61–70 of 91 posts
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It's also real hard when a dictator pops up shooting civilian willy-nilly, and you know you have the power to stop him, but you don't.
Likewise with genocide. There is a reason "we" get involved in some conflicts.
Unfortunately the history of US intervention is entirely ruled by strategic objectives, and the popular support narrative ruled by cherrypicked facts and selective attention to context.
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This is all false. The reason the US suddenly wanted to kill Assad is very simple. Qutar has natural gas. Europe relies almost solely on Russia for natgas. The west doesn't like that at all. So they want to build a pipeline from Qutar to the med through Syria. Assad says absolutely not. Assad is now enemy number one for denying the pipeline which would've freed Europe from Russia's natgas stranglehold. This is all ab…
> So they want to build a pipeline from Qutar to the med through Syria. They want to what??? You really need to look at a map before saying things like that. I just..... Do you realize Qatar is on the coast? Why would you need to build a pipeline to another coast? And why go through Syria of all places? There are so many other routes you can take, and you think they want Syria so badly they triggered a war?
The proposed pipeline goes from Qatar, though Saudi Arabia, through Syria, into Turkey and then would provide Natural Gas to Europe.
There's a second proposed pipeline people often don't talk about... it would go from Iran, through Iraq, through Syria to Europe. Guess which one Europe and the United States want.
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I don't think Russia is interested in meddling. If anything, it seems like a made up "threat" the US officials can use to justify whatever the heck they're doing.
As somebody from Eastern Europe, I can assure you that Russia is most definitely interested in meddling, controlling political parties, parliament, almost all the newspapers, key industries, online comments and pretty much everything in my country and I suspect the countries around me. I know it is a joke, but I really have to say: THANKS OBAMA.
Anyway I think in this thread we were talking about direct military operations or indirect actions through funding the training and arming of rebels or freedom fighters or whatever. And the question was about middle east, not eastern euorpe.
As opposed to trying to influence the political and economical decisions or public opinion through "propaganda" or whatever the means?
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There are no "liberal" syrian rebels, the factions america along with Saudis are supporting are Sunni militias which are cousins if not brothers of AQ. You have divided interests of Kurds, Turks, Alawite regime + Russian, Sunni Militias + Saudi + USA, Iraqi Shia + Iran each having their varied interests. Assad wants ISIS to linger around since the focus would be on it rather than him, and he is focused on fighting th…
The Kurds are not unified, and the Turks don't universally oppose them. The Syrian Kurds do not want to create a independent Kurdistan, while the Iraqi Kurds (KGP) do, and they are on good terms with the Turks. The US support of different groups has been overplayed. The US efforts were rather small and "in bed with AQ" is just spouting new headlines. The US tired to build a fraction, but failed, they have largely aba…
"Kojave"
Or do you mean a greater Kurdish State?
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It's not a conspiracy theory so much as a oddly popular Chompsky-ite view of foreign policy that can be summarized only a little tounge-in-cheek as: America is somehow responsible for every bad thing that has ever happened anywhere in the world. Nothing bad can happen anywhere without it somehow being a result of something that America did. Which serves to infantilize the entire population of every other country in t…
I was under the impression that it's not so much about America being responsible for every bad thing in the world, but that historically America has been taking advantage of those thousands of years of history, culture and of course conflict, to their own benefit. So if due to some political agenda there is profit or benefits to be reaped from nudging certain conflicts this or that way, there's a high probability tha…
The reasons behind any particular policy are of course complex. Some may be for good and noble reasons, others for not so good reasons. A few turn out well, many go badly or not at all as intended.
Many people in foreign countries even try to get us to intervene. Often they want us to fund them or to suppress their enemies. Some want us to suppress violence in other countries, just because they think we can - see Darfur. Their motives aren't any cleaner or dirtier than ours are, just saying we aren't uniquely or cartoonishly evil.
I think the important part to remember is that our real ability to change things abroad is very limited indeed and fraught with risk. We can nudge things a bit, sure. If a country is on the verge of civil war, we can maybe nudge them towards it or away from it, but we can't create the war from scratch, or control what the sides are. If they really want to fight, they will, and we can't stop them. If they really have no desire to fight, we can't make them. If we try to nudge, we may just cause the opposite thing to happen instead. It's a mess, and it's likely to continue to be a mess no matter what we do or don't do. There's always the hope that we can encourage things to be a little bit less messy, but that may not be in the cards.
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Sort of. Most of the time America intervened not for the benefit of the locals, but for its own (or its allies) benefit (including as a proxy against Russia). It's harder to criticize that. It's bad for the locals, but America needs to do what's good for America. In this case though, it's entirely "for" the locals, so America should stay out of it because it's not actually helping the locals.
It's difficult to claim that America's actions in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world have been good for America. In fact, the only war America participated in that ended up being a net good for America was World War 2, which resulted in the devastation of much of Europe and allowed American industries to expand and advance virtually unchallenged for almost 50 years. The Vietnam War however was a disaster of e…
And they were. Now we have instable areas, but the US prevented the Soviet Union from continuing to expand and collapsed it by overwhelming it with military costs to stabilize its periphery.
In some circles that counts as a net positive to the US.
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It's easy to predict a war long after it has started. It's like predicting WW II in 1942. The Syrian war, which we have a heavy hand in - before and after it began, started in 2011. That article was written in 2013. And did you check the bio of the author. It's easy to predict a war after it has started and when you have inside knowledge and a hand in how the war should proceed and end.
The notion that the Syrian Revolution began with foreign (especially US) meddling is absurd. In 2011, the US was in the process of normalizing relations with the assad regime. Obama had appointed a new ambassador the year before. Clinton thought assad was a 'reformer.' The war broke out for a very simple reason: assad's forces kept shooting peaceful protesters. Despite assad's violence, the Revolution remained largel…
That's because foreign meddling is absurd.
The FSA was organized out of Turkey, with it's high level leadership and intelligence feeding in over the border. The primary branches of al Qaeda and militant groups were funded and supplied by foreign organizations. Special forces in the United States had been perturbing for revolutions and US propaganda operations performing a regional 'blitz'.
A huge amount of disinformation in this thread, including people who are pushing personal opinions and state narratives as fact.
Sad to see this on Hacker News.
This is a pretty good article and worth a read for people who are not already informed. They were not completely correct. They seem to underestimate the stability and staying power of Jordan. Both US and Israel help to make sure that Jordan is protected. Stability of monarchies are typically underestimated. Syria's government has not fallen, and Nusra (now Jabhat Fateh al-Sham) never managed to unify the rebel to any…
Slightly off topic: does anyone know of any forums/news aggregators of comparable quality to the HN community (e.g. generally well informed, polite, and strictly moderated/self-moderated) that focus on geopolitics?
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> So they want to build a pipeline from Qutar to the med through Syria. They want to what??? You really need to look at a map before saying things like that. I just..... Do you realize Qatar is on the coast? Why would you need to build a pipeline to another coast? And why go through Syria of all places? There are so many other routes you can take, and you think they want Syria so badly they triggered a war?
He's correct. The proposed pipeline goes from Qatar, though Saudi Arabia, through Syria, into Turkey and then would provide Natural Gas to Europe. There's a second proposed pipeline people often don't talk about... it would go from Iran, through Iraq, through Syria to Europe. Guess which one Europe and the United States want.
I get that it's a bit shorter to go through Syria, but a war, just for that?
There's a major station in Doğubeyazıt, you can link to that.