Wednesday, February 18, 2015

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii (D) on CNN

I was listening to Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii  on CNN's Situation room take issue with the President saying "We are not at war with Islam. We are at war with terrorists."

But, her point might not be what you think. Her issue is that we are not defining clearly enough who are enemies are and because she is a U.S. Iraq War veteran possibly people should be listening to what she has to say.

I fully understand what Obama is saying too politically. And saying we are not at war "politically" helps dry up new recruits to ISIS. This is an important point too.

However, by not defining who are enemies are beyond "Terrorists" the ambiguities of this make our war against them basically impossible to win. So, Obama is fighting the ideological war and not the physical war when he says we are not at war with Islam.

However, by not more narrowly defining exactly who we are at war with there can be no way we can win this thing either.

What was nice about World War II?

What was nice was mostly armies wore uniforms at least so you knew who you were fighting. Now, Putin says the Ukrainian rebels are not Russian paid troops. OF course this is a lie. And Europe and the United States and Europe will loos to Putin unless we just throw up our hands and say, "Putin's a liar!" just like Stalin and Hitler before him. Now what?

However, it is exactly the same thing in regard to ISIS(ISIL) too. Unless we more narrowly define who we are fighting we can never win this war no matter how many years we fight it.

Who are we fighting?
What are we fighting to achieve?
How much money are we willing to sacrifice?
How much American Blood and money are we willing to sacrifice during the next 1, 5, 10, or even 20 years.

The more undefined what we are doing is the more money we are going to waste upon warfare that won't be useful and political points of view that won't be useful in resolving this (either Ukraine or Syria, Iraq and now Libya.

I think the best way to view this at present is that Putin by supporting Assad in Syria along with Iran has created ISIS(ISIL) which is now a smoke screen he is using while taking over European countries one by one. And even Ebola might be considered another smokescreen as well as Boko Haram in the taking over of Europe.

So, what crisis do we want to put foremost in our minds to solve? The world cannot solve all of them and at this point might not be able to solve any of them in any useful way at all.

Are we now entering such a clusterf--- in multiple situations that some type of world war II type of scenario cannot be avoided?

All these questions need answers or millions of people are going to die before we figure all this out.

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