I think plenty of my insights here are spot on, some just think them insane.
It’s easier to win strategically if you slaughter all of your enemies without concern for civilian casualties. We’ve done that too when we carpet bombed Germany and nuked Japan. The question of whether such a thing is justifiable ethically relates to what you are fighting for.
Putin seems to be fighting for the preservation of a middle eastern base, to bolster his credits as a world player for the home crowd conjuring of new desires for novorossiya with further annexation to come. More nationalist fluff to take their minds off their authoritarian state with a depressed economy.
You’ll have to forgive me if I don’t fawn over the display. This ass hole is trying to undermine the entire world order, weaken American institutions, split up Europe, and to what end?
Well, he’s the richest and by all appearances soon to be, if not already, the most powerful person in the world. So there’s that… however gauche and old-school it seems to be.
Homosexual acts were illegal in Syria before Da’esh, and gay men at least are sometimes killed by their families for fear of shaming the family honor. Hizbollah and Iran, key allies of Assad and contributors to Assad’s ground forces, are not known for their LGBT tolerance. But more importantly, Assad is clearly outclassing Da’esh in his slaughter of civilians, so you’re right in that comparing Da’esh to Assad is a bit absurd, even though they both have used chemical weapons.
Realpolitik and pragmatism are what keeps the U.S. in an alliance with backwards, sadistic regimes like in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, were rights are curtailed and hundreds, if not thousands, of their own citizens have been executed or maimed (not to mention the Saudi coalition’s bloody, reckless, and brutal air campaign in Yemen). The U.S. has pretty much overlooked it all or has made only the lightest moves outside of diplomatic statements here and there. Assad killing hundreds of thousands is not in the same category.
The U.S. supplied weapons and military intelligence to Iraq because it wanted a hedge against a larger threat - Iran. Iraq under Saddam was never a real U.S. ally - after all, most of its planes, armor, and weapons were bought from the Soviets. And what the U.S. and some European companies did in helping supply Saddam led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iranians and Iraqis/Kurds. It seems like the U.S. should and occasionally does learn from its mistakes. Supporting Assad would make the U.S. an enemy of the Syrian people, would alienate all other Arab countries, and would embolden Iran and Russia.
You do realize that Assad is supported by huge numbers of Syrians? He couldn’t have lasted as long as he did in this war without that support (I’m referring to the time before Russia and Iran stepped in.) And as for alienating Arab countries if they’re countries like Saudi Arabia I’m all for it. The US should support secular leaders in the Middle East not rabid religious fanatics like the Wahabbists and other Islamic extremists. They all hate us anyway however much some of them mask it.
I don’t realize that. His dubious re-election margin of 88% in government-held areas only was not that convincing. But it was the first time there were (pretty much completely unknown) other candidates on the ballot, so at least Assad is improving in dressing up his dictatorship like a democracy. I do realize that Assad has at least the nominal support of his fellow Alawites, in particular the wealthy and influential ones. As to the rest of the population, he appears to keep them in line with threats of force and torture against them and their families and open threats of a full genocidal pogrom on the scale of Rwanda should he be overthrown (which he directly fuels by his regime maintaining Alawites as a general ruling class/preferred sect and his brutal and sadistic measures).
Yes, we should ally ourselves with the moderate Islamic leadership of Iran and Hizbollah that have a strategic alliance with Assad. Here’s a simple test of who the U.S. should support in the Middle East - which group of countries want to keep things relatively stable versus what group of countries want to re-shape things dramatically?
Saudi Arabia and its (Sunni) allies want to contain Iran but otherwise are content with the overall strategic landscape as it is today. Helping groups fight and potentially topple Assad is a bonus. Iran and its (Shia) allies want to expand their power to prevent any possible future encirclement and, if possible, destroy Israel, remove U.S. forces and influence from the Middle East, and become the dominant regional power.
They already are. They want to be the dominant regional power, much the same as China wishes to be the dominant regional power in Asia. You only need to look at China’s behavior in the South China Sea and East China Sea and its attitudes towards the objections of its neighboring states to see where that would go if the U.S. wasn’t around at all.
