Fine, I apologize for using the term. But some of the organizations we support in Syria like to call themselves the Army of Conquest, as they say in the are we the baddies skit, I didn’t pick their name, and they’re affiliated with Al Queda the organization that declared war on NYC.
Just say terrorist organizations. No ‘true believer’ in any religion is out killing people over it. These are people who have perverted religion to suit their own ends. You see it every day in the religious right in this country.
The point is that beating the war drum is dangerous. That goes for when Trump called Kim Rocket Man and talked about unleashing fire and fury and it goes for the constant talk about who our enemies are and who is or isn’t committing treason. If we find ourselves in a war with Russia, proxy or not, and millions of people die, some of the responsibility will have been because people, people who laughed their heads off when Mitt Romney said Russia was the biggest threat in the world, will have been talking like war for years.
I don’t follow, the difference is that you seem to put more value in America not killing people than people not being killed, which is a weird thing to me that seems to amount to an attitude of ‘as long as my hands are clean living out here in the woods between two oceans’, is this unfair?
I have no idea what Syria would have looked like if the Obama went through with getting rid of Assad, is it possible it could have played out better than how it actually played out, with a 10 year civil war and the rise of ISIS?
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Unfair? It’s absurd. I have no idea what you’re saying about my FP or what you’re saying about your FP and I don’t think you do either. Are you suggesting that American policy in the ME has been reducing the number of people killed? In general it hasn’t. In some specific cases it has. I support the cases where it has, but not the ones where it hasn’t. What about my FP are you suggesting would increase the number of people killed?
I put more importance on how our policy can improve because allegedly I have some say in that matter. If “who will run in 2020” is referring to some Russian election then maybe discussing Russian policy in the ME is more on point.
I mean, is your FP position that we should arm the Army of Conquest because that’s exactly what Putin doesn’t want us to do? (We should probably go along with Trump and support Turkey then too because they are also supplying the Army of Conquest.)
I’ll get to your point above but this one is an easier one, America allied with Stalin to defeat Hitler; The Army of Conquest are boy scouts compared to Stalin.
And then maybe Afghanistan and Iraq were right too and maybe George W. Bush was a great President.
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No, they’re not because that actually happened and it was bad, I gave you a counterfactual.
That’s a terrible point and we didn’t ally with Stalin to improve the lives of Russians. But, I’m sure the Syrian people will love living under the rule of the Army of Conquest.
There is no such thing as the Syrian people. There are certainly many ways in which favoring the Sunnis could have lead to the slaughter of the Alawites, maybe all things considered it would have been ok to allow Assad to gas the fuck out of everybody with no inteventions, maybe that would have been best. But certainly the non bombed to death Syrians in the North would have preferred living under the Army of Conquest because you know, they would be living.
My FP is simple. You either overthrow every dictator or you overthrow none. This is why I’m not equipped to be a person making these types of decisions. You keep ignoring the elephant in the room. What do you do when the milk has been spilled?
I’ll give you an example of how the U.S. could have ‘won’ in Iraq, that no one in that bonehead administration thought of because they actually hated the people over there and only wanted Iraq for its strategic positioning in the center of the middle east. They claimed they could win that war in 7 days. They deposed Hussein, and basically did that…at the absolute hottest time of the year (they went in later than they wanted and they wanted to get out as fast as possible).
So, they wrecked the entire infrastructure of the country, and had no plan for what to do when that happened (with a massively oppressed majority population). Look at our cushy lives here. How many days can we live without revolting with no electricity, no running water, no working toilets? I’d put the over/under at around 7 days. Now add in 120 degree heat, and it’s probably significantly sooner than that. If the ‘hearts and minds’ initiative had Army Corps of Engineers right behind any action fixing every single thing they broke right away, maybe all of the things that came out of us being in that illegal war in Iraq could have led to something better. We’ll never know, because that didn’t happen because the people behind that were monsters.
The question for you (and again, I’m not the right person to talk to on foreign policy) is what do you do if we just let everything go in the middle east? Putin then fills the vacuum there. Then he takes Ukraine. Then he starts moving into eastern Europe and/or tries to reunify the Soviet Union against the wishes of all the countries that used to be a part of it. Do you just let him do that? I don’t think either of us are qualified to talk on FP in a complicated world where every move one way or the other will result in the loss of tons of lives. Everything since the early 90s (and maybe a lot of the Cold War) was trying to preserve a detente, one where we’re not too aggressive and neither is Russia.
Trump is absolutely stripping away that detente, and is making the world wildly more dangerous by the day. And that’s what Putin wants. No one wants World War III, and Putin is for sure banking on that. Again, this is way more complicated for anyone who is not actually involved in FP decisions to just throw stuff out there on. I completely respect that you are really well kept up on this, but I also believe you’re not thinking about it from all sides which is how I think loss of life decisions should be. We broke it, and we can’t abandon it or what happens to the Kurds will happen. The outcome of that will likely be worse than anything that happened in Iraq. None of this is black and white or simple, and nearly everything is based on decisions others made that set chains of events in motion that can’t be put back together after they were broken.
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The groups like the Army of Conquest are the ones who are killing people in Northern Syria right now. As I mentioned, the same groups we have supported because they are anti-Assad are also supported by Turkey and they are largely Turkey’s shock troops at this very moment.
I wouldn’t have abandoned the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria (I wish you’d stop saying “The Kurds”). Putin would not have been all over Syria if we hadn’t invaded Iraq.
Something pretty simple is that a foreign power can not win a civil war for someone else. The best you can do is support an actual good partner. Like the French could support us in the Revolutionary War. That can work. But you can’t do it with bombs and you can’t do it with bad partners. We could do something for the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria. We have been doing something for them. But the US isn’t trying to do things in the best interests of the poor people in Northern Syria. Turkey, Syria (Assad), Saudi Arabia, Iran and Russia all have a lot more impact on the bottom line one way or another and The SDF was never more than a marriage of convenience.
I never came close to saying, nevermind said, that the point of US foreign policy in the ME or anywhere was to save lives. Maybe in some cases that just happens as a lucky consequence.
That’s not news, Turkey wanted Assad gone since day 1, so did SA, the Gulf states, they have been funding all kinds of groups to fight Assad for almost 10 years. I assume Turkey is directing those shock troops at the Kurds now, if it were intervening to fight Assad that would be news.
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Not going to roll the whole tape, but you said that I don’t care about people’s lives unless it’s America killing them and then you were making contrasts with my allegedly anti-humanitarian foreign policy.
That’s a weird thing to say. The people I know from Syria (one of my daughter’s best friends is half-Syrian), consider themselves Syrian and they aren’t Alawites.
I didn’t say that you did, I asked a question to understand your views better; but would that have been so bad, isn’t that what a pacifist would believe?
Micro, you’re doing good work in this thread.
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Fair I guess, there are some Syrian Christians, Kurds obviously, maybe some secular people, but generally speaking (well not generally, almost exactly speaking) the Syrian civil war has broken along sectarian lines (Sunni majority vs Alawite Shia minority), inside borders drawn by Europeans after WWI