Cease to Hope posted:

These are examples of Trump specifically ordering policies of increasingly indiscriminate bombing and covering up the extent of doing so.

Helsing posted:

As opposed to the very discriminate and cautious carpet bombing of Fallujah in 2004?

Cease to Hope posted:

I think it's a bit early to assume we fully know the consequences of Trump's foreign policy to boot. Knowing that it's bad and suspecting that it's even worse than we know is different from knowing for a fact how bad it got. Even the harshest critic of Bush didn't know for a fact everything we know now back in 2003.

Cease to Hope posted:

That is a post about 2004 written based on revelations six years later. I even specifically addressed this like one page ago.


We knew it was bad then, we just didn't specifically know how bad.

Evaluating Trump to be worse than Bush because he is openly brutal or careless is not a moral judgement that killing people with ~decorum~ is somehow less bad, but rather using what we do know about Trump to guess at the things we don't know about Trump. That's all we can do, unless you want to adjourn this discussion until 2024 or so.

Helsing posted:

Surely we can acknowledge how bad he is without spinning fairy tales about the noble intentions of democratic champions like George W. Bush.

Cease to Hope posted:

I don't think people in this thread are spinning fairy tales about whatever.

People are laying Yemen and Syria and Pakistan (and Somalia, albeit not recently in this thread) at Trump's feet, based on guessing how bad things are from sketchy evidence, or saying that Trump's naked indifference/bloodlust are a green light to dictators who previously felt that America's lip service to democracy meant that overt oppression was risky. (Trying to be fair to eg Sinteres's argument here, even though I don't find it very convincing.)

I don't think you speculating about how everyone is deranged by a need to justify their hate of Trump is helpful, especially since that same rhetoric was deployed to defend Bush.

V. Illych L. posted:

but obama actively and intelligently helping in the quashing of democratic movements in e.g. egypt is also worse.

Helsing posted:

This is a comforting lie you're telling yourself so that you can pretend that your outrage against Trump's foreign policy is based on genuine moral outrage and not partisan frustration. I'll try to stop repeating myself at this point because it doesn't seem like there's much left to say.

Helsing posted:

I guess it depends on how you define "backed", which is inherently a vague term, but why do you think it's implausible to imagine that the US recognized that Mubarak's position was untenable and therefore offered tacit encouragement to get rid of him but then, upon realizing that their preferred factions weren't going to be competitive in a democracy, decided it was better to have the military return to power with a new strongman?

Volkerball posted:

Volkerball posted:

People are accusing him of being a dubya fanboy so I'd say it's more like he's coming around to mine.

Ham posted:

You are factually incorrect. Sisi in Egypt was almost convinced into easing human rights and non-profit organisation laws in Egypt through the Obama administration's policies towards him, something Trump reversed on coming to power.

Volkerball posted:

Because that's not what happened? Relying on your imagination to conjure up a fantasy of how world history played out isn't exactly a scientific method and that's why it's so hard to take people like you seriously. Sisi rode a wave of Egyptian nationalism into power. As it turns out, Egyptian nationalists aren't exactly the most pro-American bunch! The ambassador to Egypt, Anne Patterson, called for the protesters demanding Morsi's removal to take it easy, and people took that as the US being in the corner of the Muslim Brotherhood and trying to influence Egypt's internal affairs. Put another way, one of the major talking points that enabled the coup directly contradicts your framing of how things played out. She was a reviled figure in the country, and Americans, and foreigners in general, were not safe showing their faces around the protests because it was quite possible they would be attacked. Some were murdered, and the US sent some embassy staff home, and closed during business hours. The case of this Egyptian anti-imperialism is a prime example that having anti-Americanism as a pillar of your ideology doesn't inherently make you right and moral. You can justify heinous poo poo in the name of opposing the US, just as the US did in the name of opposing communism. It doesn't matter if you recognize that Bush's administration was a human rights disaster. You still have an obligation to put in the work in to learn what the gently caress you're talking about before you start going around acting like you know everything, or your worldview can still very well end up in a bad place.

Edit: I mean I can't not post this old gem along with this argument.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcXXy-Jb6wU

The New York Times posted:

The White House and the Strongman

How the Obama administration watched the demise of Arab democracy — and paved the way for Trump’s embrace of dictators.

