redlegphi

Nader made similar arguments in 2000, which led to him pulling a bunch of votes from Gore in Florida, allowing Bush to "win" Florida. Now I'll grant that had Gore been in office, there's still a good chance that 9/11 would have happened and that the invasion of Afghanistan would have followed. However, I strongly doubt that we would have invaded Iraq. That's about a trillion dollars, several thousand American lives, and an unknown number of Iraqi lives different. Sometimes small differences can be significant in the long run.

It must be so hard being the oppressed majority.

I know i took one sentence out of your paragraph, but i felt the need to address it. Salvation is not hard to find at all. "Seek ye first the kingdom of god and all of the other things shall be added unto you" Salvation is a prayer away. If you invite Jesus Christ into you life, it shall be done, it's God's promise to us. Simple as that. God is a jealous God. Be ye not decieved: "God is NOT mocked." God is mocked daily. God (assuming His existence) does not appear to care anymore than I would care if I were to be mocked by ants. One has to think that an omniscient and omnipotent being would find humans to be quite insignificant. As for salvation, I believe the rules on that are a bit more stringent than one prayer. For example, I seem to recall Jesus inviting a man to give up all his wealth to come follow him, because rich folk will have a difficult time getting into heaven.

I don't think it's really difficult to understand, though I do think a lot of Americans don't understand it for the same reason that I don't know the first thing about how to grow corn: I'm not a farmer, they're not Soldiers. I think that's probably a big part of what's driving the 64%. I do think it can be difficult to implement, particularly because it involves employing a lot of non-kinetic and/or effects-based assets that a lot of the leadership in our Army either hasn't been taught to think about or isn't used to thinking about. Though that has changed a lot over the past 5 years or so, which is why we're getting better at COIN (though if you threw us into an old-school NTC rotation against the russian hordes, I'd be scared to see what the outcome would be right now).

The time window can obviously become an issue and there are obviously times when it's necessary to just take the shot when you get it (like when we took out Zarqawi). That said, the Pakistanis going in and taking them with ground troops has several advantages over the UAV option. 1) It's the Pakistanis doing it, not us. 2) It removes the psychological effect of the UAV kill. I think the UAV kill tends to cause more resentment than ground troops rolling in and getting into a firefight. If there's a firefight, then it's clear that there were at least some bad people there, justifying the action. The UAV kill tends to come out of nowhere, like we're a country that fancies ourselves equal to God, capable of smiting people at will. 3) There's a chance of getting intelligence from people you capture, driving further operations. I'd say it'd probably also easier to collect documents and such from a building that hasn't been blown up by a missile, making exploitation of said documents easier as well.

There are some scholars who believe that Jesus Christ of Nazareth was born around the end of October. That would shed new meaning to the evolution of Halloween. There are some scholars who believe that I was born around the end of April. That would shed new meaning to the evolution of Easter.

In COIN, there is no single enemy who is so important that his death justifies pushing a civilian populace further into the enemy camp. If they can get a clean shot on a "bad" guy, then great. Take it. But it seems like there aren't a lot of those clean shots happening, which means that we're breeding our next generation of militants. Also, if we know where a guy is well enough to target him with a drone, I'd say it'd be a hell of a lot better to get the Pakistani military to go pick him up so that we can try and drag intel out of him. Intel drives operations, or so they keep telling me. Dead guys tend to give us very little intel. Of course, that runs into the problem of the Pakistani military and ISI being infiltrated by Taliban and AQ, though I have to believe that there's a work-around for that that would keep the information from getting out until it's too late for the target to help himself. In short, I'm voting option 2.

Pretty much... yup... if you hurt me... I am one who believes I get to hurt you back... but I will hurt you back so hard your grandmother will hurt too. It makes your enemy know you are not weak... and they will know that they will NOT get away with impunity. Wars are not won from weakness. Wars aren't won through overwhelming brutality either. Just ask any Soviet soldier who had the pleasure to serve in Afghanistan in the 1980s. I dont know... we taught a bunch of Afghans back in the 80's and they out brutalized the Soviets. WE helped them to bleed the best the Soviets had. The Mujas understand brutality and respect it. I'm curious how it is you think the Afghans out-brutalized the Soviets given that the Afghans didn't have any carpet-bombing campaigns that I'm aware of and never distributed explosive toys among the children of Soviet soldiers.

I was reading something about this the other night. Apparently shortly after Saddam invaded Kuwait, Osama volunteered to lead a force against Saddam to expel him from Kuwait. He got more than a little pissed at us when the Saudi government decided to let the US take care of Saddam instead.

Pretty much... yup... if you hurt me... I am one who believes I get to hurt you back... but I will hurt you back so hard your grandmother will hurt too. It makes your enemy know you are not weak... and they will know that they will NOT get away with impunity. Wars are not won from weakness. Wars aren't won through overwhelming brutality either. Just ask any Soviet soldier who had the pleasure to serve in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

I assume the point of the joke is that Germany's/Switzerland's culture is being replaced with Islam? Though given that only 5% of Germany and 4% of Switzerland are Muslims, that's a bit ridiculous to claim.

I don't think it's nationalism so much as uniculturalism. The US, I think, tends to be more multi-cultural than Europe, especially with immigrants who are here legally (though there are obviously areas of the US with strong anti-immigrant sentiments who would love to pass laws similar to the Swiss and French). I would say the US tends to be more nationalistic than most countries in Europe, especially in the "rah rah, we're number one" American exceptionalism sense of the word. Just my two cents.

