Kondor3
Cafeteria Centrist
Afghanistan was a righteous shoot - although we should have been in-and-out of there in a matter of weeks, or six months at the outside....Bombing and invading Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with 9/11, Al Qaeda or WMD's... was that a defensive operation? ...
Iraq was not.
In both instances, those conflicts were reactions TO Jihadism rather than the trigger.
The Iraqis were fighting for their master, Saddam Hussein....Here's the difference. They were fighting for their homes...
That portion of the Afghans that fight us were fighting for political power to re-impose Sharia over their fellow Afghans.
Our guys were fighting because they volunteered to serve our country in that capacity, for a variety of reasons...Our guys were fighting because the Army promised them a free education that never happens...
It was their bad luck that W and Cheney and Powell betrayed them before they even mustered for deployment to Iraq...
As to education, well... Sammy gave me four years at U of I Chicago (Circle) and a degree at the end of the tunnel, so...
Your average Iraqi was not supportive of Saddam Hussein...You tell me which one is going to be more "committed"...
Your average Afghan is not supportive of the Taliban or their extremist interpretation of Sharia Law...
But, in the case of Yemenese and Sudanese and Syrian and Libyan and Wahabbi and Muslim Brotherhood or Iranian Jihadis, well...
They really aren't closely linked to former operations in Iraq or former or present-day operations in Afghanistan...
Rather, they are all about the spread of Militant Islam...
The world's last remaining large-scale Warrior Cult...
Founded by a despicable creature, bathed in blood past and present, self-excusing, changes locked-out, incapable of reform...
A Warrior Cult that finds useful idiots, excuse-makers and apologists amongst the Threat-Recognition -challenged in adversarial audiences...
The forces we applied in the case of both Iraq and Afghanistan were just right for fighting a war......The thing is, we tried to fight a war with inadequate forces... the Generals told Bush we didn't have enough men, and he invaded anyway. We then gave tax cuts to rich people and borrowed money from China to fight the war. What could possibly go wrong.
We won the wars...
We lost the Peace...
And that because we tried to nation-build (again, for the umpteenth time) rather than just walking away from the smoking ruins...