Do we really have to take military action to Syria?

Like it or not the realities are that there are people out there that believe they have the right to do anything they think is right no matter how many laws are passed declaring them wrong.

Thank God you arnt in position to do as you think is the right thing.

You and JTT dont live in the real world. Like it or not the realities are that there are people out there that believe they have the right to do anything they think is right no matter how many laws are passed declaring them wrong.

The Startling Size of US Military Operations in Africa
The Pentagon's Africa Command will tell you there's one military base on the entire continent. Don't believe them.
—By Nick Turse | Fri Sep. 6, 2013 3:00 AM PDT


They're involved in Algeria and Angola, Benin and Botswana, Burkina Faso and Burundi, Cameroon and the Cape Verde Islands. And that's just the ABCs of the situation. Skip to the end of the alphabet and the story remains the same: Senegal and the Seychelles, Togo and Tunisia, Uganda and Zambia. From north to south, east to west, the Horn of Africa to the Sahel, the heart of the continent to the islands off its coasts, the US military is at work. Base construction, security cooperation engagements, training exercises, advisory deployments, special operations missions, and a growing logistics network, all undeniable evidence of expansion—except at US Africa Command.

To hear AFRICOM tell it, US military involvement on the continent ranges from the miniscule to the microscopic. The command is adamant that it has only a single "military base" in all of Africa: Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti. The head of the command insists that the US military maintains a "small footprint" on the continent. AFRICOM's chief spokesman has consistently minimized the scope of its operations and the number of facilities it maintains or shares with host nations, asserting that only "a small presence of personnel who conduct short-duration engagements" are operating from "several locations" on the continent at any given time.

With the war in Iraq over and the conflict in Afghanistan winding down, the US military is deploying its forces far beyond declared combat zones. In recent years, for example, Washington has very publicly proclaimed a "pivot to Asia," a "rebalancing" of its military resources eastward, without actually carrying out wholesale policy changes. Elsewhere, however, from the Middle East to South America, the Pentagon is increasingly engaged in shadowy operations whose details emerge piecemeal and are rarely examined in a comprehensive way. Nowhere is this truer than in Africa. To the media and the American people, officials insist the US military is engaged in small-scale, innocuous operations there. Out of public earshot, officers running America's secret wars say: "Africa is the battlefield of tomorrow, today."


http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/09/us-military-bases-africa

In the real world we have to protect ourselves.

The biggest threat to America? The size of its own military budget

Don't be fooled by terror alerts and dire warnings: the world in general is a safer place than ever and the US in particular

Michael Cohen

Dear America: I know you've got a lot on your mind these days. Work is a drag; the kids are still on summer vacation; the car is making an awful racket (it's probably the muffler); you've got to clean out the gutters; your anniversary is right around the corner and you can't think of a thing to buy; you really need to see the dentist. It's always something, right?

Well, here's one piece of good news: you're pretty safe.

Sure, Obama had to cancel that summit with Putin, and al-Qaida might be plotting to attack an overseas embassy, and there is that guy down the block who is just a little too into guns, and truth be told, you might want hit the gym a bit more often (just sayin') … but otherwise, you're pretty good.

Don't believe me? Check out what Michael Morell, the No2 man at the CIA, had to say about the threats facing America in this recent interview with the Wall Street Journal. If anyone knows about foreign threats, it's gotta be this guy, right? He's a big muckety-muck at the Central Intelligence Agency. He gets to see everything; even that stuff Snowden leaked.

What he's most worried about? Syria.

Hasn't there been a civil war going on there for three years? Why is that a threat to the United States? Well, according to Morell, the "risk is that the Syrian government, which possesses chemical and other advanced weapons, collapses and the country becomes al-Qaida's new haven, supplanting Pakistan." Putting aside that such a scenario is a slim possibility, even if it did happen, it wouldn't actually a direct threat to the United States. It's not as if Syrian Islamist rebels are yelling "Damascus today, Des Moines tomorrow".

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/09/biggest-threat-america-size-military-budget

The U.S. spent more on defense in 2012 than did the countries with the next 10 highest defense budgets combined
April 12, 2013
- See more at:

http://pgpf.org/Chart-Archive/0053_defense-comparison#sthash.o3PuraZx.dpuf

It will never "go off" until a rogue state uses it against us.

When and how is your plan to deploy a weapon of mass destruction? Is it a plan to deliver several of them?
Can you give details of what goes thru your mind as each goes off?

But there is a plan to use it?

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — U.S. and European diplomats welcomed a "significant shift" in Iran's attitude at talks on Thursday aimed at resolving the impasse over Tehran's disputed nuclear activities. Iran said it was eager to dispel the notion that it is trying to develop a nuclear weapon and to get international sanctions lifted as fast as possible.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif shook hands and sat next to each other at the meeting with five other world powers. Kerry leaned over to Zarif as the meeting was ending and said: "Shall we talk for a few minutes." They then had an unexpected one-on-one meeting.

It was the highest-level direct contact between the United States and Iran in six years.