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Cat Mattress posted:I can grant you Japan. As demanded by the post you're replying to, the Constitution was created by Americans who took into account Japan's situation, history and culture, keeping elements of the older Japanese Constitution when it didn't hinder modernization into a liberal democracy. Yeah, the dictatorships are why I put the word "arguably" in the last two examples. The countries that almost conquered them still are dictatorships though, so people of a certain bent can count them if so inclined without be wholly disingenuous. I'm personally really torn because I was raised pacifist and am staunchly anti-war, but the root of the modern American interventionist ethos stems from the defeat of the isolationist bloc before and during WW2. Obviously, their retreat from national politics helped to unleash something truly monstrous on the world, but a part of me is inclined to consider a time in this country when a lot of "Anti-imperialist" wanted to sit back and let Hitler, Stalin, and Tojo carve up the Eastern Hemisphere among themselves. I'm more sympathetic with the 30s isolationists (the pacifists anyway, gently caress the fascists) than most "patriotic" Americans and I don't consider WW2 to be the "good war" our latter day mythology has transformed it into, but I'm still really glad that the Nazis lost and feel a certain pride that my country helped defeat them and I think most Americans feel the same. So long as that awareness remains part of our collective identity, the justice of intervention per se can never be wholly discredited and calls for total isolationism will fall on deaf ears.
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Feb 10, 2018 03:06
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ChairMaster posted:Yea, I'm sure you honestly just meant to dissuade me from the notion that America is the only imperialist power in the world that you definitely thought I believed, and not doing the same exact garbage you always do. I'll just take your word for it. That you refuse to engage in good faith discussion is obvious, don't assume that applies to normal posters. A Typical Goon posted:Ah so it actually was ‘I don’t understand the words I’m being a ridiculous pedant about’ thanks for confirming how stupid you actually are Cool, noted that you believe America is the only imperialist power. Have fun understanding the world worse than Donald Trump! Duckbox posted:Yeah, the dictatorships are why I put the word "arguably" in the last two examples. The countries that almost conquered them still are dictatorships though, so people of a certain bent can count them if so inclined without be wholly disingenuous. Key factor to remember: the interwar "isolationists" still allowed for plenty of military and quasi-military intervention in Latin America. Though the official American stance was to not participate in politics outside the country or wars outside the country, we were still acting like America was totally fine to go shoot up some Nicaraugans if they didn't stay on the strings. fishmech fucked around with this message at 04:00 on Feb 10, 2018 |
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Feb 10, 2018 03:57
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I mean given that Syria is operating modern day torture and death camps that are industrialized it really is a modern day Auschwitz, albeit at a smaller scale and one arguably less directly targeted at minorities. So you're half there, but hregardless, the comparison is hardly inappropriate. I'm really confining this solely to Assad's death and torture camps a la 215 branch so don't read anything more than that into that sentence please. As for the rest of this dumb discussion, I feel like getting wrapped up trying to fit modern geopolitics into a neat little ideological framework is dumb and inevitably doomed to failure. Strict adherence to "leftism" or "socialism" or "anti imperialism" is going to lead you into troubled waters and uncomfortable alliances no matter what you do. Same with those of us more friendly with interventionism as well. Recognizing your beliefs don't work everywhere, every time, for every peoples is important.
