Thursday, February 21, 2019

2/22/19 Why Are We Still At War?

    I know we aren't supposed to think about the war machine in full effect killing the bad guys in a far away land we have never seen and probably will never get a chance to visit.  Given that though, the next question has to be why are we still there?  Yes the official fighting may have ended, but we still have about 20,000 troops there along with another 4,500 private military contractors.  I mean back in the early 2000's when I kept arguing with my coworkers who supported the war, they insisted it wasn't about the oil.  I still think that is the only reason to be there.
    I am not a supporter of ISIS or whatever they are calling themselves these days, I love that if we have to be at war, my army is bigger than yours, for sure.  We know this, but those poor naïve souls that insist on fighting our guys, do they realize it is a fool hardy mission to stand against what America brings?  I am basically writing this because I saw a couple videos on YouTube that compare and contrast the US military Vs the locals over there.  It seems they found a GoPro on a dead ISIS Jihadi and the way they operate is like children playing Army compared to what the US does.
    In their video from the GoPro, we see a group of 4-5 Jihadists hiding on a hill and shooting at some American forces over in the next hill or something.  It is essentially one guy yelling to not dishearten, that they will overcome.  All they have to do is keep fighting and show courage.  Something about do not let the heart leave your chest and keep holding your gun up and pointed at the enemy.  Eventually, they decide it is time to get out of there and he is yelling at them to head to the truck a few feet away.  Before he makes it there, he gets shot and that causes his unit to scamper faster and leave him to die.
    Contrast that with the US side and there are a maybe twenty guys taking shots from a hilltop but they just wait patiently while they open fire from a machine gun on top of a Humvee which is only a diversion while a Hornet flies by and about blows up the mountain to take care of a few bad guys.  There was another video where a group of about 7 jihadis were loading up an SUV and the whole time they are being monitored by US troops on a helicopter with various types of Infrared and other optical effects to see in the dark.  Technology these poor desert dwellers can't even begin to understand.  When it is time and they have communicated everything to their superiors, only then do they eliminate all the bad guys on the screen with a couple of blasts from their 30mm cannons.
    There is just a huge discrepancy between the two sides in technology.  The US brings in the latest weapons that exist while the Jihadists are fighting in shoes missing laces with machine guns they must pick up off other dead bodies.  There is nothing fair about this war.  While the US has killed as many as 600,000 Iraqis and something like 70,000 Afghani rebels, not to mention the civilian casualties.  The US has lost about 4500 troops since 2002.  I am not sure what my point was when I started writing this, obviously, we have no intention of leaving either country.  Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia, where 19 of the 21 hijackers came from, walked away free of any retribution.

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