By David D. Kirkpatrick
Mr. Kirkpatrick is the author of the forthcoming “Into the Hands of Soldiers: Freedom and Chaos in Egypt and the Middle East,” from which this essay is adapted.

July 27, 2018

President Trump boasts that he has reversed American policies across the Middle East. Where his predecessor hoped to win hearts and minds, Mr. Trump champions the axiom that brute force is the only response to extremism — whether in Iran, Syria, Yemen or the Palestinian territories. He has embraced the hawks of the region, in Israel and the Persian Gulf, as his chief guides and allies.

But in many ways, this hard-line approach began to take hold under President Barack Obama, when those same regional allies backed the 2013 military ouster of Egypt’s first elected president, Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood.

That coup was a watershed moment for the region, snuffing out dreams of democracy while emboldening both autocrats and jihadists. And American policy pivoted, too, empowering those inside the administration “who say you just have to crush these guys,” said Andrew Miller, who oversaw Egypt for the National Security Council under Mr. Obama, and who is now with the Project on Middle East Democracy. Some of the coup’s most vocal American advocates went on to top roles in the Trump administration, including Secretary of Defense James Mattis and Michael Flynn, Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser.

I was The New York Times Cairo bureau chief at the time of the coup, and I returned to the events years later in part to better understand Washington’s role. I learned that the Obama administration’s support for the Arab Spring uprisings had been hobbled from the start by internal disagreements over the same issues that now define Trump policy — about the nature of the threat from political Islam, about fidelity to autocratic allies like the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, and about the difficulty of achieving democratic change in Egypt and the region.

Mr. Obama and his closest advisers were often on one side of those debates. They hoped to shift established American policy and forge a new relationship with the Arab world in order to undermine the appeals of anti-Western extremism. Even in the final days before the takeover, Mr. Obama was urging respect for Egypt’s free elections. In an 11th--hour phone call he implored Mr. Morsi to make “bold gestures” to hold onto his office.

Most of his government, though, took the other side, reflecting longstanding worries about the intrinsic danger of political Islam and about the obstacles to Egyptian democracy.

In a White House meeting the day after Mr. Morsi’s ouster — two days after that last phone call — Mr. Obama yielded to those views when he accepted the military takeover. In doing so, he had taken a first step toward the policies that have become the overriding principles of the Trump administration.

‘He is the dumbest cluck I ever met.’

President Morsi, a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, took office on June 30, 2012. He spent much of his energy struggling against resistance from an entrenched establishment — the soldiers, spies, police, judges and bureaucrats left in place from six decades of autocracy.

But he was an inept politician and he made his own mistakes, too. In November 2012, as part of a battle with the judiciary to push through a referendum on a new constitution, Mr. Morsi declared his own decrees above judicial review until it had passed. Many Egyptians, especially in Cairo, were angry at the new president for failing to fulfill the promises of the Tahrir Square uprising.

Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, whose rulers feared elections and dreaded them even more if they were presented as Islamic, lobbied hard to convince Washington that Mr. Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood were a threat to American interests. And American officials later concluded that the United Arab Emirates were also providing covert financial support for protests against Mr. Morsi.

The United States provides $1.3 billion a year in military aid to Egypt, more than to any other country besides Israel, and after the uprising in 2011 the Pentagon boasted that its aid had helped convince the Egyptian generals to accept a transition to democracy. But by the spring of 2013, conversations between Egyptian military officers and their American counterparts were becoming mutual “bitch sessions” about Mr. Morsi, several of the Americans involved later told me.

Like others in the Pentagon, Mr. Mattis, then a Marine general in charge of Central Command, often argued that the Muslim Brotherhood was just a different shade of Al Qaeda — even though the Brotherhood had said for decades that it opposed violence and favored elections while Al Qaeda, in turn, denounced the Brothers as naïve patsies for the West. “They are all swimming in the same sea,” General Mattis later said in a speech looking back on the period. He blamed Mr. Morsi’s own “imperious leadership” for his downfall.

General Flynn, who has since pleaded guilty to lying to federal investigators under an agreement with the special prosecutor, headed the Defense Intelligence Agency at the time. He visited Cairo in the months before the coup to talk to the generals about Mr. Morsi. Whether the Brotherhood or Al Qaeda, “It is all the same ideology,” he told me in 2016.

