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Denzer posted:I'm also hoping Iraq/Iran/US air support loving annihilates these savages as soon as possible. ISIS fighters in Syria have weathered far worse air and artillery bombardment than the US et al would ever realistically throw at them in a million years, but kudos on cheering on a cycle of violence which got these dudes the institutional support they have in Iraq in the first place on the same basis the US removed Saddam (bad guy doing poo poo I don't like? KILL 'EM DEAD, FIX 'ER GOOD). It's the inclusion of Iran which truly elevates your post to contemporary Art.
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Jun 15, 2014 00:49
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So the US is now attempting to: Arm syrian moderates, disarm syrian immoderates, depose Bashar al Assad, shore up or at least moderate Maliki while trying not to make direct eye contact with Sadr and Sistani and the Badr Brigade which made the latest Shiite cattle call to arms in the Iraqi south, I guess pray and smile at the other countries proximal to the region who have to receive or turn away the refugees from this mess, and implicitly support the actions of the government of Israel because of legacy mandates from generational politics giving EVERYONE involved a concrete reason to despise American foreign policy if the last decade or so wasn't enough to get them off the fence, and implicitly support the actions of the House of Saud for reasons that, impressively, manage to be even dumber since their cadre funds extremists like ISIS and al-Qaeda which, by the way, is the moderate Salafi extremist faction now. Unless you are comfortable with the deaths of lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of people as the conflict escalates further and further, there is no military solution here that isn't a military funding the construction of a time machine for the sole purpose of obliterating the last twelve years of history largely brought on by military solutions to problems that, today, seem kinda nice to have been having.
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Jun 15, 2014 01:11
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Aside from "becoming peaceful" in some ill-defined way it being more likely that ISIS will be asphyxiated of means and support once something resembling a status quo sugars out from a boiling pot of syrupy ethnic and religious hatred and they're forced to govern a municipality instead of fight a forever war with that sweet US subsidized Saudi money, that is essentially 100% accurate, yes. I'm glad we agree.
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Jun 15, 2014 02:13
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Rip Testes posted:A poster a ways back suggested Russia would make sense for involvement in Iraq. Apparently Putin agrees. So on top of this we have Iran offering local assistance to stabilize the situation the US destabilized, and Russia offering foreign power projection in Syria and Iraq to cool things down for good. I'm not even mad anymore. 10/10, funniest loving war in American history.
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Jun 21, 2014 21:35
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Can anyone offer some of the mental gymnastics that'll be performed when Gulf War II is described as anything other than a crushing strategic defeat on all fronts? Like, sure, for better or worse bailing on stated objectives and abdicating the field has become America's foreign policy wheelhouse, but after a certain point even the country that brought you Vietnam revisionism where the hippies and gutless congress were the ones who lost it for us has to admit we hosed the dog harder than it has ever been hosed since maybe Fredricksburg.
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Jun 21, 2014 21:45
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whatever7 posted:This poo poo is like real life Game of Thrones. Nice people can't last long. Life is the real life Game of Thrones, which is why Game of Thrones is the real life Game of Thrones in real life. For real.
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Jun 27, 2014 03:59
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Brown Moses posted:Breaking on AP Let's check with moderate Syrian rebels to see how Israel's endorsement of their struggle has worked out for them:
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Jun 29, 2014 19:59
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Sucrose posted:I don't think anything is going to particularly doom the Kurds at this point, unless a bunch of state actors suddenly turn on them. There's exactly one thing that unites everyone involved in this mess and that is the acknowledgement that Israel sucks. The Israeli government saying your state is a step in the right direction is like Donald Rumsfeld calling up local metro section to say unprompted that your senior college term paper was really great and impeccably researched, and that you have a future in government and then hangs up without elaboration. Most people in the know would look at the phone wondering what the hell that was about and wonder some stuff you'd probably rather they not, even if the whole thing is bullshit. Absurd Alhazred posted:Yeah, I somehow don't think Massoud Barzani is really afraid of being endorsed by Israel. It's not as much of a spoiler as it used to be, apparently. Which is of course not to say that they aren't on good terms as shown, just that its another really crap wrinkle in a regional canvass that's at this point pleated with the loving things.
