Brictoria wrote:
VegetableMan wrote:
Mr Reynholm wrote:
Yes the Democrat and Republican Parties are owned by the same entities.
Correct. With the Pubs, their BS is out in the open for all to see. The Dems are more dangerous because they still try to portray themselves as progressives, which is a steaming load of excrement. They're able to get more horrible s**t passed because the keft goes to sleep when they're in office. (Evidence: Eight years of Obama!)
Why we're still in Afghanistan canned be summed up in one word:
Lithium
It's not complicated at all.
The strange thing is that although the Republicans are supposedly the party of "war"\"military action", looking at the history, it's the Democrats who seem most adept at getting their country into these large-scale wars:
US Civil war - Unsure if Democrats (or some other, non-Republican party) who broke away and triggered this, but caused by Republican party seeking to end slavery.
WW1 - Woodrow Wilson (Democrat) in power for duration.
WW2 - Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman (both Democrats) in power for duration.
Korean war - Harry S. Truman (Democrat) sent troops in.
Vietnam war - John F. Kennedy (Democrat) sent over 15,000 troops (above the 900 present when he entered office), followed by Lyndon B. Johnson (Democrat) who increased this to a peak of over 536,000.
With a history like that, anyone wanting to keep the USA out of foreign wars would seem best placed to vote Republican, not Democrat.
The Civil War cant be blamed on any particular political party.
You conveniently forgot the next war: the most nakedly imperialistic war in American history. That being the Spanish American War. Presided over GOPer McKinley the war resulted in the US owning the Phillipines, Guam, Puerto Rico, and briefly Cuba. Ironically it was fighting Spanish colonial oppression of Cuba that was the pretext for entering the War- the war that made America a colonial power for the first time itself.
Democrat Wilson led the US during it's entry into WWI. Many factors drove the US into entering the war. Dont know of any clear evidence that a GOP POTUS would have kept us out.
The US did not enter World War Two. It was World War Two that entered the US when the Japanese obliterated half of our Navy at Pearl Harbor. The attack on our own soil meant we were then already at war So there wasnt even a choice:both parties in Congress almost universally ratified FDR's declaration of war on Japan. Hard to imagine any president of either party not declaring war after Pearl Harbor. A couple weeks later Hitler declared war on the US. So we were then at war with both Germany and Japan with out our POTUS lifting a finger.
US troops were already occupying southern Korea when the North Koreans invaded. Democrat Truman was in charge of the American war to roll back the invasion. It's not obvious that any GOP POTUS would have done differently in response to the Communist aggression at that moment in history. It was the thick of the Cold War, and shortly after WWII which voters were blaming on "appeasement".
Democrat JFK put a few thousand advisers into Laos and into South Vietnam, but it was his Democrat successor, LBJ, who manufactured a crises called "the Tonkin Gulf Incident" (much like "Remember the Maine") to justify escalating JFK's low profile war into a major high profile land war with 100s of thousands of US troops. Like the Spanish American it was a war in which we clearly and aggressively "crashed a party we werent invited to".
The elder George Bush waged Desert Storm to free Kuwait from Saddam Hussein. But why freeing Kuwait was any of our business is still not obvious.
And then came the
younger Bush. Nine-eleven was like Pearly Harbor. Bush did what FDR, or any American POTUS of either party would have done, and went to war in Afghanistan against Al Queda to avenge 9-11. But then a year later he used that same 9-11 to justify invading a second country-one that had nothing to do with 9-11---Iraq. And we are still involved with both countries.
Trump seems hellbent on ending two wars, but on starting a third one. Getting us out of Iraq and Afghanistan, but on starting a war with Iran. So go figure.
So of the all the too many wars the US has gotten itself into only four were ones that I would consider to be clear cases of "elective surgery" so to speak-- ones that we didnt need to get involved in: The Spanish American, Vietnam, and both of the two Iraq wars. The respective presidents who got us involved were McKinley (GOP), Lyndon Johnson (Democrat), George HW Bush (GOP), and George W. Bush (GOP). Three Republicans and one Democrat.
20 Jul 2020, 8:28 am
