JUST the Stolen Documents/Mar-A-Lago/"Judge" Cannon Trial

[Trinity]

Any day Lindsey wants to subpoena the Chalupa sisters to the Senate, they’d be happy to speak under oath. They won’t dodge or hide behind bogus privilege. They’ll bring their phones and documents. Unlike American public servants. I wonder why he’s reluctant.

[old salt]

Tough day for our French allies in N Africa. RIP.

https://news.yahoo.com/13-french-soldie ... 58772.html

[DocBarrister]

Important article on how Donald Trump, the most malignant and incompetent commander in chief in American history, is inflicting real damage to the U.S. military.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/27/politics ... index.html

DocBarrister

[old salt]

Shifted to this thread for future reference. ..

And when you're done, have a look at VDH and see if he's managed to criticize one single move of Trump (pssstt: there's isn't one. Laughably so)

Great minds think alike. Read & learn something.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/ ... ervention/

The Trump Doctrine: Deterrence without Intervention?
By VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
November 5, 2019

Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign sought to overturn 75 years of bipartisan foreign policy orthodoxy, especially as it applied to the Middle East.

From 1946 to 1989, the Cold War logic was to use both surrogates and U.S. expeditionary forces to stop the spread of Communist insurrections and coups — without confronting the nuclear-armed USSR directly unless it became a matter of perceived Western survival, as it did with the Berlin airlift and the Cuban missile crises.

That logic led to major conflicts like Vietnam and Korea, limited wars in the Middle East and Balkans, interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean, and occasional nation-building in conquered lands. Tens of thousands of Americans died, trillions of dollars were spent, and the Soviet Union and most of its satellites vanished. “We won the Cold War” was more or less true.

Such preemptory American interventions still continued over the next 30 years of the post–Cold War “new world order.” Now the threat was not Russian nukes but confronting new enemies such as radical Islam and a rogue’s gallery of petty but troublesome nuts, freaks, and dictators — Granada’s Hudson Austin, an unhinged Moammar Qaddafi of Libya, Hezbollah’s terrorists in Lebanon, Nicaraguan Communist Daniel Ortega, Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega, the gang leader Mohamed Aidid of Somalia, the former Serbian thug Slobodan Milosevic, Mullah Omar of the Taliban, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, arch terrorist Osama bin Laden, the macabre al-Qaeda and ISIS, and on and on.

These put-downs, some successful and some not so much, were apparently viewed by the post–Cold War establishment as our versions of the late Roman Republic and Empire policies of mowing the lawn, with an occasional weeding out of regional nationalists and insurrectionists ... The theory was that occasionally knocking flat a charismatic brute discouraged all others like him from trying to emulate his revolt and upend the international order. Having one or two legions always on the move often meant that most others could stay in their barracks. And it kept the peace, or so the U.S., like Rome, more or less believed.

But the problem with American policy after the Cold War and the end of the Soviet nuclear threat was that the U.S. was not really comfortable as an imperial global watchdog, we no longer had a near monopoly on the world economy that subsidized these expensive interventions, and many of these thugs did not necessarily pose a direct threat to American interests — perhaps ISIS, an oil-rich Middle East dictator, and radical Islamists excepted. What started as a quick, successful take-out of a monster sometimes ended up as a long-drawn out “occupation” in which all U.S. assets of firepower, mobility, and air support were nullified in the dismal street fighting of a Fallujah or a Mogadishu.

The bad guys were bothersome and even on occasion genocidal, and their removal sometimes improved the lot of those of the ground — but not always. When things got messy — such as in the Beqaa Valley in Lebanon, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, or Somalia — it was not clear whether the American use of force resulted in tactical success leading to strategic advantage. Often preemptive insertion of troops either did not further U.S. deterrence or actually undermined it — as in the case of the “Arab Spring” bombing in Libya.

At home, in a consistent pattern, the most vociferous advocates of preemptory war usually claimed prescient brilliance, as when the American military rapidly dislodged the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. But then came the occupation and post-war anarchy. As American dead mounted, the mission mysteriously creeped into nation-building. Sometimes, in the post-invasion chaos, the once noble liberated victims became the opportunistic victimizers. Depressed, some of the original architects of preemption blamed those who had listened to them. The establishment’s calling card became, “My weeks-long brilliant theoretical preemption was ruined by your actual botched decade-long occupation.” In extremis, few kept their support; most abandoned it.

Into this dilemma charged Donald Trump, who tried to square the old circle by boasting that he would “bomb the s*** out of ISIS” (and he mostly did that). Yet he also pledged to avoid optional wars in the Middle East — given that they did not pencil out to the Manhattan developer as a cost-benefit profit for America. We had become the world’s largest large oil producer anyway without worrying very much about how many barrels of oil a post-Qaddafi Libya or the Iranian theocrats pumped each day, and our rivals, like China and Russia, would soon find out that their involvement in the Middle East would likely not pencil out.

