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Lol at Trump just trying to sell more weapons systems.
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Nov 6, 2017 22:24
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Count Roland posted:The real question is is what if anything KSA does in response. They should bomb Qatar, obviously.
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Nov 6, 2017 22:27
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I think most trials in the KSA are probably of the "show" variety. What happens to those arrested probably depends on who has control over the judiciary right now. I expect there will be trials because there were arrests, but a few timely "suicides" might crop up for anyone they really don't want around.
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Nov 7, 2017 00:39
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Saladin Rising posted:The "Trump plan for the Middle East" is as follows: You forgot the part where he sells a shitload of weapons.
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Nov 7, 2017 03:26
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Relevant Tangent posted:You're assuming Trump won't just declare war via Twitter regardless of how ready we are. That's fine though. No one actually takes anything he says at face value so everyone would just keep arguing about what he really meant until someone took the phone away. It's one of the few perks of having a president who's pathologically incapable of leadership.
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Nov 7, 2017 04:19
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Crazycryodude posted:Is Rojava still cool and good? Cool? Yes. Good? Eeeeh.
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Nov 7, 2017 07:17
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Retarded Goatee posted:They're a still living actor in one of the roughest neighborhoods in the world. Some of the PYD people are dedicated/dangerous PKK lifers from Iraq and Turkey. They're lurching toward a one-party state the Ocalan portraits are apparently loving everywhere. There's been conflict between Kurds and Arabs and allegations of Kurdish chauvanism and shameful collaboration with the Assad regime. So they have problems and big ones, but I've never seen anything that made me say "welp, gently caress them forever" and I'm still willing to count them as the "good guys" in Syria even if I maintain my reservations.
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Nov 7, 2017 08:34
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Al-Saqr posted:https://twitter.com/ajenews/status/927992871881408515 
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Nov 8, 2017 06:14
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Randarkman posted:Yeah, you'll see this alot with with Iranian emigres in the West it seems (also often with their families still in Iran). Non-practising/non-religious though with a weird mix of "I WISH IRAN WAS STILL ZOROASTRIAN!". Never mind that Zoroastrianism kind of came down like a house of cards with the fall of the royal family and already was severly weakened both as an institution and as a popular religion by factors such as the Mazdaki revolution, the weakness of the monarchy in the late Sassanid period and the destruction and disruption wrought by the last great war with Rome. I'm not sure cultures really have "high points" and some Persian nationalist out there probably thinks it's been all downhill since Xerxes. Iran is an interesting case because the Persian identity is ancient but has shifted hugely over time, along with its borders. The Shia faith of the Safavids is relatively recent part of Persian culture and coexisted with a more secular monarchist sort of ethnonationalism before attempting to subsume it. This may be "ancient history" to an extent, but it still provides ammunition for secular nationalists who vaguely miss the Shah or want a "Persian" rather than "Islamic" government. Traditionalist, conservative, and reactionary elements who nevertheless find themselves at odds with the government are always looking for ways to prove they're the real patriots and the more left-wing "smash the state" types have their own motives for undermining the powers that be.
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Nov 8, 2017 11:14
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Iranian society has been dominated by a hardline ideological minority since '79. It's not a contradiction to say that the government is a corrupt and theocratic totalitarian poo poo show and that most Iranians are moderates who yearn for reform. Rouhani is something of a synthesis of those two realities -- a safe channel for reformist impulses that doesn't threaten the dominant ideology. As Volkerball loves to point out, the "most Iranians are good people" argument is pretty irrelevant as long as they have a "supreme leader" who is willing to impose his manichaean worldview on the rest of society and even export it abroad. I'd like to believe that will change in time, but until it does, Iran's foreign policy will continue to be a source of misery and strife in the region.
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Nov 9, 2017 06:06
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Ardennes posted:I think the point is that while Iran has higher execution rates, the Saudis are usually just the next place down (they weren't that far behind in 2014), neither one deserves brownie points. I wonder how the execution rates would look if we could account for extrajudicial/tribal law/"sharia" killings. Both Iran and the KSA have an issue with paramilitary "moral police" and other alleged "non-state" actors taking the law into their own hands. My impression is this is worse in Saudi, but I don't have the stats to back that up.
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Nov 9, 2017 08:20
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I think Iran and Saudi are locked in the classic cold war scenario of using the other regime's misdeeds to justify their own. I don't think taking one or the other out of the equation would "fix" their rival overnight (look at all the poo poo the post cold war US has pulled), but finding a way to ratchet down tensions would probably be a good thing for both countries and the broader Middle East.
