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Comment by nhchris | Hacker News Reader

You have elections.. but which party can you vote for if you want a stop to Middle East wars?

The US did end one foreign war quite recently. It was pretty messy, since it was definitely not a victory, and cratered the president's approval ratings. It turns out there is almost no political constituency for visibly losing a war.

Additionally, the US' kinetic operations in the Middle East have shrunk substantially as the drone strikes have been substantially curtailed, again under the same president that recently extracted the US from a long-running foreign war. He got no credit for that either; it turns out nobody in the US really cares very much, and even the people who generally disapprove of US foreign military involvements don't seem excited to give credit to the current guy.

The US has always ping-ponged between loving foreign wars and hating foreign wars. Not having a reliably anti-war party is not great, but that's at least as much the fault of the voters.

Remember Code Pink that was so active protesting the Iraq and Afghanistan wars? They are protesting the war in Ukraine, but notice how the media is not giving them hardly any attention now. These grassroots activist movements are just as much provoked into activity as they are genuine organicly driven.

They ended the occupation of Afghanistan abruptly in order to redirect resources to a certain other conflict, more critical to US elite interests.

Which conflict would that be? I'm not aware of any wars that started in 2020/early 2021, when the US was preparing to withdraw from Afghanistan.

https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB10014.html

God I love policy-wonk shit. I got to get back into reading this stuff semi-regularly, it's a blast. Thanks for the link.

Yeah it’s fun to watch it fail as the empire collapses.

It's possible US intelligence agencies were aware Russia was preparing to escalate their invasion of Ukraine in early 2021, so I assume that's what's being alluded to. Preparations and plans were most likely starting in Russia by then, that's true (even limited mobilization is a pretty big undertaking—it's hard to hide supply-dump preparation and heavy equipment movement and shifting soldier concentrations). Though IIRC the US government didn't start saying that publicly until late 2021/early 2022.

If they knew about it in late 2020, that info must not have made it to the upper levels of the military, given how much crying and foot-dragging they engaged in when Trump tried for his (IIRC) 90-day withdrawal. One wonders how ready our military actually is if they act like moving low-thousands troops and some equipment out of—not into!—a theater in which we control the airspace, within in a couple months, is a crazy thing to ask of them. It may have been a bad idea to withdraw that fast, sure, but some of their spokespeople they had on the circuits whining about how hard it was weren't saying it was a bad idea, but that it literally couldn't be done. Sure, Jan. Certainly, if The Shadowy Figures That Control Everything (riffing on the vibe of GP's post) had already decided we needed to shift to Ukraine, that was still a closely-kept secret in late 2020.

And I'm not as sure as GP that Biden's following through on the withdrawal was because of Ukraine, but I'd also not rule it out as extremely-unlikely—the timeline is such that it's possible.

Oh, this one's easy. Trump's withdrawal is as much of a clusterf*ck as Biden's, it sours American appetites for more military adventure, scuttling a Ukraine campaign.

Another fun exercise is to ponder how much - if any - influence Trump's supposed ties with Russia have on these hypotheticals. There was some other issue, recently, whose details have since slipped my mind, that made me think, "Oh, this 100% makes sense if you assume that Trump is being told to do Thing by a party who is trying to weaken America's position ahead of a resumption/escalation of 2014's hostilities." I believe it was something that Democrats uncharacteristically reversed course on, which, again, would lend credence to the notion that this was something of a clandestine pitched battle from the start. I wouldn't rule it out. Not from a Secret Society Ruling The World standpoint, more like Leaders In A Desperate Position Pulling Out All The Stops.

The Iraq war was overwhelmingly popular with the US electorate when it started. It had far more approval than almost any other policy at the time.

The US was overwhelmingly propagandized toward, but all you had to do to find resistance was to open the funny pages:

https://www.gocomics.com/boondocks/2003/01/15 https://www.gocomics.com/boondocks/2003/01/09

(I HIGHLY suggest reading at least a few weeks forward, starting from the second link.)

I'm sure Doonesbury got in on it, too. Eventually. After the Napster arc.

LOL, literally an example I thought of after my post. How much of the population dislikes foreign adventurism? That's a semi-common position across the aisle, among actual voters! Hell, Trump ran on it and it worked for him (once, anyway)! But typically this position has almost zero representation in our legislature, because our electoral system is really, really bad.

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