Comment by chatmasta | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chatmasta | Hacker News Reader

> “We write these strategic white papers, saying things like ‘Get the local Sunni population on our side,’ ” Skinner said. “Cool. Got it. But, then, if I say, ‘Get the people who live at Thirty-eighth and Bulloch on our side,’ you realize, man, that’s fucking hard—and it’s just a city block. It sounds so stupid when you apply the rhetoric over here. Who’s the leader of the white community in Live Oak neighborhood? Or the poor community?” Skinner shook his head. “ ‘Leader of the Iraqi community.’ What the fuck does that mean?”

This quote really exemplifies the failures of “nation building” from 2000-2010. It was always a hopeless quest with misguided and unmeasurable goals.

How much money was wasted, how many lives lost, in a hopelessly misguided pursuit to “stabilize” a country the US destabilized in the first place?

It's just the BS you sell when your cronies first get rich by supplying the military and then get rich again by supplying the rebuild. The destruction and lives lost are externalized costs of doing business. And terrorism is big business for those guys.

From the horse’s mouth: https://youtu.be/omnskeu-puE

Even more so when you consider those borders were invented in the last century.

Heck of a lot of Europe's borders were invented in the last century as well.

https://www.euratlas.net/history/europe/1900/index.html

Europe had its share of violence too, perhaps that's one reason why?

I believe the poster was referring to England and France being party to a secret agreement to partition the Ottoman Empire after World War I, despite overtly backing Arab revolt with promises of independence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sykes%E2%80%93Picot_Agreement for those interested.

That was what I was referring to indeed. Our borders in Europe have also been drawn up "artificially" (borders as a concept did not exist until relatively recently anyway), but there's quite a difference between two foreign countries imposing themselves and europeeans conflicts settling their own borders.

You probably meant "From 2000 BC to 2010".

But today's the year 2018, so why drop the 8?

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