House passed bill 407-16 to expedite getting Afghan allies to America. I’m guess if you take a guess at the 16 Republican No vote you can get pretty close without looking them up.
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New interview question I ask to job candidates:
If you had 4 cars and a helicopter, how much cash would you be able to fit in them?
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That’s OK, it’s not really that big of a news story the last several days or anything.
Because he was willing to do the right thing even though it sucked. Trump was also going to do it. Obama refused for 8 years and passed the buck, Bush started the whole mess in the first place. The end being messy is just the climax of 20 years of a huge mess. The pullout was always going to be a cluster****. The only question was what sort of cluster**** it was going to be.
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We all knew it would be a cluster f#$%. I think the timing was really just public opinion polling. As are most things.
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On public opinion polling, I think “stop tweeting” was a consistent message Trump ignored and part of the reason he lost in 2020.
Yeah we judge decisions based on how they poll publicly over the week after they’re made these days. That’s why our government is a $hitshow. We are a prosperous and bored people who observe the governing of our nation daily like it’s a spectator sport. We have to determine the winner and the loser immediately so we can point fingers and play the blame game. The problems with this philosophy are starting to pull at the threads of our core as a nation. This meme sums Americans up perfectly.
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Claim apparently made first by the Russian ambassador. There’s going to be a lot of propaganda stories flying around for the next while.
I agree with a lot of this. But it didn’t have to be THIS level of clusterfu**. This is a massive show of incompetence.
BBC Analysis
We never fail not to learn from history, like the recent enough invasion of Afghanistan by USSR.
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We failed to learn from our own invasion of Iraq. If you recall, Iraq was subdued very quickly, faster than our military leaders anticipated. It was celebrated as a huge show of superior logistics, and shock and awe.
But the more important lesson there was this. The Iraqi people did not like there leaders. There was no way they were going to fight to the death for a government they didn’t want in the first place.
Years later, we are shocked and awed by the Afghans quick collapse. Go figure.
We’re great if the mission is purely “show up, kick some ass, take no names.” The setting up of a stable government after and the clean-up after the initial, awe-inspiring victories where we have to track down all the stragglers who got away? We suck quite a bit at that part.
The fallacy is that we set up regimes to be self sufficient. We step up regimes to be specifically dependent on our involvement so of course they collapse when we withdrawal.
Self determination is only the goal if the self determines we are their superior and our interests are met first.
Beau does a pretty good job of explaining how “we lost the peace.”
“If Vietnam falls, is China next??”
And go figure Vietnam is now an ally. Sure took 20 years after the war ended to normalize relations and another 15 for them to formally become allies so who knows what the future will bring.
If China wasn’t so aggressive with its neighbors Vietnam would still be a minor opponent on the world stage. Its not that they like us so much as they are afraid Pooh bear will take their honey.
Agree with this statement.
Collapse was inevitable. But did people specifically need to get crushed by a cargo plane? Probably not. Does it matter? Probably not much. The US has never been reliable. But it’s not great anyway.
China invaded Vietnam for 3 weeks and after about 50 thousand people died, they were like “okay I think Vietnam learned their lesson” and then withdrew. I wonder what would have happened if we just went in, popped Osama and then went out.
I mean I think we definitely wanted to go in and pop Osama. It wasn’t intentional that it took ages to get him.