Civilians in government were skeptical, too. Secretary of State John Kerry had grown close to many of the most fiercely anti-Islamist Persian Gulf royals during his decades in the Senate, even sometimes yachting with them. He had always distrusted the Brotherhood, he told me years later. When he visited Cairo for the first time as secretary of state in March 2013, he took an immediate dislike to Mr. Morsi.

“He is the dumbest cluck I ever met,” Mr. Kerry told his chief of staff as they left the presidential palace. “This isn’t going to work. These guys are wacko.”

Mr. Kerry got along better in his one-on-one meeting with Gen. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. A former military intelligence chief, General Sisi had vaulted himself into the job of defense minister in a shake-up just a few months before.

“I will not let my country go down the drain,” General Sisi told Mr. Kerry, as he later recalled to me. He knew then that “Morsi was cooked.” General Sisi was prepared to intervene. Mr. Kerry felt partly relieved, he told me.

“It was reassuring that Egypt would not fall into a civil war or a complete massacre of the public or an implosion,” Mr. Kerry said, although he added, “I did not sit back and think, ‘Great, our problems are going to be solved.’”

Senior American diplomats in Cairo had told me that March that a military intervention was “extraordinarily unlikely.” But by the next month, Ambassador Anne Patterson was picking up other signals from the top generals. In an encrypted email, she warned at least some in the White House that “if not imminent, a coup was a high likelihood within a few months,” one official told me. She predicted that any military intervention would surely be brutal.

The White House was sending Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel talking points intended to warn General Sisi that Washington would punish a coup. Among other things, United States law mandated a cutoff of aid to any military that overturned an elected leader.

But the message Mr. Hagel delivered “was totally, totally different,” a senior official on the National Security Council who read transcripts of the calls later told me. “The White House wanted the message to be ‘Democracy is important,’ and Hagel wanted it to be ‘We want to have a good relationship.’ We never could get him to deliver stern talking points.”

In an interview in early 2016, Mr. Hagel told me that he had been besieged by complaints about Mr. Morsi from Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Mr. Hagel said that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the emirates’ de facto ruler and military chief, had called the Muslim Brotherhood “the most dangerous element afoot in the Middle East today.”

Israeli leaders had said they were counting on General Sisi because they worried that — despite Mr. Morsi’s repeated pledges — the Muslim Brotherhood might threaten the border or help Hamas. And General Sisi himself had told Mr. Hagel that “there are some very evil, very bad forces afoot — you cannot understand it like we can understand it here.”

Mr. Hagel said he had agreed with them all and sought to reassure them: The Muslim Brotherhood “is dangerous — we recognize that,” Mr. Hagel said he told the Emiratis. “I don’t live in Cairo, you do,” Mr. Hagel said he had told General Sisi. “You do have to protect your security, protect your country.”

‘On an island in our own government’
On June 30, millions of protesters took the streets across Egypt to demand Mr. Morsi’s ouster. The next day, Egyptian Air Force F‑16s with colored contrails painted hearts in the sky over downtown Cairo. The generals were openly backing the protests.

President Obama was traveling in Africa, and on July 1, he spoke for the last time with President Morsi. The Egyptian military was not “taking direction” from the United States, Mr. Obama warned, according to a White House aide’s detailed record of the conversation. But he mainly urged Mr. Morsi to strike a compromise with his civilian opponents so that his presidency became “almost a unity government.”

Follow Nelson Mandela, Mr. Obama said. He had just visited Mr. Mandela’s sickbed and recalled his post-apartheid government in South Africa. “He even put his former prison guard — the man who had been the warden at the prison where he had been held — and he put him in charge of the security services. It was because of those gestures that he showed he was about bringing the country together,” Mr. Obama told Mr. Morsi. “Be bold,” he added. “History is waiting for you.”

“Very good advice, from a sincere friend,” Mr. Morsi answered. But it was too late. The military’s presidential guard had moved Mr. Morsi into its own base, ostensibly for his safety. Two days later, on July 3, 2013, General Sisi announced Mr. Morsi’s removal.

Mr. Kerry told me he had argued at the White House that Mr. Morsi’s removal was not, in fact, a coup. General Sisi had merely bowed to the public will in order to save Egypt, Mr. Kerry said, noting that the general had announced a plan for new elections. (Mr. Sisi was elected president the next year and again in 2018, each time with more than 95 percent of the vote.)

