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Trump suggests giving Vladimir Putin whatever he wants
(newrepublic.com)
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this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2024
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This was his strategy in Afghanistan too!
Arguably that was always going to end with a Taliban takeover, but we could've done that without giving them a leg up.
If only we'd continued our brutal occupation of Afghanistan another 20 years, maybe the regime would've lasted another two weeks after we left.
Y'all are completely hopeless, enjoy your forever wars.
Are people like this just incapable of grasping nuance? I can only definitively speak for myself, but I'm pretty sure nobody here wants forever wars (maybe there are some dumb tankies that think they want it)
We all wanted out of Afghanistan, we just would prefer to have, you know, an actual plan.
But you know that already, don't you? Or are you actually that ignorant?
And what would that plan have looked like, exactly? How do you pull out of the country, watch the inevitable collapse of the regime you spent 20 years building, and hand the county over to your enemies without it being messy and getting egg on your face?
It was inevitable that things would play out the way they did, and it needed to happen. Biden made the call and accepted the fallout for a completely necessary and good decision that everyone had been calling for for years. And yet, rather than taking credit for it, y'all want to try to shift it over to Trump! That's insane to me.
Did I ever claim to be a fucking expert on military operations? I don't fucking know what that plan would look like. That doesn't mean I'm ok with how it went down.
It was absolutely not inevitable that it went down that way... Do you already forget how bad that shit was?
That's a completely ridiculous stance. You have no alternative whatsoever to what happened, and as I pointed out, it was always going to be messy because it represented 20 years of total failure, but you're criticizing it... why? Because the news told you to? The same news that lied us into the wars in the first place?
I didn't forget how bad the pullout was, I just also didn't forget how bad the occupation was. Ending the war deserves enough props to outweigh any mistakes made in the pullout.
I, someone who has no experience with military tactics whatsoever, personally, have no alternative and that means there must be no alternative.
I appreciate how much credit you're giving me here... but no. Don't be obtuse.
I know you're smarter than that.
What I said is that you have no alternative, which you just agreed with.
So that returns to my question - if you're not aware of any alternative, you have zero solutions to what could've been done differently, even with the benefit of hindsight, then what, exactly, has led you to make this criticism? Because the news told you to, the same news that told all sorts of lies to justify the wars?
Jesus Christ do I need to do everything for you?
I'm not an expert, so I don't need to provide an alternative, nor would I ever be expected to.
So instead of just making some shit up and then choosing to believe it, I'd rather take a look at what people who are actually experts might say about whether or not we could have done better...
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/30/politics/state-deparment-afghanistan-withdrawal-report/index.html
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/top-us-generals-testifying-congress-chaos-withdrawal-afghanistan/story?id=108281065
https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2024/03/19/congress/pushing-back-afghan-withdrawal-milley-biden-mckenzie-00147797
Oh hey look, even our own government agrees with me that we could have done better. They made a whole report about it: https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/State-AAR-AFG.pdf
This was Donald Trump's "plan," carried out by the Biden Administration (who were put in a shitty position that required them to adhere to the existing "plan"). Biden administration isn't blameless, but this is absolutely on Trump.
It's honestly pretty fucking weird that you are so adamant about this specific thing. I'm kind of curious as to why?
Why? You wanna know why? Because from the earliest age that I was aware of politics existing, we were sending people overseas to commit mass murder for no fucking reason! Why? Because I was calling for it to stop since I was thirteen and there was never any indication that it ever would! It legitimately could have continued for another 20 years as the corpses piled up higher and higher while having no meaningful voice to oppose it! My own damn brother came back so fucked up from the experience that he made my family's life a living hell and eventually went out to try to kill some innocent person! And we got off so unbelievably lucky, do you have any idea, and shred of understanding of what the people of those countries went through, for absolutely nothing? How dare you ask me why. You have a fucking responsibility to understand the horrors that you're supporting if you want to criticize the withdrawal.
But thank you for answering my question, you are indeed, blindly trusting what the "experts" in the media and government tell you to think, even when those exact same "experts" lied to the public and faced zero consequences, completely failed to show the perspective of the victims, and never experienced any personal cost from it.
It's absolutely bizarre to me that y'all refuse to give your own guy credit for ending the war. Trump "made a plan" but left it for the next guy to carry out so that he'd have to take the flak from the media when they inevitably attacked whoever ended the war. If he'd won reelection, he very well could've torn up that deal and left it to the next guy again, prolonging the war. Biden could've done the same, but he accepted the responsibility and took the flak, and there is absolutely no reason I can see for y'all to accept the media's framing of that as a bad thing, except that you just love war so much you won't take credit for ending it even when it would benefit you.
Ah, by the end I realized that this is really about team sports for you. And that's why you keep ignoring most of what he's saying.
Standing in a pool of blood over a mother's corpse: "Oh, I guess this is all just team sports to you, isn't it?"
Uh huh
You should take a moment to read up on the topic.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020%E2%80%932021_U.S._troop_withdrawal_from_Afghanistan
Trump signed the original agreement with the Taliban. Biden delayed the deal from May until September. Trump had a year to handle sorting the agreement he made.
Most of us understand both presidents failed in it's execution. It's important you know that Trump lit a short fuse and walked away.
Trump failed in it's execution because we were still there when he left office. Biden succeeded in it's execution as evidenced by the fact that we are no longer there.
I will repeat my question, since you didn't answer it at all: How do you pull out of the country, watch the inevitable collapse of the regime you spent 20 years building, and hand the county over to your enemies without it being messy and getting egg on your face?
Either go full imperialist and take over the country, making it a US territory, or never bother in the first place.
That's...not a plan for exit.
I mean, I generally agree but this is a flippant, bad answer.
I know, but the whole situation was fuk
Are you 12...?
How about just "never bother in the first place?"
No, we should've left shortly after killing Bin Laden.
If we had pulled out then, the regime we were propping up would instantly collapse and the withdrawal would've been messy and y'all would be criticizing Obama for pulling out the exact same way you're criticizing the pullout the way it actually played out, because it was always going to play out the same way.
Criticism >>>> More American soldiers dying in a pointless war
Mike Gravel said it best:
That quote directly contradicts you criticizing the stance of giving up on Afghanistan. I should be the one quoting it at you. I cannot make any sense of your position whatsoever.
Not giving up, tipping the scales to favor a terrorist organization. His "deal" gave the Taliban greater legitimacy, bolstered their numbers, and probably gave them all a good laugh as we held up our end and they almost immediately violated the agreement.
So what? We got out, so it was a success. The Taliban were always going to take over, they didn't get "legitimized" by making a deal with the US, they got legitimized by winning the war. And so what if they did? Afghanistan is officially Not Our Problem.