ExPatriatePen wrote:You missed the point. No one is comparing the Iraq war with the the Terrorist attack on the US embassey.
The question is about how we accept that our politicians are lying to us... Regardless of the issue, we expect the, to lie, we don't hold them accountable to the truth.
Who in their right mind would compare benghazi to the Iraq war? That's completely disingenuous and an obvious attempt to change the discussion.
I did a poor job of articulating my point.
Ambassador Rice is being publicly skewered by some Republican politicians for, in my opinion, reasons that are completely disingenuous. It's political grandstanding of the highest order...... and none of this posturing was present ten years ago when overt lies and misinformation spurred on a war that resulted in the deaths of thousands of Americans and god knows how many Iraqi civilians.
The selective outrage being displayed here my problem. I have no problem with wanting to hold our elected representatives accountable for their actions..... but I want that accountability to be both ways. Fundamentally, I am in complete agreement with what you're saying.
We're talking about a woman who was confirmed by a unanimous vote in the Senate, she's not a controversial person, and is highly unlikely to have made the decision of what information (if any) to deliberately withhold. She was the messenger.
Sarcastic wrote:I just have a problem seeing the US government shooting missiles on targets in the middle of a city.
If you look at the history of air power, you see technology playing the role of force multiplier.
Today, a single-seat F/A-18F can carry more than three times the payload of a B-17 and carry munitions that can be directed by a combination of satellite and laser guidance to hit specific windows in target buildings. And a single aircraft carrier can send 40-50 of those jets into the battle space. So you've got 80 people delivering the mission effectiveness of 3,000 aircrew 60 years ago, and they can accomplish in one mission what used to require days of bombardment. In the 40s, the circular error of probability (where 50% of bombs would land) was over a mile.... meaning that targets the size of a rail yard would only get hit with half the bombs dropped on it, and the other half - 500-600 bombs - would land in the surrounding neighborhood. Today, normal CEP is one or two meters.
The problem is the bad guys are in urban environments. So even with modern CEPs within the wingspan of the average fifth grader, when a 2,000-pound JDAM explodes it doesn't know that it shouldn't send shrapnel through any adjacent structures.