In other words, if Europe cannot defend our territorial integrity, it is not for a lack of money thrown at the problem.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
(I mean, wow, for all its failures to militarily impose peace and good governance in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US did manage to completely take out the governments and military forces of two large countries in a matter of weeks. That's actually pretty astounding. Like I said up thread, even once-mighty Russia couldn't do that in tiny Chechnya, a region 30 times smaller in population than Afghanistan.)
Afghanistan defeated the Indians, the British, the Russians, and is well on its way to defeating the US. When there's hardly much of a government to start with, blowing up the capital hardly counts for anything.
The most spectacular feature of US military intervention since WWII is its almost endless capacity for failure.
The US can just about handle tiny impoverished states in its back yard. It's fairly good at interfering in other countries through 'covert diplomacy' psyops, and economic oppression.
But as a military power, it's a joke. The US failed in Korea, failed in Vietnam and Cambodia, failed in Iraq and is failing in Afghanistan and against Somalian pircay. In any conventional confrontation with a reasonably sized enemy, the US military machine will be cut to ribbons.
santiago:
governments in places like Iran worry about hostilities against French ships or other assets because they know the French can use American logistical resources to hit back, if needed.
Why would Iran open hostilities against French ships?
Not that Europe couldn't mount a potentially heavy-handed economic retaliation in such an event, even if we can't terror bomb their capital. International power is not measured simply by the amount of powder you can burn over somebody's cities.
And it worked precisely as well too.
By comparison, since the American survival of the cold war, the US has militarily defeated Panama in 1990, Iraq in 1991, Serbia in 1999, the Taliban government in Afghanistan in 2001, and the government of Sadaam Hussein in 2003. America's military defeats so far really only include its small operation in Somalia. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the jury is still out on the new military missions of supporting new and sustainable governance institutions, but with the the strengthening of Nouri al-Maliki's clout since Obama's declaration to withdraw forces earlier, that mission actually looks brighter now under Obama's strategy than it did a short time ago under Bush.