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Jun 29, 2014 20:54
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Freakazoid_ posted:Is there any reason to not like Kurds at all? It seems like they're the only silver lining in this whole mess. I don't know a whole lot about them other than the Halabja attack and what I picked up from an episode of No Reservations. The PKK is a fairly disagreeable lot if you cross them and have done nonzero scummy things in their history i/r/t terrorism in Turkey. The thing is, in context, well *flails arms wildly at a map of everything east of Libya and west of China*
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Jul 2, 2014 23:11
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pengun101 posted:Is that a giant knife? It looks like something out of IS final fantasy. It's a custom butcher's knife.  (this is 18 inches/440mm, they get bigger) e; and of course it could also be a prop but, y'know, goes without saying i'd hope. "Big knives exist" is the extent of my point Willie Tomg fucked around with this message at 01:44 on Jul 6, 2014 |
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Jul 6, 2014 00:18
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Miruvor posted:So Maliki has declared that the Kurdish Erbil province in Iraq is a base for the IS.. Digging that hole even deeper for himself. How large of a support base can this guy possibly have to keep him afloat? It seems like everyone, even most other Shias want to be rid of him. Maliki is extremely good at triangulation in the context of an Iraq riven by militia lines more than party lines. Sure, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani is more beloved but the dude's over 80 and never wanted the job (and who can blame him?!). Then there's... who? al-Sadr? Baquir al-Hakim?
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Jul 9, 2014 19:02
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blowfish posted:Border changes have a habit of blowing up into the next clusterfuck five years later. Then again, the situation in Iraq sounds like it can't go anywhere but up. In a hypothetical world where a destabilized Syria and insurgent Saudi-funded Islamic State shared a border with Iran having acquired the southern half of its old military nemesis due to the almost unbelievable incompetence of its even older ideological nemesis thus gaining an adjacent border to the Saudis funding the IS, you would not have to wait five years for it to turn into a clusterfuck. That's a promise!
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Jul 14, 2014 19:32
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This life has, actually, all been a dream.
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Aug 8, 2014 18:39
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FAUXTON posted:What is this, 1979? Don't worry, if that does happen then a decade down the line we'll stab him in the back in one of the annual American international interventions in/on/around things we don't like the look of and replace him with a biddable Western-friendly face to only light comment within Syria and it will all go perfectly according to plan. Perfectly.
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Aug 28, 2014 06:33
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it's going to go down like this isn't it
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Randandal posted:I don't know what the US strategy is Neither does the US government, apparently.
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Sep 2, 2014 20:09
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Ooh ooh we're hashing out the degenerate roots of Abramic religions with a focus on Islam? Oh nice someone already mentioned fundie Christians, quick someone do the Jews so this entire tangent gets maximally stupid as fast as possible! for gently caress's sake please do not Go There
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Sep 8, 2014 07:31
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If radicalized Westerners are the concern let's cut off ISIS' primary source of Western foreign fighters and invade Europe. They'll never see it coming. Check and mate, fundamentalist Islam.
