The Glade 4.0

Guardian

I'm basically in agreement with him. I wouldn't be sorry to leave NATO. I've had it with Europe expecting us to foot the bill while they get an equal say in calling the shots, especially if they are going to push idiocy like the ICC and other "soft power" initiatives that keep them on top of the world without having to spend for it.

If we did, I can only hope we'd transition to a more strategic, less interventionist (and probably cheaper) force structure, but... I might be hoping for too much. Hell, I'm definitily hoping for too much.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

We need to just start billing the rest of the world for participating in conflicts they have an interest in that outstrips their pathetic, atrophied abilities to project power.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

I'd be fine with that as long as we don't go crawling back the second we want them to pitch in on something.

Considering we usually want them to pitch in so they don't ***** about us doing **** unilaterally, I don't see this as an issue.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Yes, the U.S. clearly needs to go begging to Europe in search of military power.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

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Holy shitsnacks!

We tried really hard to get the rest of NATO to sign on to the Iraq war, and only pulled out the "NATO/The UN is useless" and "we should get out of NATO/The UN" when they rejected us.

After nearly a century of jumping in to save the world, we should retire from the job.

WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Panama, Grenada, Yugoslavia, Kuwait, Iraq, and of course dozens of not quite incidents, we're tired, we're way in debt, few like us and the ones that do don't trust our money anymore. Screw it, we're closing the fire station and just playing Canasta with Canada.

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The U. S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself. B. Franklin

"A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone." -- Tyrion Lannister, A Game of Thrones

This!

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"Said I never had much use for one, never said I didn't know how to use one!"~ Matthew Quigley

"nothing like a little meow in bed at night" ~ Bruskey

"I gotta float my stick same as you" Hondo Lane

"Fill your hand you son of a *****!"

It sounds like a good idea. Let someone else do it. It's tempting and alluring.

I'm all for doing less in the world. I think it's time we let Germany and japan deal with their home defense. It's going on 70 years. I don't think they are gonna seek revenge on us if we let them have their own army.

However who do you expect to deal with the Saddams and Adolphs of the world? France? Should we just stick our head in the sand and hope by the time they knock on our door we can gear up and deal with them?

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

Adolph we let do his thing for over a decade before we intervened, and then only because Japan attacked us. we let the Russians take Berlin. Saddam we helped put in power in 1979, and then let let him misbehave until 2003, when we captured him and gave him back to his people. They did the right thing, albeit messily.

The thing is, as long as we keep doing it, no one else will step up.

We should stop putting idiots in power because they are at the time friendly to us. When idiots get in power we should let someone else take them out for awhile.

When the first world powers needs an assassin, let them try to find someone else. Either that, or formally ask the USA to intervene.

Of course if you attack the USA in any way, all bets are off and you go down - immediately. No more Mr. Nice Country.

IMHO we did the right thing in Pakistan and saved face for the Pakistani government. We didn't know anything about it probably saved a bunch of their lives. Now it is time for us to come home and let Pakistan and Afghanistan have the governments they so richly deserve and are unable to prevent.

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The U. S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself. B. Franklin

"A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone." -- Tyrion Lannister, A Game of Thrones

Ok, first of all, the U.N. has nothing to do with NATO. The U.N. being useless has been a problem for a lot longer and has nothing to do with the reasons NATO is falling apart.

Second, We did not try to get NATO to sign on for Iraq; we tried to get individual NATO countries involved. NATO's treaty terms did not apply to Iraq. They did apply to Afghanistan and they were for the most part met - except that some nations like Britain, France, and Canada ended up actually fighting alongside the U.S. while other NATO nations demonstrated their soldiers were too fat, lazy, and ill-trained to do much fighting. Others were simply so worried their soldiers might actually shoot someone, or basically do anything other than put band-aids on the natives that they essentially refused to do anything that might involve combat.

Third, the Iraq war began 8 years ago and this is coming up now. We didn't "only pull out this line" because of the Iraq war at all; the issue of who was going to get involved and who wasn't is long dead.

