US launches missiles into Syria in response to chemical weapons attack
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Wow, this is nuts.
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Well, the conflict without end seems to have found a new reason to continue sucking billions of dollars of taxpayer money.
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Little Marco was just on Fox/Hannity. He's backing the actions.
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No definitive proof given to the World and even then you have to balance the potential for reprisal.
What will the Tit for the Tat be?
How many Hezbollah cells are here or can walk across the border?
You don't need cruise missiles or Stealth Bombers if you have assets already in place.
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No business like WAR for big businesses.
One foreign conflict after the next. Creating more and more enemies in more places during a time when America has never been more divided. The speed of information has created more division than existed during the civil war. Try to find even TWO people to agree about anything. If they talk about it long enough they'll find reasons to disagree. Military being infiltrated by libtards and queers. Yet here we are finding more reasons to act like we are the entire world's police force.
Yeah yeah yeah... "Well what do you want to do... fight them over here!?!?!?!" I've heard that shit before, and my response is... let them try. How about spend some time and money to ACTUALLY secure our borders? Besides, some real terror inside this country is just what we need to get the libtards to shut their mouths. They'll be BEGGING us to carry guns everywhere then. So I say, bring it on. Enough of this foreign conflict bullshit. ENOUGH.
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@orkan I agree with your points, but I see it as a double edged sword. If we do nothing, with Russia and North Korea watching it doesn't send a very good message.
War sucks, but show of force is needed.
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From www.navy.mil
Source
WASHINGTON (NNS) -- At the direction of the president, U.S. forces conducted a cruise missile strike against a Syrian Air Force airfield today at about 8:40 p.m. EDT (4:40 a.m., April 7, in Syria).The strike targeted Shayrat Airfield in Homs governorate, and were in response to the Syrian government's chemical weapons attack April 4 in Khan Sheikhoun, which killed and injured hundreds of innocent Syrian people, including women and children.
The strike was conducted using Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles (TLAMs) launched from the destroyers USS Porter and USS Ross in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea. A total of 59 TLAMs targeted aircraft, hardened aircraft shelters, petroleum and logistical storage, ammunition supply bunkers, air defense systems, and radars. As always, the U.S. took extraordinary measures to avoid civilian casualties and to comply with the Law of Armed Conflict. Every precaution was taken to execute this strike with minimal risk to personnel at the airfield.
The strike was a proportional response to Assad's heinous act. Shayrat Airfield was used to store chemical weapons and Syrian air forces. The U.S. intelligence community assesses that aircraft from Shayrat conducted the chemical weapons attack on April 4. The strike was intended to deter the regime from using chemical weapons again.
Russian forces were notified in advance of the strike using the established deconfliction line. U.S. military planners took precautions to minimize risk to Russian or Syrian personnel located at the airfield.
We are assessing the results of the strike. Initial indications are that this strike has severely damaged or destroyed Syrian aircraft and support infrastructure and equipment at Shayrat Airfield, reducing the Syrian Government's ability to deliver chemical weapons. The use of chemical weapons against innocent people will not be tolerated.
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@norcal_in_az said:
@orkan I agree with your points, but I see it as a double edged sword. If we do nothing, with Russia and North Korea watching it doesn't send a very good message.
War sucks, but show of force is needed.
It's what the UN is supposed to be for. Granted we foot the bill for most of that anyways.
America is hated because we intervene
America is hated when we don't interveneNo other nation in the world is treated that why, no one was asking France, Britain, Sweden, Germany or whoever what they were going to do about this.
Partially because they didn't have idiot past leaders that got them involved in things they should not be involved in.
$19 trillion dollars in debt, why the hell should we help anyone? Drive ourselves further in the hole and get bitched at by everyone else.
Those damn missles cost $1.5 million each, and no one is going to cover that cost (besides the tax payers), or even thank us.
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@norcal_in_az said:
@orkan show of force is needed.
It's thinking exactly like that, which keeps us in a conflict abroad WITHOUT END. What do you call EVERY damn year since Gulf 1?
