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Saudi Arabia's new leader is certainly eager to distinguish himself from his predecessor.
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Nov 6, 2017 22:19
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I'd be curious to hear from anyone familiar with the region who can comment on how the Saudi war in Yemen is perceived. It comes off like a pretty embarrassing disaster in which a country with a very expensive array of military toys repeatedly fails to defeat a poor insurgency in its own backyard. Do other countries in the region actually fear the prospect of a military confrontation with the Saudis or are they more concerned about the soft power resources that the Kingdom can wield?
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Nov 6, 2017 23:14
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Count Roland posted:You're right, but I do wonder if there's other factors involved. Why do you say that it's a stretch to think this was an intentional trap by Syria?
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Feb 11, 2018 21:51
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Willie Tomg posted:
I mean, wasn't it proactive State Department and Pentagon planning that created this entire mess in the first place a decade and a half ago?
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Feb 15, 2018 22:17
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Herstory Begins Now posted:Sounds like 4-5 billion new customers for premium american Aqua-Cola ftfy
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Jan 3, 2019 01:05
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I think the more accurate term for this would be a "blog post".
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Feb 20, 2019 20:35
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Volkerball posted:They said Assad or we burn the country, let them enjoy the fruits of their labor. Ah, so this is the kind of quality discourse that D&D is at risk of losing when posters like Volkerball stop feeling welcome.
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Mar 26, 2019 13:07
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Al-Saqr posted:lol I'm so happy they deserve what they get for fighting for nazism. lol get hosed nazi scum. they wanted their pig poo poo dictator they can have him, they deserve their fate for choosing fascism over their own countrymen for all I care. The half of syria exiled abroad will build a better life and a better future, while those scum get to sit in their shithole prison they fought so hard to keep. 
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Mar 27, 2019 15:35
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Wow this thread is really bad. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Mar 27, 2019 16:34
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Do you think American would've be able to maintain a democracy for multiple years without a military takeover, had the 2016 election never occurred? Do you think the American people as a whole appreciate democratic values, considering trends in their country? Or are they more used to strongman leadership? From what i've seen I'm inclined to believe the latter. If I sound like I support dictatorships then it's my cynicism talking. And deep down I don't.
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Apr 18, 2019 22:48
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Actually I think you'll find that hot climates make for slothful and indolent people only suited for rule by a tyrant. Only the temperate northern climes can cultivate the rugged individualism necessary for democratic government.
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Apr 19, 2019 15:22
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Sinteres posted:This is really loving bad, and if the US government carries through with it, it's basically a statement to people living under the yoke of dictatorship in the Arab world that they're not allowed to aspire to live in a democracy: That's hardly new though. There's been a broad perception in the region that [url=]the United States is only concerned with its own larger geopolitical interests and props up local dictators while thwarting local aspirations for political and eocnomic sovereignty that goes back to the 1950s. FOREIGN RELATIONS OF THE UNITED STATES, 1958–1960, NEAR EAST REGION; IRAQ; IRAN; ARABIAN PENINSULA, VOLUME XII posted:2. Current conditions and political trends in the Near East are inimical to Western interests. In the eyes of the majority of Arabs the United States appears to be opposed to the realization of the goals of Arab nationalism. They believe that the United States is seeking to protect its interest in Near East oil by supporting the status quo and opposing political or economic progress, and that the United States is intent upon maneuvering the Arab states into a position in which they will be committed to fight in a World War against the Soviet Union. quote:Our economic and cultural interests in the area have led not unnaturally to close U.S. relations with elements in the Arab world whose primary interest lies in the maintenance of relations with the West and the status quo in their countries—Chamoun of Lebanon, King Saud, Nuri of Iraq, King Hussein. These relations have contributed to a widespread belief in the area that the United States desires to keep the Arab world disunited and is committed to work with “reactionary” elements to that end. quote:The continuing and necessary association of the United States in the Western European Alliance makes it impossible for us to avoid some identification with the powers which formerly had, and still have, “colonial” interests in the area.
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Apr 30, 2019 18:21
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While certain high level officials might recognize that its a clumsy and unnecessary statement to put out the idea that it's some kind of dramatic shift from America's typical posture or that it will somehow shift the already overwhelmingly negative opinion most people in the region have toward America just comes off as a bit silly though. I think American actions over many decades speak more loudly than any one administration's actions could at this point.
