Civil War 4T and this 4T

[Bob Butler 54]

(08-05-2016, 11:52 AM)guwill Wrote: I am shocked by your statement that the DNC has essentially adopted Bernie's views. The TPP is official DNC platform. A 15/hr minimum wage and universal healthcare are nowhere to be seen. The bankers have OVERWHELMINGLY been funneling cash into the Hillary campaign. Hillary has a stated policy goal of overthrowing the Assad regime, and the Obama administration has started airstrikes in Libya again. The democrats are the war party. They represent the bankers and the military-industrial complex. I apologize for this coming off as somewhat insulting, but are we watching the same election? How can you make any of those claims?

I'm not so confident that the GOP has fully flipped to being the peace party.  Bush 43 went into Afghanistan and Iraq and started building bases and embassy complexes.  There was all sorts of talk about invading another country after Iraq was stabilized.  If you judge from his building programs, Bush 43 intended to turn Iraq into a puppet state and forward base for further aggression.

This policy is now thoroughly discredited.  Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats are going back to serial preemptive unilateral nation building.  We simply don't have enough boots on the ground available to occupy the Middle East and fight off the inevitable insurrections.  I don't anticipate either party starting a full out ground war without very good answers to Powell's Questions.  Drone strikes, air strikes and special forces squads, sure, but not a full out war.  

The Republicans were isolationist until the live reporting of the London Blitz.  When Mao won the Civil War in China, the Republicans blamed the Democrats for not going in and fighting on the Nationalist side.  Truman should obviously have gotten us involved big time in a land war in Asia.  From that point until Bush 43, the Republicans were generally the war party, voting strong military budgets, talking tough on Communism, though there were Democrats in the White House when we engaged in Korea and Vietnam.  

That's a long tradition by US standards.  I'm not sure things have really changed.  I don't know that we'll be sure where they are really coming from until they are in a position to call the shots.  I suspect some of their current policy is to oppose anything that Obama does.  Currently, Obama seems in their eyes to be weak on terror and too strong in using force against terror.  At the same time.  Different Republicans will take turns attacking him from either side depending on what is in the current news cycle.

I think the Middle East is an ugly mess.  Bush 43 took out Saddam.  Things have gone to pot since.  Saddam was a totally immoral tyrant, but at the same time he was the lid on the pressure cooker.  Bush 43 started the process of bringing the troops home, and Obama continued that.  There was little choice on that short of vastly expanding the US Army and Marines.  There is a certain ratio of occupying forces to occupied population.  If you don't meet that ratio, you can't suppress the insurrection.  Given Republican refusal to raise taxes to support the force required, Iraq was not winnable.  

Assad is another Saddam, though less successful at it after Saddam fell.  With 20 20 hindsight, it might have been better for peace in the region if we left Saddam in power, but Assad is not maintaining peace in the region.  He's a good sized part of the reason the area is unstable.  His rule is intolerable.  The locals will be revolting until he is gone.  There will be no peace until he is gone.  I sympathize with the goal of removing him.

But I don't see us putting massive numbers of troops on the ground.  I don't think either party will want to do so without enough allies for a successful occupation, and that isn't likely to happen.  No one wants to occupy the Middle East these days, for good reason.

Thus, I anticipate sustained status quo, not that I'm pleased with the status quo.