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Please guys, stay on topic. This thread is about the situation in Iraq and Syria. | ||
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Velr
Switzerland10812 Posts
On October 06 2015 17:54 xDaunt wrote: Or imagine if Bush was still president, and it happened on his watch. I haven't followed it closely and can't comment on the backlash this had in the US, it better be huge. But I doubt you can really complain about the treatment of Bush after the shitshow the Reps made out of Benghazi. | ||
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xDaunt
United States17988 Posts
On October 06 2015 19:41 Velr wrote: I haven't followed it closely and can't comment on the backlash this had in the US, it better be huge. But I doubt you can really complain about the treatment of Bush after the shitshow the Reps made out of Benghazi. Apples and oranges. Republicans allegedly putting on a circus during the Benghazi hearings has nothing to do with the media choosing how (or not) to report on stuff. | ||
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Redox
Germany24794 Posts
On October 06 2015 21:01 xDaunt wrote: Apples and oranges. Republicans allegedly putting on a circus during the Benghazi hearings has nothing to do with the media choosing how (or not) to report on stuff. This story is apples and oranges anyway if you guys are talking about the airstrike on a hospital in Afghanistan. Noone cares about Afghanistan now. Has nothing to do with propaganda or whatever. There have been enough reports about failed US air strikes in Astan when this was still interesting. Apart from this the Russian airstrikes are of a completely different nature than the US ones. They use mostly dumb bombs since they lack cheap guided ones. What they do to avoid civilian casualties is drop leaflets that warn inhabitants to leave the city they are bombarding and thats about it. | ||
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Rebs
Pakistan10726 Posts
On October 06 2015 21:01 xDaunt wrote: Apples and oranges. Republicans allegedly putting on a circus during the Benghazi hearings has nothing to do with the media choosing how (or not) to report on stuff. Allegedly ? There is no question of allegations here there is plenty of evidence to suggest that there was a shit show one of many I might add. As for Bush so you think that someone with a terrible track record of invading countries and helping to screw struggling neighbour states as well as setting everyone back in the region decades should not be subject to harsher. more scrutinized reporting ? I guess he would have been need of a break. Your right the reporting is terrible but not for the reasons your suggesting. Its still shocking that any criticism of the Bush era can come with subtle claims of being victimized. Then again Christianity is under attack and the army is about to knock your doors down and take your guns so its not too surprising that this line of thought is persisting. | ||
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Mohdoo
United States15725 Posts
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KwarK
United States43284 Posts
On October 06 2015 17:54 xDaunt wrote: Or imagine if Bush was still president, and it happened on his watch. Nobody I know has been giving Obama a pass on foreign policy for a while now. About the only good thing he has going for him vs Bush is that he didn't manufacture the clusterfuck he now manages. This idea that American foreign policy became okay for the opponents of it once Obama won the Presidency is a delusion of people desperate to see hypocrisy where none exists. Obama has been a colossal letdown for myself and people like me. | ||
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heliusx
United States2306 Posts
On October 07 2015 02:55 Mohdoo wrote: Anyone else uncomfortably finding themselves siding with Russia? I feel like the Western dream of a democratic, westernized Middle East is misguided and unrealistic. Focusing on going for stability first, dictator or not, seems like a good idea, to be honest. Assad is a butcher, do you not remember how the civil war started? | ||
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Simberto
Germany11649 Posts
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Mohdoo
United States15725 Posts
On October 07 2015 03:01 heliusx wrote: Assad is a butcher, do you not remember how the civil war started? As Simberto said, it doesn't look like we have as many options as we keep telling ourselves we had. We are aiming for a 10/10 situation, failing, and then ending up with a 2/10 situation. If we kept ourselves realistic, we could have a 6/10 instead of a 2/10. Obviously my numbers are totally bogus, but it's the point I am trying to make. It seems to be the point Russia is making. | ||
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heliusx
United States2306 Posts
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KwarK
United States43284 Posts
