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The CIA part is new.
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Jun 22, 2012 00:16
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| # ? May 19, 2024 00:09 |
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How are u posted:Awww yeah here we go! 80's Afghanistan 2: Electric Boogaloo! pfft afghanistan had some exciting parts but it was such a boring scenario, i'm glad they really went all out with this syria map, it's like 200% scarier  it keeps crashing whenever i start a game with israel and iran units though
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Jun 22, 2012 00:17
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I'm pretty sure the CIA have always been there, since the CIA are basically everywhere, all the time.
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Jun 22, 2012 01:16
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I think Kuwait's parliament-head of state relationship is more dysfunctional than Egypt's.http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/21/kuwait-parliament-idUSL5E8HL6PX20120621 posted:KUWAIT, June 21 (Reuters) - More than half of Kuwait's members of parliament have resigned in protest at a court's decision to annul an election that had given the Islamist-led opposition a majority. More background here
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Jun 22, 2012 02:16
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So now Kuwait politic is basically a mini-Egypt?
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Jun 22, 2012 02:21
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Kinda, it's quite a stable country. It has a relatively free parliament though for a monarchy and that results in it getting dissolved all the time.
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Jun 22, 2012 02:23
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Xandu posted:Kinda, it's quite a stable country. It has a relatively free parliament though for a monarchy and that results in it getting dissolved all the time. Wasn't their reaction to the Arab Spring to cut a check for four grand to everyone in Kuwait in return for their not rebelling? (I'm working off of half-remembered things from spring 2011, forgive me if I have the dollar amount off).
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Jun 22, 2012 05:12
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Probably, Saudi Arabia and I think Qatar did as well.
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Jun 22, 2012 05:14
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This thread is obviously too big for me to search so feel free to ignore it if it's something asked often. When the Egyptian riots were going on you'd have Fox news talking about the Muslim Brotherhood possibly rising to power while the liberals would say it's just pathetic fear mongering. Isn't that what's happened? If so how exactly did it happen when it was so supposedly unlikely? Not remotely trying to legitimize Fox news or anything, broken watch twice a day etc.
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Jun 22, 2012 07:21
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The Fox News analyses was probably like this. "The Muslim Brotherhood will come to power and rule Egypt with Sharia law and they'll be very hostile to Israel and they had ties to terrorists in the past."
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Jun 22, 2012 07:25
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SexyBlindfold posted:pfft afghanistan had some exciting parts but it was such a boring scenario, i'm glad they really went all out with this syria map, it's like 200% scarier I can't get past 2030 without a "terror cell" from some shithole in Syria claiming I'm the source of all their problems and blowing up Manhattan. Who are these assholes? I don't got time for this. Nuke em all and let God sort em out I say. A student posted:The Fox News analyses was probably like this. Actually I don't recall much of anything. Obama and Clinton were kind of wrapped up in that day or two revolut-protest in Iran, and supported Mubarak for too long. It was probably one of those "Obama is being way too conservative to rip on right now, so let's talk about gas prices!  " moments. Could be wrong though. I'm sure if there was an inkling of a pro-Arab Spring statement out of the oval office, they latched on to it like the soulless leeches they are.
Volkerball fucked around with this message at 07:39 on Jun 22, 2012 |
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Jun 22, 2012 07:32
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298298 posted:When the Egyptian riots were going on you'd have Fox news talking about the Muslim Brotherhood possibly rising to power while the liberals would say it's just pathetic fear mongering. Isn't that what's happened? Not exactly. Fox portrayed the MB as this super radical islamic party that would turn Egypt into this sharia law caliphate, while NPR called the MB a sort of grass roots service based moderate islamic organization. There never was any debate that I saw about MB having a serious ground game advantage over other contenders, but that's because they've been delivering the goods in the form of soup kitchens and neighborhood services for years and years.
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Jun 22, 2012 07:34
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Section 31 posted:So now Kuwait politic is basically a mini-Egypt? Keep in mind, however, that Kuwait is like Bahrain or the UAE where the majority of the populace aren't citizens.