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Sep 13, 2014 20:52
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Chadderbox posted:For all the claims I hear about how savvy IS is at PR, choosing to kidnap and execute the Westerners who care most about the Middle East and the people there doesn't strike me as particularly wise at all. trigger warning: i'm going to do something very dangerous for good ol' forumid=46 and talk about aesthetics and intertextuality in regards to explaining a PR campaign that is nakedly not targeted at the prototypical D&D poster, while also mentioning bad things the US did. I'm sure its a waste of breath to point out that I'm not saying nonstate actor X is justified because State Actor Y did bad stuff, but this is also a thread where a dude straight up said we should invade Turkey for Reasons and hasn't been drummed out yet so I'm not sure how serious y'all are being. Americans in Iraq, with terrifyingly honest and good intentions, will slaughter a couple journalists and their entourage in cold blood, then beg for the chance to paste the good Samaritans who stop by to clean you off the street real quick.    ISIS, with terrifyingly honest and earnest intentions, will slaughter a couple journalists eye-to-eye in order to goad a superpower into doing something stupid in a place it doesn't understand and historically has a lot of trouble communicating to and within. Then they will kill three dudes in the street for smoking cigarettes while taking the lord's name in vain, again all in earnest. Earnesty is the key term there, coming off a decade of American occupation whose praxis can be conservatively described as "schizophrenic" where it can even be called "praxis". This is juxtaposed against a peculiarly Victorian sensibility of Americans toward actual violence IRL considering the place violence occupies in our popular media, because let's be real here pretty much everyone wants to see these motherfuckers die. I'm a sexually flexibile leftist atheist feminist alcoholic, by rights I should be first in line baying for some goddamned salafi blood. But we, such as the Americans can be said to be a "we", cannot allow ourselves to enjoy it. Sure there are some risque photos and footage of questionable poo poo US soldiers do, but generally speaking for mainstream consumption the most vivd footage Americans see of war is a few carefully cut and curated pieces of stock footage where soldiers are firing into the horizon, maybe they're swearing, maybe a bomb goes off nearby, but mostly its dominated by the omnipresent grainy nightvision or IR footage with redacted timestamps. We'll get our blood from ISIS but it'll be mediated through a few kilometers and a digital optic, then through military censors, then through newsdesk editors, then through our TVs or computers. We'll blow you to bits with a TOW because your ideology doesn't jibe with our geopolitical vision, but we'll only celebrate your death in interlaced infrared SD. We'll assassinate Bin Laden, snap a deadpic, then dump him over the side of a ship. We'll capture Saddam and show off his dental exam for the world, but leave the retributive killing to those barbarous Shia. Anything more would be tasteless and brutal, you see. Contrast this with the ISIS releases which, cumulatively, are already as a collaborative effort the most comprehensive and brutal war documentary ever made in the history of film. I wont presume to know your leanings, but the poo poo in ISIS vids is why antiwar sentiment exists, because the real brutality of the fighting isn't in the field engagements but the structural violence visited upon the population, and if you want to get utterly stone-cold blooded using High Rational Process, then in absolute terms just as the Iraq War was a fraction as tragic on all fronts as the Vietnam War, the invasion and occupation of ISIS for all its attempted genocide and excess is a fraction as deadly as the American invasion (albeit a fraction as comprehensive as well). The key difference is that ISIS records every single event that under American occupation would be brushed under the rug or delgated to proxies with SLR's and lens adapters shooting 1080p with a paper-thin depth of field, and then puts it on the internet. ISIS will not bullshit with "debaathificiation" in liquidating the local government should they prove uncooperative, they'll kill you and put it on the internet. ISIS will not dicker around rolling up 50 men on a block who may or may not be conducting insurgent activities and send them to Abu Ghraib for We watch in judgement. We watch because in adopting a pro-sumer production value, ISIS has done something very very profound which is adopting the hallmarks of a Serious News Documentary Program which we are conditioned to take seriously, far more so than the public access clownshow that is Zawahiri's Al Qaeda, and we watch because it shows an aspect of war that we usually only hear secondhand. "Forces in Ukraine have entered city X, Y dead on both sides, Z civilians thought killed or missing" etc. Adopting that visual taxonomy does a whole world of things to your brain and virtually none of them occur on the level of rational thought process! I'm sure you've noticed at some point in the last few years that in the Internet Age it is far, FAR easier to lie or obfuscate than it is to debunk a lie or establish the truth. Because of this, ISIS' decision to bypass the rational and traffic almost entirely in