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Feb 10, 2018 04:00
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Cat Army 
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>fishmech >good faith discussions this has to be trolling (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Feb 10, 2018 04:02
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Cat Mattress posted:I can grant you Japan. As demanded by the post you're replying to, the Constitution was created by Americans who took into account Japan's situation, history and culture, keeping elements of the older Japanese Constitution when it didn't hinder modernization into a liberal democracy. Japan being the best example here pretty well demonstrates the limits of American power to create democracy. The Japanese Constitution is literally written in half-broken Japanese that reads like it was put through Google Translate, has a bunch of weird poo poo in it with unforeseen effects because the American drafters didn't really understand how Japan's government or legal system worked, like the word they used for "the people" actually meant "nationals" and this has allowed the Japanese government to restrict rights to Japanese citizens the drafters intended to be universal. The judicial system is weird and poorly designed, possibly/probably because the drafters didn't understand how civil law systems or parliamentary systems worked. Like half of it is simply ignored if not in letter then in spirit, because the US didn't actually do any purging of the state bureaucracies in Japan and they just ignored it and kept doing what they were doing. Although, to be fair this isn't entirely the US's fault, in an ironic and paradoxical way the Nazis actually dismantled much of the preexisting state bureaucracies in Germany because they were an obstacle to its power, and this allowed post-1945 Germany to start with a cleaner slate I tend to be a lot less critical of Japan's democracy than some people, but its relative success is way more due to the efforts of Japanese people and Japan's prewar history of democracy and constitutionalism in the 20s than to American changes. It's incredible how incompetent the occupation was and how much of the stuff it tried to do had completely unforeseen and unintended consequences, and how much it was manipulated by native actors within Japan. Like with the economy, the US basically adopted a socialist narrative of the war from within Japan itself that blamed private capitalist business for imperialism and the war, and broke up and expropriated all of those businesses, but this ended up greatly empowering the wartime industrial planning/munitions ministry, which was a much more important driver of the war and which private business interests had fought throughout the 1930s as it tried to basically dragoon them into producing for the war effort. That ministry was created/masterminded by current PM Abe's grandpa, who they basically had to let back into politics to run it to revive the economy, and it became the central actor in Japan's postwar economy through the 1980s. The US basically accomplished that guy's goal for him by accident without even knowing what was happening. Here's a book on the 1930s part of that history http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=80140100512400 And on the postwar history http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=2791 icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 04:56 on Feb 10, 2018 |
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Feb 10, 2018 04:06
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Quick, back to back the Middle East https://twitter.com/alsuraenglish/status/962032733865127936
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Feb 10, 2018 04:07
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The Iron Rose posted:As for the rest of this dumb discussion, I feel like getting wrapped up trying to fit modern geopolitics into a neat little ideological framework is dumb and inevitably doomed to failure. Strict adherence to "leftism" or "socialism" or "anti imperialism" is going to lead you into troubled waters and uncomfortable alliances no matter what you do. Same with those of us more friendly with interventionism as well. It's not about strict adherence to principles, it's about the fact that American military adventures have led to nothing but disaster almost invariably and are not motivated in any way by benevolence or the intent to make things better for anyone.
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Feb 10, 2018 04:18
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ChairMaster posted:It's not about strict adherence to principles, it's about the fact that American military adventures have led to nothing but disaster almost invariably and are not motivated in any way by benevolence or the intent to make things better for anyone. funny how arguing against american war adventurism is ideology, but interventionist rhetoric is ideology-free and about facts and logic. don't want america to bomb children in schools and sick in hospitals and ruin both nations and infrastructure? you don't understand geopolitics, or you're interested in ideological grandstanding.
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Feb 10, 2018 04:29
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The Iron Rose posted:I mean given that Syria is operating modern day torture and death camps that are industrialized it really is a modern day Auschwitz, albeit at a smaller scale and one arguably less directly targeted at minorities. Aka the contingency approach to management: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contingency_theory
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Feb 10, 2018 04:31
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Fututor Magnus posted:funny how arguing against american war adventurism is ideology, but interventionist rhetoric is ideology-free and about facts and logic. dont you know not wanting brown children to die actually means your a tankie who supports assad/putin
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Feb 10, 2018 05:03
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Herstory Begins Now posted:The irony is that interventionists have usually been more motivated by something approaching compassion while the popularity of non-intervention was much more of a 'gently caress the browns let them die, who cares.' That's still over-simplifying it, but the US is actually a complicated, often contradictory actor. This seems like a difficult position to sustain, or at least stretches the phrase interventionist beyond conventional usage. I agree that anti-colonial ideology really did have a major influence on American policy even if it could be hard to distinguish it at times from other American interests. The best examples that come to my mind were the Suez crisis and the U.S. opposition to the Dutch pacification of Indonesia. However these accomplishments were achieved primarily through U.S. economic might and soft power, not the application of military force. U.S. military interventions have been almost entirely for cynical reasons. In the first wave at the beginning of the 20th century we had the many interventions across the Caribbean to protect American commercial interests and preempt European states from increasing influence in the western hemisphere. After WWII, U.S. interventions were overwhelmingly motivated by the strategic objective of containing the Soviet military, even more so I think than anti-communism, not that American foreign policy planners distinguished the two. Compassion had nothing to do with Eisenhower's decision to launch the Guatemalan coup d'etat, nor was the Reagan administration moved by the knowledge that its proxies in El Savador were dumping thousands of mangled bodies in the streets of San Salvador. Contrast with those "gently caress the browns" non-interventions you dismiss. Men like Congressman Edward Boland, who successfully blocked legal funding for the Contras. Truly, a callous man to deny those brave brown freedom fighters the weapons needed to defend against bloodthirsty Sandinista nuns. In the 1990s maybe, arguably, humanitarian concerns rise briefly to prominence, but those cases represent only a small proportion of the total.