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Apr 30, 2019 18:44
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Being realistic about how America is perceived isn't world weary cynicism, it's just pointing out the obvious. Setting up Trump as some uniquely awful figure is an unsubtle way of apologizing for past American presidents who really weren't notably better, even if they were slightly more measured in their communications strategy. The problems here aren't reducible to a single administration, especially not one that took office less than a full term ago.
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Apr 30, 2019 18:56
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Sinteres posted:Obama tentatively supported Egyptian democracy, so not all US presidents are the same, and for all his faults even Bush seemed to genuinely believe in the transformative power of democracy in the region in the early part of his presidency, before he realized people might have the gall to elect leaders we didn't approve of. Yeah, the consensus US foreign policy position has been to bolster some massively authoritarian leaders, particularly in Saudi Arabia, but with Trump I really think the message is that all a strongman has to do is call the people terrorists and he'll support the strongman (see also his support for Haftar). This refusal to admit how consistently bad American foreign policy in the region is does not help anything. You're inflating minor and mostly irrelevant distinctions that are more a matter of style than substance. When you're praising George W. Bush for his belief in middle eastern democracy it is time to check yourself and ask what lead you down this path.
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Apr 30, 2019 19:09
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Sinteres posted:I mean I did say he abandoned the view once it proved inconvenient, so it wasn't really praise. I'm not exactly the most patriotic American posting in this thread, and think there were plenty of reasons to question the good faith of the United States long before Trump came along, but I do think the way he's ripping off the mask and displaying the very worst of America's cynical imperialism for the world to see is a bad thing, because it's going to give license to the region's dictators to do whatever the gently caress they want with his support. I won't belabor the point but suffice it to say I think you're grasping around trying to find a distinction that makes no actual difference.
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Apr 30, 2019 19:13
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Sinteres posted:Whereas you used a lot of words to say lol nothing matters. I'm not sure where you got the idea that I think nothing matters, but then again if you think roughly 250 words excerpted from a policy memo is "a lot of words" then maybe this is the wrong discussion topic for you. If you find yourself arguing that actually George W. Bush was a champion of middle eastern democracy then maybe you're the moral nihilist here given that you're bending over backwards to find ways to say that one of the worst war criminals in living memory was actually just a misguided idealist. Herstory Begins Now posted:If you think that US FP under Trump is the same as under Obama (or even Bush for that matter) then holy gently caress I have a bridge to sell you. You can accurately say that they are all bad and fundamentally operating out of various forms of self-interest (albeit personal interests more than national interests, frankly) and that is a correct statement. Still, the differences matter and bad is not a binary, it's a spectrum. As terrible as his foreign policy was Obama at least had the Iran nuclear deal, but what makes Trump so dramatically worse in substance than George W. Bush?
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Apr 30, 2019 21:36
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Volkerball posted:By any standard that says the US "backed" the coup against Morsi, then they also backed Mubaraks ouster by the military that led to the transition to democracy. Which is to say, it would be a very loving stupid standard. I guess it depends on how you define "backed", which is inherently a vague term, but why do you think it's implausible to imagine that the US recognized that Mubarak's position was untenable and therefore offered tacit encouragement to get rid of him but then, upon realizing that their preferred factions weren't going to be competitive in a democracy, decided it was better to have the military return to power with a new strongman? Herstory Begins Now posted:Bush had a far higher bodycount (though all told Trump might well get there via famine and infectious disease due to american supported Saudi and Central American actions), but also had some semblance of a foreign policy. Hell there were even a couple issues that Bush did actual good with. Trump is the absence of any coherent, consistent policy other than who will funnel the most cash into Kushner's businesses. I'm actually legit curious if Trump has done anything philanthropic or humanitarian and I think he's the only US president I can remember who doesn't have a pet humanitarian issue that they push really hard. Like his charity was openly a slush fund for his family, idk if they actually gave anything at all charitably because they apparently weren't even doing required financial disclosures for a long time. You seem to be saying that even though Bush killed way more people and objectively did more harm that Trump is worse because he's more rhetorically unhinged? That's the only concrete difference you seem to be identifying. I don't really know what you mean by "coherent, consistent policy" in this context or how Bush's policy being "coherent" and "consistent" can be considered anything except bad.
