Originally posted by Surtur
To me if ISIS attacked the Vatican I wouldn't really want us to waste any of our resources on trying to protect it from further attack or anything like that. I would view that as pretty directly helping out a religious cause.
To me, I'd sit back and laugh as the Italian army rolled them like chumps, before our military could even *reach* there, because besieging the Vatican is really silly, y'know?
Like... the Vatican is surrounded by an EU nation with massively more military force. How the heck are we supposed to anything to help when they'd be ants attacking a lion in a military fight anyway? And Germany and France are right besides them too!
They'd be dead if they tried!
So very, very dead!
Originally posted by Lucius
"I just want to say, at least on behalf of me and my family, I thank God all the time that it was George W. Bush in the White House on 9/11 and not Al Gore."- Marco Rubio
I'd like to wonder what precisely he think would happen differently.
Does he think Gore would *not* go after Al Qaeda in Afghanistan? Because that's pretty absurd- Bill Clinton was recommending it pre-9/11, and the Democrats are not exactly pacifists, if one hasn't been paying attention. They still engage in their fair share of military expeditions with much less direct involvement than an attack on us, so there's not much chance of us not getting military involved in Afghanistan.
Let's also consider what came, not with Bush, but with Rumsfeld- the 'shock and awe' strategy that said we didn't need to send all of our forces and cover the country properly, a smaller army would shock the enemy into submission and the long term would be easy (it didn't work).
And then there's the second war in Iraq, which took forces away from Afghanistan (and suffered a similar 'not enough forces for the long haul' issue). Is it the Iraq war that Rubio is afraid wouldn't happen?
Here's the thing, it's the exact same army by the exact same generals either way, this wasn't long after the election so Bush's wars were fought with the army Bill Clinton gave him, and Bush didn't think he needed all of it for the job to boot. The only differences will be the President and Secretary of Defense up top. Heck, Colin Powell would still probably be giving advice no matter who was President.
I don't quite get why people think the military just magically jumps up or down in size and effectiveness based on the letter besides the President's name. Most officers joined up a decade or more beforehand.
What does Rubio think is going to be different?
Right now, we still eaaaasily have the biggest army on Earth. And if a Republican was in charge, they'd have the same army for most of the first term and they probably wouldn't be doing much in the way of drastic expansion because hey, this thing is huge and powerful.
The party of the president seems to be more of a security blanket type of thing- some people feel warm and safer when it's one color than when it's another, but the blanket is the same thickness either way.