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Feb 10, 2018 05:13
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ChairMaster posted:It's not about strict adherence to principles, it's about the fact that American military adventures have led to nothing but disaster almost invariably and are not motivated in any way by benevolence or the intent to make things better for anyone. I don't think that's actually a "fact" so much as it's a perspective. It may be a valid perspective, but history is a huge and messy thing and cannot be reduced to abstractions in this way, at least not without laying the groundwork to make them meaningful. What are "adventures" and how are they different from other wars or non-military interventions that resemble wars? If a war is a sober and cautious thing, fully conceived and deliberately executed, does that make it any less horrible than some third world "adventure?" What is benevolence? If you're Bob McNamara and you think fire bombing Tokyo or saturation bombing Hanoi is necessary to save millions of people from tyranny, couldn't you call that benevolence? The US often engages in stupid, pointless, destructive, and counterproductive actions overseas that are little more than massive wastes of lives, resources, and international goodwill. Then we double down on these quagmires when it is scarcely in our interests to do so. They do this not because they are Machiavellian galaxy brains who live for nothing else than the extension of American power -- if they were, they probably wouldn't accidentally sell weapons to their enemies so often. Realpolitik is bullshit. Governments don't actually work like that. Governments can't actually work like that. Governments, like people, aren't actually very rational. They rarely have all the facts, have limited ability to perceive their own self interest, and are often blinded or led astray by ideals and biases they can't even articulate. You think you just delivered a damning condemnation of the US military policy, but it doesn't work that way. On the contrary, I'd call your post appologia. If the war isn't an adventure, if the motives are benevolent (and when is it ever said to be otherwise?) then your objection vanishes. That's a problem.
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Feb 10, 2018 05:14
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Duckbox posted:Governments, like people, aren't actually very rational. They rarely have all the facts, have limited ability to perceive their own self interest, and are often blinded or led astray by ideals and biases they can't even articulate. Yes, that is also a major part of it. A giant irrational monster working on the single-year attention span of it's inhabitants does more damage by sending it's military around the world blowing things up than it does without. Like I say, American imperialism would be good if it was good, but that doesn't have a lot of bearing on the reality of the situation.
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Feb 10, 2018 05:23
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Duckbox posted:Governments, like people, aren't actually very rational. They rarely have all the facts, have limited ability to perceive their own self interest, and are often blinded or led astray by ideals and biases they can't even articulate. hey just a small suggestion
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Feb 10, 2018 05:35
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anti-interventionist: "america waging war on third-world countries is bad and there shouldn't be any more" interventionist: "you're oversimplifying history... after all, what is a war?"
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Feb 10, 2018 05:37
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Duckbox posted:You think you just delivered a damning condemnation of the US military policy, but it doesn't work that way. On the contrary, I'd call your post appologia. If the war isn't an adventure, if the motives are benevolent (and when is it ever said to be otherwise?) then your objection vanishes. That's a problem. true, thank god america has never waged a "benevolent" war nor is such a thing possible so the objection stands, likely indefinitely.
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Feb 10, 2018 05:42
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Fututor Magnus posted:anti-interventionist: "america waging war on third-world countries is bad and there shouldn't be any more" Um, I'm definitely not an interventionist. My argument was actually that a lot of anti-interventionist rhetoric falls flat in the face of concerted efforts to convince people that it will be different this time. I believe that all war is evil, not just the "imperialist" kind and I take issue with any argument that castigates one state or "bad actor" for their crimes, but leaves open the possibility that political violence might be acceptable or even valorous in different circumstances.
