Sudden Sam wrote:Before everyone goes off the deep end about AOC's comments on Afghanistan (the far right is screaming that she said we shouldn't have responded to the 9/11 attacks), that's not what she said.
Challenged on not intervening, she said that didn't mean doing nothing.
“It means not invading an entire nation without end,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted. “Doesn’t mean ‘do nothing,’ it means perhaps we could have leaned more on the larger role of other agencies (intelligence, state dept, diplomatic teams, etc) before Congress decided to invade a nation without a concrete end plan.”
The end of her sentence spells out why she, like many others, have no clue about what they are speaking about. There is not, nor can there be a “concrete end plan” for any armed conflict, even moreso for a protracted war like Iraq and Afghanistan. To believe that we can predict or war game when the shooting will stop, much less how to direct it to an ending that we can manage is sheer foolishness.
The only way to remotely approach that scenario is to wage war to an unconditional surrender— and even that in the entirety of human existence has never been accomplished to the point that it was in the can before a single shot was fired. And in all truth, using Desert Storm 1 as a template, even that unconditional surrender led to Desert Storm 2 because the utter destruction in detail of our enemy wasn’t done. I seriously doubt that we as a people and nation today have the will and spine to do to a country or alliance what was necessary to win back in World War 2. Barring some attack that knocks us out of the equivocation and relativism that has beset our national outlook, we cannot engage in such an endeavor today.
