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quote:When The Atlantic published this statement, and also published Clinton’s assessment that “great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle,” Obama became “rip-poo poo angry,” according to one of his senior advisers. The president did not understand how “Don’t do stupid poo poo” could be considered a controversial slogan. Ben Rhodes recalls that “the questions we were asking in the White House were ‘Who exactly is in the stupid-poo poo caucus? Who is pro–stupid poo poo?’ ” The Iraq invasion, Obama believed, should have taught Democratic interventionists like Clinton, who had voted for its authorization, the dangers of doing stupid poo poo. Hilary Clinton announces new campaign theme song to summarize her foreign policy.
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Mar 10, 2016 20:23
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 11:47 |
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Didn't you know? Knee capping troublesome regimes on behalf of the Israelis, Saudis and French means the "world" relies on America for stability. Imagine how much worse Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya would be right now if not for America's stabilizing influence on the region.
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Mar 11, 2016 02:03
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Fojar38 posted:I too get misty eyed when I imagine a world with the likes of Ghaddafi and the Taliban still in power gently caress Ghaddafi, I'm sure ISIS will do a much better job of running Libya. And gently caress those Taliban guys, I wonder who helped them gain power to start with? Unlike the Saudis or Pakistan. Those are countries that should definitely be given lots of money and diplomatic support, they are true paragons of stability and propping them up while turning a blind eye to who they are funding is exactly how a superpower invested in global stability ought to act.
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Mar 11, 2016 02:13
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It's precious that anyone would spin the rise of ISIS as due to American "inaction".
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Mar 11, 2016 02:45
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icantfindaname posted:It's almost like ISIS isn't the problem with Syria, and is responsible for only a small fraction of the deaths and destruction Oh, is it Assad? The guy who generously stored all those prisoners in undocumented black sites on behalf of the US government during the 2000s? Or did the problems start with his father, Hafez, who joined America's coalition to fight Iraq (you know, the country that America had been selling weapons to in the 1980s because they were fighting the Iranians, to whom America was also selling weapons).
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Mar 11, 2016 02:59
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icantfindaname posted:Moved to remove Assad at the start of the war in 2012 or 2013 Nobody is debating whether American can or does do good in the world, we're talking about America's foreign policy, and in particular it's role in the middle east. And anyone who thinks America promotes regional stability or has promoted stability at any point in the last several decades is delusional. Which is why your argument is only sustainable when you speak in the vaguest of platitudes and pretend that history started in 2012 and anything that occurred before then is off bounds.
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Mar 11, 2016 03:13
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 11:47 |
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This thread has moved fast.Juffo-Wup posted:What do you think a good American policy toward the middle east would look like? That's such an enormous question it's not really possible to answer without either writing a dissertation or being so vague as to hardly be saying anything meaningful. As a first step, though I'd suggest re-examining why America is trying to dominate control of oil rather than focusing on moving away from fossil fuel dependency. A Manhattan-project level of government investment in developing alternatives to fossil fuel would be preferable and probably cheaper than America's current energy strategy. More generally the US should re-examine it's long standing tendency to give money and aid to forces that it ends up fighting shortly thereafter. The Americans (and others) have been too clever by half and are constantly trying to fund groups like Hamas or Fatah to undermine each other. Rather than promoting stability the US actually promotes instability -- or, to be more precise, the promote an uneasy 'balance of power' between various regional actors, all with the intention of preventing any local country (or any outside force other than the US, such as Russia or China) from gaining supremacy. I would suggest the US should give up on this objective and leave the Middle East to its own affairs, with only limited involvement. This would trigger a period of greater instability in the short term but is the only acceptable long term solution. You can't have a Republican and an empire at the same time so one of those two things needs to be sacrificed, and it would be better for both the American people and the world if America would return to seeing itself as a city on a Hill rather than the increasingly incompetent world policeman who can't help but gently caress everything it touches up. icantfindaname posted:Sure, works for me Obama is just a continuation of past US presidencies. The differences are only interesting to clueless and myopic American liberals who apparently take state department and White House propaganda at face value when assessing America's goals in the Middle East. By your logic if I were to set your house on fire and then show up a few minutes later with buckets of water to help you put the fire out, then I should be praised for helping you fight the fire. Or alternative, if I don't show up with a bucket of water, then I should be condemned for not bringing water but apparently no one should mention that I am the one who set the fire in the first place. America does not have the institutional capacity to be an objective umpire type figure in the middle east. If America intervenes in the middle east it will only be to advance the perceived benefits of 'American interests', which are only tangentially related to the interests of the majority of actual Americans. I mean hell, even losing access to cheap gas would probably save millions of American lives in the long term by killing car culture and cutting down on obesity and diabetes rates in the heartland. This insane fairy tale that America or any other world power is capable of intervening in foreign conflicts without inevitably serving the interests of the people who run that world power is staggeringly naive. No empire in history has ever invaded other countries for the benefit of those countries and nothing is going to change that. At most you might find some very extreme edge cases like the liberation of France where the interests of a global power coincidentally lined up with the interests of the local population, but even these examples are vanishingly rare in the historical record. If America hadn't exported any guns, invaded any countries, given any diplomatic support to or otherwise had anything other than peaceful trade relations with the countries of the Middle East since, say, 1991, then the entire region would likely be vastly richer, happier and more stable than it is right now. It wouldn't be a perfect world but literally hundreds of millions of people would still be alive and countless more would continue to enjoy basic government services.
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Mar 11, 2016 22:09
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