"I was against going into the war in Iraq since I figured we would probably trip over ourselves in some way," Clint Eastwood revealed after screening his new film American Sniper on Saturday at the Academy of Motion Picture Artists and Sciences’ Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills.
"I had a big question when we went into Afghanistan," he also said, explaining, "Did anybody ever study the history of Afghanistan, not only with the British, but the Russians? There was a Russian general named Vivikov, who was the commander for 10 years there, and I thought, ‘Did anybody ever…?’ So I called a friend of mine who was over there for many years and knew this general. I said, ‘Did anybody from our government ever go and research it like you would a movie? You know, can we film here?’ And they said, ‘No, they never did.’ Vivikov is deceased now, but at the time I thought, ‘Wouldn’t a logical person go out and do a little research and say, ‘How would you do this, Mr. Vivikov? What did you do wrong? And what are we doing wrong? Give us at least a hint.’
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an interesting comment after the story is below... viet nam deja vu....exactly what some people were saying then. the real truth is the hardest war to win is a war of insurrection. and no war is ever 'won' if it requires an occupying force in perpetuity. all that leads to is situations like the middle east where you have generation after generation of enemies and an inheritance of hatred passed down
You people and your stupid comments. You have no choice to fight the bullies in the world. These war your complaining about went bad because the civilian authority did not allow the armed forces to do there job and that's to kill and take ground. You send in the military and than handcuff them . Guns and bullets are used to kill and not used to change the way people think. We will be in another war soon with these crazy Muslims. Kill or be killed.
Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
i ask more questions when i buy a used car than we asked before we sent our military to afghanistan
and there are some things and situations that have no military solution. that is just the reality of life
i think the bigger question would be or should be why are we takin our eye off the ball here .. its not just afganistan or vietnam or iraq .. or anyplace really .. its the industrial military complex .. eisenhower warned kennedy about it .. and kennedy made a speech at the un. about how we should beat our swords into plowshares and quit all this monkeyin around with nukes and wars and stuff .. tried to get russia and us to unilaterally disarm all them nukes .. and that was that .. they shot him in dallas .. just way too much money in guns and bombs .. and as long as we keep shootin them guns and droppin them bombs somebody is makin a shitload of money .. a lot of somebodies actually .. i don't think the mission ever was to win in viet nam or afganistan .. or iraq .. just keep shootin them guns and droppin them bombs .. and don't forget to wave the flag .. and of course wear your little american flag pin .. cause if you ain't for us then you must be against us .. and don't speak up or talk back or question anything cause if you do then you must be unamerican ..
i saw some sloganeering the other day from some superpatriots that was scarey....
"america: love it or leave it"
it was stupid when nixon was president and it is still stupid...how bout america: love it so fix what's broken?
and did we forget all we learned from losing in viet nam?
In an incredible scoop, the Guardian's Martin Chulov interviewed a senior leader of ISIS— one who came up through the ranks with the group's top leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. The single most interesting quote from the ISIS leader, whom Chulov refers to as Abu Ahmed, is quite disturbing: he credits the group's rise, in large part, to American prison camps during the Iraq war, which he says gave him and other jihadist leaders an invaluable forum to meet one another and to plan their later rise.
"HERE, WE WERE NOT ONLY SAFE, BUT WE WERE ONLY A FEW HUNDRED METERS AWAY FROM THE ENTIRE AL-QAEDA LEADERSHIP"
Abu Ahmed was imprisoned in a US-run detention center in southern Iraq called Camp Bucca in 2004. That's where he met al-Baghdadi, among others who would later form ISIS. According to Ahmed, Baghdadi managed to trick the US Army into thinking he was a peacemaker, all the while building what would become ISIS right under their noses:
"He was respected very much by the US army," Abu Ahmed said. "If he wanted to visit people in another camp he could, but we couldn’t. And all the while, a new strategy, which he was leading, was rising under their noses, and that was to build the Islamic State. If there was no American prison in Iraq, there would be no IS now. Bucca was a factory. It made us all. It built our ideology."
When they entered the US-run prison, Baghdadi and many of the others were members of small Sunni militia groups. But the organizing space allowed them to unify under the name al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), led at the time by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
"We could never have all got together like this in Baghdad, or anywhere else," Abu Ahmed says, sounding almost grateful to the Americans. "It would have been impossibly dangerous. Here, we were not only safe, but we were only a few hundred meters away from the entire al-Qaeda leadership."
Later, after Zarqawi was killed, and AQI's near-total defeat at the hands of a Sunni uprising and the American surge, Baghdadi and his compatriots rebuilt the group under the ISIS banner. Their network organized partially out of US-run detention centers has played a key role in that. The Iraqi government, Chulov reports, estimates that "17 of the 25 most important Islamic State leaders running the war in Iraq and Syria spent time in US prisons between 2004 and 2011."
In other words: without the Iraq war and American prisons there meant to detain possible terrorists, ISIS as we know it wouldn't exist.
There should have been no Iraq, period:
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/12/10/249681/not-just-torture-senat...
it's that law of unintended consequences....much like i was arguing in another venue that when an action is taken often the net result is not anything like what was intended nor even conceived of as possible
i agree cresty .. iraq was a gross misuse of power and a bunch of outright lies to mislead us .. but then chenney was the ceo of haliburton before he was vice president wasn't he ?? and haliburton got all them government contracts in iraq ?? and made shitloads of money in the process ?? and the war dragged on and on and on .. and haliburton made more and more money the longer we stayed .. does anybody think this was an unintended consequence ?? beware the industrial military complex...
oh i didn't mean that part being unintended but, for instance, the middle east is a trail of unintended consequences from the oil explorations thru the geographic division into 'countries' after ww1 by the allied powers and the resultant internecine and tribal warfare that leads us right up to the present day highly uncivil civil strife between the shiite and sunni muslims that led at least indirectly to the al queda and taliban and on and on....or that the versailles treaty settling world war 1 and heaping massive payments of retribution from germany led to such resentment in germany that it could be said it was a causative factor for world war 2 instead of crippling germany so that it could no longer be a dominant player in europe..
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