I liked those videos. Blowing shit up is cool. The problem is that blowing shit up is not a military strategy. Sure, it kills people, it destroys weapons, but what goal is sought and achieved.
-What should we do?
-Let's go and blow shit up.
-Awesome.
That's US foreign policy at the moment.
Killing the enemy, which is ISIS currently is blowing shit up. aka Killing them.
One side or the other has to win in Syria......too many have died for any other outcome. Taking out both sides would leave a vacuum afterwards which is dumb as well. ISIS are pond scum and Assad is a lesser version of pond scum.
Either way, we don't receive any long term benefit from killing them other than revenge for beheading our people.
Iraq.......The strategy should be to destroy the enemy even if it includes putting back the troops. To allow it to go down after the price already payed is stupid............but at the same time this forces us to remain afterwards.........
This whole area is a Giant Clusterfuck. Always has been and always will be.
I've lived and worked throughout MENA, so believe me, when you say that whole area is a Giant Clusterfuck, I'm right there with you.
To Iraq. Keep in mind the
following:
Many people have strong misgivings about "wasting" resources (loss aversion). In the above example involving a non-refundable movie ticket, many people, for example, would feel obliged to go to the movie despite not really wanting to, because doing otherwise would be wasting the ticket price; they feel they've passed the point of no return. This is sometimes referred to as the sunk cost fallacy. Economists would label this behavior "irrational": it is inefficient because it misallocates resources by depending on information that is irrelevant to the decision being made. Colloquially, this is known as "throwing good money after bad". . . . .
A second example is R&D costs. Once spent, such costs are sunk and should have no effect on future pricing decisions. So a pharmaceutical company’s attempt to justify high prices because of the need to recoup R&D expenses is fallacious. The company will charge market prices whether R&D had cost one dollar or one million dollars.[8] However, R&D costs, and the ability to recoup those costs, are a factor in deciding whether to spend the money on R&D.
The sunk cost fallacy is in game theory sometimes known as the "Concorde Fallacy",[9] referring to the fact that the British and French governments continued to fund the joint development of Concorde even after it became apparent that there was no longer an economic case for the aircraft. The project was regarded privately by the British government as a "commercial disaster" which should never have been started, and was almost cancelled, but political and legal issues had ultimately made it impossible for either government to pull out.
What does it take to fix Iraq. It doesn't matter what we've already spent, that blood and treasure is done with. Desiring to prevent men from dying in vain is going to have a cost of more men dying. How many future lives have to be sacrificed in order to justify past lives lost?
I don't see a way to salvage Iraq. ISIS is an organic outgrowth of what some people in the region actually want. It's also what many Muslims in the West also want, hence the flow of Western Muslims to join ISIS. What's going on in the region needs to be fixed by those with the greatest interest in fixing. Those people are staying on the sidelines because Americans are willing to die to fix the problems. Better to let American boys die fighting to fix Iraq/Syria than good Muslim boys. So long as Americans are willing to have the blood of their sons spilled, Muslims won't fix their own back yard.