You serve in the military? I wonder if you'd be so cavalier if you just received marching orders to yet ANOTHER shit hole? I wonder if your son was of age and in the military, if you'd be so eager to support this ENDLESS war in other countries? We have enough armed forces abroad to secure our country in a way that no other country has EVER been secure... if they'd just fucking bring them home and make an ATTEMPT to do it. The entire world could try to invade us all at once, and would fail. ... if only that kind of real security mattered to anyone.
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@orkan Again I don't disagree with you. I'm just trying to take it all in from all sides.
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@norcal_in_az said:
I'm just trying to take it all in from all sides.
How very politically correct of you.
“The refusal to take sides on great moral issues is itself a decision. It is a silent acquiescence to evil. The Tragedy of our time is that those who still believe in honesty lack fire and conviction, while those who believe in dishonesty are full of passionate conviction.”
― Fulton J. Sheen
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@orkan said:
@norcal_in_az said:
@orkan show of force is needed.
It's thinking exactly like that, which keeps us in a conflict abroad WITHOUT END. What do you call EVERY damn year since Gulf 1?
You serve in the military? I wonder if you'd be so cavalier if you just received marching orders to yet ANOTHER shit hole? I wonder if your son was of age and in the military, if you'd be so eager to support this ENDLESS war in other countries? We have enough armed forces abroad to secure our country in a way that no other country has EVER been secure... if they'd just fucking bring them home and make an ATTEMPT to do it. The entire world could try to invade us all at once, and would fail. ... if only that kind of real security mattered to anyone.
You don't want war in your own back yard. Of all the things I saw that got to me was the young Kids .
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We're morally justified at this point. We were before but moreso now.
The correct response at this point is to take the leash off the military and let them do the thing they signed up to do.Grind Assad into the dust and then let the rest of the Middle East take responsibility for fixing this. I'm pretty sure the UAE or Saudi Arabia have both the money to deal with this one.
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Sky rockets in flight..... afternoon delight...
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@ragnarnar said:
Sky rockets in flight..... afternoon delight...
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Ha!
Just mute the volume on the live leak TLAM launch video and play the Starland Vocal band over it.
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@ragnarnar said:
Ha!
Just mute the volume on the live leak TLAM launch video and play the Starland Vocal band over it.lol
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Where this hurts Russia is in weapons sales.
The S-400 Air Defense System was touted as being effective against low level cruise missiles.
China has something similar on that new Island they built.
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@ragnarnar said:
We're morally justified at this point. We were before but moreso now.
The correct response at this point is to take the leash off the military and let them do the thing they signed up to do.Grind Assad into the dust and then let the rest of the Middle East take responsibility for fixing this. I'm pretty sure the UAE or Saudi Arabia have both the money to deal with this one.
Let the UN deal with it, that's what they're for. How about instead of meddling in the governments of foreign nations they act like the world police they're supposed to be.
We get rid of Assad, fine, then what? Leave? ISIS or some other shit bag Islam idealistic terror group comes in.
We stay, they hate us anyways, we end up wasting billions of dollars, then we leave, then they probably just become enemies anyways.
It's not like we have plenty of examples of us doing both things in that area to pull from.
We should not be involved. We should have never been involved.
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I agree with @orkan on all his points. This has the potential to drag us into yet another years long conflict with no end, suck billions if not trillions of USD out of our country to help people that in the end, either hates us anyway, or only want our $$ and whatever they can get from us, or they don't have the power to change their circumstances to make our efforts fruitful.
With almost 20 trillion in debt, a porus border that endangers all of us, a broken healthcare system, stifling regulations on businesses, and a host of other domestic issues, I think that money would be better spent in our own country in our own people.
I also would not want a war in our backyard, and I definitely would not like to see my kids or any other kids suffer, but I think our country is in such moral decay now that I believe it's only a matter of time before some sort of "payment for sins" will be required. Whatever form that takes, innocent lives will be affected.
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We had a moral obligation to get involved, take that however you want too. Ignoring it puts us in the wrong too.
