Quote:
Originally posted by Bob Biter
Dragonlich, attempts at precognition are not a good way to support an argument. You could say "what if" for just about any situation and extrapolate like it's going out of style, but this isn't concrete evidence and so it doesn't support your point.
Any action has short-term and long-term impacts. The latter are obviously more difficult (if not impossible) to determine. By providing weapons and training to help push back Russia all those years ago, the US knew what the short-term impacts would be. Did they know about 9-11 or the current war? Of course not, since these things could not be predicted. They also could not have happened, but they did. Cause and effect can be extremely tricky, but while certain key events may certainly produce others, I think it's foolish to claim to know the future with any kind of certainty.
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Ah, thanks for (accidentally?) supporting my cause...
You're saying that it's impossible to predict the future effects of your actions today, are you? Then why are *some people* here saying that the US shouldn't have done this, and shouldn't have done that, etc? At the time, they seemed good ideas, after all...
The reality of high-level crisis meetings is as I described it: something happens (Iraq attacks Iran, Iran strikes back, seems to be winning). Military and political figures then produce a series of potential scenarios of what might happen. They suggest a series of potential solutions to prevent the bad scenarios from coming true. The president and his staff then decide what to do, based on these scenarios and solutions. As they cannot foresee the future, there are always potential side-effects they hadn't thought of. However, they cannot do *nothing*, because the results could (would?) be nasty.
With hindsight, one might say that certain actions were wrong, and that the positive effects do not outweigh the negative, but at the moment that you make those decisions, you try to do what you think is right. Politicians make mistakes; after all, even with all their information, they're just as blind as the rest of us, stumbling along from one crisis to the next. Blaming them for the consequences of their decisions isn't really fair if those consequences couldn't have been foreseen.
Or does anyone think the CIA could have known that Osama and his fellow Afghani mujahideen would end up fighting a holy war against the USA, for example? If you do, I think you're giving these guys too much credit; after all, they weren't even able to prevent 9-11; how then would they be able to look 20 years into the future?