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Apr 30, 2019 22:27
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Herstory Begins Now posted:Idk if you're aware of this, but famine death counts blow up really quickly and Yemen is on a terrifying track wrt that rn. Sinteres posted:Again, I pretty clearly stated in the original post that Bush abandoned his democratic idealism the second he realized it wasn't going to be as convenient as everyone electing pro-American leaders, so I'm not saying he's a great guy or that he did the right thing. His commitment to democracy was skin deep. That said, it's more than Trump's, since he appears to be openly hostile to it in principle. As I said in another post, even cynical American leaders asked our dictatorial allies to put a nice face on things from time to time, but Trump openly admires killers, so as long as they're not screaming Death to Israel he's fine with all the rest. If you're an accelerationist I guess you could think that's better since it removes any pretense, but you don't seem to think there was much pretense to begin with, so Trump giving a green light to dictators to oppress their people as much as they want seems bad, particularly as he's labeling even non-extremist opposition as terrorists, making it that much more likely that future rebellions will be led/taken over by jihadists and forcing the devil's choice we ended up with in Syria. If George W. Bush's "skin deep" commitment to "some beliefs and values" was actually consequential then you guys would be citing all the examples of how Bush's flawed principles made him a better foreign policy president than Trump.
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May 1, 2019 00:45
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V. Illych L. posted:imo it's a singular symptom of bourgeois narrowmindedness to see a reactionary doing reactionary things and say 'oh how i miss the days when they pretended to be less reactionary' 
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May 2, 2019 17:51
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Despite not being able to cite any specific examples people just known deep in their bones that Trump was worse than George W. Bush because Trump has to be uniquely terrible and bad in all areas by some kind of cosmic necessity. This isn't even a question that one can investigate, it's just true by definition in the same way that water is necessarily wet and 2+2 must be 4.
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May 2, 2019 21:27
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Cease to Hope posted:The first page of google results. It took me longer to write this post than find these. Bush wasn't shy about using drone strikes but the technology was barely being used until the last two years of his administration so this is a weird point of comparison, especially since by this metric you're saying that Obama was worse than George W. Bush.
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May 2, 2019 22:14
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Cease to Hope posted:These are examples of Trump specifically ordering policies of increasingly indiscriminate bombing and covering up the extent of doing so. As opposed to the very discriminate and cautious carpet bombing of Fallujah in 2004? I'm sure that the white phosphorus they were using to burn people alive in their homes was actually carefully targeted. When the US commanders horrified their British counterparts by telling their men it was a free fire zone the thing that the British didn't realize was that everyone in Fallujah was actually a terrorist already. Anyone seriously trying to argue that Trump's foreign policy represents some "unprecedented" new level of brutality unmatched by previous American presidents is making a faith based argument.
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May 2, 2019 22:33
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Cease to Hope posted:That is a post about 2004 written based on revelations six years later. I even specifically addressed this like one page ago. Are you suggesting that Trump secretly deployed 200,000 American soldiers to the Middle East and we won't know about it until years from now? Because absent something on that scale it would be very difficult for Trump to have matched George W. Bush. Also the only reason I picked Bush was because he's recent enough that everyone here should know better than to praise him. We could just as easily pick a President from the 20th century - Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon have lists of international crimes that would make Trump blush. Bill Clinton casually blew up a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan and probably killed at least 50,000 people as a direct result of destroying one of the country's only real sources of medicine. He didn't even need to order a big cover up because the American media and public didn't care enough to be outraged about it outside the predictable lefty circles. The only reason to cling so strongly to the idea that Trump has such a uniquely monstrous foreign policy is the emotional need to see him as fundamentally different from other presidents. Surely we can acknowledge how bad he is without spinning fairy tales about the noble intentions of democratic champions like George W. Bush.
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May 2, 2019 23:22
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Cease to Hope posted:I don't think people in this thread are spinning fairy tales about whatever. This is a comforting lie you're telling yourself so that you can pretend that your outrage against Trump's foreign policy is based on genuine moral outrage and not partisan frustration. I'll try to stop repeating myself at this point because it doesn't seem like there's much left to say.