If you saw a guy drowning, you would help. If you saw a guy smacking his wife around, you would help. The list goes on and the point remains the same, but I'm willing to bet you would help because you're a moral person. This is the same thing, and nobody else is helping.Syria is totally different from Iraq, if that's what you're referring to. There won't be a power vacuum as there was in Iraq because Syrians want self government. If you recall, the whole Syrian thing started because people were protesting for democracy against an authoritarian government (who then opened fire on them). Similarly, ISIS only formed there because the government was too busy fighting its own people to police within its borders. This is their revolution.
The only power the UN has is the power we and the other member states loan to it. They don't have a military. It would be more expensive for the US to fund the UN to do this, and it would be less direct too. I don't like it but billions of dollars get spent either way, but this way we can ensure the job gets done right.
Thus, we grind Assad into dust, which from my understanding can be accomplished by a conventional military without the problem going to an insurgency. Then have Saudi Arabia who has plenty of money and the same religious majority as Syria fix the country and help establish the new government.
In doing this you'd be able to stop the spread of terror, because you remove the impetus to import thousands of culturally incompatible people into western countries, thus saving money in the long run.
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Sure I'd probably help, but that's me deciding what I would do.
I'm not going to grab some random person also there and send them to help.
Not just Iraq, it's any involvement we've had with any country in that region.
Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, whatever none of it has worked out going back to the Cold War.
We cannot fix it, these people have been fighting since Islam was founded.
It is not our problem. We are not the world police, people don't want us to be the world police, and not just our own.
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I remember at one point Trump saying that if he was going to go into Iraq, or some other country in the middle east, he was also going to get the oil, so that we wouldn't go there for free. I hope that if this attack escalates into an invasion into Syria, that we get something out of it for cleaning other people's crap. I think it's only fair. Why do the UAE, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, all those other rich middle eastern countries, why don't they help eliminate criminals like Assad? Why is it always the US, that has to claim moral justification to clean up other countries for which we get nothing? The monetary cost, we could argue, is minimal compared to the cost in blood of our sons and daughters. Again, why? Are the sons and daughters of other countries more valuable than ours that we send ours to clean up the crap in other countries?
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I'm not going to argue that Iraq wasn't fucked from the get go, I think its universally accepted we were there for the wrong reasons. We could have resolved Afghanistan mostly by talking. Obama and She who must not be named trod on our collective dicks in Egypt and Libya.
Syria I maintain is a different situation, and Obama didn't fuck it up worse by the grace of God. I maintain this is a situation where we are not only justified, but morally obligated to help and in doing so we solve our own problem too.
As for grabbing random people to help, I'm not sure what you mean. Our military is not random people, it being an all volunteer force. If you mean UAE or Saudi Arabia, that would be a situation where the UN might actually do something useful for a change when it comes to dealing with them.
And I'll be the first person to agree with you that Islam needs a reformation. But this isn't just Muslims fighting each other. To me there exists a distinction between people fighting, and genocide and, using nerve gas, never mind on civilians, crosses that line.
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So many opinions. Every call I've been on today so far, I've had to endure people's opinions about this situation.
Each opinion I listen to... each opinion I read... I wonder about the person giving it. I wonder about what they truly know, that they are drawing these conclusions from. I hear phrases such as "moral obligation" and "justifiable action." Everyone seems to have a really good reason why we should be in more and more conflicts around the world.
"We don't want a war here, so lets do it over there."
Straw man argument. Who said anyone wanted a war here either? Why wouldn't we be able to defend ourselves against one, if we wanted to? We have more manpower and more equipment than any other nation. More than MOST nations combined. We have more armed civilians than any other nation. The reality is that we are the worlds hardest target for invasion right now, and could be significantly harder if we brought all our resources home."We can't let those people do that to other people."
There have been 156 people murdered so far this year in Chicago alone. Those are just the ones we know about. Just the ones confirmed. You don't have to go to syria to find moral atrocities. All you need to do is look around. ALL, and I do mean All of the shit going on in syria is going on right here in this country, right now, every day. Where is our moral obligation to our OWN citizens?We can't stop evil on our own streets, in our own homes... and people think we're going to go fix a different country? Countries that we don't understand and don't want us there in the first place?
