I thought someone in the thread said something to the effect that being gay was not a good reason to vote for someone for Pres. But I scanned back and didn’t see it. But that was what I was responding to (even if it was just some confabulation inside my own head).
Mriana, I bow to your love of Obama out of respect for your obvious sincerity.
But if you are accusing Barack of lying about Afghanistan, could you please specify what you are talking about?
There were a few stories about it yesterday, one being in the Washington Post- Ring of Fire referred to the article too:
And then finally The N. Y. Times (right click pic and open in new window):
The articles indicate that the Shrub (B. Jr.), Obama, and the Dotard (no surprise) lied about the Afghan war.
There was a Fourth article about it, but it’s more of a POV of the Afghan war: https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-delusion-behind-the-war-in-afghanistan/?fbclid=IwAR2Ruot3k8YCChjvbOIEzrvi0kSVdKWzD4gM3JahdI_NTfEaAuGg3uJeLEU
Ok, I guess I have to sort thru that to find out the actual lie that you believe Obama told. I’ll get back to it.
It was about the Afghan war, but for some reason, I don’t hold it against him. That and I already knew it was another Vietnam War or worse, so it came to no surprise. Keep this in mind though, Obama is human and for whatever reason, he felt the whole story about the war could not be told.
But what was the actual lie that Obama allegedly told us? Are you saying that he lied because he did not let us know how much that Afghanistan, like most wars, was a big shite show?
Our options then (as now) if we were to leave Afghanistan, that would let the pro US govt there, fail (and allow those who were our allies to be subsumed by the Taliban)? (And by subsumed, I mean bad things will happen to them.) AND the Taliban will probably allow Al Qaeda and ISIS to reconstitute there. And the people who have actually experienced some bit of human rights (including the women, in particular) will go back to being slaves of the Taliban version of Islam or of ISIS or Al Qaeda, when those fine fellows come back.
So I can see how Barack may not have highlighted the downside of NOT withdrawing from Afghanistan. Cause withdrawing would have been worse.
Did you read the articles and watch the video? I don’t know if there are pro-U.S. gov there, but I do know we shouldn’t be there and people are dying or being maimed for no good reason. I think a lot about the Afghan war is propaganda and sadly Obama may have been forced to perpetuate those lies.
Speaking of propaganda, you said Obama may have perpetuated lies about the Afghan war. But you have not specified the lie/s.
I started watching the 1st vid that you posted. The guy started off saying that it was a lie that lead us to go into Afghanistan in the 1st place. What lie was that? Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda were in Afghanistan being protected by the Taliban. That was real. That is no lie.
I didn’t read or watch any more, because it seemed like propaganda to me. And you never know these days, if/when you are the target of some entity’s sophisticated propaganda campaign.
But you watched and read the stuff, so please tell me just one specific lie that Obama told about the Afghan war. What actual combination of words did he say that constituted a lie? Surely there is some actual statement he made that is a lie. Or is it that he simply did not take us out of Afghanistan? Is that the supposed lie? That not doing so, is considered a lie because that couldn’t possibly have been the best course of action?
Sometimes a good leader chooses a course of action from a set of bad choices. Sometimes there is no perfect choice. Sometimes there is NO good choice at all. That is not being a liar. That is being a leader.
I thought someone in the thread said something to the effect that being gay was not a good reason to vote for someone for Pres. But I scanned back and didn’t see it. But that was what I was responding to (even if it was just some confabulation inside my own head).That sounded really familiar to me too. I think you were referring to this:
As of right now, Bettigieg doesn’t even cut the mustard and I’m not voting for someone just because they’d be a first anything. There has to be more to them than that, no matter how nice the first this or that would be.
It’s not propaganda and the Wash Po article shows more than ROF’s rant. Maybe I posted things backwards, but basically the Afghan war is as bad as the Vietnam war and we shouldn’t have been there in the first place. You will just have to read them because there is too much there to start quoting a bunch of things.
If you need a quote, here’s one:
The Lessons Learned interviews contradict years of public statements by presidents, generals and diplomats. The interviews make clear that officials issued rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hid unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable. Several of those interviewed described explicit efforts by the U.S. government to deliberately mislead the public and a culture of willful ignorance, where bad news and critiques were unwelcome. Read the story.
I’ll give you two more quotes, but I don’t want to quote mine and violate the rules, even as a mod. This one is the link from their “read the story” statement.
“We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing,” Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general who served as the White House’s Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations, told government interviewers in 2015. He added: “What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.”“If the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction . . . 2,400 lives lost,” Lute added, blaming the deaths of U.S. military personnel on bureaucratic breakdowns among Congress, the Pentagon and the State Department. “Who will say this was in vain?”