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May 3, 2019 01:05
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Ham posted:You are factually incorrect. Sisi in Egypt was almost convinced into easing human rights and non-profit organisation laws in Egypt through the Obama administration's policies towards him, something Trump reversed on coming to power. "almost" If I were going to focus on one good thing the Obama administration did that was unequivocally better than his predecessor and his successor, I'd probably focus on the Iran deal, which was at least implemented for a little while and not just something that his administration "almost" did. And like I said before, trying to call a pivot away from an Obama era policy "unprecedented" sort of overlooks the fact that immediately preceding Obama were eight years of George W. Bush. Volkerball posted:Because that's not what happened? Relying on your imagination to conjure up a fantasy of how world history played out isn't exactly a scientific method and that's why it's so hard to take people like you seriously. Sisi rode a wave of Egyptian nationalism into power. As it turns out, Egyptian nationalists aren't exactly the most pro-American bunch! The ambassador to Egypt, Anne Patterson, called for the protesters demanding Morsi's removal to take it easy, and people took that as the US being in the corner of the Muslim Brotherhood and trying to influence Egypt's internal affairs. Put another way, one of the major talking points that enabled the coup directly contradicts your framing of how things played out. She was a reviled figure in the country, and Americans, and foreigners in general, were not safe showing their faces around the protests because it was quite possible they would be attacked. Some were murdered, and the US sent some embassy staff home, and closed during business hours. The case of this Egyptian anti-imperialism is a prime example that having anti-Americanism as a pillar of your ideology doesn't inherently make you right and moral. You can justify heinous poo poo in the name of opposing the US, just as the US did in the name of opposing communism. It doesn't matter if you recognize that Bush's administration was a human rights disaster. You still have an obligation to put in the work in to learn what the gently caress you're talking about before you start going around acting like you know everything, or your worldview can still very well end up in a bad place. This is a very selective presentation of events that brushes over some important details. A fuller accounting of what happened actually helps demonstrate why any one administration or handful of people are not match for the US foreign policy blob. Obama - whose support for Morsi was not nearly as strong as you imply, but who did at least seemingly try to work out some kind of compromise arrangement - may have been the President, but he was no match for entire US foreign polciy establishment plus its regional allies, almost all of whom were opposed to Morsi. Guess who won out? And its worth emphasizing that Obama's internal opponents including senior Democrats in his own cabinet as well as Pentagon officials. And while Obama is perhaps the least villainous major figure in this story, that's mostly because he comes off as inept and overmatched by the reality of American empire. The guy sounds about as clueless here as he did when he was trying to find common ground with the Republicans on domestic issues. The New York Times posted:The White House and the Strongman If anything this story is a really great illustration of why basing your entire analysis of American foreign policy on the personaltiy of the President is deeply irrational and will lead you into all kinds of errors.
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May 3, 2019 18:08
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Volkerball posted:Your claim was that Morsi was unfriendly to the US. So unfriendly that the US manufactured a coup against him to put a more friendly strongman in place, because their (as of yet unnamed) proxy faction lost the election. Your argument here and the attached article don't help your case or even allude to it. What happened in Egypt was Egyptian. No international actor was playing the part of puppet master. Everyone was just predicting what would happen and jockeying for the best position in a very chaotic month. They were reacting to events, not causing them, which is the case a lot of the time when imagination would say otherwise. A lot of people within Obama's administration had different views about how to react, absolutely. That's what happens in a democracy. When multiple personalities push and pull in different directions, the end result can often look schizophrenic if the issue is controversial and divisive, and an administration can't unite behind one path. That this phenomenon exists is in no way an indication that Reagan's brain is alive on life support somewhere and will call the shots on US foreign policy as the God-King of the deep state eternally. The United States did not "manufacture" a coup in Egypt, nor do I think the United States was playing the role of puppet master and meticulously orchestrating everything that happened. The nature of America's relationship with Egypt and other regional powers also happens to make that kind of direct interference unnecessary. I actually think the way you describe things here is a perfectly adequate description of events and fits quite well with my initial description. The Obama administration didn't have a clear vision of what it wanted from Egypt, which lead to a lot of confusion, and ultimately the US defaulted back to its generic position of support for the military because, regardless of how an individual President might feel about the Egyptian government, that fundamental relationship is far too important to American geopolitical interests to jeopardize. As far as America's preferred outcome, I think Obama's comment here gives a reasonably good summary of his thinking: Reuters posted:“So it’s important for us not to say that our only two options are either the Muslim Brotherhood, or a suppressed Egyptian people,” he said. Once it started to look like