This story seems an odd event at this time. The period between a presidential election and subsequent inauguration is a strange moment for the commander in chief to order all troops home from across the world, if that is what this story portends. Why not do it earlier, or why not leave it to the next administration?
New Defense Chief Puts DoD On Notice: “All Wars Must End”
Published
Tidewater News and Opinion Forum 
Of course this is the right time.
Whichever way things go, the election is over. Trump had plenty enough enemies before the election without setting the military industrial complex against him,
But getting us out of these endless wars was always Trump’s goal. Now he can do it without political consequences.
Leaving it to the next administration wasn’t going to work, When Democrats are in power, they constantly get us half way into new wars and never finish them. Isis was a consequence of Obama meddling in Libya. We were at war the entire Obama administration so expecting Biden to finish getting us out was hopeless.
So, it’s now or never, and I am quite tired of seeing young men on TV with prosthetic limbs. It’s time to get our people home and leave making war to the Air Force.
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RE: “Now he can do it without political consequences.”
Makes sense to me. In the same vein he could declassify the unpublished appendices of the Horowitz report, as WSJ’s Holman Jenkins has recommended.
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“ We were at war the entire Obama administration…”
I believe we have been at war continuously since 1941. With a few scattered years here and there when our troops were not shot at or shooting someone.
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The wars in the Middle East are the result of Bush’s disastrous invasion of Iraq. That brought Al Qaeda to prominence which morphed into ISIS with some assist from Syria’s civil war.
And, of course, ISIS, like all the the other Islamic extremist movements are sourced in Saudi Arabia with our full-hearted assistance over decades in exchange for oil.
The military-industrial complex is the source for our dependence upon military force over diplomacy. Not so much overt as a cultural change over the decades since we helped win WW2. A cultural change that pushes our government into bullets and bombs faster than we need to or even should do.
And the really sad part is that we have not been the winner in any of them with the possible exception of the Kuwait adventure 30 years ago. We lost a huge amount of credibility and standing in the world when Bush invaded Iraq. And it has been downhill ever since.
Trump had the right idea when he said he would end the “endless wars”. Unfortunately he never succeeded. I think part of the issue is that he never sat down with his staff, the DOD, and Congressional leaders to effect a serious plan. Just reactive tweets when the impatience rose to the top. Constant shuffling of his advisors, aides and cabinet folks did not create a better government, just more loyal sycophants to Trump.
And the article said that Afghanistan would still be the problem.
“”As we prepare for the future, we remain committed to finishing the war that Al Qaida brought to our shores in 2001. This war isn’t over,” Miller wrote, in reference to the 19-year old war in Afghanistan.
“We are on the verge of defeating Al Qaida and its associates, but we must avoid our past strategic error of failing to see the fight through to the finish. Indeed, this fight has been long, our sacrifices have been enormous, and many are weary of war – I’m one of them,” he added.”
Pulling troops from Africa and other hotspots around the world may be a good thing. But the key is Afghanistan and that is still going to be on our list of places we are engaged in. Or at least the latest DOD chief says so.
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Occupying Islamic states is not good policy. We should have learned that from the Soviet’s experience.
The right way to deal with terrorist threats is to punish the host countries so severely that the local strongmen will rid themselves of the terrorists.
That’s what Gadahfi learned and why he had ruthlessly suppressed Islamic extremists, driving Al Qaida out of Libya and into Mali. There was no longer any threat from Libya until Hillary and Obama decided it was a good thing to kill him and let the Islamists take over.
The right thing to have done after 9/11 would have been to tell Afghanistan to turn over the guilty parties or learn to do without nice things like bridges and electricity, and made good that threat with the Air Force and Cruise missiles.
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You forgot what we did in Afghanistan. Essentially, we had the advance CIA and Special Forces pay the warlords to do most of the fighting. Good idea until Bush just couldn’t contain himself and listened to Cheney and the neo-con artists.
Telling the Afghans that we would hurt their infrastructure is like telling a poor man he can’t sleep under the bridge.
It was Iraq that created this whole mess. A Bush relied on how cowed the opposition was, including media, about seeming unpatriotic.
Bush will go down in history as the second worst president we ever had. He was first, but Trump has taken that title with extra points.
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Uh, Al Qaida was in Afghanistan before 9/11 and long before Bush was President.
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Yes, but they were not in Iraq.
The history goes back decades with a boost in Egypt when a crackdown on religious leaders jailed many future extremists, including Al Qaeda.
Iraq gave them a rallying cry and the rest is history.
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“Isis was a consequence of Obama meddling in Libya. ”
Bullshit. Or more accurately, another of your endless supply of lies about President Obama.
Isis was the result of Baathifcation in Iraq.
You don’t get to back up your birther slanders with made-up history.
https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/timeline-the-rise-spread-and-fall-the-islamic-state
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