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I'm very skeptical about relying on decapitation strikes as foreign policy. For starters, it seems like the sort of thing that's way easier to talk about than it is to implement. So you're likely looking at a high chance of failure out of the gate, highly dependent on a whole bunch of murky stuff like intel and chains of command. What's the impact of a failed strike? I don't know, but it's not going to be a pure win. Even in the best case scenario, where you've killed your man, it's not as if it magically resolves the underling situation. Leaders come from power bases. Kill just Assad and the SAA is still there. Destroy the SAA, and the Alawites, Iran, and Lebanon are still there. Maybe if there's a clear winner among the competing power bases that's ok, but in Syria there hasn't been, nor have I seen such a thing in other situations. Anyone got any positive examples? I'm also skeptical that the threat of decapitation is really a good deterrent to a dictator. The idea that threatening their life will somehow make them more pliable geopolitical actors is, uh, sketchy at best. We even have a nice little example in North Korea. We've had joint command forces in the area transparently training for a decapitation invasion for decades. It's got the NK elite terrified, certainly. I suppose that that sort of thing has its place in geopolitics, but I find that US policy with such things tends to be schizophrenic to the point of uselessness.
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Mar 11, 2016 11:47
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 03:40 |
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icantfindaname posted:Considering each of them killed ten times as many people as ISIS, and directly play into the Islamist narrative that secular government is evil, yeah. Basic math is hard when you have a pathological need to justify isolationism and reflexive anti-Americanism, I guess? Just comparing kill-counts is naive, because it ignores displacement. An established dictator has control over the movements of his people, so massacres and purges are comparatively easier. If ISIS controlled its borders, it would be just as brutal as any dictator (especially since it's, you know, a goddamn medieval-style caliphate). Moreover, if the Syrian war was taking place in a shithole like Sudan, we would be seeing six or seven figure casualties among the displaced.
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Mar 11, 2016 19:40
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That being said, ISIL is fundamentally an Iraqi phenomenon that just so happens to project into Syria. They didn't help make the civil war any simpler, I don't think that they were the most important factor.
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Mar 11, 2016 21:33
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The reason that Syria is such a clusterfuck is because there are so many godamn factions, which all have their own agendas and which all have strong emotional and/or existential reasons not to back down. I think that's why Obama balked on intervention. He intuited that no matter what our best intentions were, we would fundamentally never care enough to be anything other than one faction or another's puppet.
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Mar 14, 2016 10:40
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Given that the USA hit its stride right after WW2 when basically the entire rest of the world was either a smoldering ruin or colonial shitheap... Yeah, we've lost relative power. We had lead, and now it's smaller.
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Mar 15, 2016 03:47
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