“In Egypt, what was the alternative? It wasn’t Jeffersonian democracy,” Mr. Kerry told me. “Over whatever number of years we have put about $80 billion into Egypt. Most of the time, this is the kind of government they had — almost all of the time. And the reality is, no matter how much I wish it was different, it ain’t going to be different tomorrow.”

The United States needed the Saudis, Emiratis and Israelis for other priorities, Mr. Kerry said, and he did not want to “get into a fight with them over something as historically clear as how Egypt works.”

President Obama decided not to make any determination about whether Mr. Morsi’s ouster was or was not a coup, effectively accepting it.

“The people who wanted to have a different kind of relationship with the Egyptian people, including the president, were on an island in our own government,” Ben Rhodes, Mr. Obama’s deputy national security adviser, later told me. “There was a sense of inevitability about the military resuming control.”

The Egyptian military crushed the opponents of the takeover with a series of mass shootings, culminating on Aug. 14, 2013, in the killing of as many as 1,000. Human Rights Watch concluded that it was the biggest single-day massacre in recent history, surpassing the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. Egypt’s police soon widened the crackdown to suppress independent liberal, leftist, feminist and Christian organizers as well. And a backlash against the takeover ignited an extremist insurgency centered on the North Sinai that continues today.

President Trump and his advisers have hailed Mr. Sisi as a model Arab leader. “A fantastic guy” who “took control of Egypt, and he really took control of it,” Mr. Trump said when he first met Mr. Sisi.

Mr. Mattis no longer contends that “imperious leadership” is a problem in Egypt. In a public talk before he became Mr. Trump’s secretary of defense, he celebrated Mr. Sisi for trying “to reduce the amount of negatives about the Muslim religion,” concluding that “it’s time for us to support him and take our own side in this.”

“The only way to support Egypt’s maturation as a country with civil society, with democracy,” he argued, “is to support President el‑Sisi.”

Helsing posted:

"almost"

If I were going to focus on one good thing the Obama administration did that was unequivocally better than his predecessor and his successor, I'd probably focus on the Iran deal, which was at least implemented for a little while and not just something that his administration "almost" did. And like I said before, trying to call a pivot away from an Obama era policy "unprecedented" sort of overlooks the fact that immediately preceding Obama were eight years of George W. Bush.


This is a very selective presentation of events that brushes over some important details. A fuller accounting of what happened actually helps demonstrate why any one administration or handful of people are not match for the US foreign policy blob. Obama - whose support for Morsi was not nearly as strong as you imply, but who did at least seemingly try to work out some kind of compromise arrangement - may have been the President, but he was no match for entire US foreign polciy establishment plus its regional allies, almost all of whom were opposed to Morsi. Guess who won out? And its worth emphasizing that Obama's internal opponents including senior Democrats in his own cabinet as well as Pentagon officials.

And while Obama is perhaps the least villainous major figure in this story, that's mostly because he comes off as inept and overmatched by the reality of American empire. The guy sounds about as clueless here as he did when he was trying to find common ground with the Republicans on domestic issues.


If anything this story is a really great illustration of why basing your entire analysis of American foreign policy on the personaltiy of the President is deeply irrational and will lead you into all kinds of errors.

Volkerball posted:

Your claim was that Morsi was unfriendly to the US. So unfriendly that the US manufactured a coup against him to put a more friendly strongman in place, because their (as of yet unnamed) proxy faction lost the election. Your argument here and the attached article don't help your case or even allude to it. What happened in Egypt was Egyptian. No international actor was playing the part of puppet master. Everyone was just predicting what would happen and jockeying for the best position in a very chaotic month. They were reacting to events, not causing them, which is the case a lot of the time when imagination would say otherwise. A lot of people within Obama's administration had different views about how to react, absolutely. That's what happens in a democracy. When multiple personalities push and pull in different directions, the end result can often look schizophrenic if the issue is controversial and divisive, and an administration can't unite behind one path. That this phenomenon exists is in no way an indication that Reagan's brain is alive on life support somewhere and will call the shots on US foreign policy as the God-King of the deep state eternally.

