12-01-2016, 12:31 PM
(This post was last modified: 12-01-2016, 04:27 PM by Warren Dew.)
(12-01-2016, 10:23 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(12-01-2016, 09:19 AM)Warren Dew Wrote:(12-01-2016, 07:51 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: Thus, the Obama / Hillary policy of getting the boys home, of avoiding occupation forces, of reducing the number of boots on the ground is the exact opposite of the original Republican neocon doctrine: serial unilateral preemptive nation building.
This isn't accurate, though, at least as applied to "the last 8 years". Bush was beginning to draw down forces in Iraq when he left office; Obama redirected those forces into a massive buildup in Afghanistan. It wasn't until Clinton was no longer Secretary of State that we left Afghanistan.
True enough. The neo-con doctrine, though, was troops near the oil, which is Iraq. Afghanistan was more about fighting factions that export terror. The Democrats in my opinion stuck with troops on the ground too long in Afghanistan, but Obama seems reluctant to concede Afghanistan to the Taliban.
The Wikipedia article you linked to doesn't highlight oil at all. I've run into the "Iraq invasion is about the oil" theory once before, also from someone on the left, and he later admitted that he'd been dissuaded from the theory after I suggested he work out the numbers regarding how small the value of Iraq's oil production was relative to the cost of invasion.
While "neocon" meant something different during the Reagan administration - it was basically about conservative willingness to run deficits - I think that for Bush it just meant "happy to use military force". That seems to apply to Bush, Obama, and Clinton, but ironically didn't apply to Reagan.