well-produced images is a Big loving Deal, because it signals that they're actually quite well equipped for the contemporary era because like most successful corporations they bypass your cortex and grab you straight by the damned brainstem, your limbic brain. Both individuals and groups get really really loving malleable when a PR campaign starts prodding you on the levels of sexual/aggressive/fear/hunger/safety instinct. So we watch in judgement, these videos showing acts that either Americans have done or have accomplished through proxies and say "we need to kill the people doing this, or something, just do something other than nothing to these monsters". And that is very sad because every time an American says that, Sayyid Qutb reassembles an approximate corpus in the backyard mass grave of an Egyptian black site and gives a big ol' thumbs up, because those actions are straight-up Jahiliyyah in his definition, validating his ideology and embodying the dissonance between our ideals and how quickly we discard those ideals not out of malice but because we simply don't know poo poo and act erratically yet reliably when presented with new information penetrating a fortress of stable geopolitical and cultural ignorance. There's some pretty salty language that applies to ISIS, but "ignorant" ain't one of the terms. ISIS knows exactly what it is, what its doing and what it's trying to do. Obama has cheesed me off for various reasons irrelevant to the scope of this thread, but if there's an upshot to his administration its the almost perfunctory and transactional way he's addressing this challenge, trying to stifle the blaze of oxygen and trying to get the thing burnt out of its own accord. He's also tremendously unpopular for it with 75% of the country opposing either because he's killing too many people or too few, which means he's probably hit a nice middle ground of just enough murder for the occasion. But as if to prove on some cosmic level that even if there isn't a God the Universe undeniably has a sense of poetry to it, just as Obama's administration has now defined the literal policies of Ronald Reagan as unconstitutional and mandatory gay national socialism and shifting the terms of "acceptable narrative" accordingly, so has ISIS affected the conversation in the Middle East to be one of breaking at last the borders of their colonial period and realignment along broadly religious and (sort of but not really relatedly) cultural grounds. I sincerely doubt, with their penchant for martyrdom, that ISIS has any real staying power as a territory beyond occupying the negative space between other countries but if the success of a nonstate actor can be judged on their ability to affect discourse then ISIS is running the table with their PR right now. --- Sorry if that post ranged on a bit, but a picture really is worth a thousand words and ISIS has shot over a thousand hours of footage in at least 720p30, and nearly all their words address the subconscious limbic brain so a conversation about their PR aesthetics in a forum predominated by (mostly) rational written text is going to get a little janky.
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Sep 18, 2014 19:34
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that post, GBS version, ultimate goon relatability edition: American guncam footage is a censored JAV japanese porn where the chick mewls and cries and is clearly not having a good time or at least playing at it very well. ISIS execution reels are a bleached and brazillian'ed model in Burbank having her orifices joyously ravished and begging for more in panted breaths. ISIS consists of some of the most sexually frustrated men on earth right now, in the year 2014. None of this is a coincidence.
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Sep 18, 2014 19:41
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Torpor posted:You should probably never actually say "trigger warning" since it is vague. You should probably just say exactly would be objectionable about the video itself. thanks, man! good looking out, just added some text past the colon hope you liked it --starwars420@juno.net
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Sep 18, 2014 19:43
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4th Asclepiadean posted:You seem to know quite a bit with regards to PR and the way ISIS is using it, Willie Tomg. Are there any other major historical precedents for this? Obviously this is the first one to really utilize the internet to this degree, but I'm always curious about propaganda techniques (though this may not really be the same as "propaganda"). Used to do commercial video in NY and LA and did a bunch of political work, activist work, and ad work, and specialized in work where those three types of work interleave toward an end. The end was usually was getting you to buy something. I left because the money wasn't good enough for how much of a whore I felt. For past precedent: The Last Tournament in Tennyson's Idylls of the King. Seriously. To actually answer your question though: Sort of, kinda. Most of the particulars of ISIS's net outreach as an ostensible state actor and belligerent were pioneered by the IDF first and appearing prominently around events like Operation Cast Lead (which is one of one million hilarious details that speckle the horror of pretty much everything between Morocco and China at the moment) but what makes ISIS so confounding isn't what it's doing