Not even close to comparable. Chechnya wasn’t a bombing campaign. It was a full-on invasion. More importantly, the Russians never left and never intend to. Big difference.

Indeed. All of this intervention is really just delaying the inevitable unwinding of the artificial colonial states which were designed SPECIFICALLY so that no single ethnic group had enough power to challenge the British on their own.

I think you give him too much credit. Russia can’t bomb away an insurgency any more than we can. If such a thing was even possible Daesh would be gone and Iraq and Afghanistan would look a lot different.

Right, because flight instructors are the same thing as aerospace enginineers. Because being able to fly a plane is TOTALLY the same thing as designing them.

Europe can afford the refugees. In fact, they kind of need the population boost.

Russia is tottering and they have NO better way of sorting out Syria than anyone else does. They cannot restore Assad oror make Syria whole again. They cannot bomb Daesh out of existence any better than the vastly superior wetern-allied countries can. There is no victory possible here.

Those don’t seem like problems. Letting the Mideast sort out its own problems (for ONCE) seems like a far better idea than perpetually playing referee-by-force. That heavy handedness has NOT worked.

Umm...what? The US uses local forces because the US doesn’t want to be a colonial power in permanent occupation of a country. So you NEED domestic allies who will run the country after the dictator is toppled. Otherwise you’ve just get another Somalia or Libya: countries run by warlords with an impotent, nominal…

Ehh...that’s a bit dramatic. The USSR had big strategic goals and would spend decades building up communist allies. Putin is, perhaps deliberately, random and fleeting. Georgia and Ukraine were over in weeks.

No, the US doesn’t assassinate leaders. At least not since the comedicly incompetent attempts to off Castro. It wasn’t American soldiers literally shoving bayonets up Ghadifi’s ass. That was the Libyans.

Eh...US doesn’t have single payer because insurance/healthcare lobbyists and conservative orthodoxy. The US spends far more than Europe on healthcare. In theory, the US could have a far bigger military if it went single-payer and stuffed even a fraction of the savings into the Pentagon.

Maybe. But it’s arguable the Arab Spring wouldn’t have happened without Iraq and it’s dysfunctional but still freely elected democracy. Not that Iraq wasn’t a clusterfuck, point is: butterfly effect.

The F-117 was a really, really primitive stealth aircraft. Not only was its shape a result of 70’s era computers being unable to handle curves, but the faceted design was optimized for specific frequency ranges, and was markedly less effective against other frequencies. As a result, they liberally slathered a heavy,…

If killing Assad was the goal, he’d be dead. You could park a B-2 or F-22 30 minutes away from Damascus without anyone knowing and drop a JDAM on the first building the embedded spotters watch him go into. They could also just bomb every government building in Damascus and the military and civilian commands…

The aggressor in what? A shooting war? Haha. No. Putin is a thug, not an idiot. He can’t win a shooting war. His conventional forces are paltry and nobody wins a nuclear war. He knows this.

France has been extremely expeditionary lately. Syria, Libya, central Africa...

This isn’t stated enough. If the goal of Israel OR America was really overthrow, it would be done already. The USAF could have parked a B-2 or F-22 in orbit over the med or Iraq and be within 30 minutes of removing Assad immediately and no one would even know until after the bombs hit. He’d walk into a building and…

Russia has laser guided bombs and missiles, which are still the gold standard for accuracy. No one doubts they could match the capabilities of the US Paveway series, which reliest on decades old tech. Pretty sure they even used them in Georgia.

And how is that not STILL a true statement? They don’t object to Russia helping with Daesh. It’s a blanket statement that excludes any one of a million possible caveats for the sake of brevity.

This is an amazing remix of that gif. You don’t have nearly enough stars.