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Feb 10, 2018 06:17
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Duckbox posted:Um, I'm definitely not an interventionist. My argument was actually that a lot of anti-interventionist rhetoric falls flat in the face of concerted efforts to convince people that it will be different this time. I believe that all war is evil, not just the "imperialist" kind and I take issue with any argument that castigates one state or "bad actor" for their crimes, but leaves open the possibility that political violence might be acceptable or even valorous in different circumstances. Not an interventionist yet consistently falls on the side of defending their point of view while saying poo poo like “I am as opposed to this as anyone”. It’s ok to be lovely, you have company, lean in.
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Feb 10, 2018 06:33
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The best service most of y'all could do to promote anti-American views is to keep your mouths shut and let people who are smarter than you argue your case for you, cause goddamn.
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Feb 10, 2018 06:37
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E. ^^^Sigh.Coldwar timewarp posted:Not an interventionist yet consistently falls on the side of defending their point of view while saying poo poo like “I am as opposed to this as anyone”. It’s ok to be lovely, you have company, lean in. One of the things you learn early on about being a pacifist is that there's a big difference between opposing this war and opposing all war. Your best allies today might be your worst enemies tomorrow. Most of the people on my "side" of the intervention debate aren't on my side of the "war is inherently evil" debate, so I'm just as inclined to argue with them as anyone. Duckbox fucked around with this message at 06:43 on Feb 10, 2018 |
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Feb 10, 2018 06:41
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Volkerball posted:The best service most of y'all could do to promote anti-American views is to keep your mouths shut and let people who are smarter than you argue your case for you, cause goddamn. lol yes and please stop quoting fishmech, I really hate having to see his posts.
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Feb 10, 2018 06:44
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Duckbox posted:Um, I'm definitely not an interventionist. My argument was actually that a lot of anti-interventionist rhetoric falls flat in the face of concerted efforts to convince people that it will be different this time. I believe that all war is evil, not just the "imperialist" kind and I take issue with any argument that castigates one state or "bad actor" for their crimes, but leaves open the possibility that political violence might be acceptable or even valorous in different circumstances. "concerted efforts to convince people that it will be different this time" comprise more obfuscation and deflectory pedantry than actual good-faith argumentation, it's better not to engage with that poo poo when you can pull back the curtains instead.
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Feb 10, 2018 06:50
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An Israeli fighter jets got shot down by something in syria.
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Feb 10, 2018 06:52
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Yeah https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/red-alert-sirens-sound-heavy-aerial-activity-in-northern-israel-1.5806508 I'm reading Beware of Small States rn incidentally and it's pretty interesting stuff. Any other reading recommendations by anyone in this clusterfuck of a thread? It's mocked in CSPAM (tho what isn't) but for real authenticity I think a thread that centers so often around the Syrian Civil War should be as dumb, hosed, and serious as the Syrian Civil War actually is. Better than the definitely hiiiiiilaaaaaarious Assad memes.
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Feb 10, 2018 06:56
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Volkerball posted:The best service most of y'all could do to promote anti-American views is to keep your mouths shut and let people who are smarter than you argue your case for you, cause goddamn. The poster who thinks the Iraq war was a positive for Middle Eastern civilians has logged on to call others stupid
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Feb 10, 2018 07:00
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Fututor Magnus posted:"concerted efforts to convince people that it will be different this time" comprise more obfuscation and deflectory pedantry than actual good-faith argumentation, it's better not to engage with that poo poo when you can pull back the curtains instead. Yeah, I've already rambled on more today than I would if I wasn't home sick with nothing to do, but I guess my nutshell argument is that I believe American militarism is rooted in the myth of the "just war." We can and should keep relitigating past conflicts and exposing the crimes of a venal neo-imperialist elite, but we've been doing that since the sixties and it hasn't worked very well. I think the reason for that is that we're just convincing people that those wars were bad. Hell, I know those wars were bad, but the trouble is I (unlike Fishmech, apparently) don't think "levels of imperialism" is something you can quantify. I'd rather define the evils of war in terms of death, destruction, and human suffering than by abstract -isms that emphasize the illegitimate motives for war rather than the illegitimacy of war itself. I'll stop now.
