Update on Syria: Americas Latest Perpetual War

I don't have a "great solution" any more than anyone does. The situation is fairly dire but there are certainly things that could be done to make the situation better, rather than making it worse. These things involve making peace in the interest of the people of Syria rather than continuing the war in the interests of the United States. Like it or not, at this point the Assad regime has essentially won the war.

"Best just stay the fuck out of it" is the worst possible solution.

It is not. Nor is it what I suggested in any event, if you'll refrain from clipping my sentences.

You believe the sight of another western "rescue" of the region is a greater relief? Christians used to be violent? You really believe the Iraq and Afghan wars caused fewer innocent casualties than Assad? As George W said "we fixed Iraq".....

Do you really believe those coalition forces were sent to Iraq in order to help those civilians? Do you really believe they were in Iraq, or now Syria, out of kindness? Seriously? This comes across as almost painfully naive.

I can't help but notice a comparative lack of current western forces in Congo or Cambodia which have far worse humanitarian issues then Iraq ever did. Wonder why, surely we should be enacting regime change? Oh, we did that already

There's a clear and well documented sequence of causality from the coalition invasions to the current situation, one which frankly I've never actually heard disputed before. No one mentioned "muslim groups", I said ISIS.

ISIS represent a backlash to ill advised and illegal western invasions (note - not "interventions"), they were created by the remnants of the Taliban and Saddam's supporters cooperating with other extremist groups to exploit the massive anti US feeling already endemic in the region and the lack of cohesive social structures available to contain them. They couldn't have come into existence without our help.

Those invasions created a situation which was ripe for the chaos we see now and were never intended to represent a humanitarian effort for those people. They were self interested endeavours which shat all over international law and represented completely irresponsible interference in a region already sick and tired of being the puppets and victims of the political machinations of foreign powers. Where do you think all of this resentment towards the west came from? Why do you think the middle east represents such a fertile recruiting ground for terrorists? Why do you think we have such a refugee crisis in Europe now?

It's the same old mistakes, the same old imperialism masquerading as responsibility with dominant powers on the world stage assuming a caretaker role we are ill equipped to undertake or even understand and creating more problems than we ever "solved" in regions of the world we have no place setting foot except as visitors.

Staying out of it from the start would have been the best outcome. The early insurgency in Syria would have died a quick death without western support in arms, money, intelligence, and even allowing FSA commanders to direct the conflict from the safety of Turkey.

Instead thanks to western support we have a large permanent Russian base on the eastern Mediterranean. An easy supply route for Iran to supply Hezbollah and other militant groups. A significant upgrade to Syrian air defences that make life far more difficult for Israel to maintain dominance in the region. Turkey and US relations are heavily strained due to US support of Kurdish groups. A refugee crisis. Plus half a million killed. This is a total failure on our part.

So your answer is to let Assad do as he pleases? Gross.

What has the military intervention achieved?

Should the US now intervene in Cambodia?

Did i just wake up in the far, far past today? Christians? Really? While the West no doubt has a strong Christian influence it is nothing compared to the depravity and horrific things we see on a daily basis from the Middle East. The Koran, which these Muslim sects and unfortunately some people take way too seriously, outlined this - not the West

Back up for a sec - did you just call the Afghan war illegal? The Taliban were given the option to give up bin laden, who confessed to 9/11 right away, and they flat out refused. Plus after 9/11 i don’t really give a shit if anyone considers the afghan “invasion”illegal. Fuck those guys

Iraq, maybe you have a point. But to attribute the rise of Isis to that singular moment is ridiculous. Tensions between different Muslim sects existed long before that and they never needed the West to start killing each other, they were doing that just fine beforehand. That’s why there was a dictatorship in Iraq for crying out loud

They were saving the populations from oppression and furthering their own interests. Don’t be so black and white

MAY have been awful? Jesus dude. Not a good look for you there

No one is generalizing. I literally used the words “factions” and “elements” of Islam

Yeah i mean thanks for shit they did thousands of years ago but let’s be honest, it’s the West driving the march towards the pinnacle of humanity. Acceptance, innovation, social programs etc etc etc. This is the best time for human beings to be alive in history and apart from oil, which the West also produces, I’m pretty hard pressed to think of any major contributions the Middle East is making apart from severe oppression. Even Dubai, which is viewed as the jewel of the Middle East, was built on literal slavery. In the 2000s.

I may not agree 100% with the Iraq war but I’m not an unrealistic wanker that doesn’t see the big picture, such as yourself

You know who hates muslims the most? Other muslims. You’re making bad excuses for what should be regarded universally as terrible behaviour

A very disappointing rebuttal by you

Why so you can tell everyone afterwards that all the problems in Cambodia are due to US intervention?