Trump started well enough. He backed down the provocative North Koreans and Iranians with tougher sanctions, while refusing to use kinetic force to reply to their rather pathetic provocations. He bombed ISIS but yanked American “trip wire” troops out of the Kurdish-Turkish battle zones in Syria, and he green-lighted the military’s killing of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. He ratcheted up sanctions against Russia and armed Putin’s enemies without committing to defend any of the old republics of the Soviet Union. He increased the defense budget and boomed the economy but did not use such newly acquired power other than against ISIS.

Rarely has such an empowered military relied so much on economic sanctions. And rarely have leftist pacifist advocates of using sanctions and boycotts so damned Trump’s reluctance to launch missiles and drop bombs — the only common denominator being that whatever the orange man is for, they are against.

Trump’s apparent theory is that time is on his side. The Palestinians are cut off from U.S. funds; their U.N. surrogates are orphaned from the U.S. The U.S. Embassy is in Jerusalem. The Golan Heights are not going back to Syria. It is up to the West Bank and Gaza to change the Middle East dynamic, since their Gulf paymasters could care less about them, given the Palestinians’ romance with an Iran that is slowly going broke.

North Korea is squeezed by toughed-up sanctions. They can conduct missile tests, threaten, and cajole, but ultimately their people will be eating grass if they don’t wish to deal. And if they do launch a missile toward the U.S., they are convinced that Trump will launch a lot more against them.

Iran wants a confrontation before the election to undermine the Trump Electoral College base of support. So Trump is apparently willing to overlook such petty slights as the downing of the American drone by Iranian forces. But the Iranians must know that if they start targeting U.S. ships, or attacking NATO allied vessels and planes, Trump will likely restore deterrence by one-off, disproportionate air and missile attacks against Iranian naval and air bases — without intervening on the ground and without worrying that Iranian oil will go off the market entirely.

So there is a sort of Trump doctrine that grew in part out of Trump’s campaign promises and in part from the strategic assessment in 2016-17 by then national-security adviser H.R. McMaster, outlining a new “principled realism.” The net result is not to nation-build, preempt, or worry much about changing fetid countries to look like us, but to disproportionately respond when attacked or threatened, and in a manner that causes real damage, without the insertion of U.S. ground troops, in the fashion of the past 75 years.

Balance in achieving deterrence is the key. If Trump’s protestations that he does not wish to take enemy lives or conduct endless wars for no profit encourage enemy adventurism, then he will have to respond forcefully when American forces are attacked — but in a way that is not open-ended. And that usually means not through the use of ground troops that involve wars that, in Trump’s mind, create bad optics and poor ratings back home.

There are three ways of losing deterrence. One is to bluster, boast, and threaten and then do little — as with Barack Obama’s bombast about red lines in Syria.

A second is to reach out and appease a thug who has no intention of seeing outreach as anything other than laxity to be exploited. The Obama administration’s Russian reset combined the worst elements of this strategy: alternately courting and lecturing Putin, while doing nothing as he invaded former republics and returned to the Middle East.

A third way of losing deterrence is to get bogged down in a quagmire that encourages other would-be terrorists, revolutionaries, and psychopaths to try instigating more of the same. Afghanistan and the Iraq, from 2003 to 2006, are good examples of gridlock. The Libya project of Susan Rice, Samantha Power, and Hillary Clinton is a perfect case of hasty bombing followed by embarrassed indifference to the resulting chaos, and then withdrawal after the loss of four Americans.

There is one final paradox related to the dilemma of maintaining deterrence without invading hostile countries. Trump apparently believes that a booming economy, a well-funded muscular military, and plenty of U.S.-produced oil and gas give America enormous power and a range of choices that recent presidents lacked.

The result would be that when forced to respond to an attack on an American asset or ally, the U.S. could do so disproportionately, destructively, and without any red line, promise, or virtue-signaling about what it might do next — given its unique ability to hit abroad without being hit at home, and with a well-oiled economy that has no need to beg the Saudis to be nice, or to urge the Iranians to pump more, or to get the Venezuelans back into the exporting business.

Add up all these paradoxes, and I suppose we could call the Trump administration’s idea of deterrence without preemptive intervention as either “Live and let live” — or, more macabrely, “Live — and let die.” Either way, the paradox is to maintain critical deterrence against American enemies to prevent a war, but without Pavlovian interventions, and without being baited into optional military action that is antithetical to the national mood that got Trump elected

[Typical Lax Dad]

Shifted to this thread for future reference. ..