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Jun 22, 2012 07:35
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Martin Random posted:Not exactly. Fox portrayed the MB as this super radical islamic party that would turn Egypt into this sharia law caliphate, while NPR called the MB a sort of grass roots service based moderate islamic organization. There never was any debate that I saw about MB having a serious ground game advantage over other contenders, but that's because they've been delivering the goods in the form of soup kitchens and neighborhood services for years and years. Which isn't to say there aren't theocratic goofballs in the Muslim Brotherhood, but not nearly as many (nor as crazy) as Fox portrays. Some of that may admittedly be due to al-Noor siphoning off the real lunatics, and it's plenty unsettling that a round-the-bend Salafist party got as much support as they did, and for that matter that the MB is playing ball with them regarding the constitution. But yeah, Fox misrepresented the situation because that was easier (and reflected worse on Obama) than the truth.
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Jun 22, 2012 07:53
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What exactly is going on here? Nothing disturbing in this video, just never seen something like this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fj8yoDHpC2M VVVVV Thanks, that makes sense. Didn't understand what could produce those types of explosions so consistently. Volkerball fucked around with this message at 08:14 on Jun 22, 2012 |
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Jun 22, 2012 07:59
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The descripton says it's an explosion in Aleppo of arms depots.
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Jun 22, 2012 08:01
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The Daily Show stole our thread title  http://youtu.be/-xvDOc71Dbc?t=5m10s Great interview though Xandu fucked around with this message at 10:36 on Jun 22, 2012 |
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Jun 22, 2012 10:29
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 In celebration of the defected fighter pilot. https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=252913451491032&%3Bset=a.137495319699513.28138.137488386366873&%3Btype=1&%3Btheater
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Jun 22, 2012 11:38
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His home was burnt down according to reports.
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Jun 22, 2012 11:39
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Patter Song posted:The Nazi example actually shows its success in areas, at least areas where there was enough carrot-and-stick that "The Nazis are going to kill you whether you resist or not" became a reality. A good example is Lidice. A man from Lidice assassinated Heydrich, the Nazis respond by killing every adult man in the village of Lidice and deporting the women and most of the children to a concentration camp, there's pretty much no resistance among the Czechs for the rest of the war because everyone's frightened their village would be the next Lidice if they did anything. They did the exact same thing in France, Norway and the Netherlands, and at the very least France and Norway continued resistance. There never really was all that much in the Netherlands with the exception of two areas. This is not even mentioning the massacres and continued resistance in Belarus.
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Jun 22, 2012 11:45
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V. Illych L. posted:^^^^Right, I'm not by any means an expert on WWII so I can't really comment on it, but I thought that Greece and France both had active and fighting resistance movements despite it all? Orange Devil posted:They did the exact same thing in France, Norway and the Netherlands, and at the very least France and Norway continued resistance. I can't speak for Greece but the French resistance did relatively little before the Allies launched their invasion (partly by design: they did intelligence gathering to help that invasion rather than risky sabotage actions that wouldn't help much in the long run). There's also the fact that half of the country wasn't directly occupied by Germany until 1942, and that the biggest resistance groups (at least initially) were people hiding in the countryside to avoid being sent to Germany as part of the forced labour program. Those groups didn't do much at first because they had little weaponry and they waited until 1944 to build up strength for a general uprising when the Allies landed in Normandy. When the rural guerillas actually rose up in 1944, the German military attacked a number of them with overwhelming force and utterly wrecked them, while they also cranked the reprisals on civilians way up (but it was still a far cry from what they were doing in Eastern Europe). They were also actively losing ground in France by that point, so their ability to put down uprisings diminished with time. I also don't think there were uprisings in urban areas. That is, there were uprisings (like in Paris) but only as Allied forces were about to liberate the area in any case. We're not talking about months of fighting like in Warsaw, Grozny, Misrata or Homs.
