How does one do the strikethrough thing?

Get it? This is actually a comment about racism.

[ -] without spaces [ /-]

Wookie06, I want to make some things explicit. I hope you accept the following in the spirit it was written.

It's okay to be wrong.
It's okay to change your mind when you hear more evidence.
The shame of a lie is with the originator, not with the believer.
You are not defined by what you know today, but what you do with the truth once you have it.
Agreeing with someone on one issue, at one time, doesn't make you responsible for defending all of their beliefs. You are only responsible for what you say and believe.

The reason I'm saying this is because I don't want you to feel like you're backed into a corner. If you only believed something because someone lied to you, and now you know differently, that's at least one good thing that can come from these discussions. I just hope that you don't think you need to defend a bad thing just because you repeated it yourself.

For all of the Western military intervention that has transpired in the name of freedom in the Middle East, we couldn't bring ourselves to really escalate against the obviously immoral actors when it counted. Airstrikes to help overthrow Gaddafi? No problem.

But when Assad crossed the line that Obama had drawn by using chemical weapons against his own people? Basically nothing at all, for fear of upsetting the anti-war left, or being incredibly pussy-footed about Russia and China by deferring to UN security council vetos. And it's a goddamn tragedy, with nearly half a million civilian casualties in Syria, and a massive refugee crisis.

I do not think history will be kind to the way Barack Obama approached the Arab spring.

Danke

If you've guys have seen Adam Curtis' latest instalment in his anthology of oh-so-paranoid but very often brilliant (and beautifully edited) video documentary, 'HyperNormalization', you'd also know how Ronald Reagan built up the image of Muammar Gaddafi into some kind of evil arch-nemesis, whereas Hafez al-Assad was in fact the real bad actor, inventing the concept of suicide bombing through his funding of Hezbollah, and probably orchestrating the Lockerbie bombing (which Reagan would blame on Gaddafi).

Gaddafi was the easier target, but Reagan and his European counterparts had let a really, really bad hombre get away with murder, a tragedy of which we are now seeing the latest consequences throughout the Middle East.

It has nothing to do with the anti-war left. Russia's position in Syria is strong enough to block U.S. intervention. If the U.S. could take reasonable action to prevent deaths, it should, but there's no reasonable course of action.

Don't forget that the U.S. literally caused ISIS. Not through malevolence (maybe some) but mostly by being dense about the political situation. Murdering Gaddafi was a ****-up. Supporting terrorists caused the situation in Syria, a ****-up. It's a blunder possibly worse than Iraq and Obama bears quite a bit of responsibility for what happened.

The great thing is how the policy decisions of the US executive take many years to unfold. For example, once all of the dust settles, Reagan is going to be remembered as the worst president in US history, if not the worst executive of any country. His legacy gets worse and worse every year.

But, I mean, Trump's administration is still young. There's lot of time for him to catch up.

I mean Reagan's administration also treated Hussein as an ally and provided military intelligence at a time when he was gassing Kurds.

So it would seem that my post was pretty much exactly opposite of this.

Yeah, I'm against arming radical Sunni Muslims and praying they will do our dirty work for us. But just because that was very stupid and cowardly, doesn't get us off the hook for not taking out the very bad guys.

And yeah, I was going to mention Hussein as another extremely bad guy who slaughtered his people and probably would have continued to do so. (And I don't know what the **** went wrong with gulf war II, though, and it probably never should have happened despite that, especially not on such disgraceful lies.)

History is probably going to remember Obama for trying to de-escalate the conflict, or at least trying to extricate the United States from it. History is probably not going to draw the conclusions you're making, not for an administration book-ended by Bush-actually-Reagan Doctrine, War on Browns bull****.

Most of Obama's criticism isn't gonna be about his foreign policy, it's gonna be about the precedents that led to the first American caesar.

But that's precisely what they were trying to do by arming rebels/terrorists. I mean they're terrorists if Hezbollah is so yeah.

I don't know why you seem to think military intervention should be taken so lightly. No violent conflict will ever end without lots of suffering and death.

I am not blaming the anti-war left. They have every reason to be incredibly sensitive to those who would beat the drums of war. I am talking about Obama, and his extreme sensitivity to being well liked, and seen as a consensus president (lol).




Actually completely false, from what I've heard from Clinton's Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia/Ukraine/Eurasia, Evelyn Farkas. She admittedly has a pro-interventionist bent because of her success in Europe in the `90s.



