My own pet theory is that it involves Iraq.
Which means, of course, that in no time, depending on the subject matter of the OP, someone decemberesque (Sam Stone, Shodan, Brutus) or Reederesque (elucidator, DtC, sailor) will be along to turn the thread into another “Bush is great/Bush is Hitler” thread.
Fourth post. Good job, Sam.
Anyone else remember, a couple years ago, when Sam Stone was actually one of the rational conservatives on this board?
-Joe
Yep. I used to agree with him in many threads regarding economics (capitalism versus socialism etc). I also remember defending the process which led to the election of George Bush (Electoral College, SCOTUS, etc). I also remember predicting He would not invade Iraq as I believed him not to be stupid. Oops!
So sailor, were you just trying to make Merijeek’s predictions 2 for 2, or what? 
It’s not just you. I’m not sure if he’s overcompensating for december or for George W. Bush, but he’s definitely overcompensating for something. Maybe the local hockey season up in Canada sucks. 
Anyway, to bring this thread back on track…
Not to be callous, but I think the lack of SDMB activity on this event is just because it’s not really an SDMB issue. We don’t have a “headline news” forum, so the closest thing is Great Debates, but there’s nothing to debate here – it’s the latest disaster to come out of Bush’s Iraq war fiasco, and Primus knows that’s been hashed to death. Even if several dozen American servicemen were killed in the attacks, it still wouldn’t be an SDMB-appropriate topic by itself.
Before someone mentions 9/11, I’ll point out that those attacks were out-of-the-blue, and caught everyone by surprise. The turmoil in Iraq, unfortunately, has been ongoing for months, and an incident like this bombing was bound to occur sooner or later.
Now, if al Qaeda claims responsibility for the attacks, and someone wanted to start a post in Great Debates over “Does this prove Bush’s war on terror is a failure?”, then we’d have something to chew on…
Granted, the bombing was a horrible thing. But something struck me as odd about the matter.
Back when the invasion was in full swing, I seem to recall that the Pentagon steadfastly refused to even comment on the number of Iraqi fatalities resulting from military action. And when retaliatory attacks occurred against US troops or UN locations, the media had a death and injury toll for foreigners but not for Iraqis. Now that it’s Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence, the death tolls have become startlingly exact.
It’s almost as if the violence of the invasion was downplayed to justify it, and the violence of Iraqi against Iraqi is played up to justify the continued occupation. It’s all too easy to write this off as ethnic or religious intolerance, but is it really the case? Is it entirely impossible that the bombing was carried out against Iraqis seen as collaborators with the US? I note sailor’s comment about US troops being driven away by a hail of stones. Surely if the Iraqis saw the US as liberators and protectors that wouldn’t have happened?
whoa there big fella, I don’t know of anyone who watches the news and doesn’t react to death whether it is a terrorist attack or a natural disaster.
And nobody mentioned the 180 missing people in the Philippines from the terrorist attack against a ferry boat last week.
Are these events connected? Appears to be. Who’s going to take care of it, the UN? It would be the first time they solved any real conflict. This is a war. WE are at war. THAT is the reality for which society has been desensitized to. It scares me that nobody realizes how close to the edge the world sits because we are all dependent on a very thin cocoon of infrastructure. In an economic war, guns can’t be used to grow food. If North America is taken down financially, Asia and Europe will fall like domino’s. The world’s largest producers of food will turn inwards and a large part of the 3rd world will literally starve to death.
I think perhaps the reason is that no one sees a way out of this mess. Iraqis are dying while we are there. Iraqis were dying before we came. Iraqis will die if we leave. And, given that the Cheney/Rummy fantasy of the Iraqis greeting us with open arms and becoming a democracy has not exactly worked out, the Administration seems not to know what to do either.
There is no easy answer as to whether this could have worked out for the best. The problem was that this never got discussed and debated before we did it. Wouldn’t it have been better for the case for the war to have been made on human rights grounds, where the assumptions of the administration could have been challenged? Correcting human rights problems the world over is not a job any president should take on without agreement by the people, especially if it is going to be expensive in terms of lives and treasure. Clinton, and the UN, was wrong about Rwanda, but he was right about Bosnia. I’m not sure how the debate would have come out, and if I would have agreed with the result, but that’s democracy.
Instead we went in based on lies, and now we’re stuck.
Sometimes there are no simple answers. Yes, the situation in North Korea is horrible, but is the answer an invasion which might set off a nuclear war on the Korean peninsula? One of the principles of the UN is sanctity of borders. There are situations where this must be violated, but let’s do that after careful debate, not made up scare tactics.
Magiver: *Who’s going to take care of it, the UN? It would be the first time they solved any real conflict. *
Um, you’ll recall that the first Gulf War was an intervention authorized by the UN, and it (along with the subsequent UN peacekeeping border-enforcement mission UNIKOM) did indeed solve the conflict of Iraq’s invading Kuwait. (It didn’t solve all of the other problems with Iraq, as we know to our cost, but there’s no question that it solved the problem of Iraq’s threat to Kuwait’s sovereignty and territory.)
There have been a lot of other UN conflict resolution and peacekeeping efforts recently, which have stabilized a number of troubled areas and arguably averted a lot of bloodshed.
