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Notes -
mission accomplished
Taking out a leader means nothing. Leaders come and go.
Respectfully disagree.
Sometimes it seems to me like Afghanistan, Iraq and Ukraine have gotten people convinced that the way to do military action is to occupy a foreign country and turn it into a vassal and that's the standard by which all military operations must be measured. Iraq and Afghanistan failed because the vassalization process broke down, not because of the invasion.
This isn't true! Limited military operations, including punitive expeditions and decapitation strikes, can be successful if the goals are modest.
I don't think Putin could have achieved all of his goals merely by removing Zelensky, but arguably if we had tried this in the Middle East (no invasion, just grabbing bin Laden) we would all be much, much better off.
What's happening in Venezuela looks like a repeat of our removal of Manuel Noriega, which was viewed as a successful operation for the States. Obviously it's too soon to tell if there's a Part 2: the US could still decide to go back for more and get bogged down. But overall I think taking out leaders is actually a pretty viable strategy in the right circumstances.
So we will soon have regular flights to the US to bring cocaine.
https://www.nytimes.com/1991/08/13/world/cocaine-is-again-surging-out-of-panama.html
Neocon wars always end up with drugs and refugees.
Just removing one person won't do much, the regime can easily continue even if one person disappears.
I think that's bad but that's not a failure of the military operation if the military operation's goals are more modest than "end all cocaine flights for all time." By which sorts of standards no policies, wars, or other human endeavors are successful.
Are we defining "neocon war" here as a war that ends up with drugs and refugees or what.
Correct. But also, the regime can easily not continue if even one person disappears. It depends a lot on the regime and the person!
Imperialist war projects end up causing chaos. Chaos opens up for refugees and migrants. The war to bring feminism to Afghanistan 10x the world's heroin production. US meddling in LATAM has caused millions of refugees to pour into the US and has helped drug smuggling.
All war projects end up causing chaos; war is chaos. Look, your original argument was that removing a leader was meaningless. I don't think that's correct. If the US had committed to merely removing AQ leadership during the GWOT there would have been less chaos. But by your telling that would have been meaningless. Which justifies the massive war project that was the Global War on Terror, since merely removing UBL and other AQ leaders wouldn't have accomplished anything. But now (in your telling) we're Kafka-trapped, since a massive war project to hunt down and eliminate terrorists would have created more chaos instead of stability. So the proper response to hostile, violent, or illegal acts against your nation-state or populace, apparently, is to do nothing.
Forgive me for wondering if you didn't get it exactly backwards. You'll notice that Afghanistan was moved on about 3 seconds after the Taliban banned heroin; heroin production massively soared under Coalition occupation, and then after the US finally left Afghanistan heroin suddenly dried up in North America and subsequently was banned (again) by the Taliban, cratering production. Very mysterious - it's almost as if between 2001 and 2021 whoever was interested in keeping the heroin supply going developed a superior alternative.
If the US hadn't been meddling in the middle east there wouldn't have been a GWOT to start with. If the US hadn't let people who live in a cave in Afghanistan into flight school it would never have happened.
Killing Bin Ladin would not have changed much in Afghanistan. Spending 20 years trying to spread DEI to Afghan villagers didn't help either. The US should focus on the US, not regime change.
Sure, maybe. It doesn't follow from that that you can just let people blow stuff up and shrug your shoulders.
The US is and has always been, at least in part, a maritime merchant republic. All such nations throughout history were inevitably getting embroiled in affairs abroad because their domestic politics rely on trade and trade relies on stable, non-hostile trading partners and open sea lanes. This is why the Monroe doctrine exists and why the US got involved in the Middle East almost instantly upon becoming a nation.
You could wish for some alternative version of the United States that was not this way, but you would be disappointed. "That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way."
This is by no means me endorsing or supporting any given US military action. In fact I am broadly critical of US military interventions! But the idea that a merchant maritime republic wouldn't regularly be performing military actions overseas, including regime change in extreme cases, is a fantasy.
China does more overseas trade than the US. They are the biggest trading partner with almost every country in the middle east. They didn't have to waste trillions fighting forever wars there to dominate trade.
The US spent two trillion in Iraq for China to be Iraqs biggest oil buyer. Venezuela was not a threat to American martime trade.
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