The Glade 4.0

Your point is valid. In fact, I believe we should bring back the option of Champions dueling in place of an actual battle. This would be great for television ratings.

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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
█ ♣ █

And after Pence --> Ryan --> Hatch --> Tillerson --> Mnuchin --> Mattis --> Sessions --> Zinke --> Young(SecAg) --> Ross (SecCommerce) --> Hugler (SecLabor) --> Price --> Carson --> Chao --> Perry --> DeVos

There is no situation that we're not utterly ****. Except Mattis. Maybe.

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Holy shitsnacks!

Sorry, Feudalism is not making a return any time soon.

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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."

Um, from the article:

The entire basis for this nonsense about the CIA is "surely Assad's not that dumb". But... what's in it for the CIA? It makes no sense at all.

The present leadership was not in a position to do anything when those events happened, however, so this really isn't relevant.



It seems less than effective because you're using a definition of "effective" that has nothing to do with the goals. The goal of this strike was to remind Assad and Russia that we have limits of what we will tolerate; that not attempting to force regime change was not a clean slate to do whatever they please.

ISIS is not getting any more recruits because of this. This is the bog-standard response to everything we do "But it will cause more people to radicalize!!" Individual events are not what cause radicalization on a numerically meaningful scale. Furthermore, anyone who would join ISIS for any reason is someone that needs killing anyhow. We are not going to nice ISIS out of existence.

Regarding Russia accusations - who cares what they accuse us of? "Illegal" is meaningless rhetoric in international affairs. Nations regularly fling "illegal" at anything they don't like. Actually, it's become a habit even domestically with people thinking "illegal" and "unconstitutional" meaning "anything I disagree with." I don't know what "agreement" you're talking about or why any "consensus" was needed, either.\



See, this is the thing - no matter what Trump did or didn't do, you were going to find fault with it because it was Trump doing it. This isn't happening because Trump. Hillary Clinton wanted to get in there and have a no-fly zone in the worst way. So did a number of other Republicans. We'd no doubt be even more deeply involved if Clinton, Rubio, or Bush were elected (this was the worst thing about the Republican field; too much nation-building interventionism among otherwise good candidates). You start out complaining about "more war", then here in this post you're on about "consensus" you're all worried about provoking the Russians, but you also then want to ***** that the response wasn't strong enough.



I'm disagreeing with you because you're wrong, not because you've decided to turn yourself into a libtard snowflake. You're just repeating the same bullshit about the strike being ineffective, despite the fact that you have no knowledge basis whatsoever to conclude this. You want so badly for absolutely, 100% of everything about this strike to be 100% terrible that you are making arguments that can only be true if the military doesn't know what a Tomahawk is capable of.

On top of that, you can't have it both ways. You can't on the one hand say "this isn't our concern, no more wars" but then also demand we take in refugees (while ignoring the source of the refugee problem), complain that we might be causing more violence by retaliating, complain we didn't retaliate hard enough, and ***** that past administrations didn't strike in circumstances that were worse so therefore this one shouldn't now. Not only do many of these propositions not make sense on their own merit, they're a heap of mutual contradictions.

Hell, a while back you were posting about how we ought to send a SEAL team to take out Kim Jong Un. Never mind the suicidal nature of such a mission, it's obvious you have no coherent view of what should happen in the world. You've entirely wrapped up in making sure that everything Trump does is fit into your newly adopted worldview, but you don't even have that coherently worked out. RD, Lenas, even Xeq- I often disagree with them but a coherent viewpoint is discernible; I can at least get some idea of what endstate they would like out of a given problem, even if I disagree with it. The same applies to Taly; I am not entirely sure yet if I agree or disagree with taking a shot at Assad himself (I am still giving that idea thought), but at least it fits into a coherent viewpoint she seems to hold. I have no idea what you think Syria ought to actually look like, and if you do have one I suspect it is simply a vomit of idealistic nonsense that no leader could ever achieve.

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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."

Without any leaks, what are you basing that on? There were tons of leaks, purposeful and accidental, as well as the standard host of German spies.

