The ISIS situation and Nuclear war

[Cartoonist]

Should we ramp up another war? I'm surprised at the support for war here on DU. I won't chastise anyone for their support, but I would like to know how far they are willing to go. Elizabeth Warren supports air strikes. I'm OK with that. That's how Bill Clinton won the Bosnia war without a single American combat loss. Some people want to fund the rebels. That's how we created Al Queda. Elizabeth doesn't think it's a good idea and voted against it. She's getting some totally unwarranted grief for it because some people interpret her earlier remark as a blank check which she has now turned into rubber.

Suppose the resolution called for nuclear strikes against ISIS. Would these same people who criticize Elizabeth still do so if she voted against that? At what point does the funding bill become unsupportable, even for people who want war? If you think defeating ISIS should be a #1 priority, does that mean that you would support a nuclear strike?

[AverageJoe90]

1. I doubt we'd be using any nukes against ISIS, TBH.....

Unless, perhaps, they somehow managed to acquire a nuke themselves, and tried to use it against any of our military forces over there.

[Cartoonist]

2. Agreed

It was merely a rhetorical question. But how far do we go? Airstrikes? Boots on the ground? Full scale invasion? Do we make Bush's war look like a game of Pinochle? What is the level of conflict people can support?

[Maedhros]

3. I'll chastise them.

There is absolutely no reason to think that American military action will do anything other than make the situation worse. Our track record with military action in the Middle East is one of repeated miserable failure. Avoiding American combat losses is a minor issue - it's not as if American military lives are more important than those of Iraqi and Syrian children.

[Scootaloo]

4. "Airstrikes" on former Yugoslavia resulted in a very high civilian death toll

NATO's own estimation is that only one-fifth of the people killed during the action were combatants. This is because bombs explode, and explosions are not discriminatory in who they pick up, throw around, shred, impale, and roast.

This is the same administration whose Secretary of State went on camera and proclaimed that five hundred thousand Iraqi children who had died of purely preventable causes, expressly because of our sanctions against that nation, were "totally worth it." She was not rebuked by the administration for this horrid statement at all.

But of course, only American lives matter, right? Who cares how many subhumans we splatter on the walls, who cares how many filthy Arabs we render homeless, orphaned, or crippled. Who cares, so long as we stand astride these untermensch like the ruling colossus that we are?

[Cartoonist]

5. There is no humanitarian way to wage war.

There is no humanitarian way to stop it once it's begun. We're all ears for humanitarian solutions, but I see you didn't offer one