[Winstonm]

 mike777, on 2014-December-18, 14:59, said:

Any suggestions on what the USA could be doing better on the topic of terror and war in 2015?

These people seem to have an idea.

[mike777]

It looks like that is from 2008, do they still recommend all of this for 2015?

It looks like we did all of this for years as far as I can tell, strong policing and info gathering.

[kenberg]

 PassedOut, on 2014-December-18, 13:25, said:

I don't see WWII as the template for the wars the US has fought since then. We fought the Vietnamese to block them from having the government they wanted. We invaded Iraq "at a time of our choosing."

I agree, or largely agree.

The post of mine that you cited in your response was in fact my response to Mycroft's post (good grief this gets involved) in which he claimed that the U.S. entered the European war in late 1939 or early 1940. Humpty Dumpty had something to say about the meaning of words but really I felt that was not an accurate portrayal.

With regard to terrorism, I thin we are at a crossroads. I see us as not really a warlike people. You and I and others watched the Roosevelts, and no doubt TR relished war. To me much of what TR said about war sounded nuts. His views may have resonated with people at the time of the Spanish-American war, but not now I think.

I caught just a portion of an NPR discussion today. It was interesting and if I can see it in its entirety I would like to. They were reporting from Islamabad on how both the Pakistani people and the Pakistani government are dealing with recent events. One of the reporters was saying he thought that the government was uncertain about how to deal with the most radical groups. A Pakistani citizen responded that the government was not at all uncertain, the government supported the Taliban. The reporter obviously didn't like this answer so he repeated that this meant that the government was uncertain.

If anyone really is sure about what to do, that someone isn't me. mostly I think that involvement in the middle east is a terrible terrible trap. If we could quarantine the area, I would favor that. It is not possible to do so.So we are stuck, we are all stuck.

[mycroft]

Ken, I am referring, of course, to the Merchant Marine of all nations, including the U.S. And you have given evidence of my statement that their efforts and dangers got minimal recognition - "we shipped supplies to Britain", "any soldier...was confused" "or anyone else".

Ask the people on the ships running the German submarine blockade (and later, and possibly worse, the Archangel Run, but that was mostly post December) - the Merchant Marine - if they were sure they weren't at war before Pearl Harbor. Then, as now, doesn't matter much to the thousand pounds of high explosive coming quickly toward you...

Mike: no, not really, except what I've said above. If we admit that these tactics are doing nothing but satisfying our revenge lusts and breeding new terrorists to satisfy *their* revenge lusts, admit to the previous mistakes (including in court), and switch to a "I'm better than you, you can't touch me" strategy, in 30 or 40 years the fires will have consumed themselves and no major new ones lit to replace them.

Of course, you can't get elected espousing that strategy, and you certainly can't get *re-*elected. And without the money from those who profit from U.S. Forever War (or more particularly, with it against you, promoting you as a "coward" and a "pushover" and "soft on (fill-in-the-blank)") you will quietly disappear.

Realistically, I can't imagine anything we've done in the last 7 years that would change what the RAND Corporation (not exactly a "leftie liberal peacenik" organization, but also not one to ignore facts that don't support their desired argument (or avoid looking for them, either)) found in 2008. We had 5 years of post-September 11 under our belts, and we haven't really changed. If anything, instead of treating the problem more like a police problem than a military one, we seem to be treating a lot of actual police problems as military ones now (and wondering why those actors are being looked at as "the enemy" rather than the "guardians of peace").

Perhaps the only thing that can save the U.S. is a true "return to Jesus" moment (you know, the one of "the good Muslim Samaritan" and "the least of these" fame, not the "Nuke a Commie Whale for Jesus" one) or perhaps someone who knew not only that Eisenhower was right, but what to do about it now, 50 years after we ignored him. Perhaps I should be less cynical, or less caring, too.

[barmar]

Maybe I'm looking through rose-colored glasses, but I don't see America as having an "appetite for war" (although there certainly are some legislators who do). Rather, due to our ideals and the fact that we have the most powerful military force on the planet, we've effectively become the policement for the world. If we don't do it, who will?

The argument then becomes whether it needs to be done in the first place. Unfortunately, it seems like it does. The world is too small to say "What happens in the Middle East isn't our problem."

When people point to Africa and say that we're not intervening there, I don't see that as an argument for also staying out of the Middle East, I think we should also try to help Africa. Of course, I know why our government treats them differently: oil. But if we were living up to our humanitarian ideals, we would be in both places (in fact, we probably should have been trying to resolve problems in Africa for a long time).

[blackshoe]

 barmar, on 2014-December-19, 11:03, said:

If we don't do it, who will?

China? Not right now, perhaps, but they would almost certainly try to fill that vacuum eventually.

