Yee Haw!
Alzheimer's Patients do tend to live in the past.
Posted on 08/07/2021 4:53:01 AM PDT by RandFan
The reason is we “think” in terms of nation states. They don’t.
They are a tribal culture. The tribes come together to fight invaders. When the invaders are gone, the tribes go back to living in their small slice of the world.
The “government” in Afghanistan is akin to organized crime running the cities. Outside the cities, the culture hasn’t really changed.
That is why they are virtually unconquerable.
The only successful invasions of that area happened when everyone was killed. Every person put to the sword.
Not exactly our style.
I have been advocating for several years a policy I call ‘embaseees’. Embassy + AirBase —> EmBASEeees. We go into a terrorist country, clear out their taliban equivalent, then withdraw to very large Embassies, perhaps 3 of them. Have them big enough to encompass a military airbase where we can use it for decades on end to conduct anti-terrorism operations. As long as the ‘host’ country aint killing Americans then we let them have self-sovereignty. Kind of like how we operated in the Phillipines for decades. We could even have an intermediate zone that we patrol but it would be autonomous. Let them have their taste of freedom. A referendum every 10 years to see how large the boundaries of the intermediate autonomous zone should be.
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I thought Biden already surrendered. I guess he doesn’t remember.
We have become politically correct.
Can’t go after the enemy if they hide in populated areas.
If that were the criteria in WWII we’d have lost.
While the Taliban purposely bomb populated areas to sow fear.
dementia Joe sows fear no where.
We "got out" of Vietnam by negotiating a Peace accord with North Vietnam and South Vietnam after bombing the North Vietnamese into submission in December 1973 resulting in their returning to the negotiations and signing the Paris Peace Accord just about a month later.
In that agreement in which the right of South Vietnam to exist was codified, the United States had the full right under the accord to resume military action against the North Vietnamese in the event they engaged in military action against the south.
The North Vietnamese had no intention of adhering to the treaty and began building up of key forces. When they did begin their invasion. Ford asked Congress for permission to use air forces to uphold our part of the treaty (as required under the reprehensible Church Act) and Congress denied the additional funds needed, so no support was given during the Communist invasion in 1974-1975.
There are similarities, except the current Administration feels there is political hay to be made in executing military operations. In 1975, the opposite was true.
It will all be fun, games, and cigars being lit with $1 million dollar bills until an aircrew ends up in the hands of the Taliban.
And the Tet offensive was a huge military victory for the US and failure of the communists, but the US MSM made it a huge political defeat in the US. Cronkite was an abomination to real news. He was the beginning - at least for me. And, frankly, I think we - and the world - are where we are because of what happened way back then. That is when it really began.
Oops, I meant bombing the North Vietnamese into submission in December 1972.
I am in complete agreement with you on this: The seeds of where we are today were actually sown in the Sixties, and when Vietnam ended and those same protesters cut their hair and put on suits is when things began to really decay.
As for Cronkite, I have come to despise Cronkite with a white hot burning intensity. As a kid, I of course followed Cronkite and did not view him or any other news source as “political”. It was only when began REALLY paying attention that I knew there was something foul there, and then seeing him chum around with Ted Kennedy told me all I needed to know.
This was fully confirmed for me some years later with Cronkite’s speech accepting the Norman Cousins Award. He was a traitor to this country and this speech of his proved it to me, may he rot in Hell.
WALTER CRONKITE PROMOTES DEMOCRATIC FEDERAL WORLD GOVERNMENT
Received W.F.A.’s Norman Cousins Global Governance Award on 19 October 1999
I am greatly honored to receive this award for two reasons: first, I believe as Norman Cousins did that the first priority of humankind in this era is to establish an effective system of world law that will assure peace with justice among the peoples of the world; second, I feel sentimental about this award because half a century ago Norman offered me a job as spokesman and Washington lobbyist for the World Federalist organization, which was then in its infancy.
I chose instead to continue in the world of journalism. For many years, I did my best to report on the issues of the day in as objective a manner as possible. When I had my own strong opinions, as I often did, I tried not to communicate them to my audience. Now, however, my circumstances are different. I am in a position to speak my mind. And that is what I propose to do.