It is quite true, however, that UN missions in the past decade have not succeeded in finally and absolutely resolving any major conflict. On the other hand, can you point to any non-UN military interventions in the past decade that have succeeded in finally and absolutely resolving major conflicts? I can’t think of any. It’s easy to sneer at the UN, especially if you don’t know a lot about what their forces are actually doing, but it’s somewhat harder to argue convincingly that unilateralist alternatives are more successful.
From here in the UK there is some bafflement at some of what’s going on in Iraq.
The bit of Iraq that the British forces control seems to be relatively peaceful and the Army/population realtions seem quite good. Why is there this difference?
Is our bit inherently more peaceful than the rest of Iraq or are we doing something right? (we have had a LOT of practice at this sort of thing).
Or is it that America is seen as the only real power involved and as such people are ignoring the other countries personnel (try telling the Italians this)?
Or is there something else entirely?
In any case it looks like a full-on civil war is pretty much inevitable.
The arguments used in support of the USA acting unilaterally in the international realm are equally valid in support of dictatorship as a best form of government at the national level. Democracy is slow, inefficient and often produces bad results. A dictator can make the trains run on time and does not have to worry about the people who just get in the way of doing things right.
Working within the international community may be slower and may sometimes, even often, lead to results which fall short of perfect. But it is still better in the long run than the USA trying to be world policeman and world dictator. It is bound to fail and will only reap enmities it does not need.
No, he can’t. What a dictator can do is lie about the trains running on time, discourage people from complaining, and eliminate people who tell the truth about it.
I think you missed my point which is that that is what those who defend dictatorship as a form of government say. It is not what I say. I say the opposite. Similarly those who defend the USA acting as a bully say the USA can achieve better results by not having to worry about what others think. I say the USA cannot unilaterally impose good solutions on Iraq or the rest of the world. What the president can do is lie about it. Yep. the parallel holds up pretty well.
Ah, the liberal dream. If US forces actually work to protect the Iraqis, they are all evil because they are “oppressing” them. If US forces pull back and concentrate on protecting themselves, they are all evil because they are making anarchy spread.
No I didn’t.
<aside> Good to see you around again, where’ve you been for the past month or two?
South China. Awful weather, wonderful time.
Glad to hear you enjoyed it.
<end aside>
**
I’m assuming by “unilateral” you are referring to the 2nd Gulf War. I disagree with your use of the term unilateral. Russia, France and Germany hold veto power in the UN above that of other countries. Their veto of the use of UN troops is not inclusive of all the other nations and it did not negate the authorization of force that already existed in at least 3 resolutions. It simply withheld the use of UN troops. Since UN troops have historically not been used in direct conflict it was more a show of political force then anything.
Germany, Russia and France had a vested interest in keeping Saddam in power. That’s fine if they want to continue this relationship. I’m not going to hold them to some mythical high standard because the US and every other nation does the same thing. However, their financial interest was held intact by a force of troops from other nations. The physical presence of troops on Islamic soil created a conflict that led to bombings around the world including the USS Cole, various embassies, and ultimately 9/11. There was virtually no offer from the UN to intervene in Mid-East stability. The direction the UN took was to maintain the status quo which meant that the principle authority in the region (the United States) would continue to act in it’s role as world police force. If we followed that course then the conflict would continue unabated against the United States. Not France, not Germany, and not Russia.
I’m not against the UN, I think it is a great institution. But my comparison with the Guardian Angles was deliberate. The UN does not have the structure to effect change if it involves actual combat. This is not the UN’s fight because that is not the UN’s function. There is no unified world army beyond that which nations agree to. When the UN sends in troops, they are at the discretion of the countries that send them.
And even a person who is well-informed on events is at the mercy of what the media, or the government, allows to be shared with the world. Few know that China loses hundreds of miners each year due to accidents in coal mines - and some estimates, which I can’t cite now since they’re in a State Department book back at work, say thousands - each year. It only becomes newsworthy when more than 10 die at once, perhaps.
Dogface replied to sailor: *“Iraq is sinking into chaos and civil war and the US occupation forces are making it their priority to protect themselves rather than the Iraqi population so it just makes it easier for anarchy to spread.”
Ah, the liberal dream.*
Can’t let that revolting remark pass uncorrected. No, it is not a dream of liberals (or of anybody else AFAIK, except perhaps for Islamist extremist terrorists who use stasis to try to install fundamentalist theocracies) to have Iraq “sink into chaos and civil war”. That’s disgusting. Like everybody else, we liberals would be very pleased to see Iraq rapidly become stable and peaceful.
It’s true that liberals have been arguing since before the war that the Administration seemed to have no clear plan on how to make a post-war Iraq rapidly stable and peaceful. Now that events seem to be demonstrating that we were right, it’s natural that we’re going to point that out. But it is a lie to suggest that liberals in general “dream” of the sacrifice and ruination of thousands of innocent Iraqi lives just so that we can be proved right.
Magiver: I’m assuming by “unilateral” you are referring to the 2nd Gulf War.
No, I meant what I said: I was asking about any unilateralist (not necessarily strictly unilateral, i.e., carried out by only one state) military interventions in major conflicts over the past decade.
*This is not the UN’s fight because that is not the UN’s function. There is no unified world army beyond that which nations agree to. *
There I agree with you.