Domodedovo bombing.

so then, Barkey, what would you like America to be like?

Mildly isolationist when it comes to foreign policy, but utterly cold and efficient when we actually decide to do something.

I think we could have avoided half the conflicts we've been in during these last several decades, but I'd rather we kept our noses out of these issues and only went in when it was actually necessary, not just on a whim.

But when we do go in, we go all out, committing tons of resources, being extremely thorough, and instead of letting politicians run the show, have them give a blanket objective to the brass, and let them do whatever they have to do to achieve it. In the case of Iraq, using Petraeus' block by block strategy of isolating specific neighborhoods, patrolling and investigating them until we can exterminate every last bit of active resistance, and then sending military police in to hold them, people who actually know how to interact with civilians and the general public.

And you do this block by block, until the city is secure, and you have MP's training local police forces on how to keep order and peace in said city, then you move on to the next major population center. Then you isolate the smaller areas of population that resistance is coming from, and you proceed to saturate the area with forces to either force them to keep their heads down while you secure other areas, or give you the chance to destroy them.

During all of this, the major population centers would have schools, universities, and infrastructure being built, and the populace being educated and taken care of. This process would take about ten years, maybe a little more, if you wanted to be thorough. Eventually most of the active and determined resistance would be dead, and the people who lived for years reaping the benefits of the improvements to their cities that we fostered would start to take positions in government, military, and police forces.

It's essentially a process of sanitizing, rebuilding, and training every major population center so that it becomes a force multiplier by being able to train competent forces to protect that territory on their own, so that we have the manpower to leave those places and move on. It's a thorough and very methodical process, but it's way better than what we did, which was go in with shock and awe, break all their shit, and then sit there with our thumb up our ass, scratching our heads, wondering what we should do next. Education and knowledge were the most effective weapons in our arsenal, and we didn't use them.

We only had a military goal in Iraq and Afghanistan, which was to destroy the enemy.We never had a broader based goal of how we'll rebuild what we destroyed and win over the populace. For all the time spent saying we're there to win hearts and minds, we haven't done much with the purpose of doing so aside from giving humanitarian rations out and providing medical care. We should have helped them get the infrastructure they needed and the education they needed to stand on their own two feet and help us drive out the subversive element, and we should have localized our efforts in a more methodical fashion instead of just spreading our shit far and wide across the country without any real focus on the problem areas.

edited 27th Jan '11 2:57:22 PM by Barkey

"Mildly isolationist when it comes to foreign policy, but utterly cold and efficient when we actually decide to do something."

What does isolationist mean to you? If you mean no more world police, yeah, but what about helping out those in say...humanitarian crises?

I'd support that in the capacity of which we helped Haiti.

I really want UN Peacekeepers to be a viable force though, if I was calling the shots they would actually get used in places that needed them, like some of those countries in Africa that can't go 4 years without having one authoritarian government toppled by another.

But this is off-topic, do we know who is responsible for the bombing yet?

Someone from Stavropol Krai

(that's a caucauses administrative zone but its mainly ethnic Russians not mountain peoples - aka the majority aint ghetto ass ingush or chechens - but AFAIK the Circassians were B& from that region)

fun fact: the guy who did it was Russian proper, not some other ethnic group http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/27/AR2011012702152.html

We're half-assing it to be honest.

1 million dead from the occupation is "half-assing" it? -_-

The US could've simply let Iraq balkanize and enjoy the new political sphere generated from that....and that's something that would be well cool. Even if it ends up with a lot of ethnic cleansing and nborder disputes along the way.....

edited 27th Jan '11 10:11:24 PM by BalloonFleet

By half-assing it I meant that we're not doing things in the best possible manner for completing our objective.

k

[also a bump]

and ewwwwwwwww http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article6168959.ece

Been going on for years, I can't feel too sympathetic, the Chechens do the same thing to Russians that they capture.

I don't have a problem with not taking prisoners, though I do have a problem with torture.

Actually originally chechen guerillas set Russian PO Ws free and unharmed. Originally it was a war of national liberation and the chechens were not fundamentalistic, the horrors of the first war made it turn into that. As the russians were dickish things got worse (and I am referring to the FIRST chechen war). Yeltsin should've let those people go free and deal with a 'destabilized russia' instead of that shit

So, it is officially considered solved, although no details are given. http://rt.com/news/investigative-committee-domodedovo-solved/

Damn vague