…remains undeclared.
We haven’t declared war on anyone in almost eight decades, but we’ve been in almost continual fights, and lost thousands of troops. Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to be a voting issue for Congress. As Stephen Green says, the main two terrible things we did after 911, were the authorization of military force, and the Patriot Act. And it seems that Westphalia is dead.
[Update a few minutes later]
An interesting take on what’s going on in Syria.
It will be ironic if the Kurds finally end up with a homeland after all this.
Not a homeland but a semi-autonomous province of Syria most likely. It looks to me like Trump is playing chess to everyone else’s checkers. Or maybe the game is poker and he just knows when to fold a bad hand. But you know, orange bad.
Most of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi citizens. Most of the madrassas in Pakistan are Saudi-funded. Al-Qaeda was created by the Pakistanis. Iran is one of the largest supporters of terrorists in the world. Syria is controlled by Russia, Iran, and a couple others. Now that we don’t need oil from the Middle-East, (most others do, but we don’t!!!), why the diddling on the periphery? If we are not going to eliminate the causes of terrorism, and it looks like we don’t want to, then why waste time, people, and fortune on a sinkhole? I applaud president Trump and his actions.
This is why Afghanistan is a stalemate. Can’t win there without dealing with Pakistan. In the olden days we would have marched in there and occupied their farmland and places of cultural importance.
Just exactly against whom would you declare a state of war? Al Qaeda and the Taliban? You can bet those organizations would, formally, cease to exist the very next day. This is not a war of nation against nation, but there are very definitely people shooting at us, and they are not going to stop just because we run away from them. We have a choice, fight them over there, or fight them over here, but fight them we must, and damned be he who first cries, ‘Stop! Enough!’.
I saw a snarky comment about the Ohio debate that said something like “How bad is TDS? So bad that it’s got Bernie Sanders outraged that US Special Forces aren’t killing indigenous brown people in a third world country.”
That Thomas Wictor take was interesting. I have no idea if some of the stuff he says are true but…