“We don’t invade poor countries to make them rich. We don’t invade authoritarian countries to make them democratic. We invade violent countries to make them peaceful and we clearly failed in Afghanistan.”— James Dobbins, former U.S. diplomat
The lie from the Shrub, Obama, and the dotard is that all was going well over there, when it was not, and the lives lost (U.S. and Afghanistan). If we had stayed out of it, “the list of names on that wall would be a whole lot shorter” (The Dirty F***in’ Hippies Were Right).
If you sift through all the documents in the Wash Po, of which there are many, you’ll see that wasn’t just the only thing that the government wasn’t honest about. BTW, even a search on Factcheck.org would show that Obama wasn’t always forthcoming on everything. Sometimes he told a partial truth, but I’ll tell you this, he told the truth more than the Shrub and a 90% more often than the dotard. Except for the Afghan war. He perpetuated a rosy picture, that wasn’t at all true, thus the picture in the situation room with Hillary et al when Osama Bin Lauden was allegedly killed. I’m almost certain that not only was it a gruesome assassination, but some of our own may have been bloodied, mamed, or even died too. I seriously doubt it was a clean kill without incident to our troops. It was more than likely a gruesome mess thus why they wouldn’t show any of it to the public and thus their expressions in that picture. There’s a lot they didn’t tell us and a lot they weren’t honest about.
We’re not pulling out anytime soon as promised:
Instead of bringing stability and peace, they said, the United States inadvertently built a corrupt, dysfunctional Afghan government that remains dependent on U.S. military power for its survival. Assuming it does not collapse, U.S. officials have said it will need billions more dollars in aid annually, for decades.
But the U.S. nation-building project backfired in so many other ways that even foreign-aid advocates questioned whether Afghanistan, in the abstract, might have been better off without any U.S. help at all, according to the documents.“I mean, the writing is on the wall now,” Michael Callen, an economist with the University of California at San Diego specializing on the Afghan public sector, told government interviewers. “We spent so much money and there is so little to show for it.”
And yes, in various parts of the last article they did compare it to the Vietnam War, so it wasn’t just me saying that. Obama, this article, kept throwing money at the problem and the article said, with how much money was thrown at the problem, Afghanistan should have looked like 1955 Germany, but it didn’t and doesn’t. So much of our money was spent that it actually crashed their economy, not improved it. It didn’t improve anything.
Lastly, from the NY Times:
The Washington Post said the new document trove has a precedent in the Pentagon Papers, but also drew distinctions with that 7,000-page study of the Vietnam War, which was based on internal government documents kept secret until published in 1971 by The New York Times and The Post.In contrast, The Post describes the new documents as drawn from interviews conducted between 2014 and 2018 that were used by the inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction to write a series of unclassified “Lessons Learned” reports that have been publicly released. “About 30 of the interview records are transcribed, word-for-word accounts,” The Post said. “The rest are typed summaries of conversations: pages of notes and quotes from people with different vantage points in the conflict, from provincial outposts to the highest circles of power.”
Any more, even concerning Obama’s part, you’ll have to sift through all the articles and interviews yourself, because I do not intent to violate any rules by quote mining or posting lengthy anything. Obama was not forthcoming 100% or 100% honest about the Afghan war, which is no surprise given it was just another Vietnam War, which is what I’ve always thought of it.
Great. Now you’re spreading an unfounded conspiracy theory that Obama presided over a gruesome mess that he lied about and covered up when our guys took out Bin Laden.
As far as Bush mismanaging wars - that is absolutely beleivable. That’s all he did in Iraq - mismanage that war.
But I bristle at Obama being thrown in with the likes of him and called a liar without being specifically told 1 single lie that Obama told.
So you suggest Obama’s lie was not sharing how bad things were in Afghanistan during his terms. There are lots of things that leaders don’t share with their ppl, for various reasons. I believe that Obama must have had a good reason for that. One obvious reason is that as Commander in Chief, it probably wouldn’t be helpful to go on about how fubar things are going, at times, as it would be counter to the efficacy of the efforts of the troops. And as I suggested before, leaving Afghanistan might well have been the worst option, in terms of what would have ensued, during Obama’s term.
I don’t think Obama was perfect. For one thing, his moderation was ultimately beaten by the extremists on the “conservative” side. So that now we have the Dotard on the verge of becoming DOTUS. (I will declare him DOTUS when the Senate lets him off of Impeachment without any punishment for attempting to corrupt our next Presidential election. At that point we will no longer have a President because we have instead, a pathological liar and a perpetual white collar criminal who can not be punished by any law. He can and will continue using the power of the Presidency, or at that point, rather, the power of the Dictator in whatever way that occurs to him to get what he wants - more power.)