And when you're done, have a look at VDH and see if he's managed to criticize one single move of Trump (pssstt: there's isn't one. Laughably so)

Great minds think alike. Read & learn something.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/ ... ervention/

The Trump Doctrine: Deterrence without Intervention?
By VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
November 5, 2019

Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign sought to overturn 75 years of bipartisan foreign policy orthodoxy, especially as it applied to the Middle East.

From 1946 to 1989, the Cold War logic was to use both surrogates and U.S. expeditionary forces to stop the spread of Communist insurrections and coups — without confronting the nuclear-armed USSR directly unless it became a matter of perceived Western survival, as it did with the Berlin airlift and the Cuban missile crises.

That logic led to major conflicts like Vietnam and Korea, limited wars in the Middle East and Balkans, interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean, and occasional nation-building in conquered lands. Tens of thousands of Americans died, trillions of dollars were spent, and the Soviet Union and most of its satellites vanished. “We won the Cold War” was more or less true.

Such preemptory American interventions still continued over the next 30 years of the post–Cold War “new world order.” Now the threat was not Russian nukes but confronting new enemies such as radical Islam and a rogue’s gallery of petty but troublesome nuts, freaks, and dictators — Granada’s Hudson Austin, an unhinged Moammar Qaddafi of Libya, Hezbollah’s terrorists in Lebanon, Nicaraguan Communist Daniel Ortega, Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega, the gang leader Mohamed Aidid of Somalia, the former Serbian thug Slobodan Milosevic, Mullah Omar of the Taliban, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, arch terrorist Osama bin Laden, the macabre al-Qaeda and ISIS, and on and on.

These put-downs, some successful and some not so much, were apparently viewed by the post–Cold War establishment as our versions of the late Roman Republic and Empire policies of mowing the lawn, with an occasional weeding out of regional nationalists and insurrectionists ... The theory was that occasionally knocking flat a charismatic brute discouraged all others like him from trying to emulate his revolt and upend the international order. Having one or two legions always on the move often meant that most others could stay in their barracks. And it kept the peace, or so the U.S., like Rome, more or less believed.

But the problem with American policy after the Cold War and the end of the Soviet nuclear threat was that the U.S. was not really comfortable as an imperial global watchdog, we no longer had a near monopoly on the world economy that subsidized these expensive interventions, and many of these thugs did not necessarily pose a direct threat to American interests — perhaps ISIS, an oil-rich Middle East dictator, and radical Islamists excepted. What started as a quick, successful take-out of a monster sometimes ended up as a long-drawn out “occupation” in which all U.S. assets of firepower, mobility, and air support were nullified in the dismal street fighting of a Fallujah or a Mogadishu.

The bad guys were bothersome and even on occasion genocidal, and their removal sometimes improved the lot of those of the ground — but not always. When things got messy — such as in the Beqaa Valley in Lebanon, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, or Somalia — it was not clear whether the American use of force resulted in tactical success leading to strategic advantage. Often preemptive insertion of troops either did not further U.S. deterrence or actually undermined it — as in the case of the “Arab Spring” bombing in Libya.

At home, in a consistent pattern, the most vociferous advocates of preemptory war usually claimed prescient brilliance, as when the American military rapidly dislodged the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. But then came the occupation and post-war anarchy. As American dead mounted, the mission mysteriously creeped into nation-building. Sometimes, in the post-invasion chaos, the once noble liberated victims became the opportunistic victimizers. Depressed, some of the original architects of preemption blamed those who had listened to them. The establishment’s calling card became, “My weeks-long brilliant theoretical preemption was ruined by your actual botched decade-long occupation.” In extremis, few kept their support; most abandoned it.

Into this dilemma charged Donald Trump, who tried to square the old circle by boasting that he would “bomb the s*** out of ISIS” (and he mostly did that). Yet he also pledged to avoid optional wars in the Middle East — given that they did not pencil out to the Manhattan developer as a cost-benefit profit for America. We had become the world’s largest large oil producer anyway without worrying very much about how many barrels of oil a post-Qaddafi Libya or the Iranian theocrats pumped each day, and our rivals, like China and Russia, would soon find out that their involvement in the Middle East would likely not pencil out.

Trump started well enough. He backed down the provocative North Koreans and Iranians with tougher sanctions, while refusing to use kinetic force to reply to their rather pathetic provocations. He bombed ISIS but yanked American “trip wire” troops out of the Kurdish-Turkish battle zones in Syria, and he green-lighted the military’s killing of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. He ratcheted up sanctions against Russia and armed Putin’s enemies without committing to defend any of the old republics of the Soviet Union. He increased the defense budget and boomed the economy but did not use such newly acquired power other than against ISIS.