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Jun 22, 2012 12:11
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Syria's Olympics shief has been denied entry to the London Games: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-18550862
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Jun 22, 2012 12:20
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Egyptian revolutionaries trying to figure out where they went wrong: horizontalism and a refusal to play politics 298298 posted:When the Egyptian riots were going on you'd have Fox news talking about the Muslim Brotherhood possibly rising to power while the liberals would say it's just pathetic fear mongering. Isn't that what's happened? If so how exactly did it happen when it was so supposedly unlikely? The Muslim Brotherhood has risen to power in Egypt, there's nothing confusing or wrong about that. It wasn't unlikely; the Muslim Brotherhood was the only real organized opposition to Mubarak's rule. There are theories that he allowed the Brotherhood to function and repressed secularists in order to further the idea that he was the only alternative to Islamism (I'm skeptical) Where I guess the divergence is comes from the Western conservative interpretation that they will instantly set up the caliphate or the liberal interpretation of uncritically embracing the religious fundamentalist party that represses women. az jan jananam fucked around with this message at 13:12 on Jun 22, 2012 |
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Jun 22, 2012 13:00
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Sivias posted:Is it possible that knowing the chance their militants being caught in Syria exists, mocking up non-military IDs and distributing them to combatants/telling them not to bring any identification linking them to the Iranian military? Seems silly to me if you are sending in supposedly covert soldiers into a foreign combat zone not to at least try to hide the fact that you're sending soldiers into a foreign combat zone. That's possible. It seems to me that FSA units have a pattern of kidnapping random Iranians in Syria and forcing them to make ridiculous "confessions" like this one where they gush about their love for the Syrian revolution and their hatred of Bashar, and how important it is for Iranians to reject Bashar. I don't know what the "profile" of an Pasdaran intelligence agent exactly is but I don't think that these guys fit it, and they never make any admission of being any part of the Pasdaran. I don't doubt Iranian personnel are in Syria and helping in whatever way possible but the recent kidnappings seem plainly like attempts to build on anti-Shi'a xenophobia. The most common youtube comments on the videos are some variant of "kill them" without questioning who they are. One person calls them the "dogs of the Magi", an anti-Iranian slur insulting ancient ties to Zoroastrianism and the high place of dogs in old Persia. Syria death toll via activists 
az jan jananam fucked around with this message at 16:39 on Jun 22, 2012 |
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Jun 22, 2012 13:24
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There's reports of a Turkish airplane crashing in Syrian territorial waters, no offical reason for the crash, but lots of rumours.
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Jun 22, 2012 14:32
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HamaEcho just tweeted after being missing since June 16thquote:Released. Treated worse than last time. A lot of people got arrested in past few days in Hama, the regime is very desperate to stop Hama
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Jun 22, 2012 14:35
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This WW2 business really is extremely tangential to what is happening in Syria, but I'll continue until someone tells to stop it: Civilians with rifles and Stens were not going to do much against German occupation forces other than die in droves, so they mostly waited under cover and in remote hard to reach areas that Germans were likely to leave alone. French resistance had no other option than to wait until Germans were about to retreat ahead of the Allied forces and then make a show of force, like happened in Paris: the uprising had no military significance, but it was very important for national spirit after many years of occupation. Uprisings in Prague and Warsaw followed the same idea, although the latter failed abysmally when the liberating army failed to appear. In Greece the same happened, with the twist that communist and royalist fighters were anxiously waiting to see who would eat whom. That struggle was decided before it earnestly began by Churchill and Stalin coming to an agreement about spheres of interest in the Balkans, however. But it's difficult to compare these examples to Syria. First of all, German army was a first grade military might, which arguably the Syrian army isn't. Partisans didn't have many effective means with which to engage Germans in direct combat, so mostly their usefulness was limited to espionage, sabotage and tying some military resources to occupation duties. When they tried to confront Germans in Warsaw, the whole capital was levelled. Modern insurgents have much better anti-tank weapons, but even then the battle of Fallujah proved that entire cities can be cleared with relatively little regular army casualties, and without carpet bombing the entire city. Syrian army can not hope to follow that example, so they would have to substitute some of the superior training and equipment with raw firepower, and be prepared for heavy losses. The big question is will they be able to maintain troop morale, as apart from some Alawites and other minorities it should be hard to rationalize such draconian measures against own people. But it's impossible to know what the real situation with that is. In Libya one of Gaddafi's commanders in Tripoli was a rebel mole, we can only speculate how the case is in Syria. And so can the Syrian secret police and counter-intelligence.
