"Benghazi didn’t make me think “Obama and Clinton screwed up and people died;” it made me think “why were we there in the first place?”
We had this thing called an embassy. I don’t think it was very important to Obama or the state department. Who cares why it was there.
What difference does it make? (waves hands in air acting upset)
That is only logical considering that much of the world remains developing. However compared to the developed world, the conditions of the American poor are far worse than say their counterparts in Germany or Canada.
What’s your point exactly?
Yeah, in Tripoli. What that has to do with Ben Gazzara is not clear.
It ranges between the next 8 and the next 19 depending on what you count as military spending and how you address purchasing power parity. We spend more on the military than on foreign aid by orders of magnitude, though.
No, it’'s important. If all the world were represented by 30 kids in a classroom, and 28 of the kids agreed to not use calculators on the math quiz, and 2 kids never agreed to that, it’s not right for the classroom bully to beat up one of those 2 kids for using a calculator on the math quiz. It’s not a teacher enforcing a just rule, it’s someone being a bully and trying to impose their will on others.
In other words your argument against stopping countries from killing people with calculators is “no fair!” Good luck with that. In any case I’m pretty sure I’ve already showed that Syria is a signatory to the chemical weapons treaty, so this nonsense about making other people obey an agreement they didn’t sign is… well, nonsense, because they signed the agreement.
I missed where you tried that, but here’s a cite that disagrees with you.
You already responded to the post where I did that, but here we go again:
Your cite shows they are not a member of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. It’s possible that that’s something Syria is now willing to do (unlike last week, when they didn’t admit to having these weapons).
Is it better in your eyes (and less worthy of stopping) if they use pencils to kill people instead of calculators?
Obama sat by and watched while 100,000+ people were killed by bombs, tanks, machine guns, etc. This latest 1% was killed with chemical weapons and now he suddenly cares enough to do something about it? “Arbitrary and capricious” is the phrase that brings to mind.
Yes, and that’s exactly the “agreement” that they never signed that I was referring to in my classroom analogy. You were wrong, just admit it and move on.
Better? No. I’d have preferred an international coalition put a stop to this long ago, but for a wide variety of reasons that isn’t always possible and doesn’t always happen. Meanwhile civil war itself doesn’t violate international law- but indiscriminate killing of civilians generally does.
Putting aside the fact that whatever Obama does is by definition incompetent and terrible, there’s almost a century of international agreement banning these kinds of weapons. That’s not arbitrary and capricious. And of course Obama mentioned ahead of time that the use of these weapons would be taken seriously in those “red line” remarks - you know, the ones some people like to pretend were spontaneous and surprising instead of reflecting widespread international consensus since World War I.
Oh. Too bad I found that United Nations one, then.
Wasn’t it you that acknowledged that the Geneva Conventions don’t apply to a civil war within a country?
I said there appears to be some dispute over whether it applies, yes. Then again I think using them on civilians would be a war crime regardless. Given how serious this is, I think a peaceable resolution is better than just ignoring it.
It’s the “Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare” (a.k.a. the Geneva Protocol) that I think you’re referring to.
My understanding is that the Geneva Conventions and the Geneva Protocal area all agreements between “the High Contracting Parties”. Until the Al-Qaeda rebels sign up as a “High Contracting Party,” I don’t see how they have any claim to its protections, or how any of us have any business enforcing it in a war between a signatory and a non-signatory.
http://www.vertic.org/pages/posts/syria-international-law-and-the-use-of-chemical-weapons-345.php says, “… the treaty was originally intended to cover international conflicts. The ICRC concluded in 2005 that customary international humanitarian law includes a ban on the use of chemical weapons in internal as well as international conflicts, and an appellate chamber in the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) noted in 1995, in Prosecutor v. Tadic, that ‘there had undisputedly emerged a general consensus in the international community on the principle that the use of chemical weapons is also prohibited in internal armed conflicts’.”
Forgive me if I don’t fall down in worship at the “conclusions” of the ICRC on customary international law or the notes of an appellate chamber in the ICTY.
In my idealistic alternate universe, any humanitarian or global security intervention activity would be directed and defined by the United Nations (wait, hold your laughter a second…)
I’d scrap the current security council. Any kerfluffle, such as Syria, is put to an intervention vote. Votes are weighted based on degrees of country boundary separation from the conflict, with the internal country factions each getting a vote. The yea/nays are tallied and intervention is granted or denied. Weighting would likely need to be non-linear, such as 10-5-2-1.
Example:
Syrian government: 10 votes
Syrian rebels: 10 votes
Direct neighbors (i.e. Turkey, Iraq, Jordan) 10 votes each
2-removed (i.e. Armenia, Iran, Saudi Arabia etc) 5 votes each
3-removed (i.e. Sudan, Russia, Bulgaria etc) 2 votes each
Rest of world, 1 vote each
This weights the decision into a stability region that, if it matters to the region, has greater say in approving the globe-cops (USA and Poland ;)) to come set things right. A clear and inarguable intervention would allow the rest of the 1-voters to collectively outvote the regional countries if the consensus grew great enough.
Anyway, I heartily sympathize with the OPs frustrations.
What about the countries that are going to be contributing funds / troops to do the intervening? Do they get extra votes? I don’t particularly like the idea of the US Military being used as a tool of the UN which gives the middle east 100+ votes and the US just one.
Yes, it is.
I’m not sure that’s the case, and later UN agreements suggest it applies to everybody, not just states that signed it. It also seems to me that Assad gassed a suburb full of civilians. I continue to be unimpressed by “it’s not fair!”
Which ones? Cite? I’m unimpressed by the “we agreed to not use calculators so you can’t either” argument.
My understanding was that it was a suburb full of Al-Qaeda rebels. Obama said yesterday, “Then they fired rockets from a regime-controlled area into 11 neighborhoods that the regime has been trying to wipe clear of opposition forces.” Maybe he’s a liar too though?
ETA: Just so I understand clearly, if Assad had carpet-bombed those neighborhoods instead of gassed them, you’d be ok with that, right?
Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions prohibits the use of armed force against any noncombatant, even in civil wars.