Rarely has such an empowered military relied so much on economic sanctions. And rarely have leftist pacifist advocates of using sanctions and boycotts so damned Trump’s reluctance to launch missiles and drop bombs — the only common denominator being that whatever the orange man is for, they are against.

Trump’s apparent theory is that time is on his side. The Palestinians are cut off from U.S. funds; their U.N. surrogates are orphaned from the U.S. The U.S. Embassy is in Jerusalem. The Golan Heights are not going back to Syria. It is up to the West Bank and Gaza to change the Middle East dynamic, since their Gulf paymasters could care less about them, given the Palestinians’ romance with an Iran that is slowly going broke.

North Korea is squeezed by toughed-up sanctions. They can conduct missile tests, threaten, and cajole, but ultimately their people will be eating grass if they don’t wish to deal. And if they do launch a missile toward the U.S., they are convinced that Trump will launch a lot more against them.

Iran wants a confrontation before the election to undermine the Trump Electoral College base of support. So Trump is apparently willing to overlook such petty slights as the downing of the American drone by Iranian forces. But the Iranians must know that if they start targeting U.S. ships, or attacking NATO allied vessels and planes, Trump will likely restore deterrence by one-off, disproportionate air and missile attacks against Iranian naval and air bases — without intervening on the ground and without worrying that Iranian oil will go off the market entirely.

So there is a sort of Trump doctrine that grew in part out of Trump’s campaign promises and in part from the strategic assessment in 2016-17 by then national-security adviser H.R. McMaster, outlining a new “principled realism.” The net result is not to nation-build, preempt, or worry much about changing fetid countries to look like us, but to disproportionately respond when attacked or threatened, and in a manner that causes real damage, without the insertion of U.S. ground troops, in the fashion of the past 75 years.

Balance in achieving deterrence is the key. If Trump’s protestations that he does not wish to take enemy lives or conduct endless wars for no profit encourage enemy adventurism, then he will have to respond forcefully when American forces are attacked — but in a way that is not open-ended. And that usually means not through the use of ground troops that involve wars that, in Trump’s mind, create bad optics and poor ratings back home.

There are three ways of losing deterrence. One is to bluster, boast, and threaten and then do little — as with Barack Obama’s bombast about red lines in Syria.

A second is to reach out and appease a thug who has no intention of seeing outreach as anything other than laxity to be exploited. The Obama administration’s Russian reset combined the worst elements of this strategy: alternately courting and lecturing Putin, while doing nothing as he invaded former republics and returned to the Middle East.

A third way of losing deterrence is to get bogged down in a quagmire that encourages other would-be terrorists, revolutionaries, and psychopaths to try instigating more of the same. Afghanistan and the Iraq, from 2003 to 2006, are good examples of gridlock. The Libya project of Susan Rice, Samantha Power, and Hillary Clinton is a perfect case of hasty bombing followed by embarrassed indifference to the resulting chaos, and then withdrawal after the loss of four Americans.

There is one final paradox related to the dilemma of maintaining deterrence without invading hostile countries. Trump apparently believes that a booming economy, a well-funded muscular military, and plenty of U.S.-produced oil and gas give America enormous power and a range of choices that recent presidents lacked.

The result would be that when forced to respond to an attack on an American asset or ally, the U.S. could do so disproportionately, destructively, and without any red line, promise, or virtue-signaling about what it might do next — given its unique ability to hit abroad without being hit at home, and with a well-oiled economy that has no need to beg the Saudis to be nice, or to urge the Iranians to pump more, or to get the Venezuelans back into the exporting business.

Add up all these paradoxes, and I suppose we could call the Trump administration’s idea of deterrence without preemptive intervention as either “Live and let live” — or, more macabrely, “Live — and let die.” Either way, the paradox is to maintain critical deterrence against American enemies to prevent a war, but without Pavlovian interventions, and without being baited into optional military action that is antithetical to the national mood that got Trump elected

See you are wasting bandwidth

[old salt]

^^^ I'm preserving the writings of a distinguished military historian, for future reference (for free) in the thread where it' is relevant,

On the other hand, you are wasting bandwidth with your juvenile trolling, by re-quoting my entire post.

[a fan]

Where's the difference?

I stated them & posted a lengthy VDH article explaining them.
You just don't want to hear them.

Ask the Iranians, Syrians or ISIS if things are different with Trump.
You are not looking if you do not see the difference in our situation in Syria, Iraq, the Persian Gulf states & Afghanistan.

Strawman.

You are jumping up and down, insisting that it's not noon----it's actually 12:03----- and acting like this is some massive difference. Good for you.

