Jimmy Carter savages US foreign policy over drone strikes

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• Hey Jimmy, tell it to Obama! But be careful, there may be a predator drone in your future. The One doesn't critcism graciously.

• I don't agree that using a drone to deliver death is somehow shameful. I think it may be shameful to get whacked by one, since being targeted with assets that costly means you've done something that got noticed. Should make sure to not get noticed when doing that kinda thing! Yeah, I don't want to piss off anybody that has drones they can kill me with.

• Sad to think that Jimmy C could have effectively laid down the law to terrorists when he held the office. He could have carpet bombed Iran during the hostage crisis, with UN and world wide support. Get the message out that you mess with the US, you and everyone you know dies. Do the same to the next shithole country that pops their head out of the hole too. Reagan could have done it after we got them back too. Thanks for giving us our people back, enjoy the rubble.

  Seem a bit drastic? Go back in history to when we conducted war in such a manner. Are we having problems with Japan, Germany or Italy? Nope, they got the meassage. Next war, Korea. We didn't fight it to win, they're still jacking with us and everyone in the region.

  • You're right, but with the advent of the U(seless) N(umbnuts) telling everyone how to act, we have lost our cojones.
    Carter wouldn't bomb Iran because he was afraid of them or us, killing the hostages. Reagan didn't do it because we got them back and he wanted to be magnanimous. Either way, the UN would have stopped us short of total victory.
    Once again, for us to regain true supremacy and "don't screw with us" status, we need to get out of the UN and tell them to screw off when we get into a conflict.
    What are they going to do? Place economic sanctions against us? GOOD! See how well the rest of the world survives without our money buying their goods, our tourism dollars, and our financial aid! I'm betting China, Taiwan, India, Pakistan, and every other country we import the majority of our stuff from will come to the realization that the UN is run by a bunch of grade school jackasses that threaten to take their football and go home if you don't listen to them, and we all know that there's always someone else with a football.

    • The hostages were actually considered expendable. I worked with a SF guy who on on the reactionary force that was to be dropped in if needed should the rescue attempt go south. Of course we all know the rescue team never made it to the insertion point. The reactionary force's job? To quote my friend," We were to go in and hose down anything that was still moving."

  • Like it or not, a flock of 500 pounders gets the message to the bad guy. A drone, meh, they'll learn and adapt rendering them ineffective within the year. There's no way to adapt to a good old fashioned high altitude carpetbombing.

• I agree Joe, that we should just leave the shithole entirely. But, if we ARE going to try to take out more Taliban and Al Qaeda, then I think it SHOULD be done from the safety of a bunker half a world away. Our military men and women don't need to die over those lowlife dirtbags.

• This is an interesting thread, telling us something important about the war. It's no exxageration to say 90% of the people making comments in IHTM are conservatives, but clearly even among conservatives the war has begun to lack justification. Inadequate consensus on the home front is a bad way to run a war.

  • I think you are seeing the Libertarian vs Conservative contrast when it comes to foreign policy. As a Libertarian, I see Afghanistan as belonging to someone else. Sure we had to go take the training camps out, and I'm supportive of covert operations to monitor the situation in that crap hole, to make sure terrorists never have the capability to plan such an attack again.

    But we're approaching 11 years there already.... To put that into perspective, if the enemy combatants we are fighting are 20 years old today, that made them 10 years old when we invaded. What other enemy are they to know but us? Every people want their sovereignty, that's not just an American thing.

    We can't be naive and not keep an eye on things, but we also can't be naive and think we can kill all the bad guys. We need a new strategy.

    • Beside, the country that is training and arming Al-Quaida today isn´t the Afghan governement any longer but the Turkish one, even if not aimed at the US. Libyan governement doesn´t do that but certainly, allows them to work within its borders.

      Sure, it is not doing so against the US but after not just 9/11 but also all the efforts against Al-Qaida and other such groups in the following year, the US could put pressure on Turkey to stop immediately.
      Hovewer, since the lamestream medias supports him on that, he simply doesn´t need give a shit about the thousands of soldiers KIA and trillions spent. It all can just go straight right into the garbage bin, as long as things look good.

      In fact, he won´t give a shit even if it could get him re-elected, that is good measure of the level of contempt he, his abject (and already backstabbing in the case of the clintons) cronies have for the subjects they misrule.

• Actually I don't have too much of a problem with using the drones, as long as they are kept overseas and targeted to enemy combatants. As for "collateral damage," that never bothered us in WW2, as both Germans and Japanese will likely tell you about at great length. Ever see those pictures of Dresden or Hiroshima?

  As far as "US citizens" being targeted - possibly a cloudier area, but if a citizen takes up arms with a hostile power against the US, he may be considered to have forfeited his citizenship in any case -- AND he is still an enemy combatant, no matter what his birth certificate says (ironically.) oh, Travis -- would you prefer that we have half a dozen fresh markers in Arlington rather than blow up some cavedweller from a bunker? And how would this differ from any long range missile? What do you think it's like launching an ICBM from a sub?

  So the operation itself -- go for it. I suspect that like the bin Ladin raid, this is something that has been going for a while, independent of the White House, and as with everything, Sock Puppet is just trying to crab in on the act.

  Yes, I have a concern is that it might be abused domestically, but that's always true of the military. I doubt Sock Puppet is really stupid enough to try anything like that -- possible, and with him more possible than any other president, but otherwise -- drones away, baby.

  • "Actually I don’t have too much of a problem with using the drones, as long as they are kept overseas and targeted to enemy combatants."

    I think it is very telling that Bush restrained the use of drones in an effort to lower "collateral damages", while Obama doesn´t all to the silence of the lamestream medias.

    "but if a citizen takes up arms with a hostile power against the US,"

    What about a governement, also guilty of high treason, that takes arms against its people and country? Does its members count as partisans?

  • The difference is we had a good reason to fight in WW2, what is our reason for being in Afghanistan and bombing parts of Pakistan? 9-11 happened, we took out the training camps, almost 11 years later and we're still there. That place is always going to be a shit hole, why are we still shedding American blood and bombing civilians? Also, who's the enemy, someone holding an AK? How do we judge that? Are they still an enemy if our troops are home, because those AK's can't fire that far, and those IED's only blow up their own people at that point.

    We can solve all this if we left that God Forsaken place.

    • Well, that's kind of a different question anyway. But here's a good response I think: why indeed, when we can do it by drone?

      Don't interpret my response as meaning I'm 100% behind the current operation as it is -- I was responding to a very specific issue.

• Doesn´t he know most liberals approves of drone strikes now, on account of them being ordered by a half-black democrate president? Perhapse, he is anticipating Obama´s defeat in November...

  "We don´t support drone strikes, we never supported drone strikes."

• Look, we all know Carter has been a sh!t ex President, & we have seen Al Gore be the worst ex anything in living memory. But does anyone want guess how sh!tty the Obama's will be once they are gone? They will be the worst.

• Jimmy broke his leash.

  • Nah, he's just the nation's Weathervane of Stupid. No matter how good an idea he babbles about, it always turns out that he did it for exactly the wrong reasons. Jimmah just doesn't like who's doing it to whom. In this case, if it was Hamas using drones to kill Israelis, that'd be just fine with ol' Mr. peanuts.

• Jimmy needs to go to a house and help Habitat for humanity put up sheetrock, he screws up everything else he touches, kinda like the present guy in the white house. Jimmy, your a withered old peanut, go home and take your meds....