but the combination of stuff its doing. By 2014, slickly produced and regularly updated Youtube channels exist, nations have spats on Twitter and other such bizzarre stuff. Now, as a natural part of this landscape, enters an omnicidal flagellant cult succeeding with such speed largely on the basis that nobody can seriously loving believe this poo poo is actually happening even though ISIS members obsessively document and post their actions for what is essentially a global public review that will be archived until the end of the internet or history, probably both. It is a more comprehensive review of action than pretty much any military has ever recieved, and they're submitting it voluntarily. Because they don't give a poo poo. Because they don't have to. Because it doesn't matter. Because they went to fight a war to establish a Caliphate, and they're not sure what you were expecting but they themselves knew full well. ISIS denotatively speaks through violent display, and leaves the rational argument alone to burble into place via the subtext. It sounds like ISIS made a serious push into Syria recently, with looted armor and everything, and as they post the results of that on Facebook and invade a curated corporate ecosystem alongside Syrian territory in a denotative call to action that will be talked about as such by most serious commentators, as they nestle their atrocities alongside your highschool classmates' cat and kid photos, they are providing a little reminder: "hey! Hey! Your morality is false and easily broken, if not by us then by those strong enough to kill us who will do this same thing! Our straightforward and determined antipathy beats muddled and baseless idealism any day and you can hide behind facebook or sensibly liberal-realist politics, neither will save you or anyone else from the slow train coming!" It's one part Jacques Lacan '68, one part Mao Zedong: Muslim Convert, and one part Heath Ledger's Joker, in a multimedia blitz designed to communicate as much of ISIS' vision as possible across as many emergent platforms as possible in a way almost identical to a 21st century startup company and its just bizarre and fascinating and terrible to watch the interactions involved. That's a pretty good tagline for the 21st century so far, really: Bizzarre. Fascinating. Terrible. Charliegrs posted:Probably because enough people know the US doesnt deliberately target journalists especially when a couple pixels on a screen are all that differentiates a journalist from an insurgent. Not to mention that journalist was tagging along with those insurgents. But I guess some people would rather see US troops get killed instead of an unidentifiable journalist running with a group of insurgents. Nobody local to the situation gives a gently caress you didn't deliberately kill a dude when you kill a dude, just cut the mealymouthing and bullshit and kill a dude, is ISIS' point. There are, actually, a few more things than two pixels on a screen that differentiate a journalist from an insurgent, which is ISIS' point. When ISIS does not want to kill a journalist they do not kill a journalist. When they do want to kill a journalist they make him recite the reasons why they want to kill him then cut his head off and put it on the internet. This clarity and efficiency is ISIS' point. A plurality of Americans, including apparently yourself, are for practical purposes pretty cool with killing a dude on the basis of "a couple pixels." He might be a camera assistant and driver with a wife and kids, he might be a filthy insurgent and thus live in a bubble with no attachments to the community that make that guys death a tragedy, or maybe the pair hired the "insurgent" milita to run security for them that day in the killingest year in Baghdad, whatever, whatever it actually was there's a lot of things that could be there with only a couple pixels to differentiate between the possibilities. Say, at best, a 50/50 shot of insurgent/journalist, but goddamn if Are Troops and Charliegrs and the American people won't make that call, for the insurgent, for Saeed Chmagh, for the whole goddamned world if it might possibly provide a feeling of safety though it never does. That is insane. That is ISIS' point. When you make posts like the one you made just there, you concretely validate Jahiliyyah ideology and make ISIS' points for them. As a dude ISIS would like to kill a lot, that makes me sad, because I would like to see them proven wrong wherever possible. Chadderbox posted:I actually pretty much agree with all you just said. I just think that regardless of their intention, the Western world will figure out a way for it to backfire on them. If there's one thing we're better at than them, it's PR, their own recently developed skills notwithstanding. I don't think ISIS can win militarily, or "win" in a pure PR contest or "win" anything other than the martyrdom they crave by one route or another. The PR race between the guy who says he's going to kill you because you're abominable, and the guy who says literally anything else is going to be short and silly. The issue is allowing shock value to rule with the ISIS releases, and allowing it to obscure what they're actually communicating with the A/V work beyond "we killed some people and desecrated the bodies" because they don't have to go to the lengths they have if recounting war crimes is the only goal. Willie Tomg fucked around with this message at 18:52 on Sep 19, 2014 |
