The Glade 4.0

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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
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Ah, fair enough. I missed DFK!'s expanded comments after my post as well which explained what he thought was mod worthy.

I can even see his point. I wonder if he saw mine, which was that there is a long history of making "You're wrong" comments with the subtext of if you were smart enough, educated enough or awake enough, you'd get it. Seems to me that isn't contributing to the "nicer, gentler" environment either.

Or, "I think you're missing the point" is a staple of modern conversation used to get people to try and think of things in a different way; and, when asked for clarification, the speaker clarifies.

Don't play coy.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

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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
█ ♣ █

I am sorry, I didn't mean invade I was looking at nation's we "intervened" in since we didn't invade the nations/states you listed of Somalia, Bosnia or Kosovo.



It is the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, we left it in a mess.



I am sorry, I meant Nicauragua. I just finised reading The Path Between the Seas and have Panama on the brain



We intervened and left it a mess, regardless of whether or not we should have been there.

We also intervened in Cuba and most of the South American nations indirectly via the CIA and most of those regimes brought their countries right to the brink of failed nation states.

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Would you elaborate for the geopolitical neophyte in the room? ;-P

I completely agree and that is why I support this forum. Make the posts about the subject at hand, not about the poster. We have Hellfire for that sort of post, and at last I can almost completely stay out of Hellfire.

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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
█ ♣ █

Sorry about my earlier post. I edited it.

Not exactly. It was a complete mess when we got there and our goal was to avoid it becoming a violent mess. We never had any intention of rebuilding the place; just preventing a bloodbath.



We left Nicaragua in 1933, and we weren't really there to fix its problems in the first place. We've had several successes since then, so I don't see how it relates. It should also be pointed out that we didn't attack Nicaragua; we initially went there at the request of its President.

If you mean sponsoring the Contras in the 1980s, that was another instance where we didn't actually go into the country with the military nor did we have any intent to rebuild it, like Afghanistan at the same time. In any case, the country is quite stable at this point.



Leaving a country in the mess it was in when we got there is not the same thing as creating the mess and then leaving.



Intervening with the CIA isn't relevant either. It provides no useful comparison to nations where we've invaded or occupied the country.

No one ever said the U.S. had a perfect nation-bulding record. However, the best example (Somalia) was a total mess when we got there anyhow; it wasn't the result of the invasion as in Iraq (which really wasn't exactly dandy, but still a lot better). If every nation we've had some foriegn policy involvement with beyond an embassy is a nation we've "intervened" in, then I can claim practically every NATO country as a success.

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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."

Point taken. I will try to exercise more care.

So to center the discussion, we are only referring to states we have deployed troops in with the intention of rebuilding it from the ground-up who were quasi-stable before. We are not talking about direct actions taken overtly or co-vertly in another nation for any other reason?

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We're talking about states where we have deployed troops with any intention of creating a new, stable existance for that state, and we're talking about messes that existed directly because of our entrance and occupation, not the fact that it was a shithole to begin with. In other words, basically situations similar to Iraq and Afghanistan.

I'll even give you Somalia as a failure just because we didn't accomplish.. much of anything, and even if our goal wasn't nation building we still pretty much failed at whatever it was.

In any case, we've got considerable successes: Kosovo, Bosnia, Germany, Japan, Panama, and possibly South Korea (although we were ejecting a foriegn invader there). No one's argued it's a perfect record, but saying we typically leave a big mess is just not accurate.

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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."

By that definition then, what about the Phillipines? Not harping, just want to get your take on the situation.

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The Phillipines were a place we went into and actually took posession of, and then eventually gave their independance. In that case, much of the destruction and mess was created by someone else invading one of our posessions (it had Commonwealth status) and we were essentially cleaning up our own territory before giving it it's independance. It more or less fits the definition although it's a bit different because we didn't just occupy it, we owned it.

In any case, it's been a fairly stable country. It has had it's flare-ups but certainly nothing to the level that we'd contemplate returning there in force. It's actually doing reasonably well; Wikipedia claims it has the 47th largest economy in the world with a GDP of 166 billion annually, with an unemployment rate of 7.6% last year, not all that bad considering the state of the world economy.

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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."

Weren't they also declared a terrorist safe haven by us?
http://www.cfr.org/publication/9365/

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I don't miss him because I don't aim at him. His security guards tend to be much better shots than me anyway.

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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

Yes. However, you'll notice that it's limited to the southern Phillipines, specifically the island of Mindano. It's a safe haven in that the geography and a specific minority of the population make it very difficult to combat terrorism (and a great deal of it is domestic terrorism to the Phillipines).

We do occasionally provide various types of assistance to the Phillipines in relation to that, but aain, they're not a terrorist haven in the way that Libya used to be, or Afghanistan was, etc.

Like I said, they ahve their flare-ups and problems, but I don't think it's all that different from Germany having the Red Army Faction, Ireland and the various foms of the IRA, Italy's "Red Brigade" or any number of others.

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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."

No, I don't miss him. I blame him for Obama. If he didn't piss off so many people, we would never have elected someone so far to the left.

There's definitely some truth there.

Some truth, yes, but not all. The Republican Congress deserves its share of the blame.

The one that was out for 2 years by 2008?

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

Not to be that guy but I seriously think the Republicans saw the writing on the wall and threw the last election. They didn't want this economy and unresolved international issues to be on them.

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Ya think Hopwin? You aren't alone.

That's been my theory since the stuff McCain was doing looked like he was starting to throw the election.

Sarah Palin, though amusing, was hard for me to take seriously as a VP candidate.

His campaigning seemed (to me) to have lost energy about the time he chose her.

It reminded me a whole lot of when George H.W. Bush threw the re-election campaign.

Then W. started up with the bail-out program, at that point I knew they were bankrupting the country so that Barry would have a hell of a time getting the economy back together.

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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'm not a big Palin fan but her nomination charged up his candidacy as I saw it. Generated a lot of attention and got the base fired up. Where he blew it was his horrible reactions to the economy tanking.

I believe he was polling ahead until that point.

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“Strong people are harder to kill than weak people, and more useful in general”. - Mark Rippetoe