I mean here you are saying that the US shouldn’t be the world police because they ruin everything but at the same time are expecting them to be the world police

C’mon man

We don't see paramilitary or terrorist Chirstians using violence on a mass scale to overthrow a state and taking control of whole towns and geographical areas?

That's good to know.

I'll remember that when I'm next over there and people are talking about the thousands of murders, rapes, maimings, open battles in the street, beheadings, tortures, bombings that happened during the troubles. Interestingly when the peace process started in earnest the level of terrorism in the UK concurrently dropped, what was that I said about military interventions escalating matters and causing more deaths and suffering than would have occurred anyway?

Yes I did, article 51 was used nominally as a justification under international law but patently doesn't apply, as many lawyers better informed than you or I have pointed out. It refers specifically to self defense against a state aggressor, not extradition by force of a terrorist suspect and in no way justified a mass bombing campaign or occupation once it became clear OBL was no longer there, especially since it resulted in far more civilian deaths than 9/11, not to mention directly leading to the formation of ISIS.

There was no legal case for being in Afghanistan any more so than Iraq.

Hence my question about Cambodia, if the western interventions were as selfless as you imagine, why the focus on countries where the invading party has a vested interest and at a time when that interest becomes threatened? How about Congo?

Why does the US (and the UK) become so interested in human welfare on such a conveniently specific basis and never seem to heed the lesson that no matter what rhetoric you employ violent regime change almost always results in more suffering than you are preventing? Do the people of Iraq really feel better off?

Really?

Kinda reads like you are.

Maybe fuck you.
There was no such confession "right away" and the existence of an ultimatum is irrelevant. But still, there was at least some (non-legal) grounds for the Afghan invasion.

What on earth are you talking about? Muslims in Iraq were not killing each other before that and the historical emergence of Saddam's dictatorship had nothing to do with it.

It's terrible, yes, but are you seriously proposing we launch military actions against every brutal regime out there? Or just Assad?

If just Assad, justify your decision to the folk in Africa.

If everyone, how do you envisage this monumental military effort being organised? As well as the schemes for reconstruction and transition of power to locals (we don't want to impose governments on them - or do you?) afterwards.

Look, it'd be nice to think we can go in and stomp on everyone who abuses their people, but there are far too many of them to make that realistic. Short of a strange woman with an umbrella handing you an army of Cybermen for your birthday.

ISWYDT!

So what's your preferred course of action? You can pick from our current situation or from the start of the uprising. Clearly you don't give a damn about territorial integrity or national self-determination. You also want to force western values into a foreign nation like some modern self-righteous colonialist.

Honestly I feel Afghanistan was just a distraction to direct American national rage at the time. Afghanistan held little real value as a base for Islamic terrorism other than some rudimentary training. In my alternate reality we would have leaned incredibly heavily on Saudi Arabia to cut the money train that was and is continuing to fund Islamic extremism around the world. Though if you had alternate preferred scenarios in mind I'd happy to hear it.

Oh, I agree entirely. So much of what is wrong in the world goes back to Saudi Arabia and western support for them.

At least the murder of Khashoggi opened a lot of peoples eyes to what a morally bankrupt shithole Saudi Arabia is. As well as the laughable lie that Mohammad bin Salman is some kind of westernizing reformer.

Also holy shit if true. This paves the way for Turkish forces to invade Kurdish controlled regions. Maybe Syrian government forces can finally finish off ISIS controlled areas east of the Euphrates river since the Kurd's are clearly not up to the task.

Seriously?

Iraq’s history is literally filled with Sunnis brutally dominating the Shi’a, as well as bloody military coups and rebellions

Oh and there’s also the hundreds of thousands of dead Kurds along the way

Like this is easily available information that many, many people know. Except for you i guess

So now you’re flat out lying to prove a point

See this is exactly why people think you’re a terrorist loving scumbag

Good news everybody! ISIS is defeated! Let's catch the first thing smokin' outta this joint! Gettin' out of motherfuckin' Dodge bitches! It's just....that.....easy!

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/19/us/politics/trump-syria-turkey-troop-withdrawal.html

Mr Putin ordered President Trump to get out, problem solved.

First off, it is smocking.

As for getting out of another country which does not want the US controlling it I say good. Even if we could go bring our superior morals over there, which ones are superior again? Women have barely had rights over here very long, and they are just getting the right not to be grabbed and harassed at work. Blacks just got some more rights after being slaves and segregated for most of our history, and we are still tossing them in prison for being uppity. Our country was founded on protestant superiority and we still have religious morals imposed on us by law. Gay people just got the right to be married, and trans people cannot even go to the bathroom without a law being passed. Our homeless are rampant, we have huge prison populations being enslaved again by corporations.