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Feb 10, 2018 07:30
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Punkin Spunkin posted:Yeah I liked Al-Shabaab in Somaliaby Stig Hansen. All subforums hate all the others, unsuprisingly people mostly post in the forum they like the most. If you are willing to look past the differences and consume a variety of sources of information you can keep your perspective fresh. I can't imagine why someone would only want to talk to the people already agree with you and read all the same articles and twitter feeds. Though I agree with you about my discomfort with the Assad memes. More deeply I really did not like how normal it became in cspam to attack Brown Moses not because of his ideology or policy positions, but for his methods. The cspam thread even had the title "birthplace of sofa journalism" for a while. Whether he's a Saudi funded shill or not his methods were innovative, have since been widely adopted, and are independently verifiable. They simply avoid the question of whether the methods worked or not and attacked them for superficial reasons. A willingness to bury information because one finds it inconvenient is a trait I cannot abide and I'd rather spend an eternity arguing in neocon hell than deal with it so long as the neocons at least agreed not to deny their lying eyes.
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Feb 10, 2018 07:36
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There's definitely a forums rivalry/elitism element at play, but I personally prefer this thread because most of the regulars here have been following the war for years and have some perspective about the whole cluster gently caress. It's hard for anyone who hasn't been following the war for years to really have much sense of just how many loving factions are running around Syria right now and, today's lapse aside, I'm usually more interested in facts on the ground than debating ideology (again). Re: book chat, I gave my brother The Siege of Mecca for Christmas per this thread's suggestion and he liked it.
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Feb 10, 2018 08:43
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Stairmaster posted:An Israeli fighter jets got shot down by something in syria. Retributive strike in 3... 2 1 disco. https://twitter.com/washingtonpost/status/962251100274511872
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Feb 10, 2018 10:38
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Squalid posted:This seems like a difficult position to sustain, or at least stretches the phrase interventionist beyond conventional usage. I agree that anti-colonial ideology really did have a major influence on American policy even if it could be hard to distinguish it at times from other American interests. The best examples that come to my mind were the Suez crisis and the U.S. opposition to the Dutch pacification of Indonesia. However these accomplishments were achieved primarily through U.S. economic might and soft power, not the application of military force. U.S. military interventions have been almost entirely for cynical reasons. Oh don't get me wrong I completely agree, my field of study is basically US foreign policy disasters with an emphasis specifically on war crimes, I don't normally have much good to say about US FP, but I don't think it is anywhere remotely as black and white as it looks. I was emphasizing one side of it as a response to someone making a ridiculous over-simplification of American FP goals over the course of 100+ years, which misses how wildly different US FP motivations and goals are every few years, much less over the course of decades. The between the wars anti-interventionism (and again, actually, in the last decade re the ME) was absolutely rooted in a total 'gently caress those guys, let them kill eachother, not my problem, like what do we even gain by getting involved?' attitude. poo poo, Trump was even saying that basically word for word, hence why he became the darling of anti-interventionism. The regional stuff is kind of unavoidable, that's completely not a defense of it, but if you spend the money to be the dominant force in a region, it's almost an after thought to intervene and keep the deck stacked in your favor. The contra thing is interesting btw because it was a tipping point in a real way for US overseas involvement. Previously US overseas activity was kept out of US papers and popular awareness to an amazingly effective degree. The contra situation was one of the first times where news of the brutality was making it into papers and where there were even vocal, internal movements against just wantonly committing atrocities. I mean that was more about 'all these atrocities make it hard for us to sell the Contras as the good guys,' but by the cynical standards of US overseas activity that was a first. Previously the US intelligence community's willingness to use brutality was basically completely unchecked. Similarly, the generation that grew up actually hearing about US overseas fuckups and the atrocities committed either by IAs or by the literal graduates of US war colleges and directly US trained forces very much led to the more humanistic shift of application of US force in the 90s. I've made a few posts about it in the past, but a major shift in USFP is that now every action must be capable of being sold as having a humanistic basis. The actual reality of the situation may be whatever, but there is 100% a domestic demand that old school applications of American force don't happen anymore. Perversely, this is balanced by institutional demands that there be some tangible material gain for the US by intervening. The Libyan intervention is a good, concise example of this paradox: it was sold absolutely as a humanistic action (of which there was some truth), but it was carried out and approved by a bunch of people who were extremely excited to gently caress Gaddafi up personally. That shift is meaningful and personally I'm optimistic