[Hoot Gibson]

Hoot, you spend so much time with military people, I'm surprised you'd write this paragraph.

We risk our people training these people so that in the future, we don't have to go back and kill them again. Alot of the rebuilding of roads, bridges, schools, ect has alot to do with politics...people tend to turn against us when we bomb their shit and then make no effort to help them fix it, whether we killed bad guys doing it or not. Things like that make even more enemy for us to worry about.

Of course, I disagree with alot of the stuff we do to help them out, considering while we're doing it we pick up com chatter talking about our positions, how to hit us, ect. But that's war.

We cannot afford to rebuild nation after nation after they have attacked us. Knowing that our military will leave countries in better shape than they found them is not much of a deterrent to our potential enemies. It was in our national interest to rebuild western Europe and Japan after WWII because we needed markets for our products. How is rebuilding Afghanistan in our national interests? Do you think that once the Taliban retake power that they will show any reluctance to host anti-American terrorists? I don't. We should have destroyed as many Taliban and al Qaeda fighters as possible, destroyed as much of their capacity to make war as possible, and then left.

There is a better case to be made for doing some rebuilding in Iraq because of its strategic location and history of a more civil society, but Obama's failure to negotiate an agreement to station American troops there after the war suggests that we may have thrown a lot of money down a rat hole there, too.