As far as Afghan war being like Viet Nam. Not really, I don’t think. 60 thousand of our soldiers died. 150,000 wounded. No telling how many Viet Nam veterans were messed up and died prematurely since that war, and because of it.
I don’t know a good reason we got in that war except it was thought that the spread of Communism needed to be stopped. Otoh, Afghanistan was where the ppl who did 9/11 were.
(I was recently diagnosed with a bone spur in my hip, so I no longer have to be concerned about being drafted and dying in Viet Nam as I was when I was 18. There was a time during the Viet Nam war that newly arriving recruits had a life expectancy of a fruit fly.)
I did not say that. He didn’t cover up the gruesome mess of Osama’s death but he didn’t show it to the public. That’s not what I said. That said though, I’ve never been [mentally] sure Osama is dead because we never saw a picture of his corpse. So if you think I was saying he was lying about that, it’s only because my brain isn’t certain, but I was not saying that was a cover up. What I said was, I’m almost certain that not only was it a gruesome assassination, but some of our own may have been bloodied, mamed, or even died too. I seriously doubt it was a clean kill without incident to our troops. It was more than likely a gruesome mess thus why they wouldn’t show any of it to the public and thus their expressions in that picture. There’s a lot they didn’t tell us and a lot they weren’t honest about." But I was not saying they did not kill Osama, even though I’m not entirely sure they did. Whatever happened though, it definitely was gruesome just by looking at their faces in the situation room. If they really did kill Osama, it was really gruesome and I’m pretty sure some of our men went with Osama when he died. How many people we lost at that time, we’ll never know, but I am certain we lost some in the processes.
The article and papers have nothing to do with Iraq, just Afghanistan. I haven’t been talking about Iraq, just Afghanistan.
Just read the articles and stop twisting or adding to what I’m saying. However, I’m gathering you don’t want to read what any of the articles and interviews Wash Po presented. That’s fine if you want to be an ostrich and not read anything that says Obama was not 100% forthcoming. Just don’t scream that people lying when they tell you something that Obama was involved in and didn’t tell everything he knew or lied/painted a rosy picture when that wasn’t actually happening. It was FUBAR, but I guess that is just SNAFU from here on out and we must face the fact that presidents just want to make seem far better than what it is. It’s a shame young people are sent over there, only to be killed or be maimed for the rest of their lives though and for what? War is not peace and peace is not a pejorative.
Actually, Vietnam was really about oil (every Vietnam Vet I’ve talked to has confirmed this too) and Afghanistan wasn’t JUST about 9/11. It was far more than that.
As far as being drafted, it’s less likely the older one gets. So you are a long ways from being drafted. They take and kill off or maim the young ones first before they go for the older guys and if they aren’t maimed enough, they throw them back into the war to be killed. That’s all war is about really. War really is good for nothing except keeping the undertaker employed. And yes, I despise war and I object strongly to it and my anthem is “War” by Edwin Starr. I also like the song “The Dirty F***in’ Hippies Were Right” too.
They don’t show us everything that the Seals and Special Forces do, in order to protect our soldiers and their methods and tactics.
I don’t know how you came to be “almost certain” that some of our troops were killed in that Bin Laden raid and thus that it was covered up. That would be a lie of coverup. I don’t believe that happened. It’s not pretty when someone is shot in the head or otherwise killed violently. So maybe it was a gruesome site.
War is hell. But if we just stopped doing war altogether, wars would not end. They would probably just get worse. But you are right to rail against war because we have obviously been doing useless wars consistently for a while now.
The Wash Post is pretty good at coming up with investigative reporting. So I will read that stuff eventually, to try to ascertain whether you have been justified in calling Obama one of the liars on par with Bush when it comes to his part in the Afghan war.
I like Country Joe and the Fish song “It’s one, two, three, What are we fightin’ for?”
Wait! If we stop doing war altogether, wars would not end, they’d just get worse? That was a very poorly worded sentence. IF we stop doing war altogether, there can’t be a war, period. So to say they would not end is not quite right. Either we are at war or we are not. Can’t be both. That’s like saying a woman is “a little bit pregnant”. Either she is or she’s not. If we stop doing war altogether, then there is no war. If humans are fighting, there is war and it will probably get worse, but not if there is no war. If there is no war, there is nothing to get worse. Sorry bud, she’s either pregnant or she not, humans are at war or they are not. If humans stop fighting then there is no war to get worse.