It's not moral or ethical to encourage people to go to war, that you have their back, and then sit by while they get killed. Long, but worth reading the whole thing.
America has a limited appetite for war. Americans will go to war, but they do reach a point of exhaustion with war after some number of years.It is silly to pretend this fact away in order to count oneself as "idealistic." People who ignore reality are not "idealistic;" they're just cowards afraid to face reality.The fact is that Americans are tired of war and it is dangerous to write checks on America's war-fighting account that it might not be willing to cover.The fact is that one of America's two main political parties is always willing to be part of a war at the Fun Part of the war -- the declaration of war part, the first-easy-victories part -- but which abandons every war it votes for when it sees any small political advantage in doing so.Joe Biden, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton and many other Democrat Senators voted for the War in Iraq. Within three years, they were screaming that Bush "lied us into war" and that we must withdraw immediately.It is insane to pretend this away. If you know Democrats will give you initial support for a war they'll happily vote you into, when doing so grants them political advantage, and then savagely turn on that war the moment they get political advantage from that, it is lunacy to even count them as allies in war.By the way: The NeverTrumpers who sometimes claim "At least Hillary Clinton would have been better on foreign policy?" Yes, of course. The same Hillary Clinton who voted for the War in Iraq to show how tough she would be as a president, and then agitated to abandon troops in the field when she realized that opposing the war would boost her chances of becoming president.Yeah, we need that kind of patriot as President, rather than the unamerican, immoral Trump.
In 2008, Obama campaigned on the idea that he would somehow both withdraw from Iraq and yet also "win" Iraq by withdrawing.I was incensed by this; it was so obviously, transparently a lie and a dodge. He wasn't planning to "win" anything; he just wanted to bug out. I was angry at the media for never challenging his "Win by Withdrawing" claims and pissed off at Americans for believing this bullshit.But they voted him into office anyway, and by decent margins. I realized that Americans weren't really tricked by Obama; rather, Obama told them a lie that they knew was a lie but they wanted some "out" to pretend they were honoring the sacrifice of the already-dead while also bugging out of Iraq.So Obama pretended he would "win" the war in Iraq, and the American public pretended to believe him.
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Viet Nam, Iraq, Afghanistan, were also fought on a basis of winning the hearts and minds of the people, not winning the war. So we tie the hands of those fighting the war with rules of engagement that is supposed to save the lives of innocent civilians, but also cost the lives of the soldiers we send to war. Then we send those soldiers to prison if they make a split second mistake in judgement and harm and innocent civilian. Some of those civilians often times are not innocent civilians but rather combatants in plain clothes for the other side and emerge to threaten the population when our solders are not there.
I am not at all sure we always understand the culture and the people of these countries we are going to rescue. Bush's idea to impose democracy on people who have no idea what democracy is and how to do it was a foolhardy thing to do. Kind of like pushing for a referendum in Gaza so they could vote in Hamas for life.
So its with great humor that we again watch the moral preening of the Dems/Media screaming at the immoral Trump in his dealings with Putin and not doing a better job of defending our great undercover agencies who have been trying to drive him from office since before he was elected.
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