You think Trump has fixed everything. It's 6ftstick all over again, where you're simply happy that a Republican is in charge. I'm genuinely glad you're happy. It's how it works. Heck, 1/3 of the country was thrilled and though things were great simply because of Obama and his little D.

I get it.

Meanwhile, it's still a sh*tshow for anyone living in Syria, Afghanistan, and pretty much any Persian Gulf country as it relates to Trump/Bush/Obama. Stability ebbing and flowing, as it always has.

What I actually wrote was:

To not get into unwanted wars, while still maintaining forces in every single country Obama had troops in? And using drones---heavily---instead of human American troops to conduct war because American media doesn't care about civilian or drone casualties?

Where's the difference?

In the end, no amount dancing or misdirection is going to get you away from the fact that you're presenting Trump as mistake free. This is, of course, impossible. Even our greatest Presidents made mistakes. You're telling us that Trump is better than all of them, and can't name a single error, let alone the dozens of obvious mistakes he's made.

It's this silliness that's why VDH is ignored by serious thinkers. It's why he's on FoxNation more and more.

Put me in a Grad seminar with you and VDH, and I'd mop the floor with both of you. Because when a serious scholar comes up with the constant partisan nonsense that you and VDH use as your currency, they force you to present a position paper outlining Trump's mistakes, including strategic and tactical blunders.

And then the prof. would ask you to turn in the same thing for Obama's ME policies, except this time, selling Obama's foreign policy triumphs.

And neither of you are able to do that. You'd flunk out. And rightfully so.

[Typical Lax Dad]

^^^ I'm preserving the writings of a distinguished military historian, for future reference (for free) in the thread where it' is relevant,

On the other hand, you are wasting bandwidth with your juvenile trolling, by re-quoting my entire post.

[old salt]

Where's the difference?

I stated them & posted a lengthy VDH article explaining them.
You just don't want to hear them.

Ask the Iranians, Syrians or ISIS if things are different with Trump.
You are not looking if you do not see the difference in our situation in Syria, Iraq, the Persian Gulf states & Afghanistan.

Strawman.

You are jumping up and down, insisting that it's not noon----it's actually 12:03----- and acting like this is some massive difference. Good for you.

You think Trump has fixed everything. It's 6ftstick all over again, where you're simply happy that a Republican is in charge. I'm genuinely glad you're happy. It's how it works. Heck, 1/3 of the country was thrilled and though things were great simply because of Obama and his little D.

I get it. No you dont.
Things will never be "fixed" but they are improving.

Meanwhile, it's still a sh*tshow for anyone living in Syria, Afghanistan, and pretty much any Persian Gulf country as it relates to Trump/Bush/Obama. Stability ebbing and flowing, as it always has. Things had stabilized by 2009.
Bush is responsible for what we did 2000 - 2008, Obama for 2009 - 2016. Trump for 2017 - present.
They inherited what their predecessor left them. They're responsible for what happened on their watch.
By saying it's all the same, you blithely ignore all the Bush got us into, & then what he did to fix things by the time he left office.
You ignore all that Obama did to make things worse. He enabled -- the Arab Spring, the ouster of Mubarek, Syrian civil war, bombing then ignoring Libya, trying to cover up Benghazi, & most of all -- allowing the rise of ISIS, then doing too little, too late to counter it. While financing the IRGC & their proxies in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq & Yemen, by ramming through JCPOA without enduring bipartisan support, knowing it would collapse with a (R) President.
Trump's dealing with what his predecessors left him & doing exactly what he told us he would do.
You complain about what you say are his mistakes, but you don't say (specifically) what they are.

What I actually wrote was:

To not get into unwanted wars, while still maintaining forces in every single country Obama had troops in? And using drones---heavily---instead of human American troops to conduct war because American media doesn't care about civilian or drone casualties?

Where's the difference?

Where's the difference ? We also have troops in Japan, S Korea & throughout Europe.
We're not at war. We are now enabling our allies who are.
Do you not see any difference in the nature & scope of our current operations from when we were actively engaged in large scale ground combat ?

In the end, no amount dancing or misdirection is going to get you away from the fact that you're presenting Trump as mistake free. This is, of course, impossible. Even our greatest Presidents made mistakes. You're telling us that Trump is better than all of them, and can't name a single error, let alone the dozens of obvious mistakes he's made.
You keep claiming that, but you don't offer specifics. Give me substance, not style.

It's this silliness that's why VDH is ignored by serious thinkers. It's why he's on FoxNation more and more.

Put me in a Grad seminar with you and VDH, and I'd mop the floor with both of you. Because when a serious scholar comes up with the constant partisan nonsense that you and VDH use as your currency, they force you to present a position paper outlining Trump's mistakes, including strategic and tactical blunders.

