Trump's gone Neo-Con.

About the only thing I agreed with the orange buffoon on was his anti-war position, and was hoping he'd keep his promise to bring our guys home. Nope.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/21/politi...egy/index.html

The "base" doesn't like it, either, since neo-conservatism is very much a globalist agenda. Bannon is going on the offensive.

http://www.breitbart.com/national-se...ut-not-losing/

Quote:

---

I knew the man I voted for 'loved' Israel but now I'm afraid it's more serious than that.....Israel wants us in Afghanistan.....and in Syria......and in Iraq.....for decades to come. Trump is owned by Israel and it sickens me to post it. If you disagree....pay closer attention over the next year or so.

---

Quote:

---

I absolutely Can't believe President Trump is sending 4000 more troops into this God forsaken land. He was baited and took the bait. Stupid, idiotic move at best. I love President Trump, but he is listening to the WRONG people. SOMEONE 'credible' needs to get to him FAST.

---

Make the Military Industrial Complex Great Again!

#MMICGA

(Doesn't have the same ring to it as MAGA, I know :lol)

Wait, are you saying Trump broke a campaign promise by doing the exact opposite?

Another campaign promise ignored.

And what's left to accomplish there? Bin Laden dead. Mission Accomplished. Nation building there is a lost cause. After 16 years, not one Walmart has gone up and the Taliban controls more territory than ever.

I asked that question rhetorically, of course. Gotta keep the wheels of the MIC greased.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by baseline bum

Wait, are you saying Trump broke a campaign promise by doing the exact opposite?

---

Trash tweeted dozens of times over the years that US must get out of Afghanistan.

Well they can forget Syria, that's over - 'Moderate Rebels' gone, ISIS virtually defeated with help from Hezbollah on the border & almost a million people returned to Aleppo to their apparently 'tyrannical' democratically elected
dictator. Afghanistan is not even a country as such - fragmented, different tribes speaking different languages. If anyone is stupid enough to go through this crap again god help us.

lol your all doves now

I guess this means Code Pink will become antiwar again.

Wasn't a bad speech, but his goals are gonna be real hard to accomplish. Pakistan's military doesn't support the Afghan government and getting India involved will only make the Pakistan military work with China and Russia and obstructing any peace process.

Surgin' SnakeBoy can't talk about the actual policy.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Pelicans78

Wasn't a bad speech, but his goals are gonna be real hard to accomplish. Pakistan's military doesn't support the Afghan government and getting India involved will only make the Pakistan military work with China and Russia and obstructing any peace process.

---

Yeah, that raised a lot more questions than it answered.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Pavlov

Yeah, that raised a lot more questions than it answered.

---

India's has been friendly with the Afghan government because they want to be strong allies which will put another Indian friendly neighbor on Pakistan's neighbor just like Iran because India needs a deterrent against the Pakistan-China alliance who both hate India.

But I don't ever see the Afghan gov't ever being strong enough to totally control the country. What's probably gonna happen is the Taliban will end up with partial control of the country.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by SnakeBoy

lol your all doves now

---

I've always been a dove. But I was in favor of blowing the taliban to rubble following 9/11 for the bin laden connection. We did that, and bin laden is dead. Nothing more to do there except nation build, which won't take in Afghanistan.

Waste of lives.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by midnightpulp

I've always been a dove. But I was in favor of blowing the taliban to rubble following 9/11 for the bin laden connection. We did that, and bin laden is dead. Nothing more to do there except nation build, which won't take in Afghanistan.

Waste of lives.

---

Even though Trump denies nation-building, this new strategy in the big picture is basically trying to save the current Afghan govt from the Taliban and terrorists.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Pelicans78

India's has been friendly with the Afghan government because they want to be strong allies which will put another Indian friendly neighbor on Pakistan's neighbor just like Iran because India needs a deterrent against the Pakistan-China alliance who both hate India.

---

They have always been players, but calling for India to cooperate right after shitting on Pakistan seems to encourage cooperation from neither.

Quote:

---

But I don't ever see the Afghan gov't ever being strong enough to totally control the country. What's probably gonna happen is the Taliban will end up with partial control of the country.

---

That's always been the case, so attacking them a little bit more with US troops doesn't make a ton of sense.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Pelicans78

Even though Trump denies nation-building, this new strategy in the big picture is basically trying to save the current Afghan govt from the Taliban and terrorists.

---

It sounded he was signaling to the Afghanis that he's fine with the rise of a dictatorship there.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by midnightpulp

And what's left to accomplish there? Bin Laden dead. Mission Accomplished. Nation building there is a lost cause. After 16 years, not one Walmart has gone up and the Taliban controls more territory than ever.