People have lost the capacity for critical thinking in this country. Whatever lies they speak, people gobble them up and regurgitate them as if they are their own ideals. I refuse to do it. I require actual knowledge before backing actions that cost billions of dollars and countless lives.
Have any of you been to syria in the last couple weeks? No? Me either. So what the fuck can we possibly KNOW about what is going on? The truth is that it is irrelevant what is taking place there, one way or the other. What is absolutely relevant is what is taking place here, right now, every day. We DO know all about that. ... and because we constantly give our shitty government a pass on fixing it, it won't get fixed. They are too busy launching million dollar missiles to actually expend a little effort solving the disgusting moral vacuum in our own country.
It's no wonder we are fast becoming, if not already the most hated country in the world. The nerve to think we belong in anyone else's house telling them what to do when our own house is so fucked up.
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Obama did fuck it up, because he negotiated with Russia, which resulted in an agreement that Russia would find and remove all of Syrias WMDs. Not to mention Obama arming, and training rebels, and those weapons and trained soldiers finding their way to terrorist organizations.
The military may be a volunteer force, but that doesn't mean we have the right to throw their lives away involving them in conflicts that have nothing to do with us, and won't benefit us in any way.
And further the military is random people to the people in charge, they're nobodies to anyone in D.C.
This is simply not our problem, it's not our country, it's not our people, they broke none of our laws.
The only laws they broke are U.N. laws, let them deal with it, without our help ideally.
I get how wrong this was, but no good comes out of this for America, or Americans.
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@orkan said:
It's no wonder we are fast becoming, if not already the most hated country in the world. The nerve to think we belong in anyone else's house telling them what to do when our own house is so fucked up.
This. Well said, we can't be light on the street and darkness in our own house.
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I follow all your points here.
But if you overlook the moral aspect of it we're still the primary member of the UN. That's why it was formed in San Francisco in 1945, that's why 4 of the 5 major organs of it are in New York, that's why we have permanent standing on the Security council. And we signed onto it, so even removing the morality from it, we'd still have something of a legal obligation to do something because of all the treaties and agreements we've entered into. One cannot say let the UN deal with it, because the UN is UNable to do anything without us.
I'd be happy if we dissolved the UN. I don't enjoy a international body dictating what we do as a country.
We need to put our own house in order, yes. But you can't claim to want to elevate this country morally, and then turn a blind eye to something this obviously wrong.
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@ragnarnar said:
But you can't claim to want to elevate this country morally, and then turn a blind eye to something this obviously wrong.
Yes actually, I can claim that. I have more real facts to back up what I'm saying than I've seen ANYONE demonstrate regarding what they are saying about syria. Again everyone refuses to even THINK. Let me show you how critical thinking is accomplished.
Do you trust the government of this country?
Do you trust the news media in this country?
Has anyone you trust, recently been to Syria?
Have you been to Syria recently?
How do you know what you're being told about Syria is correct?
Even if it is a correct accounting of that one event, do you know what exactly prompted that event?
Do you know who stands to profit, and how?
Can you tell me ANYTHING about syria and what is going on there right now that you didn't glean from the news, random people on the internet, or governments?
Meanwhile, I can tell you for CERTAIN what I've witnessed in some of this nations larger cities over the last twenty years. Things I've witnessed with my own eyes. Things people I trust have witnessed and experienced. Thousands of people being murdered all across this country each month. A welfare state without end. A police state without end. People's freedom being viciously violated by our own government. Drugs, rape, prostitution, torture, starvation. The suffering in this country is biblical in nature... and it is tolerated by all, right there in front of us, every single day. ... and you want to talk to me about "moral obligation" as if some 3rd world shit hole that has been warring with each other for more than four thousand years is somehow more important than what is going on right here?
Moral obligation to go somewhere else and kill people? Bullshit. Moral obligation doesn't work like that. Especially when we've been doing that EXACT SAME THING for over 30 years in the same region and all we have to show for it is mountains of debt, hundreds of thousands of lives lost, and becoming the most hated nation on the planet. Doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different result is the definition of insanity.
