we kill anything that threatens our existance. That may not be nice, but thats how history says we work. Individual case exceptions aside, altruistic and "nice" species and cultures don't tend to last long. Global world peace is a nice idea, and maybe someday we'll get there, but not without some sort of outside threat to unite us, or sufficient interbreeding that there is no longer an "us" and a "them". That or maybe a nice asteroid impact to get the population down to manageable levels.

The minute we decide we don't need protection from the wolves at our border, they will eat us. Conversly, we can't make the military too big because then it will at some point decide it would do a better job of being in charge than we do. either way, getting rid of our strike fighter edge is a bad idea.

I mean, I know, and I understand the place of armed force. I think we could do with less of it, but I don't mind it just existing. I just think man... if the world's really that ******* bad, we ought to just burn it all down and stop making new lives if they're doomed to misery. If it's that irredeemably bad, destroying the world would be the most compassionate thing we could do for our fellow humans.

So, I'd rather believe that it's not that bad, but only kinda bad, and that it's the kind of bad that we can fix.

Well, you're vastly oversimplifying the situation both countries were in. Modern Turkey has been a comparatively stable, secular democratic state for most of the 20th century, with a nonexistent (until extremely recently) Islamic movement. Even now, Islamic fundamentalism has no real foundation in Turkey. By comparison, Iran circa 1979 had been under the grip of an unbelievably repressive pro-Western monarchy for several decades, which unlike Turkey had totally failed to suppress its internal Shi'i political movement through violence. The Shah was primarily concerned with wasting huge amounts of oil money to impress foreign investors and to purchase stupid amounts of military hardware from America. Ironically, when he relaxed his secret police's brutally repressive methods in 1978 - at the request of Carter, no less - this gave the Shi'i activists the wriggle room to spark a popular revolt that everyone outside of Iran totally failed to see coming.

The country as a whole was politically unstable; America had to step in to reinstate the Shah via CIA-backed coup following a popular revolt in the 50s. In retrospect, it comes as absolutely no surprise that the country was overcome by a revolutionary movement with anti-Western sentiments. The population as a whole had been tortured and impoverished by their pro-Western monarch for decades. As you can hopefully see, this is totally different to Turkey's situation. Turkey is a democracy; Iran was a dictatorship with the world's worst current human rights record. Turkey was driven by a Turkish nationalist movement that defined itself by comparatively non-hostile separation from the West; the Iranian shah represented, to the Iranians, everything sh*tty about America and about foreign influence. During Turkey's moments of political instability, the Turkish government has stepped in and restored order; when the Iranians kicked the shah out the first time, it was the Americans who restored the status quo, not the Iranians.

When you add up all the factors, you begin to see the differences. America's problem isn't that it sells weapons to foreign countries. Its problem is that it sells weapons to politically unstable foreign countries, and then when the local political situation changes to America's detriment, the weapons are still there. Turkey and India and Australia are all safe bets, politically speaking. They aren't going to be overwhelmed by a anti-Western tide any time in the next century. Your country's problem is that previous administrations acted without the foresight necessary in military planning, out of a mistaken belief that the demands of the Cold War were permanent.



I hate to sound harsh, but putting the sword to use in the other guy's country is the best option from America's point of view. That way, it's the other guy's country whose infrastructure and civilian population gets devastated by aerial bombardment.



I'm curious. Can you channel nihilism any more?

Edited, Aug 24th 2009 2:51am by zepoodle

You're right that it applies to everyone. It just isn't going to apply to America, right now, because America has the biggest stick. And because America has the biggest stick, hundreds of millions of Americans live out their lives in first-world comfort and internal peace. None of them are ever going to know what war looks like, because America made sure that war is something that happens to other people. That's your reward. That's why you fight your wars on other people's soil; so that your own soil never gets to see what war looks like.

We can all sit here blubbering from the sheer futility of our struggle, or you can get to work taking advantage of the fact that your country is so goddamn safe that it hasn't had to conscript poor @#%^s like you into the military for three or four decades.

Edited, Aug 24th 2009 3:13am by zepoodle

No... the issue isn't whether or not the country itself is liberal or not, it has to do with the generations.

Right now, we've got three generations in the US that are all pretty much divided. The older generations tend to have a more conservative mindset, the younger generation more liberal. The parents of the younger generation, which are the children of the older generation, tend to be split. There are exceptions to this, but you can't say something about the country as a whole, or the majority as a whole. People will disagree just out of spite.