Those of us who are living today can influence the future of civilization. We can influence whether our planet will drift into chaos and violence, or whether through a monumental educational and political effort we will achieve a world of peace under a system of law where individual violators of that law are brought to justice.
For most of this fairly long life I have been an optimist harboring a belief that as our globe shrank, as our communication miracles brought us closer together, we would begin to appreciate the commonality of our universal desire to live in peace and that we would do something to satisfy that yearning of all peoples. Today I find it harder to cling to that hope. For how many thousands of years now have we humans been what we insist on calling “civilized”? And yet, in total contradiction, we also persist in the savage belief that we must occasionally, at least, settle our arguments by killing one another.
While we spend much of our time and a great deal of our treasure in preparing for war, we see no comparable effort to establish a lasting peace. Meanwhile, emphasizing the sloth in this regard, those advocates who work for world peace by urging a system of world government are called impractical dreamers. Those “impractical dreamers” are entitled to ask their critics, “what is so practical about war?”
It seems to many of us that if we are to avoid the eventual catastrophic world conflict we must strengthen the United Nations as a first step toward a world government with a legislature, executive and judiciary, and police to enforce its international laws and keep the peace. To do that, of course, we Americans will have to yield up some of our sovereignty. It would take a lot of courage, a lot of faith in the new order. But the American colonies did it once and brought forth one of the most nearly perfect unions the world has ever seen. The circumstances were vastly different, obviously. Yet just because the task appears forbiddingly hard, we should not shirk it. We cannot defer this responsibility to posterity. Democracy, civilization itself, is at stake. Within the next few years we must change the basic structure of our global community from the present anarchic system of war and ever more destructive weaponry to a new system governed by a democratic U.N. federation.
Let’s focus on a few specifics of what the leadership of the World Federalist movement believe must be done now to advance the rule of world law. For starters, we can draw on the wisdom of the Framers of the U.S. Constitution of 1787. The differences among the American states then were as bitter as differences among nation-states in the world today. In their almost miraculous insight, the Founders of our country invented ‘federalism,’ a concept that is rooted in the rights of the individual. Our federal system guarantees a maximum of freedom but provides it in a framework of law and justice. Our forefathers believed that the closer the laws are to the people, the better. Cities legislate on local matters; states make decisions on matters within their borders; and the national government deals with issues that transcend the states, such as interstate commerce and foreign relations. That is federalism.
Today we must develop federal structures on a global level. We need a system of enforceable world law —a democratic federal world government— to deal with world problems. What Alexander Hamilton wrote about the need for law among the 13 states applies today to the approximately 200 sovereignties in our global village: “To look for a continuation of harmony between a number of independent unconnected sovereignties in the same neighborhood, would be to disregard the uniform course of human events, and to set at defiance the accumulated experience of ages.” Today the notion of unlimited national sovereignty means international anarchy. We must replace the anarchic law of force with a civilized force of law.
Ours will neither be a perfect world, nor a world without disagreement and occasional violence. But it will be a world where the vast majority of national leaders will consistently abide by the rule of world law, and those who won’t will be dealt with effectively and with due process by the structures of that same world law. We will never have a city without crime, but we would never want to live in a city that had no system of law to deal with criminals.
Let me make three suggestions for immediate action that would move us in a direction firmly in the American tradition of law and democracy.
1. Keep our promises: We helped create the U.N. and to develop the U.N. assessment formula. Americans overwhelmingly want us to pay our U.N. dues, with no crippling limitations. We owe it to the world. In fact, we owe it as well to our national self-esteem.
2. Ratify the Treaty to Ban Land Mines, the Law of the Sea Treaty, the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, the Convention to Eliminate All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Most important, we should sign and ratify the Treaty for a permanent International Criminal Court. That Court will enable the world to hold individuals accountable for crimes against humanity.