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Sep 19, 2014 09:55
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The original organizational referent can be safely argued to be a tribe, and there are undeniable tribal interactions present in the Iraqi north, but in their subsequent development ISIS itself has resembled nothing so much as a franchise, down to competing with lame 'ol Zawahiri's Al Qaeda down the way (so tacky, we stopped going there when we were 8! their site is made in geocities and has a link to their ICQ contact!) They have a logo, they have pretty consistent, concisely and pointedly edited copy written by captors and read by hostages and uploaded in a timely fashion. They update their Youtube and social media regularly with consistent bumpers and lower thirds. I did this same goddamned work for years. If they're a tribe, realize they're a tribe with brand management skills. Their brand is murder. Their brand is "hot" right now. My Imaginary GF posted:I will not say this so bluntly elsewhere, for I am a diplomatic individual and will deal with civil manners in civil society. No you won't, you and I both will continue posting thoughts and observations about it on the internet just like everyone else ITT. You'll probably muse about it offhandedly to a few collegues while shooting the breeze and if you're very lucky indeed be able to have a nice, meaty brass-tacks talk about it with a good friend or two. But neither of us will actually *do* anything. Civil society will do nothing. Near-omniscient robots with laser guided bombs will do something, special forces ninja men from an unknown and unknowable branch of the Army with a three-letter-acronym deployed as advisors will do something, but those are under the purview of the president alone with minimal oversight thanks in large part to "civil society" chewing itself down to the last bite post 9-11. Congress recently approved aid to the FSA which is sorta civil society-ish, but that was mostly about not being late to the party on killing ISIS while its still in fashion and coincidentally quietly passing a budget in the meantime so that was really just a domestic placebo to keep the lights on. You should say it bluntly, if you feel it. You should discard this false veil if it isn't what you're feeling, because if you don't feel it then it's bullshit, and it can be hard to forget in a hypermediated world removed from the Lacanian Real, but generally speaking IRL notbullshit will win out over bullshit every time once it hits the fan. This--all of this!--is ISIS' point. quote:They are a synthesis of classic fundamentalist tribalism with new media technology and can only be destroyed by state power operating in the region. I have no illusion as to what this call for destruction will entail and I am not proud of the fact that I am making it. However, I sleep better at night knowing ISIS will be eradicated. Don't you? For truly, what is the alternative? We could not oblige them. Generally speaking, in some strategic game or scenario or ~thing~ where you need to guess intent it helps to look at moves and patterns and think "what is my opponent moving toward, what is that getting them?" It is my assumption from how they invaded Iraq as quickly and thoroughly as they did, then tried inciting global outrage wiping out an ethnic group or three, then just obliterated all possible subtext and killed some Americans and taunted the viewers about it, that they're trying to elicit some kind of reaction or something. Some kind of response maybe? Doing *nothing* is not an option, but any response has got to be calculated against how this is exactly what they're explicitly asking for. That should be worrying because ISIS isn't Al Qaeda, they don't make the kind of amateur hour mistakes Al Qaeda does, the dudes who did make those mistakes got killed off by the SAA. The man has pissed me off and back on again, but in not rising too quickly to that bait Obama might just have won back a little respect in my eyes after two unbelievably hosed up terms in office. As I go to bed entirely too late my nightmare vision is that ISIS advances just far enough to irrevocably destabilize Assad, so that when a coalition of concerned nations finally wraps it all up its a whole lot of devastation and rubble and civilians and instability all at the doorsteps of Turkey, Israel, Iran and Saudi Arabia. And so we gotta count on those guys working together to maintain a long term peace. And it'll be too late when we look back and realize that all the beheadings and scriptural chanting and veneration of the individual martyr were data points in the plot of ISIS the orgainization's ultimate ~~martyrdom operation~~: The suicide bombing of 20th Century geopolitics. Generally speaking, I would like to avoid that endgame. meristem posted:I mostly agree with you, but I don't think you should phrase it as "ISIS 'doesn't give a poo poo'" and 'obsessively documents everything'". As I posted upthread, if it were so, if they genuinely, nihilistically didn't give a poo poo and documented everything, then where are the rape videos? This is a good point! Willie Tomg fucked around with this message at 11:43 on Sep 19, 2014 |
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Sep 19, 2014 11:38
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And please, please, for all that is left sacred in this world, do NOT invade Turkey as delicious as it may sound. Thank you all for your time and God bless.
