I don’t mean how many people they kill, assassinate or murder. Lots of those people were collateral or completely innocent or whatever. I mean how many they actually talk about. I doubt Obama had 20000 people he had debates about killing. I’m thinking maybe a couple hundred.
@pyatnitski - help me out on this
This move is what Saudi Arabia and Turkey want. Trump FP is consistent here in support of all things Sunni/Saudi/Turkey. We’re probably going to be supporting some former Al Queda dude as the next President of Iraq.
eh, I dunno. Turkey and Iran have pretty good relations. This is mostly what SA would want.
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I kind of want to do the opposite of whatever the Saudis want in the Middle East.
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Pretty much. If we got a decent government in 2016 we’d have been vacationing in Havana and Tehran by 2024 and life would have been better for tens of millions of people.
I doubt the US is going to be appointing anyone President of Iraq, unless they want to fight a ground war there again. One of the most certain results of this seems like it would be Iraq strengthening its alliance with Iran and shunning the US as much as possible. How can you have a productive diplomatic relationship with a country who asserts the right to just bomb your airports to kill your allies’ military officials (and one of your own officials, via collateral damage) without even bothering to tell you?
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I’m going to guess that nobody wanted this specific thing because it’s likely to cost everybody a lot, except for defense company shareholders I guess. If you’re SA, do you really want to unleash hell in your backyard, under the stewardship of your great ally Florida Man The Reliable? One phone call from his Russian masters and 6 months from now SA could be staring at fields and fields of burning oil while stable genius is signing a peace accord under the auspices of Emperor Vladimir. Or Florida Man can lose the election and America shows no interest in fighting with Iran, then Saudi is really screwed.
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Trump’s policy in the ME has been pretty clearly against what Russia wants unless maybe it’s just Russian war contractors that Putin is helping.
Had to actually lol at this.
Basically the opposite until a few days ago? He conceded whatever leverage the US had left in Syria to Putin and Turkey for literally no reason; he made the US completely unreliable as an ally there which is a vacuum happily enough filled by Russia. He was (correctly) not escalating with Iran when if it were President Rubio Tuesday we’d have been at war a year ago.
Ally to who? Al Queda?
Russia doesn’t want Turkey in Syria. They’d much preferred the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria.
An ally, good or bad, for whatever other bullshit they ever plan on doing over there? Any ME country that America may need to ‘partner’ with to do something when that country thinks there’s a decent chance the US will give them up to their mortal enemy over nothing.
While I do think it was ~very bad to needlessly abandon a good ally who fights ISIS for you, I was saying something in the vein of analysis, not offering a moral judgment. The US had some leverage in Syria. After Florida Man peaced out, the US had a lot less leverage. It will be easier for Russia to implement its aims there given that Assad is their waterboy. The Russians want Assad to regain full control over as much of Syria as possible, it’s relatively straightforward.
To the main point though, I can’t think of anything the US has done in the ME under the dotard that was against Russian interests.
Just adding the full video description for interested parties
For decades one Iranian commander has dominated the brutal struggle for power and influence across the Middle East. This film tells the extraordinary story of General Qassem Suleimani with first-hand accounts of his secret deals and shifting alliances across Syria, Iraq and Lebanon.
During the Iraq War, Suleimani smuggled thousands of sophisticated bombs into the country, arming the Shia militias who killed hundreds of British and American troops. But just a few years later, the western coalition found themselves on the same side as Suleimani as they both fought to defeat the Islamic State.
‘We saw Suleimani as a very capable charismatic, skilled, professionally competent, diabolically evil human being’, says General David Petraeus, who was head of US forces in Iraq. With Suleimani now coming out of shadows and taking centre stage in Iran’s strategic ambitions, this film asks whether he is shaping up for a new conflict with the west in the region. ‘We can see him as the Darth Vader of contemporary middle eastern politics’, says US diplomat Ryan Crocker.
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One thing that seems to get lost in so much analysis is that just because country A and country B signed some deal, that was mutually beneficial, it doesn’t mean that either it was what they wanted all along, or that they are now allies or part of some super villain club. Not does the opposite mean they are now sworn enemies for generations.
How friendly are Russia and Turkey in North Syria? Not really sure, I’m pretty sure Russia would have rather fought the SDF than Turkey, though, and Turkey doesn’t seem to be leaving. How friendly are Turkey and Syria in Idlib? Not overly much, the Syrians cut off a Turkish ‘observation’ post last week and just broke the nth Turkish brokered ceasefire. How friendly are Turkey and Russia in Libya? Well, not at all, they’re currently gearing up for a full on proxy war against one another for Tripoli *.
Repeat that over and over for most countries trying to be players around the world.
(* And who else is on Russia’s side there? Well, thanks for asking, it’s SA, UAE and France, among others. War and the world is a messy, horrible business.)
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“There is still good in him” Putin as Luke Skywalker talking to uh… force ghost Khrushchev?
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You can’t watch it through a VPN either (I tried and after jumping through a bunch of hoops it still demanded a license). I found another way (*cough* it’s on usenet *cough*) and agree it’s worth watching. But it’s not gonna be easy for most. The sole torrent only has 2 seeds.
How about when we killed 200 Russians?
Yeah, that was a one-off engagement of no consequence taken in self defense because the pro government Syrians and Russian mercs were being stupid, can you point to a specific policy or a sustained strategic decision?
Tucker Carlson and Hillbilly Elegy are literally parroting Microbet’s line itt.
Bernie going to win all the Trumpers.
You guys are looking for reason in what Trump is doing. He has clearly done things anti-Russia just as he has done pro-Russia things. He’s so far out of his league just a monkey randomly clicking buttons and you want to act like he is balancing ranges for the perfect amount of pro-Russia action. It’s a fruitless search for meaning into the mind of a deluded simpleton.
He just does whatever thought that pops out of his subconscious in any moment that sounds good to him at that second. Less than a year ago he was talking about nuking hurricanes and ya’ll seem surprised he didn’t think for a second about starting a war where literally like a thousand+ military service members and state department people are just working in. Straight up moron running the show.
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