I asked that question rhetorically, of course. Gotta keep the wheels of the MIC greased.

---

I just hope he was guilty because he's dead as a door nail and due process was AWOL.

When did Hillary Clinton become President?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Pavlov

It sounded he was signaling to the Afghanis that he's fine with the rise of a dictatorship there.

---

That was the most encouraging part of his speech

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by SnakeBoy

That was the most encouraging part of his speech

---

Of course you think it was.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Pavlov

Of course you think it was.

---

American government always supports American friendly dictators.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Pavlov

Of course you think it was.

---

You prefer forced democracy?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by SnakeBoy

You prefer forced democracy?

---

No such thing ultimately.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by AaronY

---

:lol

CNN said something bad about Trump? You don't say!

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by DMX7

When did Hillary Clinton become President?

---

Once Trump got done firing anyone even slightly nationalistic from his cabinet.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Clipper Nation

Once Trump got done firing anyone even slightly nationalistic from his cabinet.

---

Nationalist = nazi according to libtard so this is good no?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Pavlov

No such thing ultimately.

---

lol

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Down Under

Well they can forget Syria, that's over - 'Moderate Rebels' gone, ISIS virtually defeated with help from Hezbollah on the border & almost a million people returned to Aleppo to their apparently 'tyrannical' democratically elected
dictator. Afghanistan is not even a country as such - fragmented, different tribes speaking different languages. If anyone is stupid enough to go through this crap again god help us.

---

Yes. I support Assad honestly. We need to ally with those against our common enemy, guerrilla and organized jihadism (ISIS, al Qaeda, etc)... Israel is stupid to oppose the Assad's and Gadhafi's and Saddam's of the world that keep guerrilla jihad under control. Whereas our "allies" the Gulf states, especially Saudi Arabia, are lenient towards guerrilla jihad. Saudi shouldn't be our ally. Iranians tend to be less religious and they also have oil, why not trade with them?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by midnightpulp

And what's left to accomplish there? Bin Laden dead. Mission Accomplished. Nation building there is a lost cause. After 16 years, not one Walmart has gone up and the Taliban controls more territory than ever.

I asked that question rhetorically, of course. Gotta keep the wheels of the MIC greased.

---

I'd like to know why we are still there too. I think we should have pulled out long ago, but president Obama didn't do it. Now president Trump isn't. There must be more going on than the public is aware of over there.

Not surprising

Obama broke dozens of his promises to bring back troops from Afghan.

Its a black hole and Us is stuck in there. It could be our undoing like it was for USSR

"what's going on over there" is the USA is fighting a unwinnable war.

16 years, $Bs wasted, 100Ks of Afghanis, American people injured,killed, displaced. Afghani military totally dependent on US military.

US military hasn't won shit since 1945, and mostly because the politicians choose to start unwinnable wars.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Wild Cobra

Obama

---

*ding*

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by hater

Obama

---

*ding*

:lol hater takes his biggest L yet

Pentagon has been underreporting the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan by thousands

Even Secretary of Defense James Mattis isn't sure of the total number.

The Pentagon has admitted the average number of U.S. troops fighting in Afghanistan at any given time is much higher than initially thought.

Officially, there are 8,400 American troops in the country as part of Operation Resolute Support and U.S. Forces Afghanistan.

But the Defense Department says the actual number may be as high as 12,000.

https://thinkprogress.org/pentagon-h...-5828d61ca666/

the military, what a bunch of incompetent, loser clowns wasting taxpayers' $Ts and can't beat a bunch of ragheads, after 16 years of trying.

and the high-tech Navy! 4 collisions in a year! :lol

not only that.....it turns out that we have McHale's navy.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by clambake

not only that.....it turns out that we have McHale's navy.

---

No shit. What's up with the naval carnage

Trump’s new swamp is full of warhawks

Trump also wants to give the military more authority to act unilaterally in Afghanistan, which should bother anyone who’s concerned with unelected officials making decisions on behalf of the U.S. government.

loud assholes ... they’re being replaced by people like chief of staff John Kelly and national security advisor H.R. McMaster – officials deemed respectable by Congress, the bureaucracy, and the media because they promise to continue a broken status quo.

McMaster is a particularly telling case. A lieutenant general in the Army who once wrote a book about how military leadership in Vietnam failed by not vocalizing its disagreements with Lyndon B. Johnson,

In his first six months on the job, McMaster (along with Kelly, who came on as chief of staff last month) has started clearing out the far-right cranks that populated the administration.

does not mean McMaster, who was a proponent of the Iraq War surge of 2007 and 2008, will do good things. As reporting dating back to May has revealed, he spearheaded the effort to push Trump towards committing more troops to the war in Afghanistan. Some of the more nationalist figures in the administration allegedly even took to calling it “McMaster’s War.”