Who the fuck are we imposing morals on? There is probably more rape on our college campuses than in ISIS controlled territories, but women supposedly matter to us. It just recently became illegal to hit your wife like the Bible commands.

@14thDoctor wants to impose morals on other people and he is a an arm chair warrior who thinks punching people for their political beliefs is a moral imperative. I would not put that scumbag in charge of rapists and murderers in prison. Seriously dayton4, get your ass off your couch and go fight for the Syrians. It is over in the middle east. No one is stopping you from laying down your life for those people. See how much they appreciate it. On your way back clean up Africa, Asia, Russia, south America, and then we can talk about your neighborhood and the nazis in it.

Wow.

Wow.

Wow.


Just.... wow.

I'm sorry, but if you think America or Christians are the reason for all the violence that's been happening between cultures in the Middle East then you're a fucking moron.

Yes, you are a nutbar. Anything else we can help you with?

It seems like people do not think America is the solution to it, but not the entire cause of it. America has helped to pour gasoline on the fire that was there, but aside from the specific ideologues it seems like this is pretty much human nature up until now. A few countries may have moved down a ladder of evolution to a different point of killing and explaining each other but we all did the same thing, and we are all still doing it. The idea that America is somehow above and beyond this and ready to police the world is immature, ignorant, and boldly idiotic.

Please show where anyone said that.

Not on this scale, not even remotely. Saddams regime was anything but compassionate but that doesn't alter the fact the current situation is way worse than the comparative stability of Iraq pre invasion. There's always been violence between Sunni and Shia muslims, but the scale and frequency of the conflicts has been growing every time foreign powers stir the pot in order to serve their own ends and the coalition forces had no place being in the region at all. Period.

That being said, take it back another couple of decades and we see even the stable brutality of Saddam's regime was in no small part openly reinforced by the US, including being complicit in the development and deployment of chemical weapons:

None of this has been humanitarian, not by a long margin. The pattern of western interventions leading to escalations and further destabilising the region should be obvious to policy makers by now and the only logical conclusion is that successive generations of western leaders who have access to all this information have known their efforts would only result in further deaths and suffering but did so anyway.

The goal of preventing deaths and helping the local civilians is a very thin cover which apparently @14thDoctor has either swallowed hook, line and sinker or genuinely believes that the best way to solve a mistake is to keep repeating it until eventually you get the result you wanted.

This is just really recent history. How quickly people forget how Saddam and Osama were people who were our friends back in the Reagan years. We loved mr. Saddam way back then and fed him weapons and intelligence so he could fuck with Iran and the Russians way back then. we kept him in power and we did not give a fuck how brutal he was to the people. We helped instigate those inner Islamic tribal wars because oil and the commies. We made propaganda for supporting the Taliban. They were the noble warriors of Afghanistan that Rambo went and helped fight the Russians. Rambo was playing goat carcass polo with Osama bin Laden.

If we care so much about human rights why the hell are we still tolerating alliances with Saudi Arabia ? Before we go to war with Syria maybe we might want to tell the Saudis to stop the shit they do to their women and gays, and to stop killing journalists? Remember the Saudis who helped train and bring the 9/11 terrorists over here? Surely they used some of our billions in aid to help aid the attackers who hit us on our own soil in peacetime.

Did they attack us because we were minding our own business and staying out of their part of the world? Fuck no, we fought part of our cold war through their countries and have been funding their religious wars through oil for the longest time.

@14thDoctor doctor is just our new dinner. We should not be the world police when we allow Donald trump to be our president because we are too partisan to impeach. If we want to do something to help the Muslims that don't want to live in a tribal theocracy then we should be taking as many of them as want to live under American culture as Muslims as we can. They can come over here and be a Muslim, but they have to tolerate women's rights, gays, jews, Christians, atheists, witches, and the occasional Jedi. You can wear your head coverings, but we might need someone to check under them for security, and no one is allowed to stone women who forget them or do not want to wear them. We will try to do better against those who persecute and harass Muslims, but honestly we have some dickheads and we all suffer them from time to time.

Long before I pay taxes to go bomb some foreign people for being religious assholes and harmony others I would like to dedicate some money to our local alt right surveillance and domestic terrorism fight.

Exactly, neither the US nor any other nation has grounds to claim moral legitimacy for that role, especially where the problems they are purpotedly solving are largely of their own making and the "solution" is to do the same again.