Fourth, at the time of the Iraq war, the Cold War had only been over 12 years. At the time of Afghanistan/ 9/11 it had only been over 10. It has now been 20 years since the end of the cold war, so the amunt of time to gain perspective on the status of an alliance originally formed to stop the Soviets from pouring through the Fulda Gap has increased greatly.

Finally, we have the most recent example, for which there is a thread going on right now, of NATO wanting deal with Ghaddaffi, but being unable to do so without coming begging to the U.S. The U.S. had to take the lead on Kosovo and on the original Bosnia/Croatia/Serbia issue in the 1990s.

As a nation, evidence has been building for the U.S. that, apart from a select few countries, NATO isn't interested in taking its own defense seriously, and even among those countries, (namely Britain) the defense budget has been used as an endless source of alrgesse for social programs to the point that it's defense chiefs are warning there is nothing laft to cut. We already discussed this in a thread a whiel back.

In fact, even in 1985 at the height of the cold war, the U.S. spent 6.7% of its GDP on defense while European NATO members collectively spent about 3.5%. As of 2001, the U.S. spent about 3.5% of GDP on defense while European nations spent about 2.3%, which not only means that the spending gap, absurdly, narrowed after the Cold War but that the U.S. actually cut ore on a percent of GDP basis than the NATO nations that include so many whiners about U.S. defense spending. Here and here

So, no, we did not jsut break out this idea because of the Iraq war; this is an issue that has been building for a long time, and has its roots before the cold war even ended. By and large, European countries are unwilling to contribute to their own defense beyond a token effort, but want to help call the shots.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

It would have been just as wrong had NATO went along with the whole sordid affair. We could have been safe staying out of WWI&II as well. What makes people think we need to deal with the Saddams and Adolfs? Not that we don't support plenty of dictators when they go along with our hegemony... Wars under the pretense of protecting our economy is wrong (and also complete bullshit.) War is a racket. Unless Something is happening in Canada or close by in South America, we don't need to do **** except maybe well-wish. Foreign aid is just another political currency stolen from a country's citizens. When American's can see the information left out of history class, maybe we'll have a sane and constitutional foreign policy. YMMV.

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Mike I realize a lot if what you said and that Saddam was a devil of our own making. However I don't think he would have just stopped at invading Kuwait without a response.

We have to realize that evil exists, though and we can't just stick our heads in the sand until it's too late. I think there are better ways to accomplish that than the current dynamic though.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

Except that we have no business there? We do not need to go out in search of monsters to destroy. We have plenty of authortarian/statists in the US to fight off peacefully, let alone warring with some dictators far away. Our support of the oil cartel over there is foolish at any rate. Our history of trying to move political pieces over there is a list of failures and unintended consequences and has built the animosity that people in that region have towards the US. Or maybe they hate us for our freedoms. Someone please tell me what to think.

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

That has been our Modus Operandi for quite some time. It was too late for millions of people in WWII, hundreds of thousands in Iraq, probably similar numbers in Afghanistan. When we pull out of those last two, evil will return. When we pulled out of the south pacific we transported evil and gave it funding. We do not have the resources to stop evil all by ourselves while the rest of the world sits on their hands because we will do it and foot the bill, not any more and truth be told we never did.

We need partners, not lazy whiners. If we aren't going to get any help, we should take off the cape for awhile and let someone else try to be the superhero. Obama wimped out on Libya by going in. If we didn't want Qadhafi so bad he might have had more resolve.

World peace is not going to happen if we're the only one being the sheriff and have to constantly beg for a posse whenever a punk gets out of hand..

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The U. S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself. B. Franklin

"A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone." -- Tyrion Lannister, A Game of Thrones

I disagree with the second part of this statement.


See? That's the same reason the UN is useless.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Why is that? Would it be more fair to say it has nothing directly to do with why NATO is falling apart?



True, but the UN is useless on its own independantly of NATO and is made up of a lot more than just European countries.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Saddam waited until he had our permission to invade Kuwait.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

An alliance set up to counter the influence of the Soviet Republic is faltering after the fall of the Soviet Republic?

I totally didn't see that coming....