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It's schizo boomerism. But gotta admit, it was quick and effective. Bet this is what Putin wanted to do in Ukraine. Started before lunch and done in time for dinner. Impressive.
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.
“If the US hadn’t been meddling in the ME”
Maybe we could have figured out another energy source earlier but that was prime oil-age economics. You can throw shade now because Americans no longer remember how our economy would shutdown from an oil crisis. Today we could close to fully transaction to Tesla’s and nuclear, but I don’t think we had the tech stack back then. Energy crisis do tend to solve themselves so maybe we could have build an alt tech stack after a decade of crisis.
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