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Nov 9, 2017 09:02
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Volkerball posted:I think MBS is a product of some larger dynamic within the royal family. Something that has been brewing for a long time. He couldn't rock the boat the way he has alone as a relative newcomer to the entrenched Saudi political scene. I don't know what that dynamic is, but it's clear to me there's a huge split driving recent events, and not much good investigative reporting has been done on what that split is that I've seen. Well yeah. His appointment was a naked power grab. How many old princes from the other family lines had their dreams of being king some day stripped away overnight? It's not just that they don't get to be king for a couple years and then die and make room for the next geezer, it's that their sons won't have the prestige of being the son of a king. Consider the grandson of King Fahd who allegedly fled to Iran. He has two "bin"s in his name because his grandfather is the only reason he's important. Is his son going to have three bins? When does a prince stop being a prince? The old system let the crown bounce around between branches of the royal family so that every little princeling had status and might be king some day. King Salman has taken that all away from them. His son is set to reign for two generations and, when he dies, the only king's sons left will be the House of Salman. They're the royal line now and and every other al-Saud is just a potential pretender to the throne. Their only way back to being true royalty is to bring down MBS, so he's letting everyone know just how bad an idea that is. How it got this far, I couldn't say, but my personal theory is "too many princes" (IE they were too busy jockeying against each other to notice the ground collapsing beneath them) combined with some sort of institutional takeover of the Saudi bureaucracy. It's unambiguously a form of regime change and now MBS is trying to show everyone how much better he'll be than the old guard. In twenty years someone will write a really good book about all this intrigue, but gently caress if we can make sense of it now.
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Nov 10, 2017 11:51
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Josef bugman posted:I wonder, how likely is it that it will stick or that someone won't try and off the new crown prince (MBS was it?) or he ruins himself/the country with pointless wars. Well, this started with sidelining the previous crown prince, who controlled the interior ministry, and this more recent "corruption" purge removed the head of the national guard as well as arresting many of the most influential and wealthy figures in the kingdom (also at least one prominent prince seems to have died mysteriously during his arrest and there was that very suspicious helicopter crash). Let's not forget that the previous media purge during the Qatar crisis removed a number of journalists of insufficient loyalty and gave an excuse to shut off Al Jazeera. Saqr could give you a better read on this than I could, but my impression is that MBS's ascension occurred amidst a climate of fear and silence that was strong even by Saudi standards. The fall of princes is too big to hide, but I wouldn't be surprised if there were much broader purges going on within the military and security apparatuses right now. The old system had a balance of power of sorts maintained between powerful princes from various branches of the family who ruled various ministries almost as vassals of the crown. With so many of those powerful ministers under house arrest, their cronies are exposed and vulnerable. MBS is going for total control and with a war on and plenty of real corruption to expose (It's a kleptocracy. Everyone is corrupt.), he has all the pretext he needs to go for broke. If the window for a palace coup is still open, it likely won't be much longer.
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Nov 10, 2017 13:07
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mediadave posted:Wasn't the reason for the Qatar blockade pretty much a tweet praising Iran? It was actually a fake speech praising Iran fabricated by UAE hackers iirc.
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Nov 10, 2017 13:46
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Al-Saqr posted:the question running through my head is why now and not sooner, if they wanted to actually successfully attack Hezbollah they shouldve done it while the Iron was hot in Syria and while Assad was on the back foot and while there was enough hezbollah fighters busy in Syria, why are they picking the fight now?! at this point the Russians and Iranians have Syria Covered and now Hezbollah can recall it's battle hardened fighters back to lebanon no problem. Because something has changed in the kingdom. The Qatar incident seemed equally unprompted and was rooted in grievances that went back years. Maybe Trump's "leadership" has enboldened them, but I think MBS's power play took precedence over everything else. Some of the other princes were involved in their own maneuverings in Syria and Lebanon and maybe two years ago he was more interested in watching them fail than helping the revolution succeed.
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Nov 11, 2017 02:51
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Squalid posted:My main question is: if Saudi or Israel were to launch a campaign against Hezbollah, what would be the objective? It's been a few years since Israel last "mowed the grass" and even though they never actually win anything in these wars, they seem to play well domestically. We usually keep I/P stuff quarantined in the the other thread so we haven't really gotten into Netanyahu's corruption scandal, but Likud could probably really go for a distracting patriotic upswelling right now.