It wasn't hard to predict at all. It was cowardice, convenience, and wishful thinking that we could make politically easy surgical interventions while making empty promises about "red lines" like the use of chemical weapons, and then sitting on our hands while the activists get slaughtered.

Oh, and that fear of Russian advance? They went ahead and went into Syria anyway, after Obama thought he couldn't upset them by doing the same himself.

You're probably right that Obama will be remembered favorably to Bush/Reagan, because his situation was a result of their handiwork.

Just in case people don't know this, Hezbollah / Assad literally invented suicide bombing.



Certainly not as lightly and opportunistically as Barack Obama. I prefer to listen to the experts in the bureaucracy rather than those who would criticize me for doing something seen as brash by the Congress. Did the Iraq war so severely **** up American's perceptions of decisive military intervention that we no longer believe we can do it at all without a major cock-up?

Forgive me if I am being too harsh on Obama, my opinion on this is basically influenced by a bunch of pro-intervention Clinton people from the `90s people who thought it would be possible without ending up with a Gulf War II style situation (and without doing it Reagan style, and just handing out Qurans and AK-47s to a bunch of religious zealots--who would basically become al-Qaeda in the long run--and tell them they are driving out the imperialist crusaders).

I honestly think this also might also have been from the effect on Obama's conscience when he accepted the Nobel peace prize.

(And what a joke that was, he should have turned it down.)

Going all in on those Vox interviews, eh? :p

I did listen to that one.

I was actually not incredibly impressed by her. But I will give her some credit based on her experience as a successful Clinton hawk in Europe.

I do realize that giving somebody with that outlook carte blanche reign on foreign policy could lead to disaster. But I'd like to think that had Gore done something like the second Gulf War, just to take out Saddam or similar, it wouldn't have been such a massive screwup like it was with Bush. I'm not sure that would be possible, and there would also be no immediate reason to do it without the lies, of course, so it's probably a moot point. And of course I am not a fan of CIA assassinations either.

What is it with Republicans who think they can fight wars in the sketchiest way possible? First Reagan with his lame crusade against Gaddafi, his shady shadow wars, and the arming of radical Jihadists, then Rumsfeld thinking he can completely conquer Iraq with too few troops.

George Bush Sr. did a great job in the first Gulf War. For some reason, though, he strikes me as a far more intelligent person than either his direct predecessor, or the lackeys in his son's administration, who seem to me to be carrying the mantle of the worst elements of the Reagan people.

.

but... but, evil empire!

...not to completely exonerate the Democrats, even Clinton. He did help kill half a million Iraqi children by banning chlorine with sanctions, after all.

Er, the EU is not exactly known for its military interventions. Looks like you're talking American policies here.

I was really curious to know what you thought was so terrible about the European policy. Again, not because I disagree, but because you could be referring to several things.

It wasn't that they did anything bad. It was that they had the opportunity to do something about Assad (and his son), long before the crisis he created would become their crisis.

Fast forward to today, where we have European politicians going so far as to cut people off who try to escape to Europe, but AFAIK not much else?

I don't really know what I am talking about, but AFAIK, e.g., France has a long history of military interests (which still continue to this day, see the Ivory Coast) in Africa. But on the whole they seem to have deferred to NATO for anything big.

GW Bush did. False claims of weapons of mass destruction and the invasion in Iraq. The whole war left a vacuum of power, and IS is a direct result of it.

We protested that war, we warned for exactly that kind of outcome.

It made sense for Obama to withdraw the troops, people were tired of the needless war. But by that time the damage had already been done. You can hardly expect the US to organize a democracy where the country and the people are not ready for it.

This is certainly true. In the film HyperNormalization, the point is made that almost all of the foreign fighters in Iraq were sent by Assad (Bashar), who believed from the beginning of the Iraq war that Bush was on a war path to conquer all of the Middle East.

None of the EU countries do military interventions whatsoever. They'll lend some minor support to US lead NATO operations or the UN peace corps.

Yeah, the Dutch navy was fighting Somalian pirates, but it's not like we'll overthrow evil regimes.

No, I thought you were talking about how the EU handled (or rather: failed to handle) the refugee crisis.

For a while, most of the efforts (if any) were aimed at keeping the refugees outside our territorial waters, which was really shameful, especially when refugees started drowning by the hundreds a day.