Interesting question. I dare say that a lot of people found the terror of impending nuclear annihilation to be a very effective cure for bloodlust.

I guess the factor I see in turley as being a potential point of future unrest isn't the cypriot issue, it's the kurdisdh minority. they are out breeding the turkish populace, and the displaced Iraqi kurds are entering at a firly steady rate. way to early to tell what will happen there, and there really aren't enough of them yet to make a difference one way or the other, but little things like that can have a way of becoming bigger things down the line.

I'm in the minority on this, I know, but I feel the cold war isn't really entirely over. China is not the soviet union, and their communism is not the same communism by any means, but there are definite indications they would like to become expansionist. And russia under Vladimir Putin scares the **** out of me. I can't really figure him out. How much of it is for show, and how much of it is real?

It won't because people try to make it NOT happen. Not just me, anyone vying for power. Land. Wealth. Revenge. Sometimes, you can't get what you want with words. Enforcing those words with an invasion force gives them that much more reason to give you what you want. If a country doesn't feel threatened, they have less reason to give you what you want. I want the gaza strip. No. Yes. No. Yes. No. I'll give you 5$. Gaza Strip > 5$. Now what? Offer 10? There's a level of being adamant (or desire to gain X,Y,Z) that you don't care what they try to do. I'm keeping X,Y and Z. All that's left? Threats and action.

Let's bring in your other opinions in terms of 1,2,3. One, you have allies. Guess what? So did France and Germany at the beginning of WW1. Money. Appeasement. Cause of WW2. Notice how these two are connected? Both attempts to stop war yet they both caused the largest wars in history (not alone but contributed immensely). 3) Terrorism. You blow up some stuff. They figure out it was you and obliterate you with their military. icu Al Qaeda/Afghanistan. Lack of military = blown out of the water (also working off Kao's point of don't mess with me because of military).

Finishing off the first paragraph, both suck and war will always happen unless you have an authoritarian figure (which might result in a revolt without a strong military) or an extreme amount of nationalism across the planet leading to no wars because we all like each other too much to blow eachother up (doesn't work when certain individuals gain and use power to gain power/doesn't feel the nationalism and creates war).

The different gov't system was the key here. Being opposite sides of the political spectrum made them incompatible. Hatred arose because of a power struggle caused by the difference. And that power struggle ended (relatively) peacefully because of the threats. Cause and effect, no power struggle lessened the hatred of the Russians significantly. Then again, we could look back at my previous point of peace won't happen and why it won't.

Not really. In the vast majority of cases, wars are fought on foreign soil because that soil has something that you own soil doesn't have. Most wars are economic. "We're fighting there, so we don't have to fight here" is pure ********* The number of wars were it can be applied is tiny. It's a convenient justification, but it's rarely true.

Think about most American intervention post-WWII. They had nothing to do with a threat to American soil. They were about economics, power or influence, but very rarely about negating a threat to American soil.

Could it not be that the projection of military muscle overseas (as pointed out by Red, usually for self-serving economic or political reasons) is exactly the reason that those threats exist in the first place?

The KGB point has already been mentioned, and that is a part of iot. He knows where all the bodies are buries, and US propaganda aside, the KGB were never the "good guys" in the cold war. He's basically set himself up as a "dictator for life" as it were to bypass term limits, and he has thef full support of his military, mostly because he is finding funding for it and allowing them to be much more agressive in their posturing than they were previously. Flying a TU-95 heavy bomber over US aircraft carriers is not a friendly move. That, coupled with him nationalizing Yukos pretrolium and ******** up gas prices, and his apperent authorization of the assasination of that former KGB agent with uranium poisening make me nervous.

Russia's military is still in shambles, but much of that could recover quickly if they threw resources at it. The one saving factor here might be that we allegedly snagged a large number of former soviet nuclear weapon cores "for disposal" in return for free grain shipments to the various sucessor states right after the fall of communism. The yave sold off most of their heavy surface ships except their battlecruisers, which are now back in service, and most of their salvagable submarine force is also back in the water. Their aircraft are hurting, but they still have massive aircraft factories with which they can turn out advanced designs just as quickly as we can if they got funding. And say what you will about russian tanks nad infantry weapons, but they hold up suprisingly well even with significant neglect.

The Georgia invasion was one of the first tests of their renewed land force. It was also a hugely symbolic slap in the face to the Nato alliance, since Georgia was activly persuing membershiop.