Trump’s capitulation on Afghanistan was a win for McMaster and a stunning turn for the president,

Trump’s reasons for approving the surge read like a set of second-term Bush administration talking points:

that we need to be able to claim victory on something we’ve spent this much time on (we won’t),

that the outcome if we leave would be “predictable and unacceptable” (like the outcome of staying there isn’t also both of those things), and

that pulling out threatens national security —

as if continuing our never ending quest to make parts of the Muslim world an unlivable nightmare for the people who live there doesn’t also threaten the lives of people here in the United States.

https://theoutline.com/post/2161/trumps-new-swamp-is-full-of-warhawks?utm_source=NL

iow, y'all Trash supporters been LIED to yet again. What's wrong with you people? :lol

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DH_ouugUwAESX_R.jpg

Why Trump can’t redeem the ‘sunk costs’ of Afghan war

the plan he has embraced reflects no new strategic thinking and hardly offers the prospect of “outright victory,” as he asserted.

After the deaths of more than 2,000 U.S. service members and

the expenditure of more than $800 billionsince 2001,

it’s impossible to buy any confident rhetoric about U.S. strategy in the longest war in American history.

The U.S. and its allies had nearly 150,000 troops in Afghanistan at the peak of the surge President Obama launched in 2009 and

still couldn’t vanquish the Taliban and other extremists —

now a force about one-tenth the size can pull it off?

http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/opinion/sd-trump-afghanistan-new-policy-20170822-story.html#testnws=politicsnow&track=_newsletter_p olitics-now___________20170824

by letting his staff of generals and the military run the war, when they LOSE, Trash will blame the loss on them.

our whole government is neocon.

neocons beating the war drums, going after Iran, on neocon-style Iraq-WMD-WTC style LIES

At 'neo-con central' Ambassador Nikki Haley lies through her teeth about Iran and the nuclear deal

https://images.dailykos.com/images/4...jpg?1504543093

Nikki Haley, who didn’t have a lick of foreign policy experience before Pr*sident Donald Trump appointed her to be ambassador to the United Nations, delivered a speech on Iran’s compliance with the 2015 multinational nuclear agreement to the American Enterprise Institute Tuesday. It was quite the pile of manure.

A compilation of lies that contradicted the latest report of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which is charged with determining whether Iran is living up to the agreement.
In other words, a speech doing exactly what was to be expected from the person in the administration whom neoconservatives love the most. She’s also, horrifyingly,

reported to be at the top of the list as a replacement if Secretary of State Rex Tillerson becomes even more fed up with his post or gets canned.

the AEI is “neo-con central.”

That’s the same “think tank” that acted as the Bush administration’s principal cheerleader for the 2003 Iraq invasion and provided the Pentagon with a number of its “scholars” as consultants to put together the totally failed strategy that followed Washington’s conquest of Baghdad.

Who can forget the machismo-filled “black coffee briefings”—featuring the likes of then-Defense Policy Committee chair Richard Perle, serially mistaken Iran “experts” Michael Rubin, Michael Ledeen, and Reuel Marc Gerecht (the last two now with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies), and former CIA director James Woolsey—that bolstered the propaganda blitz about Saddam Hussein’s alleged ties to al-Qaeda, his enormous WMD factories, his fast-developing nuclear weapons program, and the gratitude which we should all feel toward the tremendous sacrifices and promise of Ahmad Chalabi as the George Washington of Iraq?


Paul R. Pillar, with 28 years in the national intelligence community until he retired in 2005, took note of what can only be viewed as Haley’s AEI rant:

The speech at AEI was Trumpian in some of the tactics it employed. The performance should cement the ambitious Haley’s place on Trump’s short list of candidates to become secretary of state once Rex Tillerson’s unhappy and probably short tenure in the job ends. The speech also used more twisted versions of familiar rhetorical twists that have been heard before from diehard opponents of the JCPOA.

One familiar Trumpian tactic is blatant lying.

Haley lied when she said that the JCPOA “gave Iran what it wanted up-front, in exchange for temporary promises to deliver what we want.”

The truth is that Iran had to fulfill most of its obligations first—including disposing of excess enriched uranium, disassembling enrichment cascades, gutting its heavy water reactor, and much else—before the agreement was fully implemented and Iran got even a whiff of additional sanctions relief.

