That’s too bad. The fact of the matter is we got someone using WMDs on his own people. We have alliances all over the place funding different groups in Syria. Obama tried to pull out of syria but nobody else wanted to pull out. The Military industrial complex will not allow us to simply pull out of Syria. They’re making a shit ton of money off manufacturing weapons for the middle east. Even if it’s at the cost of 90% of civilians in yemen, even if it’s at the cost of civil wars and turmoil in the middle east. We’re going to keep making and selling arms to the middle east. That’s absolutely never going to change without extremely strong resistance. What all of this is going to boil down to is us killing hundreds of thousands of people for the sake of millions. We can kill a few thousand people to save a hundred thousand, or we can hesitate doing nothing but idle threats like Obama and let everyone die. Sending soldiers, training soldiers, funding the rebels, none of this is going to work. The only thing that will work is force. We must kill assad, and take the oil from the russians. Playing politics is just prolonging this war, more people are going to suffer. If trump decides to wait until Assad uses chemical weapons on his own people again, then that will be repeating our cycle but it’ll be a bit more intense this time.
Guns aren’t for threats, they’re for actions.
A winning slogan for the 860 election if I ever saw one. Bravo!
LOL. The old “his own people” thing. Like with Saddam, right? Never mind there’s been a civil war for years and they’ve been killing the hell out of each other. This week they’re “his own people”. Tugs at your moral compass, right.
Dude, while you’re checking Google for 'Syrian oil take a look at ‘Alawite sect’.
Because assassinating Saddam Hussein and Moammar Gaddafi worked so well.
No wait, that’s a big part of how we got ISIS in the first place. If Assad gets killed, ISIS will flourish.
Hello Obama,
Why assassinate Assad?
So should we let him run amuck? It seems to me that russia completely lied about helping fight ISIS. When they came over to “fight isis” they dropped bombs on rebel soldiers our CIA were teaching to be effective fighters.
If Assad or russia really wanted to get rid of ISIS, then they would work with the rebels and US temporarily. Even if they don’t want to fund their enemies, the least they can do is exchange information among us. This whole russia cutting off communication with the US in syria crap is idiotic. We have a common enemy, we could wipe that enemy off the face of the earth or we could keep circle jerking in syria while innocent people continue to suffer and die.
Your way of thinking is why we had WW2. Just ignore the monster and he’ll go away right? Just ignore the monster and maybe things will get better somehow. The monster can’t be as bad as people think can he? Well guess what chamberlain that monster ended up being an actual monster and nearly wiped out the entire jewish population.
I would imagine that was his Daddy’s choice. Fathers usually lose out on a first name choice, and settle for middle. 
I imagine that the Pentagon always does enemy defense assessment after an attack, but I wonder if this was a chance to test Russian anti cruise missile defense.
This is brilliant: a Roald Dahl monster-in-the-wardrobe tale, interwoven with alternative history.
In this version, did the US land on a couple of beaches and save the world?
That didn’t work well in Iraq.
What’s the alternative. Let all the savants kill each other? Let the military industerial complex continue to play things out? Let Assad commit human rights violations? What’s next, should we let him put children in gas chambers and force their parents to bury their dead bodies? How far does he have to go until you say enough is enough?
People are going to die either way. Would you rather let a million innocent citizens die, or woudl you rather kill assad and end his regime. I know what I would do, I’d fund whoever is willing to kill assad then turn around and blame them for killing him. Problem solved.
Well, it wasn’t me who raised the “standing” issue, but if I were to try to define some way to measure it, I’d at least try for metrics that could be quantified in some way, as opposed to some gut feeling that other countries view the U.S. as weak or whatever:
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How is the U.S. dollar performing against other currencies?
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Is the demand for immigration to the U.S. rising, falling, steady? How about compared to other destination countries like Canada, the U.K., France, Germany…? What percentage of immigrants to the U.S. start businesses? Is it higher or lower than immigrants to other countries?
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How does the U.S. rate on various lists measuring GDP per capita, life expectancy, infant mortality, the freedom index, etc.
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This may be difficult to measure, but how influential is the U.S. vote at the U.N. ? How many countries (and how wealthy/significant are these countries) will tend to side with the U.S., as opposed to siding with Russia or China?
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Is the number of countries seeking trade treaties with the U.S. growing, shrinking, steady? Is there a growing number of countries seeking trade treaties with China? Are there any countries seeking to end past agreements with the U.S.?
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More long-term, how many Nobel Prize winners and major contenders are from the U.S.? How many are from other countries but emigrated to the U.S. to do their advanced work?
I’m open to other metric suggestions, but I’m not going to blithely accept “Obama hurt U.S. standing” without something to back it up, and the same for Bush43. I’m not going to project my personal feelings about them (or Trump) onto foreigners and assume they feel the way I feel, therefore my feelings are justified.
Well, if you’re going to game the situation, I’d suggest giving Israel unlimited military support to overthrow the entire region and establish a hegemony, with first-class citizenship granted to anyone in the conquered regions who converts to Judaism.
