The Art of War details how entities should conduct war in proper fashion, something the US seems to not understand in any way, shape or fashion given the catastrophic excellent adventures in foreign policy beginning with the house arrest of Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad by the CIA. From Nam to Iraq to Afghanistan, the inability of the US to understand the proper tenents of military and foreign policy is truly mind-boggling, something readily seen in an excellent article written by Nick Turse in The Intercept.
ON SEPTEMBER 19, 2001, CIA officers collected cardboard boxes filled with $3 million in nonsequential $100 bills to buy off Afghan warlords, beginning America’s martial response to the 9/11 attacks. A day later, President George W. Bush stood before Congress and declared a “war on terror” that would “not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.”
Over the next 20-plus years, the tab on that conflict, which began in Afghanistan but spread across the globe to Burkina Faso, Iraq, Libya, Mali, Niger, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen, has ballooned to more than $6 trillion. The payoff has been dismal: To date, the war has killed around 900,000 people, including more than 350,000 civilians; displaced as many as 60 million; and led to humanitarian catastrophes and the worst U.S. military defeat since the Vietnam War. American cash has built armies that have collapsed or evaporated when challenged; meanwhile, the number of foreign terrorist groups around the world has more than doubled from 32 to 69.
It gets "better".
It didn’t have to be this way, according to a new study of counterterrorism approaches from Brown University’s Costs of War Project. “Terrorism is a political phenomenon,” writes researcher Jennifer Walkup Jayes in “Beyond the War Paradigm: What History Tells Us About How Terror Campaigns End,” which was shared exclusively with The Intercept ahead of its release on Tuesday. “Counterterrorism strategies which address the root causes of terrorism, rather than the organizations and people that commit it, might end the waves of terrorist violence.”
Sophisticated statistical analyses have demonstrated that there are proven, effective methods to hasten the demise of terrorist organizations, according to Walkup Jayes’s report. But the “war paradigm,” which was a departure from America’s previous law enforcement approach to counterterrorism, is not one of them.
Think about this, I certainly have.
Is the US committing the same error with The Ukraine & Russia as Russia's not Nam, Iraq or Afghanistan,
Russia's a real country, armed to the teeth and has the advantage of ground, a grim reality the US seems to not understand.
Note, the MIC makes out as it always does.
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