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@ragnarnar I don't think we'll accomplish anything here other then back and forth.
I don't believe we have any moral obligation to do anything.
The U.N. is a terrible organization, and this is a great example, they're worthless, this is exactly the thing they should do something for, but they don't, they won't, they'd rather try and get America to obey their gun laws.
If the organizations that are supposed to be policing this aren't policing it, we definitely don't need to be doing it
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@orkan said:
Has anyone you trust, recently been to Syria?
Have you been to Syria recently?
How do you know what you're being told about Syria is correct?
Can you tell me ANYTHING about syria and what is going on there right now that you didn't glean from the news, random people on the internet, or governments?In regards to this, yes.
My old unit put boots on the ground in Syria last month, including people I was a private with and my privates now Sergeants from when I was a team and squad leader. As I'm sure you know, these are the people who I'd trust with my life, so I've keep up with them. They've kept me "informed" as well as sharing their impressions.
https://sofrep.com/76380/75th-ranger-regiment-hits-ground-syria-raqqa-offensive/It's because of my communications with my friends still in the military that I make the statement, "this is different than Iraq and Libya." Now if we handle it differently remains to be seen.
I do respect you and your evidence based approach, its part of the reason I've stopped going to other forums, but where do you draw the line? Whats the threshold for information you will or won't believe?
Even without the connections I have to persons present in Syria, the quorum of governments, NGO's, media outlets on both sides of the aisle have said there's fucked up shit going on in Syria. Am I to understand that you won't believe any of it without seeing it first hand? That borders on willful ignorance.In regards to your second point, you're putting my words in my mouth. I've never said Syria is more important than the US. I've also never said stop trying to improve this country. I don't deny we have our own problems. I've seen the same fucked up shit you have, and my home state is the epicenter of most of it.
My point is helping other people and helping yourself is not mutually exclusive. We can fix our own shit and at the same time work on helping other people with theirs.
We're morally obligated to do this. Even the killing. Legally, morally, even biblically you are obligated. You'd step in and stop a shooter in a restaurant, even if he was only going after the staff. This is the same thing.
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And we'll piss each other off and become resentful. I don't want that.
I too dislike the UN. And I appreciate your points.
Enjoy the rest of your day
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Having served in Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt and Israel I can see why we did what we did. For the people who say they don't want us there are wrong. I cannot count how many times in Iraq or Afghanistan I was thanked from the local populace for what we were doing. Things the US Military could have done better is go in clear the village of the enemy and built infrastructure while teaching them instead building the town without them. Also we made creates more enemies that most likely would have helped us but we decided to drive through the farms or hot them with piss bombs. Talking with friends who have been to Syria I can say they want us there but you only read about us battling the 20k IS fighters but if we were to support the anti Assad forces we might be able to help stabilize the region faster than you think.
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You mean people want free shit? Shocker.
Think of what you said, spend more of our money, to help them.
When 1.5 million people are homeless, and 42 Million aren't sure where their next meal will come from here in the states.
How about we worry about fixing our problems before going further in debt helping other countries.
Where's the moral obligation to help our own citizens? You know people in Flint, Michigan still don't have clean drinking water?
I'm not saying we should give everyone in America hand outs, but if people are bound and determined to give handouts to people they should go to Americans first.
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Hmmmm, we've been here before and our bombing then did nothing:
"The Ghouta chemical attack occurred in Ghouta, Syria, during the Syrian Civil War in the early hours of 21 August 2013. Two opposition-controlled areas in the suburbs around Damascus, Syria were struck by rockets containing the chemical agent sarin. Estimates of the death toll range from at least 281 people[3] to 1,729.[14] The attack was the deadliest use of chemical weapons since the Iran–Iraq War...." Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghouta_chemical_attackOur Presidents response then when he was a civilian:
I wish just for once, one of our leaders would turn inward and focus on making us whole and great again, before jumping on board to "save" others. IF this war was truly about saving others and not about money....I do believe our approach would be different and we'd be busy cleaning our own home up first before attempting to clean others.
