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Young Freud posted:I'm hoping some poo poo gets stirred up in Dubai. It would be great if all the guest workers went on strike. You mean the ones who are basically trapped because their passports were taken away? The ones that are for all intents and purposes worked like slaves? Why haven't they revolted already? Serious question.
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Feb 19, 2011 01:47
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Vernii posted:Because the army would smash them like bugs with no reservations. Yeah, that would probably explain it.  Their foreign workers, so the army wouldn't have any solidarity with them.
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Feb 19, 2011 02:11
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Yeah, it certainly sounds like the Egyptian military is shooting itself in the foot here.
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Feb 26, 2011 01:45
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spikenigma posted:I have a horrible sinking feeling. What are the chances of Ghaddafi 'winning' this and remaining in power? I'm probably just echoing what others have said, but there isn't much chance of that, and even if he did win, with everything that's happened, it would be a Pyrrhic victory at best. It seems very marginally more likely, though still next to impossible, that Libya will be split in half, with the west controlled by Qadaffi and the east controlled by the rebels, for the foreseeable future, like North and South Korea.
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Mar 9, 2011 17:17
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Ham posted:So Mohamed El Baradei was on TV for 3 continuous hours in a landmark interview. Never thought I'd see a politician declare themselves socialist that easily. Did he really call himself a socialist? In the event that he's elected, what are the odds that some foreign intelligence agency *cough* CIA *cough* topples him and installs another dictator?* *Half kidding
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Mar 10, 2011 02:05
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Nonsense posted:Not to mention the Daily Telegraph is basically an alarmist rag in all instances of daily British life. It can't possibly be any worse than the Daily Mail.
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Mar 26, 2011 16:01
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farraday posted:Looking ahead, now that it appears protests are kicking off in a major way in Syria, and regardless of what else happens, what other countries in the region are susceptible? Considering said protests have already happened in countries where they were previously thought to have been impossible or next to impossible, it almost seems like they could happen in any Middle Eastern country. Saudi Arabia seems least likely, but I even there I wouldn't put money on them not happening.
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Mar 26, 2011 21:27
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dj_clawson posted:That's what I always thought but a lot of writers seem to be ditching Newsweek for Time. Probably that just means that Newsweek is even worse.
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Mar 27, 2011 03:20
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Not A Bear posted:His punishment should be to be sequestered on a remote island and forced to perform in a Failed Dictators Reality TV series - winner take all! Might I recommend Saint Helena?
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Mar 29, 2011 05:01
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Shageletic posted:This is a few weeks old, but it tells you about the rebel ability to wage war. Foreign policy isn't my strong suit, but I don't think the rebels are going to be able to win this one, not without foreign boots on the ground, which at this point would be political suicide. There would need to be a lot more defections, and the fighters would need to actually listen to those that have defected. Question: Libya is, for the most part, basically an ocean of desert, right? How doable would a guerrilla war be for the rebels?
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Mar 30, 2011 15:55
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Young Freud posted:It might be an interesting tactic for the rebels to go out to Sirte, kick the hornet's nest, retreat back to Benghazi and have the coalition turn everything west to Misurata into a free-fire zone until they're prepared to make another advance. That would be a pretty decent tactic, and probably the best they could do in their present condition, if they were intentionally doing that.
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Mar 30, 2011 16:33
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OwlBot 2000 posted:Ah, okay. So there are some strong economic reasons to get rid of him, and it's not just a "me too!" result of their neighbors' revolutions. Pretty much. And it started out as (mostly) peaceful protests and probably would have stayed that way had Daffy not fired on them. vvvv You explained it better. King Dopplepopolos fucked around with this message at 16:51 on Mar 30, 2011 |
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Mar 30, 2011 16:46
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AreWeDrunkYet posted:Unfortunately, the attacks against the regime were largely repelled, but then again, unlike the freedom fighters in Libya, the rebels in Afghanistan are being attacked by NATO airstrikes rather than getting air support and supplies from NATO. That's because the Taliban are just as awful as Colonel Qaddafi. Hope this helps. E: Not that the puppet government is all rainbows and ponies, either.
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May 10, 2011 04:42
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Ardennes posted:and what of the people who can't make ends meet and are quietly starving to death? I'm pretty sure that rising food costs were one of the big factors behind most of the Middle East protests. And you needn't assume that the NTC will be neoliberal American puppets like it's some kind of forgone conclusion. And kudos for putting words in his mouth by asking if he's blind to torture done by democracies.
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May 10, 2011 15:26
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To plagiarize Joe Biden, any sentence uttered by Ben Stein has three things: a noun, a verb and Hitler.
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May 16, 2011 18:25
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Killer robot posted:The extra irony is that often the people taking such stances name support of brutal authoritarian regimes for sake of realpolitik strategy as one of the great evils of the US, then happily speak up for brutal authoritarian regimes just because they oppose the US. Mugabe may be a bastard, but damnit he's their bastard, so that makes it okay! It's like Bizarro realpolitik. Not that I'm a fan of the regular kind.
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May 18, 2011 01:10
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eSports Chaebol posted:And given how U.S. foreign policy operates (i.e. not very nicely), those people generally don't have the best interest of their countrymen in mind as much as other protestors. Just because America's foreign policy is complete poo poo (and it is) doesn't mean that protesters in Iran and China don't have the best interests of their countrymen at heart. That what we do around the globe is criminal doesn't excuse the misdeeds of more oppressive regimes, no matter what they say about us. Torture, for example, is wrong no matter who does it. It doesn't become right if it's at the behest of "anti-colonial" regimes.