To combat this they didn't tighten up the information, they engaged in a misinformation campaign. They leaked more. They leaked that the invasion would come in southern france. in greece. in denmark. They pulled Patton out of the invasion and gave him command of a fake army base that threatened Calais; with literally fake tanks and soldiers. It was believable enough to prevent hitler from reinforcing normandy until too late.

It's actually a fascinating story - you should read up on this.

I don't recall that being in the article when I read it; he may have added it later - which is fine, the Durandal is obviously relevant to his topic.

However, when they say it would "knock out a runway for a more substantial amount of time" that really means "several more hours". Several more hours would, indeed, be a substantial amount of time in the kind of NATO-Pact conflict that everyone envisioned when Durandal was created. Knocking an airfield out for 5 hours rather than 2 could be critical in terms of second, third, etc. order of effects, and you'd be trying to repair the runway under threat of further attack in a major war.

When there's no pressure, even a Durandal-made crater isn't THAT hard to fix. The material to fill the hole is... all around it. You can bulldoze it back in, fill it, and top it with a number of different methods. It might not be the best long-term, but it will get the runway in action again well enough for short-term purposes.

Holes in the ground are not a hard problem to solve, even for a crappy military like the Syrians.

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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."

Elmo has this idea of the "deep state" as an anthropomorphic thing that has coherent goals and ideas. He's always been that way about "government". Elmo is one of those people that will happily tell you the government is totally incompetent at everything right before telling you they can orchestrate amazingly complex and precise conspiracies with no one finding out. When you're under the illusion that everyone in the "deep state" thinks in lockstep according to the strawman you've made of them, it's easy to see where that idea comes from.

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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."

Actually... they were. At least a lot of Congress was. And they said no strikes even though a far greater number of people were killed by chem weapons. Those same people? Super happy now that Trump pushed the button. Hypocrites.



And was that achieved? I would hesitate to say yes. Because we achieved nothing of substance. Because of how the base was targeted. All show, no go.



We're apparently not going to *anything* them out of existence. Even after Cheeto Hitler said he was gonna do it day 1. We apparently still don't have a plan for them. Honestly though, I really don't mind them. They're not in a position to really do anything to us. NK is more concerning overall.



Illegal under our constitution. I don't particularly care what Russia thinks about illegality. Putin's a **** criminal too. President has to get congressional approval to attack a sovereign country when our stuff isn't attacked or threatened. Its a civil war. Not our business. But if we were going to strike, we should have struck decisively. This, we did not do.



Yeah, she would have been terrible too. Trump ran on the premise of nationalist non-intervention. He stated frequently not to go in. We knew that's what we would have gotten with Hilldawg. Trump... well, he lied. But that's not news. He said he'd do a lot of horrible things. He's tried and been thwarted. Or Hasn't tried. Or did the exact opposite of what he said. The hypocrisy is glaring here. That's all I'm saying.


Merely a wish list. **** needs a bullet... or 59 tomahawks. Provided we can target them properly for maximum effect.



Well, I can have it all those ways. "This isn't our concern, no more goddamn wars." But, if war, then accept refugees. Else, when retaliating, ensure civilian damage is minimized, and regime damage is maximized for quick resolution. Past administrations didn't strike (mainly because of congress at the time), but if we do strike, it should be decisive.

None of that is contradictory.

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Holy shitsnacks!

I should clarify... I don't think bombing the presidential palace stands a reasonable chance of killing Bashar al-Assad. I wouldn't even frame such an attack as an attempt on Assad's life. If it happened to get him, great. That's not the point. The point is, it would send a much more serious warning message than blowing up a few planes... And it's not exclusive of blowing up a few planes, either.

_________________
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
█ ♣ █

I don't understand why President Trump launching an attack deserves an appeal to the Constitution, but when Obama does it a few times there's no outrage from you.

Even if we stipulate the reason Obama wouldn't go after Syria is because he'd never have gotten Congress to approve it, that's more a function of the fact that Obama solidly undermined U.S. credibility in the Middle East with his failed leading from behind approach. Ramming a missile up a camel's *** in Syria (as Ben Shapiro is wont to say) wouldn't have send any kind of message because everybody would know there would be no follow-up. Trump on the other hand is an unknown to world leaders. This kind of attack will have a message, and a lasting one if he is actually consistent.