On October 07 2015 03:01 heliusx wrote: Assad is a butcher, do you not remember how the civil war started? We've never minded butchers in the past, as long as they were discrete and they were our butchers. The butcher sends their sons to be educated in England with the finest traditions of our public (private for you Americans) schools and then on to Oxford or Cambridge (or LSE in the case of Gaddafi's son). Four reigning Arab monarchs are graduates of Sandhurst and its affiliated colleges - King Abdullah of Jordan, King Hamad of Bahrain, Sheikh Tamim, Emir of Qatar, and Sultan Qaboos of Oman. Past monarchs include Sheikh Saad, Emir of Kuwait, and Sheikh Hamad, Emir of Qatar. This is a matter of deliberate policy. We were happy to sell Gaddafi the weapons he used to maintain his repressive regime in exchange for him letting BP into the oil fields of Libya. That's good business. It's good for BP, it's good for the arms industry, it's good for England and while some bleeding hearts may complain about it whenever a protester gets shot it's hardly likely to make front page news. Once the Arab Spring happened though things got very difficult. It would be somewhat embarrassing and bad for the bottom line to watch the BBC report on massacres of democratic protesters killed by the weapons we sold him as they protested our siphoning of their national wealth away. A century ago it would have been easy enough and we'd have just nationalised the Middle East but that's considered rude these days. Instead we had to pick the least embarrassing proxy, arm them and hope for the best. This is imperialism and the model hasn't changed in centuries. A country has resources you wish to exploit but unfortunately the resources belong to the people of that country and they don't really want them exploited. So you find someone who claims to be able to speak for the country and you do business with him, he gives you a preferential contract and you give him guns and endorse his position as the only legitimate authority. He plays ball and you let his family hobnob with the British aristocracy as if their blood is as good as ours and they go home thinking they're one of the gang. And when their school friends go into business everyone knows each other and they all know the secret handshake from Eton. But if ever fail to hold up their end of the bargain, if they can no longer speak for their country or if they become an embarrassment then you kick them out and find someone new who you can do business with. Things like the last four decades in China become pretty interesting when viewed through this lens. When the question becomes "is this place politically stable?", "can I invest my money safely here and will the government do what it takes to stay on top?" the answer becomes a resounding "yes' with Tienanmen. Some bleeding hearts may complain about it but big money knows that the guy you shake hands in at the top has the will to protect your investment, he really does speak for the country. And each year 100,000 sons and daughters of the Chinese elite come to England for their education, despite the prohibitive cost and cultural barriers. Tienanmen showed China as butchers, but also as our kind of butchers. | ||
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DannyJ
United States5110 Posts
His main reason for leaving isn't that surprising. The Kurds, despite their bravery in fighting ISIS, has in the past few weeks reverted back to the ugliness that is one of the reasons the middle East will always be shit... deep seeded hatred for neighbors (Turkey) because of some ancient claims to land is now first and foremost, even over fighting evil incarnate like ISIS. | ||
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DannyJ
United States5110 Posts
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Mohdoo
United States15725 Posts
On October 07 2015 03:16 heliusx wrote: Yes its going to be a very very long and arduous task with no end in sight for the foreseeable future but Assad is illegitimate and there are huge swathes of Syrians who will never accept Assad. Assad will never be acceptable and the war will continue until Putin kills everyone opposing Assad I guess. Huge swathes of citizens not accepting a leader is just a part of being in the middle east. I think this is a great example of the problem with framing the ME within western expectations: super unrealistic. Do you think ISIS would be where it is now within the US trying to spread democracy? Are we not way worse now? Are things getting better or worse? It just feels like you are essentially saying that anything we try to do *IS* possible and that it's just a matter of reaching it. What if it isn't possible? I feel like it is worth paying credit to the possibility that we are not capable of pulling this off. | ||
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Gorsameth
Netherlands21970 Posts