And then the prof. would ask you to turn in the same thing for Obama's ME policies, except this time, selling Obama's foreign policy triumphs.
Triumphs ? The rise of the Caliphate ? All his "triumphs" were temporary, designed to fall apart after he left office, because he committed to crank ideas that were not supported & could not be sustained. ...or are you referring to the Rose Garden celebration of war hero Berghdahl.

And neither of you are able to do that. You'd flunk out. And rightfully so.
That's why academics don't fight wars or lead us in combat, ...than God.

[Typical Lax Dad]

Where's the difference?

I stated them & posted a lengthy VDH article explaining them.
You just don't want to hear them.

Ask the Iranians, Syrians or ISIS if things are different with Trump.
You are not looking if you do not see the difference in our situation in Syria, Iraq, the Persian Gulf states & Afghanistan.

Strawman.

You are jumping up and down, insisting that it's not noon----it's actually 12:03----- and acting like this is some massive difference. Good for you.

You think Trump has fixed everything. It's 6ftstick all over again, where you're simply happy that a Republican is in charge. I'm genuinely glad you're happy. It's how it works. Heck, 1/3 of the country was thrilled and though things were great simply because of Obama and his little D.

I get it. No you dont.
Things will never be "fixed" but they are improving.

Meanwhile, it's still a sh*tshow for anyone living in Syria, Afghanistan, and pretty much any Persian Gulf country as it relates to Trump/Bush/Obama. Stability ebbing and flowing, as it always has. Things had stabilized by 2009.
Bush is responsible for what we did 2000 - 2008, Obama for 2009 - 2016. Trump for 2017 - present.
They inherited what their predecessor left them. They're responsible for what happened on their watch.
By saying it's all the same, you blithely ignore all the Bush got us into, & then what he did to fix things by the time he left office.
You ignore all that Obama did to make things worse. He enabled -- the Arab Spring, the ouster of Mubarek, Syrian civil war, bombing then ignoring Libya, trying to cover up Benghazi, & most of all -- allowing the rise of ISIS, then doing too little, too late to counter it. While financing the IRGC & their proxies in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq & Yemen.
Trump's dealing with what his predecessors left him & doing exactly what he told us he would do.
You complain about what you say are his mistakes, but you don't say what they are.

What I actually wrote was:

To not get into unwanted wars, while still maintaining forces in every single country Obama had troops in? And using drones---heavily---instead of human American troops to conduct war because American media doesn't care about civilian or drone casualties?

Where's the difference?

Where's the difference ? We also have troops in Japan, S Korea & throughout Europe.
We're not at war. We are now enabling our allies who are.
Do you not see any difference in the nature & scope of our current operations from when we were actively engaged in large scale ground combat ?

In the end, no amount dancing or misdirection is going to get you away from the fact that you're presenting Trump as mistake free. This is, of course, impossible. Even our greatest Presidents made mistakes. You're telling us that Trump is better than all of them, and can't name a single error, let alone the dozens of obvious mistakes he's made.
You keep claiming that, but you don't offer specifics. Give me substance, not style.

It's this silliness that's why VDH is ignored by serious thinkers. It's why he's on FoxNation more and more.

Put me in a Grad seminar with you and VDH, and I'd mop the floor with both of you. Because when a serious scholar comes up with the constant partisan nonsense that you and VDH use as your currency, they force you to present a position paper outlining Trump's mistakes, including strategic and tactical blunders.

And then the prof. would ask you to turn in the same thing for Obama's ME policies, except this time, selling Obama's foreign policy triumphs.
Triumphs ? The rise of the Caliphate ? All his "triumphs" were temporary, designed to fall apart after he left office, because he committed to crank ideas that were not supported & could not be sustained. ...or are you referring to the Rose Garden celebration of war hero Berghdahl.

And neither of you are able to do that. You'd flunk out. And rightfully so.
That's why academics don't fight wars or lead us in combat, ...than God.

You despise this guy:

[old salt]

You despise this guy:

I disagree with many of his policies & many of his decisions. I'd like to have a beer with him.
He's a good man. I think he meant well, but he made costly mistakes that we're still dealing with.
I never attacked him personally & never will.

[Typical Lax Dad]

You despise this guy:

I disagree with many of his policies & many of his decisions. I'd like to have a beer with him.
He's a good man. I think he meant well, but he made costly mistakes that we're still dealing with.
I never attacked him personally & never will.

he was doing what the people elected him to do. Who are you to complain? He was your CinC.

[old salt]

You despise this guy:

I disagree with many of his policies & many of his decisions. I'd like to have a beer with him.
He's a good man. I think he meant well, but he made costly mistakes that we're still dealing with.
I never attacked him personally & never will.

he was doing what the people elected him to do. Who are you to complain? He was your CinC.