[blackshoe]

As I see it, the difference between Africa and the Middle East, from a "US involvement" standpoint, is that Africa is a disaster waiting to happen, while the Middle East is a disaster that's already happened.

[neilkaz]

 blackshoe, on 2014-December-19, 12:07, said:

As I see it, the difference between Africa and the Middle East, from a "US involvement" standpoint, is that Africa is a disaster waiting to happen, while the Middle East is a disaster that's already happened.

FYP "while the Middle East is a disaster that will continue to happen for as long as you, I, or our children will live."

[Winstonm]

 mike777, on 2014-December-18, 16:32, said:

It looks like that is from 2008, do they still recommend all of this for 2015?

It looks like we did all of this for years as far as I can tell, strong policing and info gathering.

My understanding is that a Rand comprehensive review of best tactics to use with terrorists and the threat of terrorism is not like a high school yearbook, updated every year, so I doubt there is any change in recommendations; however, there is an example, fairly recent, of not following the Rand suggestions and instead using the least productive method, i.e., military action, to combat terrorists and terrorism.

If you find better information, please let us all know.

[mikeh]

 barmar, on 2014-December-19, 11:03, said:

Maybe I'm looking through rose-colored glasses, but I don't see America as having an "appetite for war" (although there certainly are some legislators who do). Rather, due to our ideals and the fact that we have the most powerful military force on the planet, we've effectively become the policement for the world. If we don't do it, who will?

The argument then becomes whether it needs to be done in the first place. Unfortunately, it seems like it does. The world is too small to say "What happens in the Middle East isn't our problem."

When people point to Africa and say that we're not intervening there, I don't see that as an argument for also staying out of the Middle East, I think we should also try to help Africa. Of course, I know why our government treats them differently: oil. But if we were living up to our humanitarian ideals, we would be in both places (in fact, we probably should have been trying to resolve problems in Africa for a long time).

what humanitarian ideals?

The US is no different from any other superpower that has existed in history. It has a propaganda that it uses on its own citizens, and with lesser effect on the rest of the world, while its actions are almost always motivated by the self-interest of the ruling class.

The land of the free systemically murdered the original inhabitants in vast numbers, while importing slaves. It cynically attacked Spain through the use of a false pretext (remember the Maine). It stayed out of both WWI and WWII for years, making huge amounts of money while doing so. It invaded Panama because of the canal, and overthrew elected governments around the world in order to install dictators friendly to it. It fought wars to sustain other dictators in power and treated entire nations as pawns in its strategic contests with the USSR and China. Its military routinely used weapons of (limited) mass destruction on civilian populations, including chemical warfare (remember agent orange? remember napalm? Remember the illegal bombings of Laos and Cambodia?)It dropped a second a-bomb, on Nagasaki, too soon after Hiroshima to expect the Japanese government to be able to assess the situation, and arguably did so to show Stalin that the US had more than 1 bomb and was prepared to be ruthless.

It imprisoned its own citizens of Japanese descent in WWII. It turned away ships loaded with jewish refugees before WWII. It supports a brutal state in Israel without in any meaningful way attempting to force it to stop using reprisal methods for which The US and allies prosecuted Germans after WWII for committing war crimes.

It maintained Jim Crow laws in much of the South for a hundred years after the Civil War, and now has a society in which socio-economic mobility is virtually non-existent and a plutocracy funds very effective campaigns that get the middle class voting against its own self-interest, to support the plutocrats. It has only a semblance of a civilized health care system. Many states actively disenfranchise entire classes of voters. It imprisons far more of its citizens than almost any other nation, and routinely, in some states, executes people. One of its leading jurists has said that it is better to execute an innocent man than disturb precedent, and he routinely speaks for the majority of the Supreme Court.

Note that there is nothing exceptional about this. It doesn't make the US any worse, or any better, than any other super-power or indeed any other nation.

Smaller nations, less powerful and lacking the resources to ever become so powerful, can claim a higher moral ground, but I don't have any illusions that that makes, say, Canadians, any 'better' as individuals than 'Americans'. I forget the name of the 19th century English stateman who said in relation to the Empire's foreign policy, and I paraphrase: England does not have friends...she has only interests

Humans are tribal animals and we don't seem able to set aside the consequences of that even when our tribe is numbered in the hundreds of millions.

[kenberg]

The above is a truly well thought out and successful portrayal of the United States as the absolute pit of humanity. What on Earth could I have been thinking for me to regard my life as happy and to think if myself as lucky to have been born here in this inner circle of hell? I am properly chastened, and I will make no further comments on any of this.

[mikeh]

 kenberg, on 2014-December-19, 15:58, said:

The above is a truly well thought out and successful portrayal of the United States as the absolute pit of humanity. What on Earth could I have been thinking for me to regard my life as happy and to think if myself as lucky to have been born here in this inner circle of hell? I am properly chastised, and I will make no further comments on any of this.