3. Consider, after 55 years, the possibility of a more representative and democratic system of decision making at the U.N. This should include both revision of the veto in the Security Council and adoption of a weighted voting system for the General Assembly. The World Federalists have endorsed Richard Hudson’s Binding Triad proposal. George Soros, in “The Crisis of Global Capitalism,” has given serious attention to this concept which would be based upon not only one-nation-one-vote but also on population and contributions to the U.N. budget. Resolutions adopted by majorities in each of these areas would be binding, enforceable law. Within the powers given to it in the Charter, the U.N. could then deal with matters of reliable financing, a standing U.N. peace force, development, the environment and human rights.
Some of you may ask why the Senate is not ratifying these important treaties and why the Congress is not paying our U.N. dues. As with the American rejection of the League of Nations, our failure to live up to our obligations to the U.N. is led by a few willful senators who choose to pursue their narrow, selfish political objectives at the cost of our nation’s conscience. They pander to and are supported by the Christian Coalition and the rest of the religious right wing. Their leader, Pat Robertson, has written that we should have a world government but only when the messiah arrives. Attempts for world order before that time are the work of the Devil! This small but well-organized group has intimidated both the Republican Party and the Clinton administration. It has attacked presidents since F.D.R. for supporting the U.N. Robertson explains that these presidents are the unwitting agents of Lucifer.
The only way we who believe in the vision of a democratic world federal government can effectively overcome this reactionary movement is to organize a strong educational counteroffensive stretching from the most publicly visible people in all fields to the humblest individuals in every community. That is the vision and program of the World Federalist Association. The strength of the World Federalist program would serve an important auxiliary purpose at this particular point in our history. There would be immediate diplomatic advantages if the world knew that this country was even beginning to explore the prospect of strengthening the U.N. We would appear before the peoples of the world as the champion of peace for all by the equitable sharing of power. This in sharp contrast to the growing concern that we intend to use our current dominant military power to enforce a sort of pax Americana.
Our country today is at a stage in our foreign policy similar to that crucial point in our nation’s early history when our Constitution was produced in Philadelphia. Let us hear the peal of a new international liberty bell that calls us all to the creation of a system of enforceable world law in which the universal desire for peace can place its hope and prayers. As Carl Van Doren has written, “History is now choosing the founders of the World Federation. Any person who can be among that number and fails to do so has lost the noblest opportunity of a lifetime.”
They can’t stay but they can’t leave either.
How many civilians will be killed in this strike. Who is acting as FAC to make sure it’s a good strike?
These planes are not effective against dispersed groups of men walking or on motorcycles.
Those of us that have been alive more than a half a century, and actually paying attention beyond what the MSM tells us, are not surprised at all by what is going on, nor the swiftness with which it is taking place.
I used to say that the 2020 election would be the last free election in the US. I was wrong. 2016 was.
And the amazing part is not that it happened, but that most people don’t grasp what happened. They simply refuse to see it. It will bite us all in 2024 and, frankly, probably in 2022.
We are entering a reset, but I think it’s the one prophesied about millennia ago, and it is followed by Jesus’ return. But it will be the worst time in human history before that.
I used to be more upbeat about these things, but I see difficult times ahead.
I used to be more upbeat about these things, but I see difficult times ahead.
The end of the last book of the New Testament:
He who testifies to these things says, “Surely I am coming soon.” Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!
Christians do not fear what is coming, though we would not be human to not have trepidation. There is a reason Jesus’ human body sweat blood.
I would guess any “CIA involvement “ is along the lines of knowing all about it and doing nothing. You know, the usual.
Aside from nuking large parts of the country, there is no military solution to Biden’s bugout mess. Afghanistan will quickly revert back to an Islamic dung heap. I pity the families of the American heroes who gave their lives and sustained life altering injuries in support of this folly. The women and girls of Afghanistan who for two decades had opportunities to become educated and live free lives will also soon become victims of Taliban barbarism .
Who is the Forward Air Control for these attacks? I assume its US Special Forces?
AC-130A, E, H, and U Spectre “gunships” were retired, replaced with AC-130W Stinger II and AC-130J Ghostrider
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