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Nov 11, 2017 05:00
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Squalid posted:This whole Hariri business has me really stumped. I'm not convinced Israel will do anything, and I'm convinced even the most incompetent Saudi strategist couldn't come up with a reason to attack Hezbollah militarily. Whether Hariri was forced or bribed into resigning, there has to be some kind of political strategy at play. What it is I can't figure out, possibly it makes no sense anyway. I think it's about money. Hariri's company holds huge stakes in Saudi oil at a time when the kingdom is apparently strapped for cash. There's a massive Aramco ipo slated for next year and the Kingdom has lowered petro taxes in an apparent attempt to make it more enticing. I'm not a finance guy, so I wasn't following the ins and outs, but many of the people snared in the "corruption" probe were Saudi oil billionaires. Hariri's multi-billion-dollar business entanglements in Saudi make him dangerous to them, but also provide a lot of leverage over him. My pet theory is MBS is trying to monopolize his hold over Saudi oil wealth (the real keys to the kingdom) and Hariri was a loose end that needed tying. So they brought him in, sidelined him, and blamed it on Hezballah and Iran. Because they blame everything on Iran.
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Nov 11, 2017 06:28
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Throatwarbler posted:So the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has just kidnaped a foreign head of state and forced him to appear on TV and pretend nothing happened like some kind of Austin Powers skit. This is a thing now. I'm still leaning toward blackmail/extortion personally.
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Nov 12, 2017 23:51
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FlamingLiberal posted:If one of the other Republicans not named Trump were in office right now we would probably be at war with Iran I don't know. Bush's neocons were a little unusual because they actually went for the big invasion instead of just talking the talk. Reagan and H. W. Bush preferred to just faff about supporting anti-communist rebels and maybe sending a few hundred marines in for "security." I think the 90s/00s interventionist streak was the product of a very particular post-Cold War mindset in both parties and the "foreign policy establishment" in general that presupposed American righteousness and military invulnerability. The forever war has dramatically changed the discourse about intervention and regime change and I don't think any modern Republican would be able to pull a cassus belli out of his rear end the way Bush did in Iraq. Intervening in a civil war is one thing, but Iran isn't a failed state, they're not officially at war with anyone, and they have a real military. You don't just announce you're going to try to crack the toughest nut in the Middle East when you can't even beat the Taliban. Also, the Europeans have way too much money invested in Iran and would never go for it. E. Lol I just realized I forgot to mention Desert Storm. It's sort of amazing that they left Saddam in power. Duckbox fucked around with this message at 15:57 on Nov 13, 2017 |
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Nov 13, 2017 15:44
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Lol, I just noticed that beeb article referring to the "US and British-led coalition."
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Nov 14, 2017 00:07
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GreyjoyBastard posted:I like that his talking points are all about business-friendliness. I'm starting to think words like "reform" and "modernization" might not actually mean anything.
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Nov 15, 2017 00:42
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Fallen Hamprince posted:making GBS threads my rear end off from giardia to own the libs. See, those are Egyptian parasites so not being infested with them is unpatriotic. Seriously though, someone is engaging in social engineering here. A harmless comment made a year ago as a joke doesn't suddenly become a national scandal without a serious push.
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Nov 17, 2017 01:23
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Let's not forget what the "am" in Aramco stands for.
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Nov 17, 2017 11:33
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Well, it's much easier to speculate than confirm in war zones. It can take a decade or two post war to start getting reliable civilian mortality numbers and even then you have to figure out how to compare them with the "baseline" numbers for famine and disease. Since it's never going to be possible to know exactly how bad things will get, erring on the side of not doing things that could cause humanitarian disasters is probably a good idea.
