GG

Speaking of being all over the place ...

Brokeback Quarry?

The leap of hope is that McCoach is finally the long term answer and Pegula is giving him the reigns to construct the team. If he's a failure of a head coach, then losing Gilmore, Zach, MG etc is immaterial because we'll be in the rinse repeat cycle again in two years. If he's a good head coach then losing Gilmore, Zach, MG etc is immaterial because McCoach will be on the way to shaping the roster to his desires. You of all people know that an 88 page discussion about the backup RB is irrelevant in the context of finally landing a franchise QB.

Because despite your oversized brain Dexter, you couldn't figure out how to post a proper link. Idiot.

Unfortunately, right now the demographics are upside down, coupled with zero prospect for immigration reform.

Yup.

I imagine so. Can you believe that the Deep State was so aligned against the President who promised a massive INCREASE in the defense budget and promised to return the military wing and veterans to their rightful status? Can you imagine how they'd act if there was a President who was outwardly anti-military?

I'm coming around to this line of thinking. Said another way, when MG is the feature back, his numbers are nowhere near his career totals. He barely got 3.0ypc in the season finale.

How in the world is it a poor example? TYTT ate in total agreement on this one. The US presence is a token one, so you win on technicality but not on substance.

None it is not. Assad is hitting everyone but ISIS

You are truly clueless. Russia would starve to death without US aid.

Watch Greggy skate out of this one by saying ISIS isn't Syria. Bingo

As the story goes, WWII was won with US munitions and Russian blood.

Which is more of a reason not to think that the enemy of your enemy is not your friend, which you consistently do.

You continue to look at it as a double sided match, when in actuality it's a three sided game.

And the evidence is? Last I checked, Iraq has a democratically elected leader and it's going through the usual growth stages in getting its institutions back to order. Its chances of survival as a state are greater than 50/50, but certainly isn't helped by the ISIS threat in the west. So if the country hasn't completely dissolved in the 5 years since the US exited, what do you think the situation would currently be if the US had stayed?

Evidenced by this: Al-Zawahiri also urged the Syrian people not to rely on the AL, Turkey, or the United States for assistance

And once again you're recasting the argument. The main reason that I'm highlighting Obama's mistake is because it's the more recent one and the one that needs to be fixed more immediately. Nobody is arguing anymore that the 2003 invasion wasn't properly planned or was launched under dubious pretences. But to his credit, Bush reversed course and set a plan in motion that started to achieve the needed stability along with greater trust from the tribes. All to be blown up a few years later and allow an even worse situation to fester. In 2010, AQ in Iraq was defeated and ISIS wasn't even JV yet. There's no way ISIS builds its foothold with a 10,000-strong US presence there. And you're using that massively failed approach as a cudgel to hammer away at your point even though it's not applicable.

Look above at the back and forth with TYTT. You are focused on the second part of the question which deals with the stamina & will of the people to support staying the course to affect change, but conflate it with the main question of whether it can work at all. I keep reminding you to separate the two because they're not the same. Basically in this thread I'm discussing policy & strategy and you're focused on the public relations effect of the policy & strategy. Not the same things. It's undoubtable that US has been a far greater cause of good in the world, but the big human disasters happen when US gets involved but then leaves with a job half done. This of course emboldens the US critics to point to failures of US policies and strategies as if intentionally leaving a vacuum is part of that strategy. You're not giving enough credit to the resolve of the US population to rally around a cause that they believe is just. I don't know if you did it intentionally but each example you site doesn't back your case. The Greatest Generation was dragged into WWII, and there was more opposition to joining the Allies until the Pearl Harbor attack. Yet, there are still many who firmly believe that Pearl Harbor was orchestrated by FDR to get US into the war. Sound familiar? You go to great lengths to speculate how the Deep State molds public opinion on foreign policy, yet you use that same public opinion as the reason the US wouldn't have the stamina to fight a good fight. You can't have it both ways. I don't nearly go as far as you in thinking that everything that the media spurts out is from the mouth of the Deep State, but politicians & media do have a huge tilting effect on public perception. Again, take the Afghanistan example. If what you're saying was totally true, there would be a massive outcry for US to get out of Afghanistan. But, we hear nothing. We didn't bat an eyelash when troop levels increased to 100,000 in 2010. But boy was there a lot of talk in whether US should keep 10,000 troops in Iraq in 2010, despite it being a much quieter place and far more important to US than Afghanistan. Why was that? It's because the sitting president molded the media and public opinion in his campaign that Afghanistan was the "good war" and Iraq was the quagmire. Never mind that he had the two reversed. But it didn't matter because he set the conversation and tone, and everybody believed that Iraq was a mess, would continue to be a mess, and we needed to get out soon. Obama grudgingly accepted the surge, but used the quiet aftermath as the convenient jumping off point, despite the huge risks of an early exit. Now consider this hypothetical. Bush starts the surge in 2005, and things are stable by 2008 and he extends the agreement to keep 10,000 troops. I think that in that scenario, US presence doesn't provide a wasteland for ISIS to grow & thrive, Iraq stabilizes more, and people are talking about its rise.

And this is precisely why it's impossible to have an honest conversation with you. You lay out a dozen paragraphs explaining the various complexities in a hypothetical situation, but then insist on a yes/no answer to a question that doesn't account for a single complexity. So in the vein of your questioning, my answer is yes, no and maybe.

Hey gatorman, this topic was specifically addressed above. To recap for the hard of listening, US military is designed for long term occupations, and permanent troop levels deployed overseas are always between 100,000 & 200,000. You may have forgotten that a war weary population, and every representative in Congress, every Senator and the executive haven't had an issue with a 100,000 troop deployment in Afghanistan for 15+ years, without much to show for it. So what's your point, other than grandstanding?

No wide stances for me.

With the right amount of resources, the US can execute regime change on every planet that your UFOs come from. That's why your question is gator-level idiotic. Take a lesson from TYTT in how to properly frame a question.

Shhh, don't give it away.

No your question has evolved many many times. Why don't you answer why you don't believe that US can be a force for good? What are these numerous failed experiments you're talking about? Why are Arabs inferior to Germans, Japanese & Koreans?