that internal American discourse has almost completely shifted away from a bunch of stupid, partisan 'we're the best and greatest and can do no wrong' bullshit. I find the increasingly partisan approach to evaluating potential interventions alarming because each situation truly has to be evaluated on an individual basis and there were some extremely tragic events that were allowed by the world community to go on far, far longer than they ever should have been. Most interventions are likely deeply ill-advised, but I don't think anyone can say that all are bad either. Frankly, after Rwanda and Bosnia non-action is a much harder sell. And I think interventionism is a suitable word for the debate because it's just one side of the 'terrorist or freedom fighters' linguistic disparity. Duckbox posted:There's definitely a forums rivalry/elitism element at play, but I personally prefer this thread because most of the regulars here have been following the war for years and have some perspective about the whole cluster gently caress. It's hard for anyone who hasn't been following the war for years to really have much sense of just how many loving factions are running around Syria right now and, today's lapse aside, I'm usually more interested in facts on the ground than debating ideology (again). Yeah I generally respect and enjoy this thread because there are a bunch of people here vastly more pertinently knowledgeable than me. I was raised by anti-american hippies, I'm pretty fundamentally in agreement with the sentiment, but people rolling up droppin some truf bombs about hey guys what if the US is actually bad.... doesn't really add much. It's also just bizarre because I'm actually at a loss to think of any regular poster (or even infrequent posters, or even the drive by shitposters for that matter) in this thread who is particularly inclined to say anything good about US FP really almost ever. Herstory Begins Now fucked around with this message at 11:42 on Feb 10, 2018 |
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Feb 10, 2018 11:35
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Also https://twitter.com/ap/status/962305409687195649 Not a good day for flying objects in Syria
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Feb 10, 2018 14:11
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Video of chopper going down. https://twitter.com/QalaatAlMudiq/status/962309128302493696
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Feb 10, 2018 14:18
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Re: Israeli F16 being shot down. The story is a bit complex. My radio news said the Israeli jet shot down an Iranian UAV flying, and was then targeted by Syrian AA and brought down. Here's an IDF tweet with video of the drone being shot down, but its a helicopter that does the shooting. An "Iranian command vehicle" is also blown up. I can't tell if the truck was blown up by the F16 that was downed. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-43014081 quote:Israel launched its second wave of strikes in Syria. Eight of the Syrian targets belonged to the fourth Syrian division near Damascus, IDF spokesman Jonathan Conricus said. The "attack" they're referring to seems to be the drone flying over Israeli airspace. If any of this is even true. Honestly it smells a bit fishy-- Israel has routinely conducted airstrikes in Syria, I find it a tad convenient that the time they lose a jet was the time they happened to be responding to "Iranian aggression".
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Feb 10, 2018 17:13
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https://twitter.com/Elizrael/status/962352401192833024?ref_src=twcamp%5Ecopy%7Ctwsrc%5Eandroid%7Ctwgr%5Ecopy%7Ctwcon%5E7090%7Ctwterm%5E1 Y'all can stop with the racist conjecture about Syrian Sunnis any time.
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Feb 10, 2018 18:51
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I bet Netanyahu really wants a distraction about now
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Feb 10, 2018 18:51
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Volkerball posted:https://twitter.com/Elizrael/status/962352401192833024?ref_src=twcamp%5Ecopy%7Ctwsrc%5Eandroid%7Ctwgr%5Ecopy%7Ctwcon%5E7090%7Ctwterm%5E1 Twitter has an enormous army of paid and fake users set up by the gulf governments, so I wouldnt place any value on a twitter poll. Also, what's the 'racist conjecture' about? are sunni's 'Better' if they emotionally want revenge for a current murderous rampage even from anyone? asking a question like this is like asking someone 'Hey who would you rather support, your current killer or a previous one'? Personally I cant pick a side, They're both vicious mass murderers, Iran/Hezbollah has no moral standing anymore. Also, Syrian's are being actively murdered right now by Iran and Assad, it's really obvious they'd emotionally pick anyone and anything else than the people killing them right this second. Al-Saqr fucked around with this message at 19:27 on Feb 10, 2018 |
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Feb 10, 2018 19:18
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Volkerball posted:https://twitter.com/Elizrael/status/962352401192833024?ref_src=twcamp%5Ecopy%7Ctwsrc%5Eandroid%7Ctwgr%5Ecopy%7Ctwcon%5E7090%7Ctwterm%5E1 the threads resident intellectual has logged on to call others racist rubes based on a loving twitter poll lmao
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Feb 10, 2018 20:30
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CherryCola posted:Quick, back to back the Middle East 
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Feb 10, 2018 20:33
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A Typical Goon posted:the threads resident intellectual has logged on to call others racist rubes based on a loving twitter poll lmao well, it's not like non-syrians could have voted on that poll. a twitter poll should be representative of the true will of the syrian people.