actually the only options would indeed be either the Muslim Brotherhood or a suppressed Egyptian people the United States made peace with that fact. quote:To make your case, you're holding up a quote from Ben Rhodes. Rhodes full time job was to weave pro-Obama talking points into the media. There's huge articles out detailing his role in the Obama administration. Of course he claims Obama was just a poor helpless sap along for the ride, because the alternative is that he would have to wear what amounted in a big chunk of the public eye to a dictator overthrowing a democracy. But the fact is that he does have to wear the US response to the coup in Egypt, because it was his administrations response. Not all of that response is negative, not all is positive, but it was absolutely his response. You're countering with the positions of Hagel and Kerry, but both of them were directly appointed by Obama, and the extent of their power isn't solely left to the realm of imagination. Kerry in particular rarely got his way within the Obama administration and raged about it on a few occasions. He looked like a drat fool when he was pushing for airstrikes in Syria following the Ghouta attack, and Obama supported him all the way up until he didn't, and Kerry was left holding a bag of poo poo. These were hardly fixed figures of American empire that Obama was powerless in the face of. His response to the events in Egypt didn't look that much different than his response to the Arab Spring before either of those two were appointed. The guiding principle throughout his presidency when it came to reacting to foreign crises was security-centric, and the goal was always primarily to weather the storm rather than seize opportunities to to stand against fascism and dictatorship. "Don't do stupid poo poo," as he put it. In essence, that bad action was always worse than inaction, so reduced action was the most surefire way to reduce risk. You can love it or hate it, but there's no doubt that it was his MO, and that a presidents MO can be clearly seen in US foreign policy while he is in office. The fact that the most consequential thing Obama did as President was to occasionally restrain the most aggressive instincts of his own advisers and cabinet - while still blowing up several new countries in the process - is a very strong indicator that the fundamentals of American foreign policy do not tend to change that much from one administration to the next. George W. Bush certainly represented an escalation in terms of American involvement but since then both Obama and Trump have mostly been tinkering with the gigantic mess that Bush left for them. You can certainly identify differences of style or focus from one administration to the next but none of these differences are such that it would be sensible to call Donald Trump's blood thirstiness "unprecedented". For a more rigorous and scholarly account of this persistence in foreign policy I'd recommend people check out this monograph.
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May 3, 2019 21:56
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Brown Moses posted:We've just launched a new Yemen project at Bellingcat: This video seems to really soft sell the extent of the atrocities. You lead in with an equivocation between both sides, you only vaguely allude to the intentional starvation campaign and seem to skip past the most disturbing detail of all, which is the active support the American military is providing to the Saudi air force. Someone getting all their information on the conflict from this video would probably walk away with the impression that the role of the American government was much more incidental than it actually is and would be left with the impression that the biggest problem is private companies ignoring international law.
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May 8, 2019 18:49
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It says a lot about that a ghoul like Lister doesn't even bother to hide his dismay at the prospect of a shattered and war torn country getting its power grid back online.
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May 28, 2019 03:54
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Volkerball posted:This post would probably carry more weight if the regime wasn't still bombing the piss out of Idlib, and going to kill and permanently displace an awful lot of people when it's ready to move on it. For the majority of the Syrian population that has been victimized by this war surely it is a good thing that the power grid is getting repaired? Whatever you wanted to see happen in the civil war isn't this an unambiguously good thing at this point from the perspective of the average Syrian?
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May 28, 2019 16:29
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Grape posted:True leftists celebrate heartily in the streets at the victory of the apartheid state mafia family regime. Since the war is more or less over in most of the government held areas isn't it better that some semblance of normalcy, including functional utilities, be restored to the greatest extent possible? What's a better short term outcome to be hoping for?
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May 28, 2019 18:06
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Rent-A-Cop posted:Peace sans fascism? There was just a long brutal civil war that has more or less established that the government isn't going to be overthrow any time soon, so perhaps in light of that it would be better for the Syrians to at least have functioning utilities? I'm just not getting how anyone who is ostensibly concerned with the welfare of the people in the country could be saying that the restoration of basic services is a bad thing. I guess it would make a sort of brutal realpolitik sense to want conditions to be really bad in government held territory if you thought the government was on the verge of falling but I don't think anyone still seriously believes that to be the case so viewing the restoration of basic services as a bad seems more like a desire that the Syrian people need to be collectively punished for having a bad government.
