Juan Cole: GOP Candidates Promise Four Major Ground Wars, Murder of Innocents, and Large Genitalia

[eridani]

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/35568-focus-gop-candidates-promise-four-major-ground-wars-murder-of-innocents-and-large-genitalia

Brett Baier asked Marco Rubio about Daesh (ISIL, ISIS), noting that Rubio has proposed “sending a larger number of American ground troops to help defeat ISIS in Syria and Iraq…”

Rubio was annoyed that Baier only thought Rubio would invade two countries. Rubio replied, “That’s correct, and Libya.”

Rubio went on about Daesh:

“So they need to be targeted wherever they have an operating space. They do need to be defeated on the ground by a ground force made up primarily of Sunni Arabs themselves. This is a radical Sunni movement. They can only be defeated if they are driven out and the territory is held by Sunni Arabs. But it will require a specific number of American special operators, in combination with an increase in air strikes. And that will include, if necessary, operating spaces in Libya, which, in fact, they are using to project into the Sinai against Egypt and ultimately into Europe, as well.

So Rubio wants US ground troops wherever there is a Daesh cell– now he is adding Libya and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. That’s 4 wars he is pledging. There will be US casualties in these wars.

[pampango]

1. Great article, eridani. republicans seem obsessed with appearing to be tough.

Kasich: I will say, look, let me tell you what happened with Libya. And I pointed out in the last debate — Hillary Clinton worked aggressively to depose Moammar Gadhafi. We had no business doing it. He was working with us. He was cooperating with us. He denuclearized. And now they pushed him out, and now we have a fertile ground for ISIS.

So the “moderate” GOP candidate supports a dreadful dictatorship guilty of massacring its opposition and of planning to commit genocide in Benghazi. That the Middle East was more stable under murderous dictators is also a Trump theme. If they were so stable, why did their people rise up and .overthrow them? (It wasn’t NATO that fought off Gaddafi’s tanks in Misrata, it was the people of Misrata).

Then, having castigated Sec. Clinton for involving herself in Libya, Kasich urged a multinational invasion of that country in which we, the US, “have to be there on the ground in significant numbers. We do have to include our Muslim Arab friends to work with us on that. And we have to be in the air.” His model for this new ground war in North Africa is the Gulf War, when George H. W. Bush sent hundreds of thousands of US troops into Kuwait along with hundreds of thousands of allied troops. That war was a major one, in which there were larger tank battles than any time since the end WW II.

I don’t understand Kasich’s plan. If Hillary was wrong to get involved in Libya, why is Kasich right to? And, is he really proposing a war on Libya on the scale of the Gulf War? Doesn’t that lead to a quagmire?

[bemildred]

2. You have to know what's important, see. nt