Reply #17: Absolutely. [View All]

[Igel]

It's not a war to help one side in a civil war, a side we know little about.

It's a kinetic military operation that will last days, not weeks, intended to provide unknown actors the ability to engage in formal, armed, civilian kinetic operations in order to provide the political space to advance potentially significant, yet undefined vital American interests and rectify previous errors by advancing universal, unchanging, yet narrowly tailored moral principles of limited applicability.

It's not at all an opened-ended war that might last hundreds of days intended to provide dubious allies' rag-tag military with the ability to use its own private air force to provide cover so as to seize local power in order to both get rid of somebody we redecided we don't like and absolve some sense of lingering guilt for things we actually bore no responsibility for so that we can feel wanted and loved.

The formal is progressive. The latter is regressive.

You can tell the difference by listening to the words of the politicians involved. Whatever you do, don't look at the actions or actually expect the words to be meaningful in any more than a fuzzy, emotive sense.