+1 Merry 23.44 Degrees!

There are lots of things I don't want my tax dollars to pay for, but abortions for poor women are not on my list of objectionable govt. expenditures. It's funny. So many of the wing-nuts on here clearly hate poor Blacks' and Hispanics' guts. Well, they hate all of them, but especially the poor ones. You'd think they'd support anything that would prevent them from multiplying. They don't want them dead, they want them to be relegated to an underclass in perpetuity so that they have a constant source of cheap labor. What better way to accomplish that than to ensure that those who are already poor have less control over their reproduction, leading to unplanned children that empty their pockets further. Of course, it'd be wrong to tar the entire right-wing with that brush. So I"ll only tar those who are opposed to abortion but who are also opposed to better sex ed in schools (actual sex ed, not "don't do it" sex ed) and who are opposed to the use of condoms.

The Taliban make most of their income from opium sale and transportation. There's pretty much zero oil in Afghanistan. And the Iraq war has pretty much nothing to do with the Taliban. As for cutting them off, that's what allowed the Taliban to ascend in Afghanistan in the first place, which led to them allowing Al Qaeda to operate out of Afghanistan, which led to 9-11. Good plan.

And to go back to the original post, I do think we need more troops in Afghanistan because security needs to get reestablished before we can get back to getting things done. However, I think it's more important that those troops are escorted by a large number of civilians (like those nice folks from USAID) who can get the Afghan government further along the road to providing services to the Afghan people. The troop surge for security, however big it is, is the supporting effort. The main effort is training, both of Afghan Security Forces and of the Afghan government.

It’s my understanding that this has already happened since 2004. So your concern is justified and accurate. “Death spiral” is a description I’ve heard. We, the US & NATO, missed the opportunity to do traditional counterinsurgency by pursuing a counterterrorism approach. As US troops secure one area and remove insurgents (or the insurgents move on, disperse, or blend into the countryside), the insurgents return and kill Afghans who cooperate when the US troops move on. Less and less people are willing cooperate because they’ve already observed what happens when the US troops move. There haven’t been enough US troops to stay and secure-stabilize areas. This is a significant part of the impetus for a 20:1000 ratio. This was also why I found the reported low-level of carry-through on threats of voter intimidation in the August Afghan elections to be “more interesting” and perhaps important. /Marg While the ANP certainly do have a problem with corruption, I don't think that's their only problem or even their largest problem. What I'd say is possibly their biggest problem is that a huge portion of them aren't cops, they're paramilitary. They don't provide the government service to the Afghan people that we expect cops to provide to us (keep us safe, maintain rule of law, etc.). Instead, they're often used to keep the Taliban at bay since the ANA can't be everywhere. While Afghanistan certainly does need some kind of force to do that, they also need a national and local police force that can do that job of police. The only way they're going to get that done is through a lot more training and a lot more recruiting. As far as targeting the Afghan people goes, that is the Taliban's target. I don't think they could target them more. That's their number one priority, because they understand insurgency operations in a way that we are only starting to understand COIN. The answer to the problem of the Taliban attacking when US forces move out isn't to have less US forces, it's to have more Afghan forces trained and prepared to take over for us as we pull out of an area so that the Afghan government can reach into those areas and provide services in exchange for the loyalty of the locals.

And of course those regulations (which you haven't even shown to exist) also demand that the electric utility make a 17 dollar profit per pair of bulbs on those energy saving programs and education. You're being shafted by your electric company, not by the climate change nazis.

I hereby invoke godwin's law. Godwin's Law is dead.

The government is totally coming to take your canned goods away and then redistribute them to members of ACORN. Sucker.

Ok, I understand better now. And while I'd agree that the actual church service should be about preaching the word or discussing religion or whatever (as opposed to selling crap from the minister's buddies) I don't see any problem with a church having a social/community aspect as well.

From here So he admittedly has taken their money in the past but stated that he no longer does. That's as far as I'm going to go for proof. I have no desire to dig up this guy's tax documents.

Except that these people are being treated in a government hospital and if they're reading the pamphlet, they've presumably asked a government-provided doctor about end of life counseling. Also, it seems entirely likely that they'd receive end of life care in those same government hospitals. Other than that, it's certainly none of the government's business.

You don't really need my help on that one. My point was that saying Hitler liked government health care and so does Obama, therefore Obama is just like Hitler is meaningless. You could just as easily say that Eisenhower was a Nazi because he championed the interstate highway system, just like the Autobahn. It would be equally ludicrous to say that Hitler was a vegetarian, therefore vegetarians are Nazis. Or Hitler had brown hair, therefore people with brown hair are evil. All of these comparisons have nothing to do with what made Hitler bad. Specifically, they have nothing to do with promoting racial ideologies, calling for the extermination of a group of people, or aggressively invading foreign countries.

I want you to link to the one that was brought up in the original post. The one that caused the people at the examiner website to (incorrectly) summarize that CO2 has no effect on the climate. THAT paper isn't one of the 200+ that you posted. You keep whining that kallend is arguing against the professor's credibility instead of the data, but I'm pretty sure you haven't even seen the data since you keep referring us back to sites and lists that do NOT contain the paper you're talking about.