Iran wishing to be the dominant regional power would mean it could carry out unchallenged on its threat to close the Strait of Hormuz and block a good portion of the world’s oil traffic/supply, throwing the oil and energy markets into chaos. It might also mean other things that don’t affect Western interests but would cause a lot of Sunni resentment and lead to possible war, such as Iranian control of the Haj and Mecca/Medina, given their accusations of Saudi negligence and hostility in the recent deaths of Iranian citizens during recent Hajs.
To piggyback on this, it is important to contemplate what different powers would want if they were in a dominant position in the region in the world.
If the US had it’s way and could impose it’s will on places like the middle east, Egypt would essentially become South Korea or Japan, same with Iran and Lebanon. To the extent that the US does not push for that it is for what was mentioned above, realpolitik calculations.
I don’t think Russia gives a flying f*ck if any country in the middle east is more free or not, they don’t even allow their own citizens to be free with their police state. China seems to want to be the new hegemon of the east, but again, they seem to be laying the groundwork now for some future confrontation decades into the future. Goodbye Taiwan. What Tibet? Not sure what the end goal is, but I cannot imagine a world with a more benign ideal for different nations and peoples compared to the US and the current world order.
Why would he ‘realize’ that, there is no great sign it is in any way true.
Of course it was such the great popularity of the Assad that saw the mass - secular - protests againt his corrupt bandit regime all across the major cities of the Syria, yes, so loved was he…
It is very Bortschy smell this fiction.
That is funny.
In fact large parts of his military defected, this was the non-radical initial opposition and his Soviet style poliitical units in the military executing the conscripts who refused to fire upon the civilians barely kept him together.
The quick slide to the us of the airpower for the indiscriminate bombing of the rebel held civilian districts - drawing on the airforce almost entirely Alaouite in its pilot corps and on the units dominated by the Alaouite (it is not to blame the Alaouite minority, but a pact of the devil was made).
The clan Assad only barely managed to avoid the total collapse in 2012, and it was from the intervention of the Hezbullah fighters and others that saved him.
So it is not in any way 'realpolitik’what it is, it is pure fear of the DAESH and others, and want to go back to the failed policy of supporting the pseudo-secular leaderships, those bloody dictators who put on some comfortable masque so one ise not frightened, and further discredit and further contaminate the secularism with the taint of the death squad, the taint of the corruption, the taint of the dictatorship.
And then in the Starbucks one can sit down and bemoan who somehow all those people hate “us” for our secularism, never making any connection between the support of the death squad running faux secular dictators and the backlash against the secular state, once a popular development in the region…
Of course that the outside powers helped propped up the faux secularism of the corrupt dictators with blood drenched hands is never seen as having the impact on why somehow the Arab region is not well in love with secular governments…
Of course, those mass protests of the hundreds of thousands in 2011 really only meant people were loving the Assads only a little less.
Exactly.
A regime that openly ran the death squads, we should not forget what provoked the cycle of the protests was the discovery of the boys who had after the fall of Ben Ali in Tunisia had done anti-Assad graffiti.
They had been tortured to death.
A well loved regime of course always reacts this way, torturing to death young boys under the age of 18 for putting up the political graffiti, regimes that are very well loved by huge numbers do this frequently.
Oh come on, if we could live with Saddam and all those ruthless South American dictators we can live with Assad. The old dictum had it, “He might be a bastard but he’s our bastard.” Now of course he’s Putin’s bastard thanks to short-sighted American and European policies.
The West did their utmost to turn Syria into another Libya, their last triumph of foreign policy. But Assad wasn’t Gaddafi, despite all the jibes and sneers of a few years back that he was finished and on the way out. He wasn’t because irrespective of the posts above he did have the support of a substantial number of Syrians and there is no way he could have survived without it. I repeat, Hizbollah, Iran and Russia were not directly involved in the early years and although there were desertions in the Syrian Army enough of them were left to keep him hanging on.
Let’s face it, the West totally failed in Syria and the whole Middle East learned a valuable lesson. If you want a reliable ally choose Putin rather than Obama or his successors.
First of all, Israelis don’t really go for middle names. They exist, but they’re not common.
Second of all, “David Shlomo” - David Solomon - is a bit too on-the-nose. Two rather old-fashioned names that happen to be those of Israel’s second and third kings? Seems a bit too Israeli, to me.
