[joseph20]

"The troops in combat today are just as brave and more skilled than past generations of soldiers. But they are by and large dying needlessly because of the liberalism that has so infected our collective mindset. The mindset that says that when an enemy combatant can be taken out but doing so will kill 4 civilians so you let him go and he later leads an ambush that takes out 4 of our own. The mindset that no longer uses our military power punitively but as some sort of international relief society, at a huge cost to ourselves in both lives and treasure."

So you believe that we should not have had the Marshall Plan? We should have just kept indiscriminantly bombing the crap out of Germany until the Nazi insurgents were all dead?

"Because of these deep rooted tribes and sects that are not a small fraction of the people, the only chance for a stable Iraq after we leave, is for it to have a strong central govt that rules with an iron fist."

Same arguments were used in the case of Japan. So if we had followed your reasoning, we would have left Japan alone after our victory. They were an entirely foreign culture, one so zealous that they would kill themselves to preserve their way of life. Who knows what modern day Japan would look like if we hadn't reconstructed them into a modern, free society?

[LaurenD]

“So you believe that we should not have had the Marshall Plan? We should have just kept indiscriminantly bombing the crap out of Germany until the Nazi insurgents were all dead?
So you believe that we should not have had the Marshall Plan? We should have just kept indiscriminantly bombing the crap out of Germany until the Nazi insurgents were all dead?”

The British firebombed German cities indiscriminately because they were in a battle for their very survival. We used the atomic bomb on Japan even though we were killing more of their people with conventional bombs than the atomic bombs did. It was so devastating to them that they gave up. We flew day missions and more targeted mission over Germany than Britain did, but don’t kid yourself.......the Germans and Japanese were rendered completely defeated before anybody worried about helping the Germans or Japanese.

One would have gotten their ass kicked if in the middle of WWll, someone started talking about how we need to start helping those poor innocent Germans and Japanese people. They said things back then like “our boys”. Those were “our boys”. Their lives mattered more to Americans than the lives of did of the Germans or Japanese. I knew we were doomed after Sept 11th when none of our leaders would even dare say that we should go to war because “Americans” had been killed. That would have been so bigoted of a thing to say afterall. We surely couldn’t think of discriminating against what happened to Americans from what happened to all people everywhere. All People everywhere were under attack was the only way to justify any action on our part. God forbid we ever go to war again for our own national security interests only and to avenge the lives of just Americans. If it’s not an “international” mission designed to defend all free people around the world then we somehow aren’t justified.