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Feb 10, 2018 21:55
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https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/02/afghanistan-us/552644/Peace Through Bombings: The U.S. Strategy in Afghanistan posted:“We will do everything we can to support the ANDSF fight against the Taliban in order to drive them to the negotiating table,” Randall Schriver, the assistant secretary of defense, said Tuesday to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, referring to the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces. “Fundamentally, our goal is to convince the Taliban’s senior leadership that its goals are better pursued through political negotiation rather than violence.” Put another way, as Brigadier General Lance Bunch, who heads the the air campaign in Afghanistan, did in an interview with Defense One: “This is all part of our overarching strategy to continue to put pressure on the Taliban until they realize they’ve basically got a binary choice: They can negotiate and reconcile, or live in irrelevance and die. We’ll continue to go until the Taliban reconcile.” https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/u-s-intensifies-focus-on-taliban-shifts-air-power-to-afghanistan U.S. intensifies focus on Taliban, shifts air power to Afghanistan posted:WASHINGTON — The U.S. is shifting combat and intelligence-gathering aircraft to Afghanistan as part of an intensified focus on the Taliban, now that the campaign against the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria is winding down, the commander of coalition air forces in Afghanistan said Wednesday. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...m=.62aa448b94c6 [quote= Bombing of Chinese separatists in Afghanistan is a sign of how Trump’s war there has changed] The expansion of the U.S. bombing campaign in Afghanistan to target a little-known Chinese terrorist group is an example of how the 16-year-old war has changed under President Trump, according to U.S. military officers and outside analysts. . . . Air Force Maj. Gen. James B. Hecker, the commander of the coalition’s air command in Afghanistan, told reporters Wednesday that there has been a “change in weight of effort” recently in U.S. intelligence-gathering that has provided U.S. commanders with more information about potential targets. The United States also has added additional aircraft, including MQ-9 Reaper drones and a squadron of A-10C attack jets in southern Afghanistan. . . .The new authorities were approved in August by Trump, and the United States has escalated the air campaign ever since. While U.S. officials have declined to say what specifically they entail, there is broad agreement that they have allowed the U.S. military to expand how frequently it strikes. The Air Force dropped 4,361 bombs in Afghanistan last year, as opposed to 1,337 in 2016 and 947 in 2015, according to service statistics. . . . Air Force Maj. Gen. James B. Hecker, the commander of the coalition’s air command in Afghanistan, told reporters Wednesday that there has been a “change in weight of effort” recently in U.S. intelligence-gathering that has provided U.S. commanders with more information about potential targets. The United States also has added additional aircraft, including MQ-9 Reaper drones and a squadron of A-10C attack jets in southern Afghanistan. “With the current uplift in resources, we can decimate Taliban command-and-control nodes,” Hecker said. “That means we can strike at the heart of training camps, where they brainwash young men to strap on a suicide vest, to kill themselves and their fellow Afghans, who are working to rebuild the country.” . . . Kugelman said the fact that there are so many apparent targets shows how rapidly security in Afghanistan has deteriorated over the past few years. “It’s a very striking and sobering reminder of how widely the insurgency in Afghanistan has expanded,” he said. “For many years, the Taliban’s strongholds were in the south and southeast of the country, but in recent years all of a sudden you have the Taliban carving out area in new places. It’s pretty telling, and it’s pretty depressing, actually.” [/quote] https://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2018/01/us-officials-estimate-taliban-strength-at-a-minimum-of-60000-fighters.php US officials estimate Taliban strength at a minimum of 60,000 fighters posted:In 2014, US officials told NBC News that the number of Taliban fighters in Afghanistan was about 20,000. Four years later, one US defense official said the current Taliban strength is at least 60,000. Another senior U.S. official said 60,000 “passes the sniff test,” while a third official said 60,000 is “a place to start.” What kind concession do you think the U.S. and Afghan government are willing to give the Taliban, do you guys think? Cabinet posts? Governorships? Integration of troops with the national army and police? Squalid fucked around with this message at 22:55 on Feb 10, 2018 |
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Feb 10, 2018 22:53
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