And third of all, “Aram”, a surname I’ve never seen before, is the biblical name for Syria - specifically, the part of Syria that contains Aleppo. Cite.
He’s been Russia’s bastard since the days of his father, when the USSR opened up the small naval base in Tartus in the early '70s. And given the very questionable foreign policy activities Assad himself has undertaken - arming Hizbollah, likely being the culprit behind several assassinations of key Lebanese leaders that finally led to the protests against the Syrian occupation of Lebanon, working with North Korea on a nuclear reactor that was discovered and destroyed by Israel, his pre-civil war alliance with Iran - he was definitely not a suitable U.S. partner or ally pre or post-2011.
The West did nothing early on. The West only intervened mid-way through Libya’s civil war under the pretext of preventing Gaddafi from massacring civilians and the opposition, but tilted the scales decisively. At that point, however, Gaddafi had already lost half the country. The West has only marginally intervened in Syria, with the vast majority of its intervention focused on air strikes against Da’esh and on training and arming “moderate Syrian opposition fighters” who would agree to prioritize the fight against Da’esh rather than Assad. Now, that training and arming is focused on the YPG and Syrian Kurds, who largely have not fought Assad and who have not attacked pockets of Assad-controlled territory within the larger Kurdish region.
Hizbollah, Russia, and Iran were not involved militarily in the beginning of the Syrian civil war because no other country was, outside of Assad’s regime and the various opposition groups. However, as mentioned above, Assad has been long-standing allies with Hizbollah, Iran, and to a lesser extent Russia (Russia has been the primary weapons supplier of Syria as Syria’s tanks, heavy weapons, and planes are of Russian origin). That Syria was ever going to suddenly become a U.S. ally, let alone some kind of dependable or attractive one, over a Russian or Iranian ally is fantasy.
The fact that the U.S. was ever even seen as a one-time ally or supplier for Saddam was a mistake on the part of the U.S. Saddam launched a war of aggression against Iran, however odious the Iranian regime was or is, gassed the Kurds, launched another war of aggression against Kuwait, and very likely would have attacked Saudi Arabia further had the U.S. and other countries (ironically including Syria at the time) intervened. The U.S. suddenly seeking an alliance with Assad would not make Assad abandon his long-time Iranian or Russian allies, it would just lead to the U.S. making the same mistake it made with Saddam a second time.
Thousands of civilians peacefully evacuated from Aleppo, the city under complete government control, no mass murder of its citizens, the UN invited in by Syria to supervise. Whoever would have thought it?
Actually probably everybody but the delusional Western supporters of the rebels who predicted Armageddon if Assad took Eastern Aleppo back. As I kept repeating in this thread Assad is not an idiot, he has no reason at all to murder innocent civilians, it would be totally counter-productive, especially now he is gaining the upper hand in the country.
Russia, Turkey and Iran are now about to confer on a peace plan for Syria. It is those countries who now carry the greatest weight in the area, the US will have no say at all, mainly because of Obama’s incoherent foreign policy.
Innocent civilians have already been murdered in Aleppo. Your trust in Assad’s “reasonableness” is baffling. If he has no qualms torturing and killing peaceful protestors or indiscriminately barrel bombing opposition controlled neighborhoods and kill any civilians living there (along with the Russian dummy bombs), productive vs. counter-productive doesn’t even enter into the equation. Assad is a monster. And like the scorpion and the frog parable, murdering civilians to preserve his power is in his nature.
And speaking of your blind trust, since more journalists were killed in Syria this past year than anywhere else, we wouldn’t really know if Assad’s forces started a killing spree on anyone left behind. Assad knows that he can always kill escaping fighters or any civilians even potentially hostile to his rule another day without the difficulties of urban house-to-house fighting.
While you’re praising Putin as your hero, keep in mind Obama could have bombed the fuck out of everything too, but if he did, you’d be condemning him as a war criminal. Funny how that works.
Putin isn’t a hero of mine. He’s a ruthless despot inimical to my own beliefs. But I’m also able to regard his actions in the Middle East through eyes unclouded by prejudice. His foreign policy has been both astute and effective, in sharp contrast to that of the American President.
And no, I really cannot imagine myself ever viewing Obama as a war criminal, a label all too lightly tossed around these days.