Comments on: U.S. nation-building in the wrong place?

By: billydkidd2011

billydkidd2011 — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 04:46:37 +0000

Whats the problem?…..We can rebuild here. We need jobs all you got to do is get enough republicans to approve the funds. OH! thats it!I forgot.Republicans refuse to vote for anything that might jeopardize their chances of taking over the White house.Got to look out for the interest of big corporations,thats how they keep the money in their pockets.Pursuing their American dream while eliminating yours.They would just soon wait it out and watch you fail if thats what it takes to regain control. If you can’t see it,then why can’t they compromise and do whats obvious to everone? Cut the tax breaks only the big corporations and the wealthy are given.We can,t afford it.Big oil….record profits and then you give them another 20-25 million and the best they can come up with is to take from the poor or less fortunate.Its going to be a long long time before the poorman can pay that deficit off! This country is sending all the work overseas because its cost effective for the company,but your being told give the rich the money and they will provide jobs.They sure will but you want be one of them.All this rebuilding infrastructures we destroyed,millions and millions of dollars stolen.These people had a hay day over there.Our country’s debt is maxed out and still the republican party refuses to do what it is going to take to get this country rolling again. Well hopefully with Obamas speech it might make it harder for them to say no.We need jobs.Rebuilding our own infrastructure is profitable.Get the oil companys to pay for it with their record profits,at least make them pay their taxes like everyone else.By the way I do believe this is the first time(not sure,maybe WW2)the oil reserves have been open.Kind of hard to dog obama about that but I hope people can see whos actually trying to help you.I’m sure the republicans got something to say about it. OVER AND OUT…DDOC

By: 007XXX

007XXX — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 03:35:28 +0000

US “building” a nation….ha ha ha ha….only thing US is good at is destroying other nations. Look at Pakistan, Iraq, Middle East, Korea. Only thing that really matters to politicians in US today is to fill their own pockets at expense of everything else even at expense of their fellow countrymen. Does Americans know which companies got hold of Iraq oil wells and how closely shareholders of those companies were related to Bush administration. It seems all the world, EXCEPT Americans, know this…amazing or stupid.

By: DarkKnightRises

DarkKnightRises — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 23:54:39 +0000

really great points have been brought up by your post

By: Whatsgoingon

Whatsgoingon — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 21:55:49 +0000

“If there is any nation in the world that really needs nation-building right now, it is the United States.” Nicely put – but where comes the money?

By: ranaoboy

ranaoboy — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 07:32:35 +0000

tired of policing the world?
you can’t go home yet, there is still iran, syria, yemen, somalia…etc.

By: rrdas

rrdas — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 02:17:32 +0000

yes US should leave but not before they attack Pakistan. Disarm them, take control of their nuclear assets and then let them rot.

By: RKFrance

RKFrance — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 23:23:43 +0000

I think we need truly global and democratic international institutions to deal with world problems. And that will take time I guess..

However, US is hugely overspending on defense. Why does the US need a huge budget, more than 15 times Chinese ?

Why should the US spend 75 % on NATO without Europeans chipping in more money and people ?

Are American lives and money cheaper ?

By: Foztah

Foztah — Sat, 11 Jun 2011 22:32:36 +0000

For a decade now, the terrists have been victorious on many levels. In the process of invading and occupying their mid-east homelands, the US and her pathetic allies have steadily been bankrupting their own home nations. Thousands of US (and her pathetic allies) soldiers have been triumphantly killed, and more keep coming for the slaughter. Meanwhile the deaths of homeland defending insurgents/terrists/freedom fighters (not to mention the deaths of innocent civilians) has created countless matyrs and sown the seeds of perennial hatred and ensured many more highly motivated, revenge seeking terrists.

Lest we forget the soldiers who died.

Lest we forget the foolhardy US and allied politicians who blundered into this disaster.

By: richinnc

richinnc — Sat, 11 Jun 2011 17:13:03 +0000

During Vietnam war – why are we there? – “to stop Communism” yet Cuba was and is Communistic and about 90 miles away. I believe much of our war “efforts” are because of all of the defense companies that make money off our wars. When there is talk of shutting down a defense project you hear how many communities will be affected. Is that sourcing of parts purposely done just so multiple Congress members will want the project to continue? Suppose Congress will get the idea of building infrastructure here would be more lasting than half way around the world?

By: majkmushrm

majkmushrm — Sat, 11 Jun 2011 16:23:37 +0000

The US has a co-dependency problem. We don’t seem to understand where we end and other countries begin (or, equally plausibly, we don’t recognize that there is an end to our country and consider all other countries as adjuncts to ours). We don’t seem to understand that, for example, Saddam Hussein killing and oppressing his people is not our problem. We do, at least, seem to understand that if you ravage a country and lay waste to its infrastructure, it would be wise to try to rectify that. Unfortunately, we do so under the rubric of “nation building”. Right. Like we’re experts at that. We’re not very good at building our own country, never mind somebody else’s.

So, even though we can’t change history, a bit of a review might be useful. We attacked Afghanistan to get Al-Qaeda. Of course, (a) Al-Qaeda was not a part of the Afghani government and (b) Afghanistan didn’t really have a government since several different factions were engaged in a bloody civil war, but no matter. We attacked Afghanistan. Our first flash, using all our really cool military hardware, was an utter failure. Unable to admit failure, the mission morphs into rooting out terrorism even though (a) 9/11 was planned and largely executed while the Al-Qaeda leaders were in Somalia and (b) no Afghani’s were involved in 9/11. After years of rooting out terrorism while fighting the Afghan civil war on the side of our puppet government in Kabul, we’re desperately trying to move into the “nation building” phase wherein we give the Afghanis a bunch of stuff they don’t know how to use, a bunch of stuff they don’t need, and an alphabet soup of organizations that have no roots in Afghanistan. We plan to be there for the foreseeable future.

Iraq is little different. We attacked Iraq because they had “WMDs”. When (heh, heh, heh) we couldn’t find any, rather than admitting failure, the mission morphed into ridding the downtrodden Iraqi people of the evil dictator Zarg … I mean Saddam Hussein (who had been one of the “good guys” back in the ’80s when he attacked Iran at our behest so that we could have a regional power other than Iran). Since it took a few years to find Hussein, a combination of our heavy handed occupation and a release of the underlying tensions in the country that Hussein’s brutal regime had kept suppressed allowed TERRORISM (ahieee) to take root. So we got morph of mission II. Well, eventually we captured and killed Saddam Hussein which allowed for morph of mission III (cue the drum roll), you guessed it, nation building wherein we give the Iraqis a bunch of stuff they don’t know how to use, a bunch of stuff they don’t need, and an alphabet soup of organizations that have no roots in Iraq. We’d like to be in Iraq for the foreseeable future but the previous idiot-in-chief negotiated a hard withdrawal date and the government is now in the position of begging the Iraqi government to please, please let us stay for a laundry list of contrived reasons.

So has this trip down memory lane taught us anything? Probably not, but here’s my take away….

1. The US government is incapable of articulating and implementing a clear and attainable objective for the military when we unleash it on some country.

2. The US government is incapable of ending anything unless the devastated nation has been transmogrified into a society that looks like what we think our society is like (as opposed to what our society really is like).
3. The US government thinks that military force solves problems. This little history conclusively demonstrates that it does not.

4. The nanny state doesn’t work any better when it’s applied to the world than it does when it’s applied here.