As we learned in Iraq and Libya, these are not mutually exclusive. If Hussein and Gaddafi were still in power today, those nations would not have fallen apart at the hands of warring factions of rebels.
Just because you can think of only of one idea does not mean it’s a good or useful idea. Especially considering you aren’t remotely qualified nor tasked with finding said solution. It’s a complicated problem that just might require a complicated solution.
To be frank, most of that almost makes me think this is a joke. Life expectancy or Nobel Prizes? When Martin Hyde was talking about standing he was not talking about a beauty contest. He meant who is top dog. Which country’s opinion carries the most weight when a problem needs attention. Ok, I don’t have metrics, but it was on Obama’s watch that saw both Russian and Chinese aggressiveness (Crimea/Syria and artificial islands in the South China sea.
Exactly. And you could see many of our allies were frustrated…after all, they expect the US to carry most of the water, and we weren’t. We were kind of disengaged except for the war on terror and the fight against ISIS.
I know why Obama did what he did. It was also not all his fault…in fact, I don’t think most of it was his fault. The American people wanted that disengagement after 8 fucked up years with Bush II at the helm. And Obama was trying to buff up the US’s soft power instead of it’s hard power. Worked too…Europeans didn’t hate us nearly as much. Japanese and South Koreans started liking us again too. But by the end of his term you could see that many of our allies (and even some that weren’t…like, oh, say Vietnam) were kind of freaking. China was pushing the limits in both the South China Sea and East China Sea. They were also exerting hard power on their various borders. Nearly EVERY nation with a border with China was a bit freaked and apprehensive. Look at the Philippines. They WON their suit…then essentially gave up their rights back to the Chinese because they didn’t trust the US to have their back (well, plus Obama dissed their murderous leader). On the other side there was Russia, pushing and testing. Then Iran, North Korea, etc etc etc.
Whether one thinks this is a good thing or a bad, it was a noticeable drop in US standing and hard power during this time.
Thought this was interesting. It’s a CNN article about right wingers and populists abandoning Trump because of the US strikes.
Putini’s interest in the ME is related to oil but not as in ‘getting’ oil. One reason he wants to have leverage in the region is to cause trouble to hope to keep oil prices high, low enough oil prices for long enough could be a personal threat to his safety. But the other is simply as a show for domestic purposes that Russia is a ‘great power’, similarly for Job 1 of the Russian regime, try to make sure Putin dies in his own bed not up against a wall.
They seem good indicators of the physical health of a country and the freedom of scientific research within its borders, to me.
“Beauty contest”, really. Economic indicators are just skin-deep to you, huh?
Assuming your assessment of his meaning is correct… what does that mean? “Top dog”? Economic indicators are “beauty contest” questions so you suggest we adopt dog show standards instead?
So how do you propose to prove anything? Try to convince us your gut feelings are a barometer?
Okay, so if that is a criteria - military aggression from Russia and/or China, let’s do some comparing. I’m going to do a blind google search on “Russian aggression”, pick the first plausible-looking cite and see what examples I can find:
A Timeline of Russian Aggression, by the NATO Association of Canada. That is my first google hit on “russian aggression”, and perhaps the cite is Canadian because I’m in Canada, but no big deal.
The first entry on their timeline is “Georgia’s Western Ambitions”, from September-October 2006 (Bush43’s second term). There are other scattered entries through the end of Bush43’s term and the start of Obama’s, with a note for July 2009 and Obama’s first visit to Moscow, when he and Medvedev signed a new START treaty. Then pretty quiet until May 2011 and the start of the Syrian Civil War, then February 2014 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. How much of this, if any of it, can be attributed to Russian boldness in the face of a perceived-weak U.S. President? I’ve no fucking idea. I don’t yet see any likelihood of Trump convincing the Russian to leave, though.
Anyway, let’s do the same for “Chinese aggression”. Looking down the first page of hits, it looks like a lot of the complaints about Chinese aggression are coming from Japan (no surprise there), mingled with some stuff about the Koreas and the Philippines. If anyone wants to blame Obama for any of this… well… I guess they could probably find a justification. They’d have to add something about what the TPP was supposed to do and what effect Trump’s scrapping of it will have, in the interest of fairness.
What it boils down to is if I see someone claiming “Bush43/Obama/Trump hurt America’s standing in the world”, I’m not inclined to accept it without some kind of evidence because it’s just too easy for the claimant to assume that since he feels America was hurt by a president’s action, miscellaneous foreigners must believe it also, helped mightily if the claimant doesn’t like that president for other reasons, quantifiable or not.
Ah the ramifications of killing an evil dictator, classic. Sure I’m in the dark on a lot of things that anybody would obviously need to know before making a decision. However those people have yet to prevent mass atrocities from happening. What’s the point of international laws if we keep letting people get away with breaking them? If telling someone to stop raping you doesn’t work out, maybe retaliating is a more feasible option. What’s the point in giving everyone a slap on the wrist every time they murder and plunder?