Russia's invasion of Ukraine: Part 5
in War in Ukraine ·
loneskipper3 said:This wasn't a military failure—it was a political one, unlike that Russian mess. If the Americans actually had the stomach to seize parts of Afghanistan by force—and if they actually gave a damn about the Afghan civilians—they could have secured those territories in three days flat, ensuring no Taliban ever set foot there again. The true debacle lies in the political delusion—the naive assumption that you can take a medieval Islamic wolf pack and somehow transform them into a functioning democracy overnight. It’s a level of idealism that seems to plague almost every Western politician born after the war—a recurring theme that figures like Helmut Schmidt and Henry Kissinger often pointed out with varying degrees of frustration.
Don't give me that—they haven't been engaged in direct military conflicts where they've slaughtered hundreds of thousands of civilians, nowhere near what the Russians did in Chechnya, for instance. But then again, if you look at the fallout from the wars since 2003, we’re talking about anywhere from 100,000 to a million deaths—so, by extension, they bear their own share of responsibility for that tragedy.
When it comes to the slaughter of civilians—and let’s be honest, even if the number of Iraqi casualties caused by Americans in Mosul was likely ten times higher than what the official US figures suggest—nobody actually holds the Russians to that same standard. It’s a strange sort of double standard, isn't it? They always seem to compensate for their staggering lack of tactical precision against actual armed forces by simply leaning on sheer, overwhelming quantity—whether we're looking back at Chechnya in the 90s, the chaos in Syria, or now, the various cities across Ukraine.
But the bolded part is true. I don't get why you'd mix this up with the conflict between the US and its rivals; it makes no sense.