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Nov 21, 2017 13:20
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Tree Bucket posted:Yeah, what on earth is going on? Have things always been this mad, or are we just more aware of it? I keep getting the very distinct and very unpleasant sensation that we are living through History. There's a dreadful resonance in all those old stories of civilisations bickering about last century's fight while next century's disaster creeps up on them. (I need to stop reading the news for a while.) It was ever thus. The 90s were a weird time of false stability where the west seemed ascendant and untouchable and all the chaos was happening "over there" and a lot of milennials are nostalgic for that feeling (despite it being the era of "ethnic cleansing," "oligarchs," "narcoterror," and "suicide bombers"). I think people were just glad that the threat of nuclear annihilation wasn't hanging over them anymore (unless you lived in India or Pakistan). In the Middle East, there was a veneer of progress -- the "success" of the Oslo accords, victory in the Gulf War and the isolation of Saddam's "rogue state" through sanctions and air strikes, and the deescalation of Lebanon's ruinous civil war -- that I think helped conceal the ongoing crisis in the MENA region. It's easy to forget about the civil war and attempted genocide in Iraq, the Taliban's reign of terror in Afghanistan, the intifada and the settlement building and rise of Hamas that undermined Oslo as soon as it was signed. Hezballah was gaining power, the PKK never went away, Al Qaeda was fanning the flames of jihad, and all over the region, corrupt dictators and venal theocrats were brutalizing their own people in the name of "stability" and laying the groundwork for the revolutions, coups, and civil wars to come. The lesson is, it's easy to ignore how bad things are when people are telling you it's getting better. It's when things get worse that all the problems come into focus and you realize they were there all along. History runs in cycles of optimism and pessimism. Hope and fear. After WW2, there was a period where things seemed to be getting better (how could they not?). The United Nations was born, Europe and Japan were getting rebuilt even as their empires were freeing themselves, the new zeitgeist was all about "human rights," "self-determination," and "cooperation." Then the USSR and China got nukes and the world was split into thirds, people learned what "partition" really meant, and "liberation" became the trojan horse for coups and proxy wars. After the Vietnam war ended and Nixon went to China, there was another era where things seemed to be getting better, but the hopefullness that elected Jimmy Carter couldn't survive the OPEC embargo, the Iranian revolution, and Soviets in Afghanistan. It's not wrong to hope. The optimism of the Arab Spring and the "pre-9/11era" didn't cause the disasters that followed. Cynicism and despair won't shield you from life's miseries. They'll only rob you of life's joys. However, optimism, like pessimism, has to be put into perspective. Things are always getting better and they're always getting worse. The big swings of history from good times to bad ones, golden years and dark ages, are illusions created by an incomplete understanding of historical forces. It's hard to be Zen about this stuff and I'm no model of contemplative detatchment or positive thinking, but try to remember that the future is unknowable and our hopes and dreads say more about where we are than where we're going.
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Nov 22, 2017 02:10
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guidoanselmi posted:That anyone ever took Francis Fukuyama seriously at any point is mind boggling to me. There's always a market for the story powerful people want to hear. That's why there's a whole cottage industry of think tank minions who specialize in finding a nice juice trend line and projecting it toward the sky. E. It's also why, every few years, someone wins an Oscar for making a magical movie about the magic of movie making. Duckbox fucked around with this message at 10:28 on Nov 22, 2017 |
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Nov 22, 2017 10:22
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Vernii posted:A multi-polar world doesn't mean something like Iraq won't occur again, it just means a higher price might be paid for conducting it. The number of wars and atrocities committed by the US, USSR, and China during the Cold War are evidence enough of that. We already know what war in a multipolar world looks like. It looks like Syria. The US made the political decision to stop playing world police for a while, so all the regional powers waded in and cocked things up.
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Nov 22, 2017 23:04
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OctaMurk posted:The US provided TOWs and actively participated in loving things up though? Oh for sure. What I mean is the US never set out to dominate Syria like Iraq and Afghanistan and that left the the door open for everyone with guns to sell to get involved. The actual coalition didn't emerge until after ISIS exploded. By then, it was already a free for all.
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Nov 22, 2017 23:27
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Bishounen Bonanza posted:"Dominate" means like what we did to Iraq and Afganistan, which is obvious from the context. Yeah this. Obama rejected the no fly zone and direct regime change. He didn't bomb Assad or mount an invasion. The US could have crushed the SAA as easily as it did Saddam had they wanted to, but, for whatever reason (domestic war weariness, lack of an exit strategy, faith in diplomacy, sheer indecisiveness, Russian intercession, regional/NATO reluctance, all of the above?) he never made that call. It doesn't matter what the "foreign policy establishment" thought because they're just professional blowhards and thankfully don't get to make those decisions. The US support for rebels set in slowly and indecisively (the FSA we're frequently the worst armed faction in the country) and the absence of a clear US commitment left abundant room for Turkey, The Saudis, and everyone else to start backing their own pet proxies and did nothing to stop Russia and Iran from moving in in force. That's what multipolar warfare looks like. The US could have said "we'll handle Syria everyone else stay out" and it might have worked for a while, but we'd have to own it -- declare war on Assad, send in troops, deal with the blowback the whole thing, but then maybe it becomes another "you broke it, you bought it" scenario and we spend the next decade seeing pictures of flag draped coffins on the news. The approach we actually took with CIA arms shipments and special ops "advisors" means we have a lot less exposure and a lot more plausible deniability, but it also means we can't control who else will get involved.