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May 28, 2019 18:32
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Volkerball posted:Most of the centers of Assad's power are relatively untouched by the war, and weren't in need of power. It's simply another tool at his disposal to punish victims and flex nuts at the rest of the country. Same deal with humanitarian aid going into his hands. It's humanitarian aid, it's good! Then it ends up being sold in shops in Damascus and not seen in the places most affected, so the smuggling networks still end up doing just as much work. These networks rely on cracks within the Syrian political apparatus to deliver aid because the state relentlessly pursues them. The more stabilized the Assad regime becomes, the worse the humanitarian situation is going to be for whoever he deems an enemy, so there's nothing "unambiguously good" when it comes to his consolidation of power. This seems to be contradicted by the fact that the regions of Syria under government control - which includes the majority of the population - have better access to food and water than those living outside government control. The regions that fell outside government control also experienced massacres and ethnic cleansing so exclusively attributing that to government forces is a sketchy way of trying to misrepresent a multi-sided ethnic conflict as a straightforward rebellion against the government. Kaal posted:It would if the average Syrian was reconnecting power to their white-picket fence houses and going back to their normal 9 to 5. Or if the Russians and the Assad regime was intending to use that power to create the conditions for a peace process rather than a military victory followed by a genocide. Since that clearly isn't happening there's little to be excited about. The "average Syrian" whose house was blown to poo poo and family scattered to the four winds and is crossing their fingers that they don't get picked up in the purges like half their friends isn't benefiting from Assad having a functional power grid to dole out as he chooses. While at this point it's pretty clear that anyone who can should flee rather than continue fighting, the reality is that a quicker end to the war isn't going to reduce the casualties at this point - any opposition still in Syria is going to be killed before the shooting stops. A dam going back online is not a return to normalcy, it's just a noose tightening. This is a hell of a take, arguing that ending the war will have literally no effect on how many people are dying. Your presentation of the 'average Syrian 'is really selective as well and, like above, obfuscates the fact that this is a conflict between fragments of the Syrian population, not just a struggle between the people and the government. Polling suggests that while the government is loathed by most of the people it still has durable centres of support that are much higher than your post implies:  The Syria regime is awful but inflating Assad to the level of super mega Hitler and trying to argue that endless chaos and zero infrastructure would be a better outcome for the population of Syria long term vs. a dictatorial but stable government rebuilding the country really beggars belief. The American backed Iraqi government also bombed large cities indiscriminately and oversaw the mass ethnic cleansing of Sunni neighborhoods and towns but I've never seen anyone here argue that Iraq would be better off as a perpetual Libya-style failed state with no central government or reliable services.
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May 30, 2019 18:55
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In a brilliant move the US allowed China to acquire classified American technology, setting back China's aerospace industry by several decades.
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Jun 8, 2019 19:43
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Saying that the majority of the Syrian population are de facto "regime supporters" just because they live in government controlled areas and using that as a justification for acts of collective punishment - i.e. arguing that they don't deserve to have functioning utilities - is really gross and it's sad how normalized that attitude is among the regular posters within this thread.
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Jun 8, 2019 22:50
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Squalid posted:but most of the regular posters think it is good utilities are being restored? Well then they are remaining very tight lipped about that opinion while a loud and prominent minority of posters angrily pushes back against the idea that Syria's largest dam going back online could be anything except a humanitarian disaster. Herstory Begins Now posted:People complain about a bunch of dead civilians from bombardment of civilian population centers and you come in here with this bullshit. You're a joke Well, first of all I believe the complaint about about the demolition of homes in formerly rebel held areas that have been retaken by the government, not aerial bombardments. Secondly, I don't care how outraged you want to get, that post as written is equating any non-Sunni and non-displaced Syrian as a "regime supporter" and implying that therefore any improvement quality of life for Syrians will only be going to the implicitly bad Syrians who don't deserve such things. That's hardly a neutral expression of concern about civilians.
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Jun 9, 2019 00:01
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Absurd Alhazred posted:Which post? Don't know about other readers but I would love to be able to assess your interpretation of whatever it is you are responding to. As written your own post seems to come out of nowhere and have no bearing on the discussion occurring between it and your previous post in the same page. Honestly, rereading my post today it comes off as shrill so I won't try to claim its an example of great posting. Still, since you ask, I was thinking of the post immediately proceeding mine: Unimpressed posted:And on more relevance to this thread,the guardian has an article about how the regime is confiscating or destroying the property of essentially Sunni refugees. So yeah that dam is going to be great for regime supporters and for homeless non supporters in Jordanian camps with nothing to return to. I read this in the context of posters like Volkerball, Grape, Herstory Begins Now and Kaal all more or less endorsing Charles Lister's take on the dam, or at least pushing back on any criticism of Lister. The implied (or occasionally explicit) argument seems to be that it's better for Syria to be a failed state than for a definitive end to the war that sees Assad still in power.
