What should the West's foreign policy towards the Middle East be other than to not do anything we've done in the past 1000 years? Just write them off and give China their shot? Because it seems like that's the direction we're heading...not that I necessarily think that's a bad thing.
Honestly? I'm not sure leaving them alone militarily equates to writing them off, but you're right that someone else will doubtless repeat the process at some point in the next few decades. It won't work out for them either. You aren't responsible for that outcome, only your own actions.
Apple are one of the world's largest corporations. Hardly a valid attack on communism, especially when China have been legislating more robust protections for employees in the past few weeks.
Chinese foreign policy seems to me the opposite of communism. The Belt and Road seems pretty much based in old fashioned capitalism.
This is a very bad take. The Taliban wasn't a response to the US. It was a response to communist Russia. But it goes back much further than that. 'Barbarism, religious extremism and widespread conservatism,' as you state, struck in the Islamic world from the beginning. It STARTED as an invading army that attacked outward in every direction. People like to blame Europe for the Crusades, but the Crusades only started when Hellenic areas of the Middle East were about to fall to Muslim armies. It literally started as a request for the west to fight back before the end of Constantinople. Then when the Muslim world was in its golden age and had conquered the Byzantine Empire, Sicily, North Africa, large swathes of India, the Balkans, all of Spain, and was at the gates of Vienna they collapsed inward. Not because of the West, but because the same religious fundamentalism that made this possible turned against their scientists and wise men. They went from one of the leading lights of scientific endeavor to a fundamentalist force that rejected anything that wasn't in their holy book. They went from the great libraries of Cordoba with hundreds of thousands of books to the demand of the clerics to destroy all books that were considered topics forbidden by the Qu'ran. And in their zeal they threw in all books on astronomy when the Qu'ran forbid astrology, because the clerics in charge were too ignorant to know the difference. But this was just the first manifestation in al-Andalus. Six different dynasties included major purges of books and knowledge there, this in one of the twin lights of knowledge in the Golden Age. The Umayyad, Amirid, Abbadid, Almoravid, and Almohad reigns in this one nation all included major book burnings. Why? Political advantage by appealing to the religious fundamentalists bestowing the legitimacy of Allah. And the other leading light, Baghdad, fell not to the West but to the Mongols, as the sack of Baghdad and the end of the Abassid caliphate in 1258. The threat to Muslim scholars was so great by the Sunni Revival (~1055) that many burned their OWN books in order to appear sufficiently pious and avoid the power of the clerics. The rise of European powers came because it's society took the exact same tools available to the Islamic world and was capable of expanding it beyond the limitations of their religion, even while undergoing its own religious convulsions because of this. The Muslims have had their own problems outside the West since inception, and the legitimacy of western hegemony as an external boogieman is irrelevant. If it wasn't the West it would be another group. They require such an external threat, and their political and religious leaders would always create one. It's no different than the Nazis proclaiming the stab in the back or American Evangelists railing against both Muslim fundamentalism and Western liberalism. It's a foundation piece of militant fundamentalism. And I in no way, shape or form think that the US or any other government was responsible for rebuilding Afghanistan after they allied with al-Qaeda. Indeed, if you assume we did have that responsibility, you are saying that the US is more responsible than other nations. I think it was good of us to try, and we gave them the chance to stand on their own two feet and build a better society, but ultimately it was up to them. And because of their corruption and total collapse it's clear they were not ready and that they weren't willing to fight to avoid this fate. Personally I find religion of all shapes and sizes repressive. But Islam has the worst manifestations and most power over the regions it inhabits, regardless of the number of many hundreds of millions of good people that happen to be Muslim. And among the West, religion is on the wane in most places, but fundamentalist evangelism in the US is very little different to Islam. These protestant evangelical churches had an amazing influence in the American revolution, but the Constitution kept them localized as it rejected their religious worldview in the aspect of governance. Of course, the madmen are trying to change that. The Middle East was shaped more than anything else by a militant religion that swept over the region and conquered. That is the biggest story of the Middle East of the last 1400 years. Indeed, it is completely ruled in the name of that religion even now.
OK, I should have said 'in this forum.' These posters are almost silent here now, being effectively run off. I see the occasional post in other forums, but they can't express those views there without being warned.