Because the chickens have come home to roost. If Iran had stopped testing ballistic missiles & not funded their rebel proxies in Yemen, Iraq, Syria & Lebanon, I'd say he earned the Nobel Prize he was awarded in advance.

[Typical Lax Dad]

You despise this guy:

I disagree with many of his policies & many of his decisions. I'd like to have a beer with him.
He's a good man. I think he meant well, but he made costly mistakes that we're still dealing with.
I never attacked him personally & never will.

he was doing what the people elected him to do. Who are you to complain? He was your CinC.

Because the chickens have come home to roost. If Iran had stopped testing ballistic missiles & not funded their rebel proxies in Yemen, Iraq, Syria & Lebanon, I'd say he earned the Nobel Prize he was awarded in advance.

He was duly elected and prosecuting an agenda that the people wanted. You were insubordinate.

[old salt]

You despise this guy:

I disagree with many of his policies & many of his decisions. I'd like to have a beer with him.
He's a good man. I think he meant well, but he made costly mistakes that we're still dealing with.
I never attacked him personally & never will.

he was doing what the people elected him to do. Who are you to complain? He was your CinC.

Because the chickens have come home to roost. If Iran had stopped testing ballistic missiles & not funded their rebel proxies in Yemen, Iraq, Syria & Lebanon, I'd say he earned the Nobel Prize he was awarded in advance.

He was duly elected and prosecuting an agenda that the people wanted. You were insubordinate.

Nope. Were you on LP then ? I said that I hoped his agenda would work, but I had my reservations & I stated them (not that it mattered)
It would have been great if he could bring Iran in from the cold & we could pull all our troops out of Iraq, without the country blowing up.
I said if they worked, that would earn him a spot on Mt Rushmore.
I would have been very happy with that outcome, but reality overcame hope.

[Typical Lax Dad]

You despise this guy:

I disagree with many of his policies & many of his decisions. I'd like to have a beer with him.
He's a good man. I think he meant well, but he made costly mistakes that we're still dealing with.
I never attacked him personally & never will.

he was doing what the people elected him to do. Who are you to complain? He was your CinC.

Because the chickens have come home to roost. If Iran had stopped testing ballistic missiles & not funded their rebel proxies in Yemen, Iraq, Syria & Lebanon, I'd say he earned the Nobel Prize he was awarded in advance.

He was duly elected and prosecuting an agenda that the people wanted. You were insubordinate.

Nope. Were you on LP then ? I said that I hoped his agenda would work, but I had my reservations & I stated them (not that it mattered)
It would have been great if he could bring Iran in from the cold & we could pull all our troops out of Iraq, without the country blowing up.
I said if they worked, that would earn him a spot on Mt Rushmore.
I would have been very happy with that outcome, but reality overcame hope.

He was your CinC and was duly elected. I am shocked you questioned him.

[old salt]

You despise this guy:

I disagree with many of his policies & many of his decisions. I'd like to have a beer with him.
He's a good man. I think he meant well, but he made costly mistakes that we're still dealing with.
I never attacked him personally & never will.

he was doing what the people elected him to do. Who are you to complain? He was your CinC.

Because the chickens have come home to roost. If Iran had stopped testing ballistic missiles & not funded their rebel proxies in Yemen, Iraq, Syria & Lebanon, I'd say he earned the Nobel Prize he was awarded in advance.

He was duly elected and prosecuting an agenda that the people wanted. You were insubordinate.

Nope. Were you on LP then ? I said that I hoped his agenda would work, but I had my reservations & I stated them (not that it mattered)
It would have been great if he could bring Iran in from the cold & we could pull all our troops out of Iraq, without the country blowing up.
I said if they worked, that would earn him a spot on Mt Rushmore.
I would have been very happy with that outcome, but reality overcame hope.

He was your CinC and was duly elected. I am shocked you questioned him.

Constructive questioning, offered in a substantive respectful manner.
Try it sometime. It makes for a more informative discussion.

[Typical Lax Dad]

You despise this guy:

I disagree with many of his policies & many of his decisions. I'd like to have a beer with him.
He's a good man. I think he meant well, but he made costly mistakes that we're still dealing with.
I never attacked him personally & never will.

he was doing what the people elected him to do. Who are you to complain? He was your CinC.

Because the chickens have come home to roost. If Iran had stopped testing ballistic missiles & not funded their rebel proxies in Yemen, Iraq, Syria & Lebanon, I'd say he earned the Nobel Prize he was awarded in advance.

He was duly elected and prosecuting an agenda that the people wanted. You were insubordinate.