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Jun 9, 2019 17:31
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Absurd Alhazred posted:I think their larger argument is that Syria under Assad is still a failed state, the dam will just help electrify some parts of it. We don't really live in a world where the alternatives are Successful Syria under Assad on the one hand and Forverwar Failed Syria on the other. Just think of how the place is going to look when the millions of refugees are kicked back to Syria because Assad's legitimacy makes it "safe". Yeah and that argument isn't wrong - the scars of the war will persist for generations. I doubt the government even wants most of those refugees to return - the tens of thousands of displaced Sunnis from opposition controlled areas, many of which the government is currently demolishing with bulldozers, certainly won't be encouraged to return. While people will be overwhelmingly better off with the fighting stopped there will still be winners and losers in the war's aftermath and for a lot of people that means the end of the war isn't the end of their suffering. That doesn't mean that the end of the war, or the return of something resembling normalcy for more and more of the country, is not a good thing. My frustration here is that I see a lot of the hallmarks of the disingenuous humanitarianism-via-bombs ideology that guys like Lister use to agitate for further military action. If you can convince people that the peace is no better than the war then sure, we might as well continue low scale interventions into places like Syria or Iraq indefinitely. The result, intended or not, is to normalize periodic attacks on Syrian infrastructure or government property and to give outside governments free reign to continue exacerbating the conflict and trying to steer it in favour of their local allies. Since I think more bombing is unlikely to accomplish anything other than making everyone in the region worse off, I think its important to pushback against people advocating that there's no way teh status quo in Syria could get worse, or, conversely, arguing that a functioning power grid in Syria would only actually benefit regime supporters (i.e. people who implicitly share the crimes of the Assad regime that hey support). Squalid posted:Helsing i don't know why you needed to restart this conversation after it had already run its course but restoring electricity is obviously good. The idea that the YPG has a responsibility to wage forever war against Assad is weird and makes little sense. Because these conversations about what kind of end game is actually desirable in Syria seem like an important and relevant topic, and I'm not sure what the harm is on a Sunday afternoon when there isn't much else being discussed anyway?
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Jun 9, 2019 20:08
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Herstory Begins Now posted:My entire position is 'warcrimes and violence against civilians are bad and should be called out and condemned regardless of who is doing them.' Given that I don't think I've ever posted in the Eastern European thread you appear to have confused me with another poster.
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Jun 11, 2019 00:28
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Volkerball posted:The view of downtown Damascus from the suburbs that were home to major protests against the regime, Oct. 2013. How far are you willing to take this logic? Are working roads and potable water also "tool[s] of oppression"? You don't think there's an alarming slippage here between basic infrastructure that is required to literally keep people alive and to keep basic services functioning vs. actual weapons of war. If what you're saying here were followed to its logical conclusion then surely the most helpful thing the American government could do right now is launch repeated targeted strikes designed to destroy the power grid and water system. It would also presumably suggest that there are many other countries where it would be best if America simply launched decapitating strikes and tried to intentionally collapse states (this is in fact more or less American policy in many places, including interventions you prominently supported and continue to defend such as in Libya, so maybe this really is your desired end state?) As for your point about Isreal, I really don't get why you're so convinced you know my thinking on this topic. As far as I'm concerned the only viable long term solution for Israel/Palestine is a single state for the entire territory. Kaal posted:I'm not going to attempt to speak for anyone else here, but I think that you're missing a lot of nuance here in trying to sweep together a bunch of different opinions. My take, in brief, is that it's foolish to try to parse this sort of stuff into unvarnished good or bad. A dam being reconstructed is good, that energy being used by a warlord to entrench a fairly evil ethnostate is bad. Some people getting power is good, some people being expressly denied power in order to compel them is bad. It's wise to accept that there aren't any actually good outcomes here. There's certainly nothing worth cheering on like you seem to be doing. I'm completely agree with this but I have no idea how to reconcile it with your previous post where you described the dam coming back online as "just a noose tightening", which seems like an unambiguous statement that the dam's reconstruction is on the balance a bad thing.
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Jun 11, 2019 18:23
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