But I think the reality is that Obama's decision to not pursue action was more because he didn't want to piss off Iran and ruin his legacy in that deplorable Iran-nuke deal rather than a moral or legal crisis:

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The Dude abides.

Islamic State /= Legitimate Syrian Government.

You expect consistency from Tangerine Jong-Il? lols.

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Holy shitsnacks!

Okay, so your argument is it's not an act of war to launch attacks inside a sovereign nation's borders without their permission as long as the the government isn't the one targeted? I don't imagine China or Russia would share your view on not calling that an act of war. I seem to think Pakistan has considered it an act of war, they are just not in a position to do anything about it.

At this point, I can't tell if this is Trump Derangement Syndrome, you're trolling, or both.

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The Dude abides.

Well, to be fair, the Bush, Obama and Trump Administrations have all argued that, as a matter of domestic law, the 2001 AUMF re al-Qaeda authorizes them to attack other terrorist groups anywhere in the world, and as a matter of international law, that attacking terrorist groups on foreign territory that is effectively outside the control of the government is not actually an act of war against the legal sovereign of that territory. Neither of those arguments is particularly persuasive, but they are at least making them. In the case of Trump's attack on Syrian forces, though, those arguments inarguably don't apply, so he actually is relying on his Article II powers as Commander in Chief under the Constitution as the source of domestic legal authority, and I don't think they're bothering with much pretense about international law at this point.

This.

Attacking ISIS forces in country is different than attacking that Sovereign Nation's own military.

Trump provided a relatively thin veneer of legality by saying that chemical weapons provide a clear and present danger to US interests. Whether or not that's true? /shrug, I tend to believe not.

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Holy shitsnacks!

Unlike al Qaeda, ISIS is a defined nation, with soldiers and territory. It's conventional war, rather than terrorism.

_________________
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
█ ♣ █

Not really. Unrecognized nation, with unrecognized borders. They also act a hell of a lot like terrorists.

Perhaps. The other side of this argument is that destroying aircraft degrades his ability to deploy gas in the future. On the other hand, attacking his palace is likely to be seen as a shot at him personally, and might push him into acts of desperation that are not entirely logical. Of course in Assad's case it's hard to envision what might be worse than what he's already done and that he has the physical capacity to do, but the point is that the problem with dictators is that if you don't want to have to go in and dig them out of bunkers bloodily and messily, you have to give them an opportunity for "retirement" - disgusting as it may seem.

If you don't, or if you do and go back on it, the next dictator will see no reason not to fight to the death since he knows he's not getting out of it anyhow.

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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."

Both of you are right. ISIS acts and behaves like a nation-state to the best of its ability. It tries to undertake the activities of a nation-state, right down to removing the trash, providing medical care, fighting fires, and enforcing the law (the appalling results of some of those notwithstanding). On the other hand, they sponsor terrorism and behave like terrorists, and aren't recognized by anyone. They exist in a grey, proto-nation status of sorts.

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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."

Only insofar as Syria is not obviously contained within the same use of force resolution as AQ. We could, in fact, even question the degree to which Syria remains a sovereign nation as it obviously has only limited control over its own territory.

Donald Trump can point to Thomas Jefferson's actions against the Barbary Pirates as ample precedent. ]



But you're not the President.

More substantially, we generally like for chemical weapons not to be used anywhere. It behooves us for the use of chemical weapons by anyone, at any time, to be regarded as "that gets you hammered; don't do it." That makes it much less likely that they would be deployed against us.

That is why Saddam Hussein didn't use them in 1991, despite all the talk and despite deploying them against Iran. Inside the magazines of each of the six aircraft carriers involved in Desert Storm was the response. He knew what the consequence was.

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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."