Just like we tried with Afganistand and Iraq you say. And look how that turned out! That's because we want to rush it. We want to get back out and have our hands clean as soon as possible. If you want to fix it you need to play the long game. Occupy for a century or more and have Western armies guarantee the democratic process is actually allowed to grow and take root. They can have their own laws their own elections/politicians. We just stay there to make sure no Dictator rises to power and that they don't try to cut each others throats. But as Kwark so nicely put, this isn't about peace or democracy. Its about money. So nothing is going to chance and they are going to keep on killing each other for the next few decades until maybe some Western backed warlord finally conquers it all and we have 'peace' for a few years before he dies and we start it all over again. | ||
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Redox
Germany24794 Posts
Apart from this it is very arrogant to think you have the right to teach a different culture how to behave and basically extinguish it on the way. | ||
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Mohdoo
United States15725 Posts
On October 07 2015 06:10 Redox wrote: Apart from this it is very arrogant to think you have the right to teach a different culture how to behave and basically extinguish it on the way. I think it's reasonable to see that the middle east needs to be whipped into shape. It's a train wreck and has done significantly worse than every other region that suffered from colonialism/imperialism. But as you said, it's not feasible or worth the investment for the West to try to be the one doing the whipping. Better to just have dictators and let business continue. | ||
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Krikkitone
United States1451 Posts
On October 07 2015 05:27 Gorsameth wrote: My position (while controversial) still remains that the only way you get peace in the Middle East is to move in an mass as the west. Occupy the entire region and reform them into stable democratic countries. Just like we tried with Afganistand and Iraq you say. And look how that turned out! That's because we want to rush it. We want to get back out and have our hands clean as soon as possible. If you want to fix it you need to play the long game. Occupy for a century or more and have Western armies guarantee the democratic process is actually allowed to grow and take root. They can have their own laws their own elections/politicians. We just stay there to make sure no Dictator rises to power and that they don't try to cut each others throats. But as Kwark so nicely put, this isn't about peace or democracy. Its about money. So nothing is going to chance and they are going to keep on killing each other for the next few decades until maybe some Western backed warlord finally conquers it all and we have 'peace' for a few years before he dies and we start it all over again. As mentioned this won't happen without a lot of bloodshed, and if there is enough bloodshed, they will work it out on their own. Protestants and Catholics learned to get along after killing each other in large numbers for a couple hundred years. France and Germany even learned to get along after killing of large % of their population twice. (and several other times in the previous centuries) What needs to happen in the Middle East, they need to kill each other enough that the people who are left don't care about Sunni/Shiite Arab/Persian. (at least no more than trying to just get along)...of course it will take centuries, but we can't really speed it up. They need to be able to ethnically cleanse their hodgepodge mini-empires (like Europe did in WWI), and get to the point where they can get along with their immediate neighbor well enough to feel like tolerating someone strange is not too bad. If, on the other hand, they spend most of their time killing people who want to "give" them democracy, then they will never be democratic. They will fight us till they leave and then strongmen will take over and they get back to killing each other. (the only people that can really fight for democracy/tolerance effectively is the people that will be voting/tolerated..otherwise it is just a different type of dictatorship) The only solution the outside world could impose is peace through genocide...turn everything from the Nile to Kashmir into an International Nature preserve where humans are shot on sight by "park rangers". | ||
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Nezgar
Germany535 Posts
On October 07 2015 06:10 Redox wrote: You underestimate the resentments and hatred towards the west in that region. And the inferiority complex in the Arab world after being dominated by the west for so long while believing in the superiority of their religion. And people seem to also underestimate the hatred not only towards the west, but also against each other and their different interpretations of their religion, the Jews, the Turks and, on the far end of the region, Hindus. There will be no long term peace and rulers not oppressing their minorities, unless education and emancipation solve the issues of religious fundamentalism that fuels every fire in the region. That includes Iran and Saudi Arabia, by the way. As long as those remain major powers in the region, there will be always some sort of bloodshed... see Yemen. And it would also include us putting and end to the economic deals with the oil rich nations in the region. On October 07 2015 07:14 Krikkitone wrote: As mentioned this won't happen