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Sep 19, 2014 11:42
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SBJ posted:This battle is pretty much going to be NCR vs Caesar's Legion This is the third worst New Vegas reference in this thread. In summary, close and delete D&D, thank you.
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Sep 22, 2014 09:23
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Miltank posted:So did the US save those Yazidis? "Yes" "no" "some of them, not others" and "the US didn't really do anything" are all perfectly valid answers to that question, so by American standards yeah we did.
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Sep 30, 2014 06:23
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Invicta{HOG}, M.D. posted:The more I think about Kobane the less I understand the ISIS strategy. My understanding is that it is of importance logistically and I am sure it would be a boon to recruiting to take a large city despite air strikes. But holding a large city empty of inhabitants with the Turkish army and irregular Kurdish groups just across the border possibly staging raids, etc. seems like it would be difficult even if they don't lose large numbers in taking it in the first place. As long as the Kurdish groups have a safe haven in Turkey that ISIS doesn't feel like it can attack without triggering entry of the Turks into the fight I don't see how they can hold the ground. Despite the name, ISIS/IS' behavior is highly inconsistent with a group that wants to establish a state insofar as the word "state" carries any kind of meaning, but very very consistent with creating as much goddamned instability as possible in a very central region of the world. I've said it before ITT but it bears repeating: The likely outcome of all this mess (unless the US directly or by proxy straight-up goes to bat for Assad to preserve the regime) will be a sweep of devastated, starving, traumatized, fractured ungovernable mess between Turkey, Israel, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, with those four parties all needing to work together to contain it. Take a minute to consider any two of those four working together on anything at all. Or, say, American attempts to broker dialogue between them. As a new political entity attempting to establish a lasting presence they're rank failures, but as aspirant suicide bombers of the postcolonial political order they're wildly successful. Dilkington posted:I've only seen the first episode you poo poo! You can't really "spoil" the plot to Twin Peaks unless you watch Fire Walk With Me first. Luckily you shouldn't do that ever for any reason, so you're on the right track!
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Oct 4, 2014 08:44
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MothraAttack posted:The Pakistani Taliban has declared allegiance to ISIS. Well on the bright side this new competition bodes ill for Zawahiri's claim to be expanding Al Qaeda operations into India! 
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Oct 4, 2014 20:30
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yep, it fits! The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion: We tortured some folks > The Middle East: To Every Cloud, a Silver Lining Around a New Cloud
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Oct 4, 2014 20:34
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Miltank posted:ok so this is just a guess, but is the actual war we are getting in about what happens to all this land after ISIS is gone? There's no "we" or "war" "getting in" really. The US, Brits, and French are taking a few swats at Them There Musselmen with air power like an obese cat pawing a toy feather just out of reach, the Turks are making noise in almost every direction but are mostly oppressing the poo poo out of the Kurds like they do, yadda yadda. The reason there's such noninvolvement is because nobody knows what the gently caress happens to the land or its constituent people, its a massive headache and beyond Erdogan wanting a vaguely desired buffer area between Turkey's borders proper and the mess that Syria is becoming, the only group that has really communicated any kind of endgame is ISIS. Which is probably why ISIS is "winning" by default more than anything else right now. The endgame is killing a lot of people where they can and torturing the joy out of whoever's left in order to fracture the gently caress out of postcolonial power.
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Oct 7, 2014 07:58
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My Imaginary GF posted:You kill everyone suceptible to having the idea. Simple enough an answer for you? Agreed. You go first.
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Oct 7, 2014 08:26
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I can see it now... Hillary 2016: Kill them all, God will know His own.
