https://twitter.com/washingtonpost/status/1162378897247391744
CUT AND RUN THO OMG
It is funny how diplomatically every word, every syllable was sweated over for weeks before being uttered publicly or to a foreign leader.
Now it is just “whatevs whenevs”
Israel would be foolish to arrest members of congress. I would guess that they would try to restrict her movements in the country though.
Haven’t seen this posted here.
Running over protesters to own the libs again
One of Trump’s congressional allies, Senator Lindsey Graham, urged the president to carefully consider the ramifications of withdrawing US troops from Afghanistan as he prepared for a meeting with advisers to discuss such a move.
Lindsey Graham
(@LindseyGrahamSC)
Mr. President, learn from President Obama’s mistakes.
A bad agreement puts the radical Islamist movement all over the world on steroids.
Be smart, take your time, and listen to your national security team.
August 16, 2019
“Any peace agreement which denies the US robust counter-terrorism capability in Afghanistan is NOT a peace deal,” the South Carolina Republican warned. “Instead, it is paving the way for another attack on the American homeland and attacks against American interests around the world.”
I’m sure he’s going to execute it really poorly, but I hope he pulls out of Afghanistan. The only parts of Trumpism I ever agreed with were the uprooting of American ‘foreign policy’. We need that money for other stuff, and the rest of the world needs to take care of itself without our intervention.
Israel seems awful. Blatantly racist and the guy in charge might be a bigger crook than Trump.
Yeah I hope they realize that it’s going to be hard to get aid dollars from Democrats going forward… And the GOP isn’t in a very good position in terms of future EV.
I suspect what’s really happening is that Bibi is a short term oriented Boomer shithead doing what’s good for him in the short run because he’ll be retired/dead when the shit hits the fan. I find an awful lot of truly head scratching choices made by the current crop of world leaders can be explained through that framework though.
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wtf…
Cliffs of Afghan plan, if Taliban chooses to accept it:
**usa pulls 1/3 of our troops from Afghanistan, leaving about 10k there
**Taliban officially denounces al-Qaeda and promises to stop helping them do terrorism
**Taliban promises to open diplomatic negotiations with the Afghan government
Lou Dobbs apparently was defending that ICE guard.
Seems there’s disparity
President Trump plans to meet Friday with Cabinet officials and other senior national security advisers for a briefing by Zalmay Khalilzad, the chief U.S. envoy to the talks. A U.S. official said Vice President Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will also attend the meeting at Trump’s New Jersey golf resort. An initial withdrawal would include roughly 5,000 of the 14,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
In exchange, the Taliban would agree to renounce al-Qaeda and to prevent it from activities such as fund-raising, recruiting, training and operational planning in areas it controls.
Also perpetual war is bad because a lot of Afghan, Iraqi, and Syrian people get killed, right?
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The response to 9/11 never should have been about holding territory. It is not lost on me that our little mission into Pakistan to get Bin Laden had absolutely nothing to do with our operations in Afghanistan (besides MAYBE some intel, I don’t know enough about exactly where that came from to say).
We absolutely have to stop putting our troops in countries that do not want us there. The reason why liberating people from the Nazi’s in WW2 went so well is that we were liberating people from the Nazi’s. Like it or not the Taliban and Baath party were both the legitimate governments of the countries they ruled over. Both entities were formed mostly by the dynamics of local politics and had managed much more of a semblance of normalcy and stability than anything that we have managed.
Honestly I think the whole idea of having a large standing military is dumb for the US. We have friends to our north and south and the worlds largest oceans to our east and west… and a large nuclear arsenal that guarantees that any invasion force sufficient to actually invade the US would be spotted by our satellites and killed off in the middle of one of those oceans.
All our talk of ‘national defense’ is bullshit pure and simple. We aren’t afraid of being attacked by another nation state. We want to be able to force other countries to do what we tell them to do with military force, and to do that we’ve built a military with a budget that dwarfs anything else on earth. I get that there are intangible things US citizens get from all this military spending, but near as I can tell nearly all the benefits go to our corporate overlords.
We really need to stop talking so much about progressive taxation like that’s some end all be all and think long and hard about how progressive expenditures are. Right now the rich and powerful seem to be getting the vast majority of the benefits from government spending. The single biggest line item is healthcare for the elderly and that is one giant shit show of rent seeking for rich people today. And then the next biggest line item is enforcing property rights, and who that benefits is right in the title lol.
I’ve used that argument in the past and it works a lot less well than talking about who is paying for it. That probably says a lot about human nature, and not all of it pretty.