Nope. Were you on LP then ? I said that I hoped his agenda would work, but I had my reservations & I stated them (not that it mattered)
It would have been great if he could bring Iran in from the cold & we could pull all our troops out of Iraq, without the country blowing up.
I said if they worked, that would earn him a spot on Mt Rushmore.
I would have been very happy with that outcome, but reality overcame hope.

He was your CinC and was duly elected. I am shocked you questioned him.

Constructive questioning, offered in a substantive respectful manner.
Try it sometime. It makes for a more informative discussion.

Really?

[old salt]

Thought provoking article about NATO's future.
(surprising to find Russian propaganda on that site)
https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2019/1 ... e_today_nl

[a fan]

Things had stabilized by 2009.
Bush is responsible for what we did 2000 - 2008, Obama for 2009 - 2016. Trump for 2017 - present.
They inherited what their predecessor left them. They're responsible for what happened on their watch.
By saying it's all the same, you blithely ignore all the Bush got us into, & then what he did to fix things by the time he left office.

Not ignoring what Bush did. I'm saying it's all fruit from the same line of thinking. Until our thinking changes, all that's different is where our troops are located, which part of the ME are our troops in, and in how great of numbers.

What you're doing here is pointing at 1988 and saying, "see, we're pretty stable". I'm saying nope, this is just a relatively calm period. It will go to *hit, because it always does. And because we have troops everywhere, we thoughtlessly commit troops to new dangers (Syria, Saudi Arabia) with no more thought than it takes to breath in and out.

Things had stabilized by 2009.
You ignore all that Obama did to make things worse. He enabled -- the Arab Spring, the ouster of Mubarek, Syrian civil war, bombing then ignoring Libya, trying to cover up Benghazi, & most of all -- allowing the rise of ISIS, then doing too little, too late to counter it. While financing the IRGC & their proxies in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq & Yemen, by ramming through JCPOA without enduring bipartisan support, knowing it would collapse with a (R) President.

While you're blaming Obama for anything you can think of, I hear he's also responsible for the poor script of the new Star Wars Trilogy. Is that true?

Benghazi? Yep. Lying about Benghazi? Yep. Bombing Libya? Yep. Responsible for both. The rest of your made up nonsense? Nope.

Financing the IRGC? Nope. That was you, and the rest of the geniuses who thought that we HAD to remove Saddam, without one thought about what that would do to the balance of power in the region. Look in the mirror for that brilliant move. "Oh no, a murderous tyrant in the Middle East that America bankrolled!!! Well, we can't have that, can we".

If you told aliens about the "strategy" to first install the Shah, then bankroll Saddam to buffer the ensuing revolutionaries in Iran, then remove Saddam as said buffer via force, and then feign surprise when....shocker....Iran is left the only large power in the region? They'd immediately conclude that dogs are running things on earth, as we are their pets.... because no one is that stupid.

Things had stabilized by 2009.
Trump's dealing with what his predecessors left him & doing exactly what he told us he would do.
You complain about what you say are his mistakes, but you don't say (specifically) what they are.

First of all, I already have over the last 3 years.

Second of all, I don't have to. You do. You're the one telling us that your reading of foreign policy is partisan free.

So let's hear it. 20 mistakes Trump has made. Should be the easiest request you've ever fulfilled here.

Where's the difference ? We also have troops in Japan, S Korea & throughout Europe.
We're not at war.

We're not at war? Dude. Do I REALLY need to give you a casualty list?

Do you think I'm angry about our ME policies for kicks? Or do you think I'm mad because US soldiers keep getting shipped home beat up in one way or another?

We are now enabling our allies who are.

Yep. That's where it always starts. Then mission creep. Then you start in with the "we can't leave" nonsense. Rinse. Repeat.

Do you not see any difference in the nature & scope of our current operations from when we were actively engaged in large scale ground combat ?

It depends on what you mean by "large scale ground combat", but yes, I can see the difference. But out of the last 30 years, how many months were spent at "large scale ground combat". Two? Three?

Desert Storm lasted a month. Invasion of Iraq lasted a month. After that? It was either leaving Iraq, or "nation building/making a country stable".

I have no clue what you think the Afghanistan War was/is----large scale ground combat? Small scale skirmishes? You tell me.

Triumphs ? The rise of the Caliphate ? All his "triumphs" were temporary, designed to fall apart after he left office, because he committed to crank ideas that were not supported & could not be sustained. ...or are you referring to the Rose Garden celebration of war hero Berghdahl.

If you can't see that Bergdahl was section 8.....I don't know what to tell you. Sane men don't walk through Afghanistan unarmed, with American clothes on. He stood to post. I could give a *hit if it was for only a day. He still did it. I'm glad we got him home.

You know full well Obama had foreign policy victories, just as every other President, including our current President. Just stop with this silliness.