Again, its the soundbite where he goes into detail with an explanation that turns out to be very wrong. Without that there is a much smaller chance this would matter much. He will be speaking in an hour so we will see whether he can wiggle out of it

Oh now you guys want to be pro america all of the sudden. Alrighty then.

Imo the US is f with Mexico just as they are f with every other nation

that they could be grifting on. And the East isnt that stupid.

The Mexicans arent that stupid. Take a map and look where

the US has f with the people all over the world.

This part of the world is a tough place. The place is interesting too.

Its basically Russia or former Russia bordering Asia bordering Arabia.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Af...11!4d67.709953

The US is protecting 2 players here. In poker terms the US is rigging the game, so Israel and Saudi Arabia can scoop the pots. The Arabs say the game is rigged. Is it?
BTW the Mexican also say their game is rigged. The syrians say it too, and especially the Cubans. Take whole South America, lets play a family pot. And while at it lets invite Africa to our game, since we know we cannot lose. Forgot a target to invite to our game?

Yes, that's my recollection as well.

We trained and armed OBL to fight against Russia in Afghanistan.
We helped supply Saddam to fight Iran.

This failure is on Dubya/Cheney & Co. for going there in the first place, and on Biden & Co. for a complete failure in properly planning and executing the evacuation.

Anyone that believes we went to Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, etc., to fight terrorism, depose evil dictators, spread democracy, help women, etc. is deluding themselves. It's about seizing/protecting resources (oil/gold/opiates), protecting pipeline territory, and enriching MIC.

But the fall of Saigon didn't have a major impact on American politics and elections.

Being dubious about Osama bin Laden's stated reasons for 9/11 is some sort of nationalist hot take? LOL.

Seems like washoe's doing another one of his getting caught up on an issue in front of a live studio audience things.

Weren't there a decent number of people predicting this collapse after troops withdrawal? I don't follow politics too closely, but I remember hearing Ron Paul talk about the difficulty of nation-building. You throw around terms like "democracy" and "freedom fighters" and "values" and assume you can have a clean transfer of power when you're done "helping" the oppressed people. But like Paul said - these people are a different culture with a different mindset that has been formed over 100s of years, and thinking that's all going to be washed away - even in 20 years - is delusional.

Yeah, his focus on the US was more about practicality/ease rather than direct US action. It was much easier to recruit people to fight against the US than Saudi Arabia and all the governments he actually wanted to topple.

I thought Bin Laden wanted to defend his home country from Iraq, and one reason he was annoyed was his home country chose the United States instead. I always suspected some jealousy on his part.

Pretty interesting to see that he is actually from Jemen. The place the Sauds are bombing for years now with back up from the west. I knew he was in S.A. but didnt know he is from Jemen.

"Early life

Bin Laden was one of more than 50 children of Muhammad bin Laden, a self-made billionaire who, after immigrating to Saudi Arabia from Yemen as a labourer, rose to direct major construction projects for the Saudi royal family. By the time of Muhammad’s death in an airplane accident in 1967, his company had become one of the largest construction firms in the Middle East, and the bin Laden family had developed a close relationship with the Saudi royal family."

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Osama-bin-Laden


Yes whats up with that. We train and equip, play best buddies for 20 years just to execute and call them terrrorist in the end. That seems to be a pattern of what we do.
2 trillion dollars went into this country, Im assuming that is total since we are there for not only 20 years. Im also assuming that some money of this went to the taliban. A trillion is 1M x 1M so 1000000x1000000= 1000000000000. Thats a lot of zeros. 2000000000000 Dollars.

lol. The more I get to know about this the crazier it gets. Im about to shut up now.

Bin Laden family and Bushes both invested in Carlyle Group (private hedge fund) with plenty of investments in defense and oil. OBL's family in construction.

Bomb, control the oil, rebuild... lots of potential for profits.

It's all about profits.

the gotcha has got to mean something though

bloke: 'biden's judgement on afghanistan was terrible, such an embarrassment to our country, many afghans died needlessly'

bob from wisconsin: 'who cares, waste of money, shoulda been out of there 15 years ago'

He could just be doing a lot of drugs.

It could be far worse becaue it provides a rallying soundbite for the next right wing trump type. It is humiliating and feeds the maga type narrative with a substantial meal.

Trump for whatever reason* wasn't pro war/imperialism but military might is always attractive to the right and it's a bad mistake to rely on the general dislike of troops abroad to persist.

*maybe it;s too cynical to think it's because he wasn't invested in the arms industry

It looks bad is massive in todays politics.

Mitigating factors pffft.

On Sunday the republican party deleted a wep page hailing Trumps Afgan deal

The fact trump was on the same path will be ~irrelevent to future elections. Could even make it much worse if the democrats make a big deal of that point keeping the spotlight on usa impotence rather than focusing on other things that the voters want.

Planets align, I totally agree.

Bad pictures happened when Biden was President.

Anyone looking past this is out of touch with the electorate.

The only thing in Bidens favour is he has most of his presidency in which events might hand him a big win and people forget about this.

Anyone expecting people to remember this in spite of big win are again over estimating the electorate.

I watched the first 10 mins of Biden's speech, and he seemed to be taking the stance that Afghanistan had all the help it could ask for and absolutely every opportunity to get its **** together, but just couldn't manage it and eventually you gotta pull the plug.

He started transitioning to what boiled down to "thoughts and prayers" and I turned it off.

This is like in Civilization II when the barbarians manage to capture a few undefended cities and can start cranking out more units. Good luck, middle east!

Fwiw I do think bin Ladens reasons for attacking the west were what he said they were, the presence of us troops in Saudi Arabia and the Saudi monarchy’s relationship with the US.

Shuffle you listed 4 leaders with wildly different backgrounds to make a weird point about elites turning revolutionaries. Bin laden was middle class never knew his ‘elite’ father who was an errand boy for the crown. Bid laden was half Syrian. He was not a favored son of the elite growing up.

Xi grew up in a backwater his entire life before real power. He speaks no foreign languages and never traveled abroad in formative years like the actual Chinese elite.

We’re in the Afghanistan thread-mullah Omar was not an elite I’m not sure he could even read.

That's not an unreasonable line of thinking, but there had to be a better way to execute on it.

It seems like he could have just repositioned it from "an endless war" (one in which no Americans have died in the last 18 months BTW), to a situation like we have in Korea. We are still technically at war there, have thousands of troops stationed, and spend tons of money. But no one considers that an endless war.

Sure. But only because the Taliban knew the US was leaving. It would have taken a massive troop surge to have kept the former Afghan government in place if the Americans stayed indefinitely. I doubt the Taliban would accept anything short of taking Kabul to stop fighting.

I could be misremembering things, but I seem to recall 15 years ago people saying that Afghanistan is such a ****ed up landscape with so many impossible to find holes to hide in that the Taliban could just wait us out. Zealots beat mercenaries because eventually the money runs out.

Turns out they were right.