So who we bombin’ next?
#bombpool
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It’s a toss-up between Iran and North Korea.
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I for one think that fighting in Afghanistan is a waste of time, money and lives. But if we are going to fight there, and we can define the enemy and our objectives, we should probably make an effort to win. If there are a large number of enemy combatants hiding in a tunnel complex, and we have weapons that can reach out and touch them there, then we should probably do so.
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I suspect we will see an ill advised, overconfident attack on North Korean nuclear facilities at some point in the next year or so, depending on how things go on the home front.
If the stock market does well and Congress starts behaving like adults, and Trump is riding high in the polls, then we can expect him to back off the war stuff. However, in the highly likely event that at least two of those things are impossible (while one is unpredictable and a crapshoot) then we can assume he will want to start a shooting war.
And if North Korea happens to have an extant viable nuke of some kind and blows up Seattle or LA (or more likely Seoul) then that will be all the Reichstag Fire needed to put the whole constitutional democracy experiment to bed for good.
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Trump’s been pushing for more civilian deaths, and this is an indiscriminate civilian-killer given the enormous blast radius. If he had nothing to do with it, it’d be a hell of a coincidence that it got pulled out now, given his directives.
Hopefully there weren’t any civilians living within a few miles of the target, because if there were, they got hurt.
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Maybe the problem is just that nobody tried bombing it hard enough.
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Didn’t you see?
I posted a fix for the “War in Afghanistan” problem!
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Understand what you are saying, but please consider; The Brits, Russians and US have been pounding these people with bombs since 1918. What has been accomplished? More martyrs. Thats what. And the worst part is we KNOW thats what happens.
So, WHO profits? Well, who are the biggest donors to the GOP and Trump?
Secondly, it would be great to imagine a bomb this size somehow only kills terrorists. Maybe.
And maybe we also just killed a bunch of women and children along with them.
Is that who we are now?
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I guarantee Brian Williams is orgasmic at the beauty.
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Did you read the first sentence of my post? I have been to some useless wars, and know one when I see it.
But I also believe that if the civilian or military leadership sends us to war, we should be able to use the tools in our arsenal to win quickly and decisively.
That would mean that we would have reasonable and achievable objectives in the conflict, and an identifiable enemy. I don’t see much of those things in Afghanistan.
I don’t have any problems with this or other specific conventional weapons being used, when the troops on the ground see them as appropriate.
If you want to win hearts and minds through construction of roads or irrigation systems, maybe you should send the peace corps or whatever. Since the leadership has decided to send in the Marines and Army instead, nobody should be surprised when, on occasions that they come under attack, our troops return fire. In this case, it appears that our troops have been under sustained attack by enemy forces who are using tunnel networks to carry out their attacks. We have a couple of tools in our arsenal designed to be effective against such an enemy. So they are using them.
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True. There’s not much tactical/operational justification for dropping this bomb, at least as far as protecting U.S. troops from sustained attack by Daesh is concerned. There might have been if we had 10s of thousands of American soldiers doing the bulk of the active combat operations in Afghanistan (as was the case during Prince Bush’s time), but that’s not the case anymore.
A single U.S. soldier (out of fewer than 8500 remaining in the country mainly as advisors to the ever-incompetent and ever-corrupt government in Kabul) was killed in the area of the ISIS base last week, but it’s not really clear if the incident warranted using this particular weapon in response – especially since it’s also unclear if the MOAB did any real damage to what may be a deep and hardened tunnel complex or if (as you imply) it killed civilians in the process.
This was another showy and noisy gesture from the regime that (dick-swinging and PR and oil and munitions stock prices aside) was likely a wash at best. Meanwhile, by the admission of the American commander in Afghanistan several thousand more international troops would be needed to break the stalemate with the Taliban (as distinct from Daesh, whom they hate) and there’s no broader military strategy into which this particular bombing would fit.
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I think they’ll have to resort back to tribalism and start from there, we need to remember that the borders of Iraq, Syria, & even Jordan were not drawn out through the natrual course of history, but rather by the Allies at the total end of the WWs , “Kurdistan” was suppose to be a thing also but that never happened
and then resolve the Sunni/Shia split, and resolve those that are okay being mixed
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This is just escalation, not a major change.
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And the bombings will continue until his approval ratings improve
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This is the real danger. I don’t think for one minute Trump is the one deciding to drop the MOAB. I don’t think Trump is in control of anything - he is absolutely out of control, in the most literal sense. The military now has pretty much a blank check to get whatever they want, and do whatever they want. They’ll come to Trump with everything on their wishlist since Reagan, and Trump will give it a rubber stamp because he thinks it makes him look powerful, when in reality he’s just feeding the militarization of our government - a tail that wags the dog. This will lead to deeper engagements, bigger deployments, and most likely another war. Maybe a big one. Maybe THE big one.
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Semantics and a dishonest argument. If one speaks about “size” of bombs in common parlance it’s not about dimensions but about destructive capabilities.
Even if one would consider weight as the deciding criteria it’s still wrong.
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Only if China okays it. Given how extremely fed up with North Korea they are by now, a possibility that’s ever so slightly past the ‘purely theoretical’ stage.
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If North Korea blows up Seattle, I think that will be more than just a convenient, cynical pretext for war. I mean, it’s a whole city. And all my stuff is there.
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Deconstructivism, more like.
And don’t play coy, you know perfectly well that Magritte wasn’t a Post-Modernist or a Surrealist (although a lot of people have the misconception that he was).
Anyway, the important thing here is to keep under the radar of the Five Families of Art.
Even Magritte and the Surrealists were fooled.
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