Yes, it rings a bell. It occurred about 400 years after the invasion of Spain by Muslims, and was a direct response to the fall of Jerusalem and the threat to Constantinople. Xerxes? The Emperor of Persia? Yes, not sure how that the fact the ancient empires fought amongst themselves has any play with your hypothesis, let alone the direct ancestors of Iran. Most successfully by the Muslims. The first place they invaded was the Middle East, as they violently conquered the cities around them. Their first conquest was the Jewish tribe Banu Qurazaya where Mohammed executed all the men of the tribe and sold the children and women into slavery. The second was Mecca itself, which opposed the mandated religious conversion of their populace. What? The Mughals, Sikhs, and Chinese never conquered the Middle East. As far as I know they never even attacked it. The Mughals were Muslims. The Sikhs were a small Indian Empire that never projected power. China could have, but turned back due to it's own sense of superiority. You seem VERY confused. As to external enemies, those have always been present, even if they were just members of other tribes or sects. Again, this is how Islam started, and their schisms, civil wars and internal confllicts always existed. The partisans of Ali started the Sunni-Shi'a split immediately upon the death of Mohammed in 632 AD.
I figured out the fact you were a bigot about 15 years ago when you stated that the reasons Norway could have universal health care and we couldn't was that they were a homogenized population and the US isn't. So they were all white, and we couldn't achieve that because we had blacks, hispanics and other minorities here. You've stated that absolute shit take a few times since.
So ISIS-K already claimed responsibility for the first airport attack. Rockets were being fired into the airport by ISIS-K forces, from a car. There was a high alert by the US, NATO and oh yeah, UK officials that subsequent attacks were planned. Literally dozens of terrorist attacks using car bombs have rocked Kabul over the last 20 years, killing thousands. Just four months ago a car bomb detonated at a girls school killing 90 and wounding 400. But you think that the US was is lying about their claim to have stopped a 2nd attack within a mile of the airport, because the US always lies and we are the bad guys. And this is why you are a bigot.
The Afghan government's old arsenal. It was inevitable when they collapsed entirely that US produced weapons would land in the Taliban's hands. However, disarming them would have made the collapse even faster. No good solution when they won't fight. And the majority of those air and vehicle assets will be useless in a few years due to lack of parts and maintenance. Same problem they had in Iran with the overthrow of the Shah. The Ayatollah got a much larger take of US weapons. They quickly become unuseable - one of the reasons the Ayatollah was willing to deal with Reagan to get parts supplies. You know, the 2nd time a GOP president dealt with foreign enemies of the US to help his political career at home.
No, no confusion. You're missing the point. All nations and empires have engaged in intermittent conflict throughout their histories. The "start" was the first time one tribe decided to collectively and systematically engage another tribe over a water hole or particularly fertile patch of fig trees. Meaningless to our purposes. What is meaningful to my point, however: 1. Given a normal distribution of such behaviours over the course of millenia certain places will tend to find themselves disproportionately affected by virtue of geography, natural resources, location relative to others and trade routes. 2. The Middle East is awash with such unfortunate locations. Indeed it could be argued it IS such a location. 3. Cultures are shaped by historical themes. Their traditions, mentality, language values and religions are all products of events which occurred generations ago. 4. External conflicts tend to result in a reinforcing and intensification of internal structures which serve to produce solidarity, such as religious conservatism. Therefore we should not be surprised that Afghanistan, as a strategic and geographical keystone of the continent should have developed a culture with strong elements of fundamentalism in terms of religious expression and tribal identities. It is exactly what would be expected of a nation or region which has been caught between expansionist powers for thousands of years. N.B. Regardless of initiator the conflicts surrounding Crusades never really directly threatened the western powers which involved themselves. They absolutely did threaten (and make good on said threat) the cultures which would become the ME nations we know now.
You've never been in the military have you? When they say those things were "decommissioned", it means they were destroyed or ravaged enough to render the item unusable.
That chart doesn't say it, but other sources do confirm that a significant chunk of them have been. The US military says it permanently disabled over 150 vehicles and aircraft before leaving Kabul so they could 'never be used again'
Thanks. The times chart basically says the military left over 75,00 vehicles there so I gotta think a substantial number of them are still operational. Granted, some of the pick-up trucks, etc. are relatively harmless.
Once again and as usual, that isn't what I said. Why is it a compulsion with you that you must misrepresent what others post? Is it deliberate or can't you read? When someone - anyone - is involved in slaughtering kids, you don't simply take their explanation as authoritative. While you may point to other terrorist attacks (which no-one disputes) it is just as easy to point to other examples of the US attempting to lie following their atrocities. It is therefore possible that they are also lying on this occasion. It is ludicrous to consider my highlighting this, or my general hostility towards the goals and activity of superpower foreign policy as "bigotry". Get the fuck out of here.
People have made a big deal about the aircraft that were left behind, but aside from the fact that many were destroyed by the US on the way out the door, the Taliban made a point of killing pilots so there aren't a whole lot of people there who could fly any planes or helicopters that weren't rendered inoperable.