without a lot of bloodshed, and if there is enough bloodshed, they will work it out on their own. Protestants and Catholics learned to get along after killing each other in large numbers for a couple hundred years. France and Germany even learned to get along after killing of large % of their population twice. (and several other times in the previous centuries) What needs to happen in the Middle East, they need to kill each other enough that the people who are left don't care about Sunni/Shiite Arab/Persian. (at least no more than trying to just get along)...of course it will take centuries, but we can't really speed it up. They need to be able to ethnically cleanse their hodgepodge mini-empires (like Europe did in WWI), and get to the point where they can get along with their immediate neighbor well enough to feel like tolerating someone strange is not too bad This is a fairly accurate statement if you ask me... We learned our lesson through centuries of bloodshed until we managed to (mostly) weed out the causes for it. As bad as they are, nuclear weapons also forcibly put an end to almost all potential squabbles. If the nation you want to bully into doing something has the means to nuke you back into the stone ages, you will think twice - unless you are driven by an insane urge to end the world, as are Hezbollah and similar religious crazies for example. So yeah, just taking the hands off the reigns and letting them murder each other for a few decades or even a century until they decide to shelve their religious fundamentalism in favor of reason and science might be one way to fix it in the long term... It's never going to happen, though. Nuclear weapons in the hands of those people is a big no-no, so we would have to step in, since wielding a weapon such as those is not a regional issue but rather one that affects the entire world. Then there is also the issue of economical interest from foreign powers in the region (oil). Another way for a long-term solution would be to empower one nation to conquer the entire region. Yes, minorities would be oppression and genocide is a possibility (see Armenians under Ottoman rule for example), but it would bring relative stability to the region and you could start the process of transforming the region into a modern day society under an iron fist. That would require a secular and somewhat open-minded head of state, though and I don't know if there is such a thing in the Middle East right now. They all seem so fixed on their religious nonsense... It would also require the rest of the world working in unison towards that goal with everyone pulling in the same direction and supporting the transition, but that again will probably never work as long as this whole stupid "us versus them" or "West versus East" or "whatever versus whatever" mentality exist. Stepping in every few years and fucking the place over for a few years, however, is certainly not how one can hope to accomplish anything. Hey, here is a radical idea: How about we accept the migrants/refugees with open arms. We give them education, show them what a wonderful and peaceful place Europe is, explain them our history and what we learned from our mistakes. In a few years or a decades's time we send them back to their homes with all that knowledge and support those people in transforming their region properly. Those are the people we want to support, no those religious nutjobs that want to bring sharia law. And how about that we start pushing the right of the Kurdish people to govern themselves - even against our dear NATO partner Turkey, who has a history of oppression and genocide towards their minorities (and denial thereof). That way we might actually end up with people who don't (rightfully) loathe the west for everything they have done in the region for far too long... But then again the economical benefits of such a proposal would be questionable at best and, thus, will never happen. It would also include us accepting and admitting that we seriously fucked up ever since ending the Ottoman rule in the region and taking over. | ||
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xDaunt
United States17988 Posts
On October 07 2015 02:59 KwarK wrote: Nobody I know has been giving Obama a pass on foreign policy for a while now. About the only good thing he has going for him vs Bush is that he didn't manufacture the clusterfuck he now manages. This idea that American foreign policy became okay for the opponents of it once Obama won the Presidency is a delusion of people desperate to see hypocrisy where none exists. Obama has been a colossal letdown for myself and people like me. Saying that Obama didn't manufacture this clusterfuck is giving Obama a pass. There are American intelligence fingerprints all over the uprising in Syria (not that the U.S. is solely responsible, but there very clearly has been a longstanding policy of destabilizing Syria and Assad during Obama's presidency). And Obama most certainly is responsible for the mess in Iraq due to pulling out all Ameican support way too early and basically giving the country away. | ||
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