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Oct 7, 2014 08:28
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No, seriously, you've been posting a lot of belligerence in this thread. You're looking awfully sectarian and politicized which will further destabilize the region hard as that may be to conceive of now. Physician, kill thyself. (realtalk: i actually love you because whether as part of a conscious effort or not, you embody a lot of the absurdity and insanity of modern foreign policy wonk discourse, please stick around you serve a legitimately important function ITT)
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Oct 7, 2014 08:34
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Tias posted:So, everyone in my facebook feed who are remotely left-leaning post shittons of pictures of female YPG fighters, like it's the second coming of Marx or something. It's ideologically sound IDF chick fetishization. Not complicated.
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Oct 7, 2014 19:09
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never trust an elf posted:Is it at all possible that the US and allies have realized that there's no use in destroying IS and creating another power vacuum, and their ineffectual response is a more of strategy to allow IS to capture a predefined area and create their state? The prerequisites of military coordination and uniform ideological acceptance from all parties involved are too insane to seriously contemplate. If we're "going there" we may as well presuppose the driving force behind it is a secret group of twelve Patriots calling themselves The Wisemen's Committee seeking to control all information and conflict itself. what the gently caress is with this thread and lending itself to videogame analogies jesus christ
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Oct 9, 2014 19:15
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Atomizer posted:Also, #5? Why would everyone else in the Middle East be perturbed with the destruction of ISIS (aside from Turkey, of course?) Oh my sweet summer child, its time for you to learn how the House of Saud rolls in their home turf...  (The Kingdom has a storied history of exporting its troubled youth into Chechnya, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yugoslavia, and basically every vaguely sectarian hotspot of the last 30 years, and the US abides it due to a mix of being that loving awful at long-term decision making and applied post-Soviet Nelson Doctrine, i.e. "gotta bomb somethin'!") Also, nobody's "helping" because "helping" would involve sending an army into a destroyed and lawless negative space between Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Israel, and you're high off your own piss if you think "helping the good guys" is going to keep from having the entire world suddenly making tough choices about which side its bread is really buttered on. Right now the "good" outcome is Bashar al Assad, the dude who gassed Damascus, stabilizing his regime in tandem with an unusually reconciliatory Iraq deciding to give nationalist fraternity another chance. I'll give you a minute to muse on that. Politics be gettin' all early 20th century up in here. Willie Tomg fucked around with this message at 08:54 on Oct 11, 2014 |
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Oct 11, 2014 08:46
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Volkerball posted:Tell me more about realpolitik. I completely agree with this assessment. That is the good outcome considering the alternatives. That's how bad it is. quote:At least if he falls, then we can begin to address the inevitable conditions that will be created after the regime collapses whether it be 2 years or 20 years from now. "Who's we, kemo sabe?"
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Oct 11, 2014 22:01
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If you think Assad regaining control is going to bring peace to Syria, I have a bridge to sell you. The stability tyranny brings is the kind of stability that fell apart and created this war in the first place. Recreating those conditions doesn't solve anything. It just kicks the can down the road until something else happens and war kicks off again. It makes all these deaths in vain.
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Voyager I posted:How do nukes solve these problems unless [MIGF's] plan is to literally glass the middle east? Yes.
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Oct 14, 2014 08:06
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village catamite posted:http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/10/17/us-mideast-crisis-jets-idUSKCN0I60TM20141017 "lol" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ux0Mb7pryM
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Oct 19, 2014 08:47
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After thirteen years of War on Terror, where much of Iraq and Syria--secular governments--used to be, there is now a salafist islamist state with an air force. The solution to this emergent problem is more War on Terror. I am an adult presumably free of developmental disabilities in the good company of peers as I say this again, and again, and again. Let's fight!
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Oct 19, 2014 08:54
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 16:23 |
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In case you thought there was a single facet of the region which was not sharpening its edges, Saudi Arabia is getting ready to execute one of the most prominent Shiite clerics in the country for extremely concrete and grounded reasons. Nothing will come of this I'm sure, now least of all.
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Oct 20, 2014 08:39
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