Two things to add at this time:

A castrated neocon is not the arbiter of what is agreeable to non-interventionists.



'Recognizing this is only fair if you say Trump has dementia too!!!'

yea they doing Zoom meetings deciphering Q drops?

...

We were talking about Afghanistan. That's where Biden is saying he'll pull troops for. That's where you were against Trump pulling troops out less than a year ago. I find it hilarious that you blame Trump for 'failing' to bring troops home when literally republican neocons that are always pro-war and democrat #resist basically put aside their differences to prevent that from happening. It's like you have no compass of causation of things in this world and just selectively see things how you want to see them. Trump is always the guilty party in your book regardless of circumstances or fact. Truly cultish and obsessive behavior.

Secondly, we never talked about South Korea or Japan. We talked about Germany and it was the same recycled discussion. You give neocon talking points about why we need to stay I disagree.

Thirdly, you were too young to know what's going in Iraq but judging by how gullible you are, you are literally the prototype of the Iraq war supporter. We went into Iraq because our intelligence community repeated a bunch of lies. You constantly yield your critical thinking for 'anonymous officials said so'. I've heard that phrase from you easily over 50 times in the last couple of years.

she/he thinks claiming of blocking people on a diablo 2 forum is some sort of ace in the hole lol. pollster jr. aka icemage really is a horrible junior boomer version of her/his illegitimate father figure.

at least pollster was mildly informed for a little while until 2014 and then i had to retire him against his wishes and banish him off into the abyss known as reddit politics/mmo-champion in 2017 lmfao

You brought up my opposition to Trump removing troops from Germany. I did not bring it up. I'm not sure how that is relevant to the conversation, except as evidence that you are opposed to more than just "stupid wars" like Iraq.

I don't even know if I said at the time I was against Trump pulling troops out of Afghanistan. As I already said, I was offended that he wanted to strike a deal with the Taliban at Camp David on 9/11. I bring up Trump failing to do it because you and cambo are supposedly against the war, so it would make sense for you to support leaving Afghanistan. Trump promised to do it, he failed. Biden promised to do it, he's on track to get it done. As I've already said, someone like Rand Paul would've pulled out in 4 years. Have the forces committed to staying in Afghanistan vanished? If so, please explain how. Because the troops will probably be out in a few months.

I have no idea what you're talking about. You've always expressed a desire that America abandon it's role on the world stage, so maybe you should just let me know if that has changed.

We're around the same age so we were both too young to follow it at the time. Based on what I've read I don't believe the intelligence community manufactured lies to get us into war. I think Bush's people wanted to go in and used faulty intelligence to do so. I have never supported the war and I think it's one of the worst foreign policy mistakes in American history.

This post was edited by IceMage on May 1 2021 04:38pm

This is how events unfolded:

1.Trump was trying to pull out troops after years of yielding to generals
2. At some point he basically said enough is enough and started to pull troops out
3. Last year as he wanted to pull out all of them, a huge opposition grew against it
4. The oppositions main argument was basically Taliban will take over so we can't and it would be irresponsible
5. Then the opposition turned to some bullshit story about Russian bounties, for two reasons really to stop him from pulling troops out and also try to paint the same old bullshit narrative that he's friends with Russia unless he does something retaliatory
6.Then the opposition mobilized Congress and actually put in place mechanisms to stop him from pulling those troops out.

I remember you arguing why it's irresponsible to pull troops out and then I also remember you 100% posted about the Russian bounties story. Now you're basically trying to distance yourself from this position because Biden is trying to do it, which is very dishonest of you.

The Russian bounties story was first reported in June 2020. Nothing except incompetence and inaction explains why Trump didn't end the war before then. And what was the result of the story? Like yourself, MAGA world thought it was fake news peddled by the deep state establishment. So when essentially all the Trump voters think it's BS, there's no good reason to argue Trump had to stay in Afghanistan because of politics.

I don't know that there were any real mechanisms passed by Congress to limit Trump's ability to move troops around. Even if there were, it was only funding, and just as Trump used defense dollars to build a wall, he could've used them to pull the troops out.

The Russian bounties story was legit and there were good reasons to take it seriously. I definitely argued against pulling troops from Syria, but I'm not sure I opposed leaving Afghanistan. Maybe I did, I'm not sure. If I had a firm position I would've remembered. Unlike you, I'm not an ideologue on this stuff.

Just to add.

Imagine how irresponsible was/is for someone of Joe Biden's political stature to say shit like this based on nothing that was proven. No accountability, neither for the politicians or the media that perpetrated these lies.




https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56775660



The story was not credible that's why he was never briefed on it. This was recently reaffirmed. The problem is we can't go back in time and change the political damage that was done based on a lie. But this has become the norm during Trump's presidency. Publish and repeat bullshit to damage then who cares about what happens later when it comes out it was all nonsense.

This post was edited by ofthevoid on May 1 2021 05:25pm

It depends what you mean by "never briefed on it." HE never heard of it but the information was in his daily briefing. He just chose not to read it. I think it's important to get the facts right and the fact is that it's possible that the program existed but there's not enough evidence to prove it existed. There were discrepancies among various intelligence agencies and the intelligence was rated low to moderate confidence. Options for retaliation were discussed but no action was taken. I can't comment if taking no action was a good idea or not because I don't know if it's standard to mention these sort of things with world leaders.

I don't think this had much of an impact on the election, do you?