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Jun 22, 2012 14:45
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Some reports that the pilots have been picked up by Syrian security, and others that it was shot down on purpose... [edit] But the Hurriyet is reporting they are actually on their way to Turkey after the crash. Brown Moses fucked around with this message at 14:52 on Jun 22, 2012 |
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Jun 22, 2012 14:46
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No official statement yet about whether they found the pilots or not, the PM will hold a press conference soon. Military says they lost contact with the plane when it was flying over the sea, southwest of Hatay.
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Jun 22, 2012 16:02
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Oh you silly Syriansquote:Syria apologizes for taking down Turkish warplane: Turkish PM
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Jun 22, 2012 16:19
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Turkish journalist on Erdoğan's plane (they were coming from Brazil) says he talked to Erdoğan who said "Syrians said their air defence systems shot down the plane and are very apologetic. Pilots are alive but not sure about Syrian security forces holding them." He asked him whether there'd be a big crisis over this and he said "We'll see." Press conf. in Ankara soon. We'll see.
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Jun 22, 2012 16:34
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Erdogan has apparently called a national security meeting tonight, but my gut says the Turkish government will pull faces but not actually do anything serious.
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Jun 22, 2012 16:35
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I suspect it's not just up to Turkey whether or not to escalate, but to the rest of NATO as well.
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Jun 22, 2012 16:37
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And I really don't think Turkey or other NATO members have any interest in escalating the conflict. Does rather prove to the world that Syria can get away with anything it likes and not expect any overt come back, although who knows what'll be making it's way over the border on the back of a donkey tonight.
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Jun 22, 2012 16:41
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Interesting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxwWf0yi6wo http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Middle-East/2012/Jun-22/177790-all-women-armed-battalion-forms-in-homs.ashx#axzz1yLH7YiWM quote:A group of women claiming to be from the Syrian city of Homs announced this week the formation of the first exclusively female armed organization to fight against the Syrian regime. I can't think of any precedents involving religious groups. Xandu fucked around with this message at 16:48 on Jun 22, 2012 |
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Jun 22, 2012 16:46
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Kassad posted:I also don't think there were uprisings in urban areas. That is, there were uprisings (like in Paris) but only as Allied forces were about to liberate the area in any case. We're not talking about months of fighting like in Warsaw, Grozny, Misrata or Homs. From what I understand of the Syrian uprising it's not so much an urban insurgency as a more Maoist style countryside insurgency, what with the countryside being the rebels' strongest bases and the Syrian army unable to hold more than the major cities.
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Jun 22, 2012 16:49
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Xandu posted:Interesting These women put out this video in January. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vowbuLxK7po
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Jun 22, 2012 16:50
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Cool, thanks for the link.
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Jun 22, 2012 16:51
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Turkey can't and won't intervene unilaterally for a number of reasons, as we know, but this'll definitely put pressure on the government and the NATO allies especially the Obama government. Already I can imagine all the loud calls for intervention. But the real shitstorm will be of course in Turkey. Wonder how they will deal with this.
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Jun 22, 2012 16:52
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| # ? May 19, 2024 00:09 |
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I wouldn't think too much of it. Having your military airplane shot down in foreign airspace usually makes you look worse than the party that was defending their airspace, so I don't really see why this would make Syria look bad nor why it would give Turkey any justification for reaction - see Gary Powers. The question is if the plane was really within Syrian airspace when it was shot and was it contacted prior to that. It's also not five years ago when Israel bombed a supposed Syrian reactor and on the way back their planes flew through Turkish airspace, so it's not surprising if Syrian air defense units are trigger happy...
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Jun 22, 2012 16:56
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