I was simply trying to point out that the USA is no different from, no better and no worse, than any other superpower. Every superpower has its good points as well as the bad, whether we are speaking of Rome, the British Empire, the Ottoman Empire and so on

It is popular for a large segment of the American public to assert that the USA is exceptional in its goodness and innate sense of moral superiority. I grew up in a country dealing with the loss of empire, and the same attitude lingered on at that time. 45 years later, coupled with a lot of reading of history, persuades me that the British Empire had warts as we'll as virtues, and that the US is little different

That isn't remotely the same as saying that the US has been a 'pit of humanity'. It is merely saying that Americans, collectively, are not saints nor innately morally superior to the peoples of other nations, which proposition seems to hit a nerve with some Americans for some strange reason

The USA of the mid 19 th to late 20 the century enjoyed ready access to living room and resources, provided that one ignored or killed or imprisoned in reservations the aboriginal peoples who were there first. As such it was able to attract countless immigrants and to afford great opportunities, so long as one's skin was the right colour (which was the same around the world of course and not especially American! although racism was rarely institutionalized as thoroughly as it was in the USA)

For many millions, it really was a land of opportunity. The 'brain drain' was a real issue in the UK when I was growing up, reflective of the greater opportunities that existed there.

Things are rarely black or white (a perhaps unfortunate saying) and it would be unfair to suggest that I intended to knock the US. I was very careful to assert that no nation enjoys any moral superiority to the USA. It seems that many Americans, even those whose posts generally suggest that they are basically liberal in attitude, are offended by a suggestion that their nation isn't exceptional and that they are not therefore, merely by virtue of being born American a superior form of human. The very existence of that sense that being treated as equals rather than acknowledged as superior is an insult is symptomatic of the problem that seems to arise with every superpower.

[blackshoe]

 mikeh, on 2014-December-19, 13:13, said:

I forget the name of the 19th century English stateman who said in relation to the Empire's foreign policy, and I paraphrase: England does not have friends...she has only interests

Lord Palmerston, Prime Minister in the mid-19th Century. Apparently DeGaulle later said the same thing about France.

[kenberg]

On another thread Cherdano got my number for saying I was going to shut up and then not doing so. Possibly I ever-reacted. but of course there is a but.

If my wife went through a list about me, comparable to the one you went through about the U.S. and then explained that all she meant was that I was not exceptional, really all she was saying was that I was just like all other men, I am not sure how soothing I would find it. Anyway, talking about how some Americans think of the U.S. as exceptional doesn't say all that much. Some Frenchmen think that the French are great lovers. Maybe they are, but it gets boring hearing about it.

I not only do not regard America as exceptional, I think of that view as a dangerous delusion that asks for trouble. When one of my daughters was around 3, a woman in a neighboring apartment explained to my then wife and me how lucky we were to have a normal child. Her own daughter was exceptionally brilliant and this made life oh so difficult. Uh huh. And just the other day a guy at the Y was telling me that he had an IQ of 160 and this made it difficult for him to find a job. Yes, no doubt. About the best a person can hope for when they go on about how exceptional they are is that they will be ignored.

Am I a liberal? Beats me. I find Stephen Colbert really boring. And I think police do a difficult and dangerous job. I believe in helping people but except in very exceptional cases I think that the help should be directed toward helping them need less help in the future. I get tired of hearing about how stupid and lazy Americans are, and I get tired of hearing, if I deviate from liberal orthodoxy, that the only possible explanation is that I have been watching Fox News.

About "interests" and "friends". I had heard this attributed to an Israeli. Probably some Athenian said it first..

[mikeh]

 kenberg, on 2014-December-20, 07:49, said:

On another thread Cherdano got my number for saying I was going to shut up and then not doing so. Possibly I ever-reacted. but of course there is a but.

If my wife went through a list about me, comparable to the one you went through about the U.S. and then explained that all she meant was that I was not exceptional, really all she was saying was that I was just like all other men, I am not sure how soothing I would find it. Anyway, talking about how some Americans think of the U.S. as exceptional doesn't say all that much. Some Frenchmen think that the French are great lovers. Maybe they are, but it gets boring hearing about it.

I not only do not regard America as exceptional, I think of that view as a dangerous delusion that asks for trouble. When one of my daughters was around 3, a woman in a neighboring apartment explained to my then wife and me how lucky we were to have a normal child. Her own daughter was exceptionally brilliant and this made life oh so difficult. Uh huh. And just the other day a guy at the Y was telling me that he had an IQ of 160 and this made it difficult for him to find a job. Yes, no doubt. About the best a person can hope for when they go on about how exceptional they are is that they will be ignored.

