Wars USA goes to liberate other 'people'? Your thoughts and beliefs

Asked a question to Denny in the other thread and Blazer Prophet suggested starting a new topic with it, so here it goes.

My view is that US needs to help other people that are being punished by other groups, but it might be biased view since I experienced it myself in Kosovo, where Europe did absolutely nothing and was against bombing ex Yugoslavia until the end, while US was strongly for it. In the end more than 7,000 people died as a result, 90% of them elderly, children and women.

 

It sounds appealing for the USA to be the world’s policeman, but as a practical matter I question sending our troops in alone to a conflict just to die for those on the weaker side.

I mean, isn’t that’s what the UN is for? The answer is supposed to be “yes”, but as we saw with Iraq when over 300,000 people called out from the grave and beyond to save them from a mentally deranged madman and his sons, when France had an illegal arms agreement with Iraq they used their veto power to force an alliance to essentially go it alone. The result is a major screw-up and thousands of US soldiers dead. What did we get in return? A real mess and now we’re the bad guys. That does not minimize the problems we brought to those people, but do you see the issues it creates?

Now, all that said, when a people are completely defenseless and being brutally treated by an oppressor, something has to be done. But again, why is it up to the US to send people to die for it all when the UN won’t send in a coalition? Should we expect something in return?

 

Personally I think much of the world has become complacent about sending troops in to clear up any conflict. They have a hard enough time even performing economic sanctions. It may just be appearances but they seem to want to rely upon the U.S. to do all the dirty work. Yes, it makes us a shining beacon of freedom, blah blah blah...but it also costs us quite a bit in terms of human lives and money. Not to mention the fact that we are the lightning rod for every incident that occurs in the world that has a tinge of bad around it.

With our economy spiraling a bit (even before Obama), I'd like to see us regroup a little and push policing duties onto a regional partner or set of partners. Let them take care of it for a few years and see how fun it is. And if push comes to shove I'm sure we could still do a few bomber fly-bys w/o having to land troops again.

 

Problem is UN is garbage. After Kosovo was liberated, from 1999 up until 2004 or 2005 everything was going wrong there, with UN controlling everything, you had bastards from every country thinking its their little project on how to run their country, in a place where we've had Greeks, Romans and even Ottoman Empire, it's not like we were animals who just became free. UN is a joke IMO and should be, especially with Russia having veto powers there.

 

That's what happened in my country, for 78 days it was bombed, no solider died. That should have been the plan for Iraq and Afghanistan, just bomb all military areas, govt buildings, Saddam's house and then let the people decide for themselves.

 

That's pretty cool man. Americans are treated like heros there. Definitely a cool place to visit if you're American.

 

Well in Iraq, that is what we pretty much did until the surge. What happened? The people killed each other like mad and we had to send in troops to stop th madness.

Then if you look at Afghanistan, there wasn't really a government to begin with. It is a bunch of tribes loosely that were loosely affiliated with the Taliban. There wasn't a real way to just bomb government structures and such. They really didn't have any to speak of.

My opinion is that every time we go into someplace to "free" people, all we end up doing is making more enemies. We are better off letting the people there uprise themselves if at all possible, and funding assistance as necessary.

Iran is one area we are making inroads in now. The best thing that we could do is inundate them with cool shit that only our freedoms here can provide, and eventually they will overthrow their conservative government on their own. The question is, can we keep their government from causing some major damage until then. I don't think anybody has answered that yet.

 

Problem is they cannot do it themselves. For example in Kosovo, we did protests, and everything else peacefully until 1998 when a group was armed and started fighting but even then it was maybe around 5000 armed guys against a full army with tanks, helicopters, heavy weaponry.

Same thing in Iran now, I'm sure majority of people there don't like Ahmedinejad and that nutcase who is treated like god there (forgot his name, old dude with long beard), but the people have no power, like we saw the demonstrations, many of them are jailed now, lot were killed. It'll take US (and NATO) bombing their military and then let the people there decide. Personally we should let Israel do the bombing.

 

Seemed ok for the Philippines. They're now fairly independent of the US!

 

???? We were already occupying the country before the surge...

Perhaps we have two different definitions of when the "surge" occurred?

 

Had a class when going through elementary school, but could only do basic, maybe 100 words or so. (pretty much clueless)

We moved here 1999, and I finished high school here, now going through college. My dad also speaks pretty good now, while my mother never tried much, she understands somewhat but doesn't really speak it. lol (as for my brother who was 11 when we moved, he's fluent, no accent etc)

 

I remember very well, we bombed it, then the troops entered, everything was at peace for few weeks then the killings started. Suicide bombing happened much later I think.

 

This is a complicated issue, so for me the answer is "sometimes".

I think the answer is yes, when one agressive dictatorship attacks and tries to take over a democracy, a country friendly to us or one that affects our national interests. Therefore when Iraq attacked Iran or China attacked Vietnam, it wasn't really our concern. However, when Iraq attacked Kuwait, it did concern us. Korea and Vietnam were appropriate actions because they helped stem the tide of Communism.

I think we also try to take action where a government is killing its own citizens wholesale, where other sanctions haven't been shown to work and we have the wherewithal to impact the situation favorably with military force.

This question is complicated and I'm well aware I've left open some huge holes in my answer. The bottom line is that we're the world's only superpower and the only superpower in the history of humankind that has ever used military force to remove another government without trying to permanently occupy the country. Being the "world's policeman" comes with that territory.

 

Was it the same thing when the people overthrew the Shah in the 70's. You bet it was. What is funny is that the same group that overthrew the Shah because of his heavy handed tactics, now has come full circle, and practices the same heavy handed tactics he did. They basically campaigned under one message, and then became total hypocrites when in power and did the exact same thing he did.

So I don't agree. It can be done, but you have to have a majority of the peope backing it. The facts are, most revolutions against governments are done against governments with superior firepower and armed forces.

 

Where do you draw the line? One could make a strong case to invade North Korea, Burma (Myanmar), Sudan, Iran, Uzbekistan, Chad and half a dozen other nations. I think if the U.S. is going to be the world's police it should be consistent about it. It it's going to liberate people in Kosovo then it should also have liberated (or at least stop the killing of) the Tutsis in Rawanda.

 

It depends.

If the likely blowback is extremely minimal and if the action required is:
-Primarily utter domination of airspace, bombing military targets, etc (Kosovo) or
-To take a weekend to stomp right over everyone who resists (Grenada, Panama)
Then I'm ok with killing the leadership just because they are undemocratic assholes.

But those are the easy decisions. It gets a lot harder when you start talking about managing civil war, repairing/inventing infrastructure on a massive level, decade-long commitments, trillions of dollars, pissing off a billion muslims, etc.

Man, I miss the days when we could win a war by blasting rock music into Manuel Noriega's living room.