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Comment by sumedh | Hacker News Reader

> The counterargument to this is that dependence on the US military keeps other countries from putting in the resources to become military competitors.

You dont need to be a direct military competitor, Afghanistan and Iraq have shown that you can still defeat US with a thousand cuts.

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Last I remember it was the US invading Afghanistan/Iraq and not the other way around. The US funding Saudi Arabia, antagonizing Iran, and collapsing Iraq has the bloody logic that it prevents an oil-rich Islamic superstate from unifying the Middle East like various Turkish/Iranian/Arabic empires have in the past. Keep globally influential competitors from forming.

> Last I remember it was the US invading Afghanistan/Iraq and not the other way around.

Which means the US had to do all the expensive logistics work too.

> Keep globally influential competitors from forming.

At the expense of US soldiers dying from the hands of AL Qaeda/ISIS and wasting trillions of dollars which could have been used to rebuild US infra and providing healthcare and other services to US citizens.

Didn't the US lose by that definition?

Argue whether it's a winning or losing strategy in congress, I'm just saying that's what the strategy is, making sure the US has as a much of a global monopoly on conventional military power as possible.

> making sure the US has as a much of a global monopoly on conventional military power

No one is saying US does not have that monopoly, its just that US still loses with that monopoly.

How have either Afghanistan or Iraq defeated the US in any conventional sense of the word?

In the conventional sense that the US ultimately failed. Yes they managed to blow up a lot of things and kill a lot of people, but it's difficult to argue that US national interests have been improved, let alone with any durability. In some respects it's fairly uncontroversial to say that US interests have suffered a net loss.

What exactly has US accomplished in Afghanistan and Iraq.

George Bush in 2003 had the Mission Accomplished banner, if the mission was accomplished, what are US soldiers still doing in Afghanistan and Iraq.

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