Ryan Costello at the National Iranian American Council dissected what he counts as five of Haley’s lies in detail. Here’s a summary:

• “Iran has been caught in multiple violations over the past year and a half,”

Haley claimed. Not so. The IAEA issued its eighth report Aug. 31. As in the previous reports, the agency found Iran is in compliance. That includes maintaining its supplies and enrichment level of uranium and its heavy water within the allowed limits. Heavy water is used in reactors that produce plutonium that can fuel nuclear weapons. Iran has dismantled its only reactor capable of producing weapons-grade plutonium. Haley’s claim that Iran exceeded the allowable levels of heavy water in 2016 misunderstands the agreement.

• “There are hundreds of undeclared sites that have suspicious activity that they (the IAEA) haven’t looked at,”

according to Haley. Costello wrote:

Yet the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Paul Selva, stated in July that “Based on the evidence that’s been presented by the intelligence community, it appears that Iran is in compliance with the rules that were laid out in the JCPOA.”

Haley had every opportunity in August to point out one or two examples of that suspicious activity when she was in Vienna last month but she failed to do so. So which intelligence agency—apparently unknown to Gen. Selva—told her about these hundreds of sites without giving her some coordinates she could pass along to the IAEA?

• “Iranian leaders … have stated publicly that they will refuse to allow IAEA inspections of their military sites. How can we know Iran is complying with the deal, if inspectors are not allowed to look everywhere they should look?”

In fact, Iran has allowed inspectors to visit the military site at Parchin and take samples. The IAEA has had no reason to ask to visit other military sites. The agreement does not permit wholesale inspections of military sites, only those that are suspected of violations. Surely, if there are hundreds, Haley could provide a list of at least a handful for IAEA to check out.

•“The deal [Obama] struck wasn’t supposed to be just about nuclear weapons. It was meant to be an opening with Iran; a welcoming back into the community of nations.”

The Obama administration repeatedly made clear that the agreement was only about Iran’s nuclear program and nothing else. Yes, the hope was that diplomatic doors would be opened, but the agreement was not predicated on this.

• “We should welcome a debate over whether the JCPOA is in U.S. national security interests. The previous administration set up the deal in a way that denied us that honest and serious debate.”

More nonsense. Did Haley miss the extensive, fiery debate that went on in Congress over the agreement?

Fifteen years ago, that team at the AEI was all too happy to see members of the Bush administration disinforming the nation—and the world via the United Nations—that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/201...tail=emaildkre

AEI? War is a for-big-profit entreprise.

I don't get what conservatives want us to do about Iran. This new Trump regime supposed to be America first and anti-interventionist so even the trump followers wouldn't wanna go to war in that shithole

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by AaronY

I don't get what conservatives want us to do about Iran. This new Trump regime supposed to be America first and anti-interventionist so even the trump followers wouldn't wanna go to war in that shithole

---

"regime change" has worked beautifully so far, why stop?

Trump: Iran is violating the nuclear deal.

Top US general: no, it isn’t.

The chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff just said the Iran deal is working.

https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/Pxdc...85346950.0.jpg

top generals do not typically contradict their commander in chief on strategic issues like this in public.

The fact that not one, but two, of America’s leading military officers has done so in recent days suggests that

the military brass strongly believes that adhering to the Iran deal is in America’s best interest

https://www.vox.com/world/2017/9/27/...dunford-senate

This is why foreign leaders IGNORE Trash and his non-stop lying and self-aggrandizement.

Trump’s Irrational Hatred of the Iran Deal

Even fierce critics of Tehran called the agreement vital to international security. The President wants to decertify it.

the landmark agreement capitalized on a rare consensus. After years of hesitating, China and Russia joined the other permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, along with Germany and the European Union, in supporting American pressure on Iran to change course.

At a negotiating session in Vienna, the coalition was so large that, for appearance’s sake, Iran stocked its side of the table with additional staffers. Jake Sullivan, one of the U.S. negotiators, recalled, “It was the whole world versus Iran.”

the effect on its nuclear program was unquestionable.

In return for the removal of sanctions imposed by the United States and other nations, which had crippled its economy,

Iran agreed to shut down facilities and to give broad access to inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Even fierce critics of Tehran, including U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis and Ehud Barak, the former Israeli Prime Minister, have held the agreement to be vital to international security.

When President Trump discovered that not only Mattis but also Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and other national-security officials wanted to preserve the agreement, “he threw a fit,”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2...I2MTQxMDE5NQS2

All y'all's Big Orange Turd is a motherfucking insane asshole

If he decertifies the deal, the cabinet must ram the 25th Amendment up his obese ass.