Ok, there are hypocrites in Congress, but Congress wasn't and isn't the one who decides this. The President is. Are you suggesting that Trump's decisions ought to be driven by making sure Congressmen =don't appear to be hypocrites? Ok, good luck with that. Maybe we ought to also have talked about the hypocrisy over judicial filibusters, which are totally bad when Republicans do them but totes ok if Democrats want to do them because Senate traditions or something - against a guy previously confirmed by unanimous vote. I don't think "clean up Congressional hypocrisy" is a reasonable expectation of any President.

Or how about the fact that the situation was different. Congress went along with the removal deal in 2013, taking a chance on avoiding action at the time. Evidently that didn't work. Now, we're trying something different. Adjusting your position based on changes to the situation or the ineffectiveness of a previous position doesn't make one a hypocrite.



What do you actually know about targeting anything, with anything? Really? You're not in a position to say "yes" or "no". As far as the political effects, it's too soon to tell. We may not know for months. I can guarantee you that there are very frank and very one-way conversations between Russia and Syria right now, but we won't hear about them. They are revising their own courses of action based on this new information.

Trump, after all, just demonstrated that Russia can't or won't attempt to defend Assad against a missile strike, despite the presence of at least one S-400 system. That called Russia's ability as a patron into question. Russia is trying to save face right now, to at least some degree, and with Russia all is maskirova.



We've stepped up air attacks on them considerably - day 1 as a matter of fact, when Mattis was sworn in. The Iraqi military is making progress, slow as it may be. I'm not sure what you think is realistic, and you can't have it both ways. You can't complain that we're not doing anything to ISIS, then turn around and complain that we shouldn't be because NK. This is what I mean about incoherency - the only thing you are interested in is finding a reason to criticize Trump. Your sole actual concern here is affirming your view to yourself.

Also, when you make comments like "Cheeto Hitler" you sound like a **** retard. Really. Donald Trump's skin color isn't even remotely relevant, and he's not Hitler, nor even close to it. All you're doing is revealing an emotional investment in the situation that precludes any sort of detachment or ability to assimilate information that might contradict your view.



So, you brought up Russian accusations of illegality, under our Constitution despite the total irrelevancy of Russian views on our Constitution and that you don't care what they think? WTF are you even talking about? "It was illegal but we should have struck decisively". WTF is this bullshit? Should we have nuked Assad? Invaded? What the hell do you think a decisive strike looks like? you're just amal

Furthermore, the President does not need Congressional approval just because the target is a sovereign country. Period, end of story. This has never been true. there is no such language in the Constitution, and Congress put no such language in the War Powers Act, and no President has ever been held to the standard, and there is no supporting court decision.





He didn't go in; he fired some standoff missiles the Syrians can't reply to. People don't want to see years-long nation-building wars, that doesn't mean they oppose a quick spanking for some dictator using chemicals on civilians.



Maybe you can stop pretending the Navy doesn't know how to use Tomahawks and you do?



No, you actually can't. Some of those goals inherently compromise other ones. You can't just "ensure regime damage is maximized and civilian damage is minimized" at the same time by magic. What makes you think that simply getting rid of Assad in a "decisive" strike is a "resolution"? Ok, he's gone, now what? You're just throwing out buzzwords and its obvious you not only haven't, but don't want to, confront the fact that these problems are a lot more complicated than just "yeah we should do stuff better".

It's also hilarious that you think Obama was making his decisions because of a Republican Congress rather than not wanting to be the guy that got into a new ground war. It's almost as if in your rush to make Republicans responsible for everything, you're denying the agency of everyone else and don't even realize it.



Just do us a favor and don't vote in the future. Really. It's not eve the liberalism; it's the utter disconnect from reality. There's no way you can seriously think that.

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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!

I'm not going to mine for any type of quote about Tomahawks being targeted properly. I'm only going to say that at one time, long before GPS, which can be accurate to within 1 meter, the US military had the ability to put nuclear missiles within 10 meters of target. You can bet that any tomahawk that didn't have an engine failure hit within 3 feet of its target.

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"If you haven't got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me." - Alice R. Longworth

"Good? Bad? I'm the guy with the gun." - Ash Williams

Exactly. So we deliberately missed most of the air base.

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Holy shitsnacks!