See, the problem is: Europe is a big place, and we just couldn't agree on the policies. and what policies we did agree upon were largely ignored by the countries in the Southeast, who just couldn't handle the numbers of people flooding in, so they closed their borders, against all agreements. The results, of course, major humanitarian crisis, people literally dying in the mud outside the fences.

Merkel at least did the right thing, showing leadership, saying we could handle this.

But then Erdogan came along, and we made a deal with the devil. Now Turkey's limiting the influx of refugees, and he's bribing his way into the EU. Or so he dreams. But yeah, he does have the EU hostage now. He's already made several threats to open the borders again.

The only good thing I can say about the EU policies is that screening has become better, which means actual war refugees should be able to come, while we send the people away who come from countries that are safe.

I think I misremembered something, then, when I had assumed that Europe had some kind of opportunity to 'do something' about Syria. I had heard in the Adam Curtis documentary that it was the European intelligence agencies who had pinpointed Syria as likely backer of the Lockerbie bombing, but that after 18 months of consensus, it was President Reagan who convinced the world that it was actually Gaddafi who was some kind of evil-doer that we need to knock down and call it a day (sound familiar?).

But even moreso than Reagan (if I am to believe this HyperNormalization documentary), it was really Assad (and his son, who has carried the legacy of his father) who is the really, really bad guy. Hafez al-Assad backed Hezbollah in inventing suicide bombing. This threw a wrench in the Palestinian peace process, when Israel kidnapped a bunch of Hamas members and dumped them on an isolated mountain controlled by Hezbollah, who taught them suicide bombing, which they would use repeatedly in Israel. This despite the fact that suicide is forbidden by the Qoran, and also had no justification whatsoever according to Sunni traditions (unlike Shia Islam, which had rituals of self-sacrifice). Let's not also forget that 9/11 was basically a scaled up suicide bombing, now by Sunnis (who were an off-shoot of the 'Freedom Fighters' that Reagan CIA people had handed out Qorans and rifles to, telling them to fight off the evil invading empire), so in a way we see how something started Hafez al-Assad, left to fester as a result of Reagan's cartoon view of the world (and in the face of the European intelligence agencies), catalysed by the Israeli military, and then later exacerbated further by very similar cartoon views of George W Bush (now with Iraq taking the fall for Al-Qaeda, rather than Libya taking the fall for Syria). And both times around, the idiotic reaction from the Republican president amplified the bad forces that provoked them in the first place (now also with the second go-around compounding the first as well).

Which brings us to the iteration of Let's See How a Republican with a Cartoon View of the World can **** Things Up.

As far as I can tell, Trump doesn't have the numbers to get re-elected unless he starts some kind of war or crusade of some sort, except maybe by another electoral college / gerrymandering victory.

Why is it that Republicans hold cartoon views of the world and side with the enemy in the sabotaging interests of their own constituents in both domestic and foreign policy? Is it because their base is more religious that they can get away with this?

I mean, you would be completely right if not for the things done after Bush which worsened the situation.

I see similarities between the war on drugs and Obama's normalization of the drone program. Both were started by the cartoon realities of the Ronald Reagan flavor, but then institutionalized perhaps by later presidents in a policy of continuous, pinpointed strikes in the midst of civilians, be it by UAV operators, or DEA / police raids. In either case, an idiotic policy which doesn't address the problem, but doubles down on the mistake with no end in sight, all the while inuring further misery to innocent bystanders, and further enlisting would-be terrorist / drug dealers in the perpetual struggle, feels at best like a conflict of interest to create conflict against your own people.

It's like in 1984, where the fascists benefit from the conflict with the enemy.

I read on /r/politics that Trump has now gone a week without receiving an intelligence briefing. It's like George Bush with My Pet Goat all over again.

Stand by for a horrific unifying attack in the fall of this year. You can screen cap this and post it on 4chan later.

is that a threat?

Some of you are alright, don't go outside tomorrow.

The horrific attack was last Fall.

9/11, never forget
11/9, always regret

So I'm not really in the mood to read too much more about politics, but I've been seeing in the news that the wheels are churning in the bureaucracy as the DHS implements Trump's fatwah on unauthorized immigrants--who presumably have been here for quite some time (though apparently not including the Dreamers, i.e., those who entered as minors).

I'm gonna be super interested to see what those farmers out in the central valley have to say when they suddenly have nobody working for them.