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Nov 23, 2017 03:50
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Squalid posted:I don't think it was ever possible for the US to have prevented Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf from interfering in the Syrian Civil War. Just stopping private Gulf donors from funding Al Qaeda was difficult enough. Turkey was always going to try and divide the rebels from the PYD, and all the American money in the world couldn't guarantee Syrian rebels would behave as good little western liberal proxies and not engage in a little ethnic cleansing or create a new dictatorship following a victory over Assad. At the start of the revolution, the PYD was far from the only group in Rojava and their relationship with the FSA didn't go to poo poo until Turkey started getting more involved. Obviously we can't prove a counterfactual and I opposed US intervention at the time (still do, mostly), but if Assad had been ousted in the first year of the civil war, the factional map would have been unrecognizable. It took time for the regional powers to really start digging their hooks into Syria and that, more than anything, is what pulled the revolution into a dozen different directions.
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Nov 23, 2017 09:46
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I will say I get a bit  about the phrase "fascist animals" because usually it's the fascists calling everyone else animals.
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Nov 24, 2017 16:59
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I'm also conflicted, but I think giving people the option to put the guns down and go home is important because you can never kill them all and you don't know how many innocents will die if you try. Ideally, you'd want to make sure they won't pick up arms again, but it's hard to be sure of anything in a war zone. I don't know what will happen to the fighters and families bussed out of Raqqa, but I feel like the fact that they agreed at all probably means they're sick of fighting and most just want to keep their families safe. I understand the desire to see them face justice and I feel the same way about Assad, but wars are about more than justice and the preservation of life sometimes takes precedence.
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Nov 27, 2017 07:05
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tekz posted:I was under the impression that Russian expenses in the war in Syria was only a couple billion dollars. The Russian economy is not in a good place right now. Their military has always been good at doing more with less than the US, but they're a vastly poorer country and the sanctions and oil crash hit them hard. Between Syria and Ukraine, they're surely feeling the pinch.
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Nov 28, 2017 09:32
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Part of me wonders if this is a deliberate provocation to try to get Iran to break the nuclear deal.
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Nov 30, 2017 06:59
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R. Guyovich posted:pivoting to "b-b-b-but russia and china" happens all the time now, in the year 2017, on a variety of criticisms of the united states, especially any time a hypothetical end to us hegemony is brought up The last two pages of this thread also proves that the reverse is true. I don't think "country X is worse" arguments have ever served much purpose besides deflection, but good lord do people love to deflect.
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Dec 1, 2017 02:26
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It seems like people get hung up on the setbacks and successes of the moment and have this picture of power diplomacy that waxes and wanes year by year and there's truth there, but I think the long term material circumstances are also telling. The US may or may not be a "superpower," but it's also clearly in a league all its own. China and Russia don't have a globe spanning navy, a massive air force, an innovative space program, a large highly educated professional class, military outposts all over the planet, or a preeminent role in global finance and culture. They're big and powerful and some day might "overtake" the US, but we're far from being their yet. China's foreign investments aren't the sort of global realignment they're often characterized as, but rather a way for them to outsource their excess industrial capacity and make the best of a bad situation, generally at their clients' expense. Such products include "the world's emptiest airport" in Sri Lanka and an overpriced rail project that has almost bankrupted Kenya. Once people start figuring out that accepting Chinese infrastructure loans is more dangerous than the IMF, they'll have to find a new way to wield their soft power. Besides that, China has massive problems that make it unlikely that we'll find ourselves living in the "Chinese Century" any time soon. Their environment and public health are catastrophic -- rivers like oil slicks, scant arable land getting depleted faster and faster, and skies dark as a Rembrandt painting over every major city. Plus, everyone smokes, their diets are dubious at best, there's a chronic shortage of doctors, and the population is aging rapidly. Education, inequality, and corruption are still at typical third world levels of dysfunction and don't seem to be getting better. I genuinely hope China gets its act together and its people get the future they deserve, but it has a much longer way to go that than the Forbes set would have you believe. As for Russia, they like to flex their muscles and took over some territory that was part of the Soviet Union thirty years ago, but so much of their recent success on the world stage has been the result of a deliberate US disengagement. That can change quickly though. Just because the US never set up a no fly zone in Syria, doesn't mean it couldn't have enforced one.
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Dec 1, 2017 12:19
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:Britain has nukes, a permanent UNSC seat, and one of the world's major financial centers. They've needlessly let their military run down but they still punch way the hell above their weight otherwise. Also their leadership of the Commonwealth, their "special relationship" with the US, and the preeminence of the English language gives them a tremendous amount of cultural and diplomatic clout.
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Dec 2, 2017 03:29
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It could be Saleh was anticipating the Houthis turning on him (dictators are paranoid) and this "uprising" was a desperation move.
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Dec 3, 2017 22:27
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coathat posted:Pretty good hearing the guys calling for regimen change 24/7 getting all indignant about an expresident getting got. I don't think anyone has advocated regime change at least since this iteration of the thread started. Stop trolling and 
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Dec 5, 2017 23:30
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