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May 19, 2011 15:31
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eSports Chaebol posted:No, not really. Things aren't black and white like that. That's his point. You're judging opposition movements solely on how the Evil West perceives them. It's something the political version of a hipster would do.
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May 19, 2011 19:07
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Also, I remember the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts under President John Adams. Just because a thing happened while a Founding Father was president doesn't make it constitutional.
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May 20, 2011 01:35
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THE HORSES rear end posted:The Anti-War movement has been dead/useless since we withdrew from Vietnam. They might have had more success against the Iraq War if the media had given them the attention they give the Tea Party. Millions worldwide and hundreds of thousands here protested, and the only thing the media could say was, "heh, silly hippies  " But a few thousand retards in tricorn hats are national news and are worth taking seriously.Edit: not to mention how much the media loving cheerleaded for that war.
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May 20, 2011 18:55
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THE HORSES rear end posted:You seriously talk about your hate-boner for "leftists" in every single post you make, don't you? ANSWER's not great, but at least they aren't trying to take us back to the Gilded Age or the antebellum period. And Code Pink seriously aren't as radical as ANSWER. And neither have an entire "news" network behind them.
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May 21, 2011 00:10
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Plus the war we started in Iraq has killed more people, or at least as many, in eight years than Saddam did during his entire reign, so there's that, too.
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Jun 26, 2011 20:45
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pylb posted:I don't actually remember an armed insurrection in Iraq similar to the one in Libya (or Afghanistan), though all I really remember is our news wondering why the US insisted there were WMDs when the UN inspectors insisted they couldn't find any. There was something of an armed insurrection, in the latter part of the Gulf War, but we stood by as they were virtually annihilated by Saddam's forces. Also, no one asked us to go into Iraq the way the rebels did with Libya, which seems to be a nontrivial distinction. And 150,000 is the conservative estimate. The death toll could be in the many hundreds of thousands, which would be comparable with Saddam's body count, which again he accumulated over decades.
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Jun 26, 2011 21:35
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Wsobchak posted:It wouldn't be without the NATO involvement, which is a blatant attempt of oil-grabbing. Oil grabbing? Please. Libya under CQ was already selling oil to the West, and had NATO not interfered, CQ would have easily won and would then have continued to sell us oil. Edit: Rosscifer posted:Could you clarify the oil-grabbing process I'm hearing so much about? There are no western army divisions on the ground so is the west grabbing the oil via telekinesis? Are they suctioning up the oil into their airplanes? Exactly. It isn't like we can drink their milkshake from across the Atlantic Ocean or even from the Mediterranean.
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Jun 27, 2011 23:29
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suboptimal posted:And yet if they hadn't, they wouldn't be in Tripoli now. It would have ended in a bloodbath in Benghazi in March if NATO hadn't been involved.
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Aug 22, 2011 00:17
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Only these rebels can snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. E: On the other hand, it's only been a little more than a day, and everyone was expecting Stalingrad 2.0. Maybe some patience is required.
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Aug 23, 2011 02:18
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Brown Moses, is there any truth to what this man says? I doubt it but can't actually rule it out completely. I do have to admit, though, that he comes off as just another "The West supports it so it must be bad!" moron.internet poster posted:I am concerned (as I have mentioned here before) that the early part of the uprising was apparently very thin in numbers. It is reasonable, in that case, to question whether they had a mandate for a revolution. Further, since it was pretty clear that NATO stepped in and significantly tilted the playing field (i.e.: the rebels would have been slaughtered) it seems that NATO has entered the “regime change” business. There are also questions worth asking about the degree to which the rebel movement may have been CIA-sponsored or created. I remember reading stuff back in the early 2000s about CIA operatives in Libya trying to drum up resistance to Quadaffi, and it’s interesting that some of the people involved in the uprising had, apparently, been living in Virginia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khalifa_Belqasim_Haftar lived just outside of Langley since the 1990s – then reappeared in Libya to support the uprising.) This kind of thing smells slightly of rat – very familiar rat, at that. In 1986 the CIA was backing Haftar and other anti-Quadaffi forces in Chad. The UK apparently also funded its own anti-Quadaffi groups. So we’re possibly seing the end-game of a battle of the puppets, here. http://freethoughtblogs.com/dispatches/2011/08/25/the-troubling-win-in-libya/#comments King Dopplepopolos fucked around with this message at 16:06 on Aug 26, 2011 |
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Aug 26, 2011 16:03
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Brown Moses posted:And some posters from Benghazi Is ... is that the Russian flag on top?
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Sep 15, 2011 13:51
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At the risk of another derail, didn't a small group of officers basically hold the Emperor hostage in August 1945 so he wouldn't surrender?
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Sep 25, 2011 23:35
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Dr. Quigley posted:Or is this one of those things where US/Western hypocrisy and nefarious doings over the years have made people so cynical that they will take the wrong side of an issue just out of spite? It probably is that thing, yes. There are people who will defend literally any dictator, no matter how brutal and tyrannical, if that dictator says mean things about the West and imperialism. Hell, there are still people on this board who defend Stalin!
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Jul 20, 2012 03:08
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