4 ms·

Have the foreign operations of the US government in the last ten years saved or ended a larger number of lives?

• jedberg 14y ago
  How could we possibly know, given that most of the operations are I assume clandestine and we'll never hear about them, positive or negative? For some anecdotal evidence, I worked with a guy who was a colonel in the Army reserve. He was called up a few years ago to head up a base in Africa. His mission? To bring food and water to the citizens there. The army was doing this because they had to fight off the warlords who would try and steal the aid that was being provided. So sure, you hear about a whole bunch of things the government is doing that is evil, and I'll be the first to stand with you and agree, but there is a lot of good being done too. Imagine if the NSA had intercepted the plans for 9/11 and been allowed to stop it. 3000+ lives would have been saved, and you would have never ever heard about it.
  • briandear 14y ago
    And that has happened on numerous occasions. The number of Hezbollah fronts that have been stopped in just Houston alone saved a large number of lives by disrupting financing mechanisms that facilitate illicit materiél aquisitions. But the tin foil hat crowd would prefer to fixate on missteps. There was plenty of bad stuff the US (and Brits) did in WWII, but cracking Enigma codes saved potentially millions of lives. I don't know who would argue that working on the Enigma project was harming the worl, except maybe Germans at the time. The intel world is very ambiguous. It a person can't deal with ambiguity, then they'd be better off staying out of the intel community.