Am I a liberal? Beats me. I find Stephen Colbert really boring. And I think police do a difficult and dangerous job. I believe in helping people but except in very exceptional cases I think that the help should be directed toward helping them need less help in the future. I get tired of hearing about how stupid and lazy Americans are, and I get tired of hearing, if I deviate from liberal orthodoxy, that the only possible explanation is that I have been watching Fox News.

About "interests" and "friends". I had heard this attributed to an Israeli. Probably some Athenian said it first..

Your analogy to your wife listing off your faults is inexact. I didn't start the subject. A better analogy would be where you had been boasting about your status in the world and your wonderful ideals and then your wife listed off a series of examples of your behaviour that demonstrated that in reality you frequently acted in pure self-interest and in a fashion utterly opposed to your professed ideals. Of course, it was not 'you' to whom I was responding in the first place. I have never seen you make the sort of claims about the US to which I was responding. And I will repeat my theme: in my view, all nations...all 'tribes' are guilty of elevating themselves, in their collective mind, above other tribes. When Canadians or New Zealanders, for example, do that, it has little impact on the world. When a superpower does it, the results can be ugly. See Vietnam. See Iraq. See how the US justified those wars, and how the US media pays 100 times as much attention to US casualties as it does to Vietnamese or Iraqi casualties, when if one were even-handed in the value one placed on human lives, the ratio could be reversed.

Repeated boasting about how wonderful the US is need occasional reminders that for much of its history, maybe for all of its history, it has been wonderful only for some. I doubt that it is wonderful for most young black males now or at any time in the history of your country, as an example. It isn't wonderful for low income families with chronic illness in the family and inadequate health insurance, and obamacare didn't fix that for everyone and may in any event be destroyed by the republicans in 2017.

In short, we tend to have a very selective collective image of who we, as a nation...no matter which nation...are. The US is no exception.

This is how the species appears to be. If we ever want to improve, we need to educate everyone to recognize the cost of tribalism

[kenberg]

Repeated boasting about superiority of one's own country or culture can indeed be tiring. I once listened as a visitor from Turkey explained to me what was wrong with American funeral services. They do it better in Turkey, I gather. I'm not a major traveler but I get here and there and it would never occur to me to explain to people in the country that I am visiting how they could improve their funeral services. In other matters, we sometimes notice differences. Flying out of Peru, we got on the plane and after a minimum of fuss it took off. No one explained that in an emergency we should fasten out own air mask before we helped others. My wife an I both appreciated this sensible approach on their part. In Canada I get my gas by the liter, or is that litre, and I watch my speed in km/hr. No problem. Some people, and by no means only Americans, have a great need to explain why they do it right and everyone else does it wrong. I like to think that I lack that gene, or at least it is recessive.

I was once amused by the following. A guy from the Netherlands, in the U.S. for a year, never lost an opportunity to explain to me what was wrong with the States. Tiresome. But then somehow the subject of France came up. Man! Apparently there is much more wrong with France than even with the United States.

I think that the best that we can hope for about tribalism is that we all realize that we are all susceptible. In the small, it's annoying. In the large is is extremely dangerous. Which, after a detour, gets us back to terrorism.

[ggwhiz]

 kenberg, on 2014-December-20, 10:13, said:

I was once amused by the following. A guy from the Netherlands, in the U.S. for a year, never lost an opportunity to explain to me what was wrong with the States. Tiresome. But then somehow the subject of France came up. Man! Apparently there is much more wrong with France than even with the United States.

I was in South Africa in '98 when the US was in the news for something objectionable that I don't recall and my SA Bridge partner asked me what we Canadians thought about Americans.

I told him that you are our overbearing obnoxious cousins and we frequently want to slap you upside the head (he's all revved up for late night yankee bashing session) then I said but at the end of the day we're family and they feel the same way about us (especially Chretien and Trudeau).

Poof, he switched to talking about Zimbabwe.

[kenberg]

 ggwhiz, on 2014-December-20, 12:51, said:

then I said but at the end of the day we're family and they feel the same way about us (especially Chretien and Trudeau).

I was going to make a joke about how we all loved Maggie but I decided to first look her up on the Wik to see how she has fared. I think in fact I would like her. A little crazy maybe, but who isn't.

[blackshoe]

 kenberg, on 2014-December-20, 07:49, said:

About "interests" and "friends". I had heard this attributed to an Israeli. Probably some Athenian said it first..

Or it was Ugh the caveman.

[barmar]

Is America going to be nominated for sainthood? No. But we have ideals of democracy and human rights, and these are codified in our Constitution. We don't always live up to them, but they're goals we strive to. There are certainly better places to live -- we have a significant problem with violent crime and race relations.

But among the super-powers (US, Russia, and China), who would you want to use as the standard-bearer?