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"Europeans" did not at all broadly support the deployment in Afghanistan. European governments honoured article 5, but it was very unpopular at home.
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Apr 6, 2024 09:29
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Antigravitas posted:"Europeans" did not at all broadly support the deployment in Afghanistan. European governments honoured article 5, but it was very unpopular at home. "very" unpopular is pushing it - it wasn't a big deal in any country whose politics i follow. it wasn't popular, but nobody was seriously running for election against the occupation or anything. even the fringe left weren't pushing their anti-occupation stance for the most part in the way they would've if it were a thing people actively resented
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Apr 6, 2024 10:22
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I also remember living through those times and it was pretty clear that the decision to go to war, in Afghanistan and Iraq, and for every military adventure since, was taken first, and then afterwards it was made popular. Or just about made to garner enough support. Over here in Italy they opened the sluice gates and a flood of 24/7 bloodthirst screaming propaganda came gushing forth. You could not be a pacifist voice in public discourse. Doubts could only be publicly acknowledged after the enormity of the disaster became apparent, but that was years later, when the massacres were done, the money was already spent, the countries devastated. But the public discourse in the lead-up to both invasions was something I have not seen since, I have never seen that level of pro-war propaganda hydro-cannon again, to the point that it's hard to even convey that atmosphere or sometimes to acknowledge that it was a thing that happened and not some feverish nightmare. If the government ever decided to to something similar again, I have no doubts that the process would be exactly the same, so someone can always well ackshually me about how popular the war was
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Apr 6, 2024 13:46
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In many countries Iraq was completely, 100% different from Afghanistan. The biggest ever demonstration in Finland was against the idiotic invasion of Iraq. Meanwhile Afghanistan was just a background thing which we helped with, even though Finland wasn't in Nato at that time. Of course in some unfortunate countries they did both.
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Apr 6, 2024 17:15
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mortons stork posted:I also remember living through those times and it was pretty clear that the decision to go to war, in Afghanistan and Iraq, and for every military adventure since, was taken first, and then afterwards it was made popular. Or just about made to garner enough support. tbf this is basically all meaningful foreign policy - see the remarkable process of swedish NATO accession for a recent case of squeezing the toothpaste out of the tube before anyone had time to really talk about the issue. even after it became clear to anyone paying attention that we were propping up a cruel and totally illegitimate puppet regime in afghanistan it wasn't unpopular because 1) there was a sense that we owed this to the americans (this is the main benefit sketched in the norwegian parliamentary inquiry into that war, for instance) and 2) it wasn't causing any direct impact on the lives of ordinary people. the guys who went were typically professionals and/or volunteers, and you could make a plausible case that we were helping out with women's rights etc. (uplifting the natives, if you will) by the continued occupation so it was kind of a wash. the lefties were of course opposed, but the general sense was that we were opposed because this is the sort of thing to which we're always opposed rather than any particular political commitment. for an examination of typical nordic attitudes to afghanistan well into the occupation, see Borgen season 2 ep 1. it's quite watchable television and it's also extremely revealing e. if anything i'd say that iraq is the exceptional case here, since the americans made such a public attempt at bullying their allies into making a serious investment with them, which those allies weren't necessarily prepared to do without any at least plausibly compelling reason. many countries did despite the case for that war being obvious nonsense, but the degree of elite discord on the issue made a public conversation real and potentially impactful in some instances. dissent on that point was taken seriously in a way which i don't think i've seen replicated at any other time in my life when it comes to major foreign policy decisions. V. Illych L. fucked around with this message at 22:24 on Apr 6, 2024 |
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Apr 6, 2024 22:21
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jaete posted:In many countries Iraq was completely, 100% different from Afghanistan. The biggest ever demonstration in Finland was against the idiotic invasion of Iraq. Meanwhile Afghanistan was just a background thing which we helped with, even though Finland wasn't in Nato at that time. ISAF operated on a mandate from UN Security Council, so had also the approval of Russia and China. This ties to Putin approaching GWB at the time, pointing out that "see, I was right in dealing with Chechens!" This relationship soured quickly when Bush and Blair started drumming up for war against Iraq, and in part cemented Putin's view that Russia must seek geopolitical independence and regional leadership, Russia has only to lose by playing by rules if USA plays Calvin Ball. I'm not sure that he wouldn't have become an underpant poisoning genocidal despot in any case, but that we'll never know. However USA and Britain lost a lot of soft power in third world by destabilising the entire region hunting for non-existent WMDs, something that Putin then claimed Ukraine had in 2022.
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Apr 7, 2024 15:02
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Iraq also cost a lot of good will in Europe. There's a reason they renamed french fries into freedom fries. The war caused a massive loving rift within NATO. The German Foreign Minister stepped up to the podium and explained to the entire world that he didn't buy the WMD evidence. I was in school at the time and it was not only tolerated but encouraged by the school administration to go anti-war protests. An otherwise completely unthinkable thing. It was absolutely within the Overton window of the time to discuss whether a military alliance with the US was still appropriate, given that all they did was bomb brown people in illegal and cruel invasions. The US massively lost the public trust. Russia seemed sane and rational by comparison. The 2000s were the reasons why in the 2020s many people simply laughed off American intelligence that pointed towards a Russian invasion of Ukraine. No one wanted to believe the Americans because of how they acted in the years after 9/11.
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Apr 7, 2024 23:13
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Lord Stimperor posted:Iraq also cost a lot of good will in Europe. note that this was purely in the realm of public discourse - elite sentiment was firmly enough pro-american that the NSA being publicly revealed to have tapped angela merkel's communications was basically brushed under the rug in 2015, and smaller allies have had our leashes shortened considerably with the establishment of american not-bases with what amounts to extraterritorial status on our soil. we love the americans and always have, except for iraq and before that vietnam
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Apr 7, 2024 23:22
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Lord Stimperor posted:Iraq also cost a lot of good will in Europe.
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Apr 8, 2024 05:27
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A Buttery Pastry posted:Was that "many" people still, given that Russia had already annexed Crimea six years earlier, and parts of Georgia earlier still? Neither of those got enough news coverage to cause a significant shift in public opinion.
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Apr 11, 2024 19:34
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VictualSquid posted:Neither of those got enough news coverage to cause a significant shift in public opinion.  Georgia does not seem to have moved the needle much, but Crimea appears to have shifted attitudes quite a lot in Europe. I suppose it's possible it didn't stick in all cases, but then we're talking about people getting convinced within a decade that the guy who just annexed a neighboring territory would definitely not invade the same country again.
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Apr 11, 2024 21:10
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Both Israel and Palestine being fans of Russian anti-western authoritarianism is pretty funny.
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Apr 11, 2024 21:23
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A Buttery Pastry posted:This does not seem to be true: The sentiment I remember from before the war wasn't "Putin would never invade again", it was "Putin will not invade Ukraine right now". The arguments that convinced me personally were pointing out reasons that an invasion would fail if Putin tried. Though there always was an only half joking undercurrent of "The Amis are saying he will invade, which proves that he won't".
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Apr 12, 2024 18:23
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