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“If” that had happened? I’m unaware of the U.S. gassing the Kurds. Are you creating a strawman, or a red herring?
I appreciate your snark much of the time, but is that really necessary? I thought I was being relatively polite.
I do not in any way minimize Saddam’s brutality, nor that his regime sucked so very many camel balls. The issue under discussion, however, was relative stability. I argue that Iraq under Saddam was more *stable *than it is now. It was not “sectarian chaos;” while I’m not certain I would apply that term to the region now, I think it’s a lot closer to chaos than it was under Saddam.
I do not mean to suggest that I condone the tactics he used to create that (relative) stability. I abhor them.
Now: did our ouster of Saddam, and subsequent war in Iraq, improve living conditions for the majority of Iraqis? I don’t think so. Will it in the long-term? Dunno. Sure hasn’t so far.
The USA doesn’t spend trillions on state of the art weaponry in order to use something so primitive as gas - the USA just supplies the cultures so client dictators can create the gas themselves.
I think that last comment was for me, not you.
Ah, I see that, thanks. Sorry to bristle, Shodan. I think the point still stands.
It’d be interesting to see numbers on who killed more innocent Iraqis, ISIS, or the US military.
Now we double the prices in the minibar, cut off the AC at random times, and only bring them clean towels once a week. That should get 'em outta there soon enough. Wait . . .
A good enough job that Iraqis today are nostalgic for those times and with good reason, I should think. So long as you kept your mouth shut about politics you could always earn a living and get enough food and clean water, the economy worked, the utilities worked, women (so long as they escaped Usay and Quday’s attention) could walk safely and unveiled in public and work side-by-side with men, you did not need to carry an AK-47 to go to the corner store, and living next door to people with a different religion did not endanger your life. None of which has been the case since the Coalition forces arrived.
It’s because the “do nothing” option never gets refuted.
When the Arab Spring made it to Syria and Assad first started killing civilians, there was a call to aid the rebels at that time. Of course we did basically nothing partly due to all the people saying we’d just make the situation worse.
The result has been hundreds of thousands of syrians dead, and a conflict spreading throughout the region thanks to a group pretty much creating hell on earth.
At what point do we say that do nothing may have led to a worse outcome?
And here I was going to start a countdown to the first “And Mussolini made the trains run on time” counterargument. What can I say, Shodan, you’re fast.
And again, the last time we tried to act in a purely supportive role – Libya – we couldn’t so much as load a plane with bottled water without the Congressional GOP throwing sand in the gears at every turn. Calls for impeachment from the “Let’s make him a one-termer” crowd were a constant refrain. Maybe, just maybe, we might craft a cogent foreign policy if the GOP paused to wipe the rabid foam from its collective lips once in a while.
US did a lot more than deliver bottled water in Libya. Turned out great, didn’t it.
-Tao Te Ching, 10
Concede few, if any, will be persuaded by Tao quotes. People can’t understand where these statements are coming from, and it can’t really be explained, either. So, take it with a grain of salt.
The ME is pretty fucked up. Warring factions all around, mostly focused on objectives that don’t have much/anything to do with the US, even if we helped set up this nightmare. Can we stop them fighting? Well, we can do airstrikes and degrade the bad guys/worse guys over time. And we can notice that ISIL is not capable of running a state. Once they take over a region, you can count on the utilities going down, fires burning, etc. Let’s allow the people in civilized areas to see how much ISIL sucks on the screens of their iphones for awhile. If there is a case for ground/total war, let it build, don’t force it. If there isn’t, let it go, the world has never been in control anyway yanno.
Unfortunately it seems IS is relatively savvy when it comes to using social media.
Of course some people will get the message that IS rule means everything going to shit, but I think anyone that doesn’t want to join IS is already not going to relish them taking over, regardless of how they handle utilities.
Must…not…godwin the thread
Look, the Iraqis themselves can’t even be bothered to defend their own territory- they just drop their guns and run. We would have been better off not helping the Iraqi army at all, since every time they flee, ISIL grabs another cache of American heavy weapons, like just happened in Ramadi.
No need to Godwinize the thread, ISIL by no means compares to mid 20th century Europe. The only way WE can bring stability to the region is by conquering the place and installing a governor, permanently. How on Earth is it our responsibility to do that? Bill Maher put it best: let the locals take out their own trash for once.
No, that isn’t true.
I hope you are not trying to draw a parallel between mass murder and Abu Gharib. Because that would be a bit on the further side of ridiculous.
Regards,
Shodan
I suspect that most of the region will wind up under the control of despots. Poor George Bush (“democracy is breaking out all over”). Better accept the truth than fool ourselves. Democratic, stable governments just ain’t gonna happen.
Get your smelling salts. I made a comparison! Look out! What will I analogize to next?!
That fits the all too frequent story of IS’s early successes. It doesn’t however describe the fall of Ramadi. That fight’s been going on for over 6 months. Plenty of Iraqi’s did in fact stand and fight to defend their own territory. During the time of that fight other Iraqis not only could be bothered to fight but attacked into well defended IS positions to clear Tikrit. Outside of Ramadi, there’ve been other offensives by the IA in Anbar province. The evidence doesn’t show the Iraqis as highly skilled and possessing high morale. It also isn’t currently showing that all their units just drop their guns and run on contact.
Well, I very much doubt Libyans now are nostalgic for the Gaddafi years the way Iraqis must be for the Hussein years.
What makes all the difference is that the U.S. never put any boots on the ground in Libya.
Hopefully something reasonable.
[QUOTE=ralph124c]
I suspect that most of the region will wind up under the control of despots.
[/QUOTE]
And it seems it is simply a choice of which despots. Some preferred Saddam, because he maintained a stable regime with only occasional outbursts of mass murder, and there wasn’t all that much sectarian violence, apart from the Kurds and Sunnis, and he didn’t threaten his neighbors, apart from invading Iran and Kuwait, and most of the women his sons didn’t kidnap and rape were better off and had jobs, and all the children who didn’t die because he was stealing from the oil-for-food program were relatively OK, except for the ones he tortured to punish their parents.
Whether ISIS will turn out the same or better or worse remains to be seen.
Regards,
Shodan