Reuters posted:

“So it’s important for us not to say that our only two options are either the Muslim Brotherhood, or a suppressed Egyptian people,” he said.

“What I want is a representative government in Egypt and I have confidence that if Egypt moves in an orderly transition process, that we’ll have a government in Egypt that we can work with together as a partner.”

quote:

To make your case, you're holding up a quote from Ben Rhodes. Rhodes full time job was to weave pro-Obama talking points into the media. There's huge articles out detailing his role in the Obama administration. Of course he claims Obama was just a poor helpless sap along for the ride, because the alternative is that he would have to wear what amounted in a big chunk of the public eye to a dictator overthrowing a democracy. But the fact is that he does have to wear the US response to the coup in Egypt, because it was his administrations response. Not all of that response is negative, not all is positive, but it was absolutely his response. You're countering with the positions of Hagel and Kerry, but both of them were directly appointed by Obama, and the extent of their power isn't solely left to the realm of imagination. Kerry in particular rarely got his way within the Obama administration and raged about it on a few occasions. He looked like a drat fool when he was pushing for airstrikes in Syria following the Ghouta attack, and Obama supported him all the way up until he didn't, and Kerry was left holding a bag of poo poo. These were hardly fixed figures of American empire that Obama was powerless in the face of. His response to the events in Egypt didn't look that much different than his response to the Arab Spring before either of those two were appointed. The guiding principle throughout his presidency when it came to reacting to foreign crises was security-centric, and the goal was always primarily to weather the storm rather than seize opportunities to to stand against fascism and dictatorship. "Don't do stupid poo poo," as he put it. In essence, that bad action was always worse than inaction, so reduced action was the most surefire way to reduce risk. You can love it or hate it, but there's no doubt that it was his MO, and that a presidents MO can be clearly seen in US foreign policy while he is in office.

Sinteres posted:

Man this thread's dead when I'm triple posting across four different days. Anyway, Trump pardoned an American soldier who murdered an Iraqi who he suspected of being involved in an explosion that killed two other soldiers. Obviously the message Trump is trying to send is that he's a badass who supports the troops no matter what, and it lines up with his campaign rhetoric about supporting torture and worse, but I don't know how the Iraqi government can view this as anything other than a sign that American forces need to get the gently caress out of the country. If Americans are going to be pardoned even in the rare instances that American military courts find them guilty, it's hard to take any promises of accountability seriously.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/06/politics/trump-pardon-us-soldier-iraq/index.html

Ham posted:

Thanks for keeping it up to date, thread has a lot of lurkers.

quote:

"Saudis using Belgian weapons in Yemen"

The #BelgianArms-team found evidence that Saudi Arabia is using FN F2000 assault rifles produced in Belgium. The country is also employing armoured vehicles equipped with tank guns produced by Belgium's CMI Defence with ammunition from Mecar. The Eurofighter Typhoon fighter jets and the military version of the Airbus A330 also include Belgian know-how. The Saudi-led coalition is deploying both types of plane in its attacks on Syria.

Belgium's Walloon government insists that the export licences for military equipment that it issued only have the Saudi National Guard as its end user. The Walloon PM Willy Borsus has said that the National Guard doesn't operate outside Saudi, but #BelgianArms has found evidence of operations in Yemen. National Guard soldiers use FN F2000 rifles as well as armoured vehicles with Belgian tank guns.

The investigation also revealed Belgian armoured vehicles are used against demonstrators in Bahrein.

The exports continue despite well-documented human rights violations and in violation of EU policy.

#BelgianArms also discovered that Belgian firearms are widely used by Mexican drug cartels.

Journalists working for VRT, Knack, Le Soir, Lighthouse Reports and Bellingcat co-operate in the #BelgianArms investigation.

Brown Moses posted:

We've just launched a new Yemen project at Bellingcat:

Grouchio posted:

Why are Belgian Govts being post-colonial dickbags still?

Brown Moses posted:

We've just launched a new Yemen project at Bellingcat:

Grouchio posted:

Why are Belgian Govts being post-colonial dickbags still?

Toplowtech posted:

Post-colonialism?

Grape posted:

Yeah that's a good way of describing what would happened (god forbid).
People who think this would go domestically just like Iraq 2003 aren't really paying attention.

Pembroke Fuse posted:

This is a good project.