I don’t think Syria was ever going to be a win for American interests, but we had to get involved to stem the flow of ISIS fighters into areas that were under more of our direct influence.
The problem is, ISIS isn’t dead. ISIS is an idea. The ISIS fighters still exist; they’re just laying low and figuring out new ways to launder money, and they’re looking for new places to wreak havoc. Syria will have areas that will be difficult for Assad to control, which is most likely where ISIS will regenerate. Afghanistan might be another.
I said I wasn’t sure. That doesn’t equate to not caring. Turkey’s position is complex, and while I know a little about it I don’t pretend to understand even the basic currents that are flowing through it these days. What I do know is that the Turks are more concerned with Kurds than anything else, either their own or those in Iraq and Syria. In addition, I know they do allow us to use basing in their country, which is a pretty big concession, and that they were very willing to go after ISIS/ISIL in Syria. Then there is the Erdogan and his party.
So, instead of a drive by about my ‘novella’ and incorrectly saying I don’t care, feel free to expound on all the stuff I’m missing about Turkey (or Syria, or Russia, or Iran or even Trump…knock yourself out).
Yes indeed, so very clever of you to understand. Also the international postal union is the functional description - it is indeed that - and the legal name is another thing.
it is funny, the inability to differentiate between a descriptive and a proper name.
Neither is non arguments.
There is a current issue about an imbalance relative to the rate settings coordination with some Asian countries. Not with all countries, but between the developed markets and some Asian countries.
Unless you bizarrely think the sole function of the institution is just setting and coordinating those rates and not its many other functions or even the question of the international coordination.
the reasons for staying in are clear, and it is irrational to quit an insitution over a specific narrow problem - what would be rational and well considered is to ally with the other developed market members (and others feeling the developing Asian rates for the China notably are misset) to achieve a change.
Of you can play the childish Go it Solo temper tantrum and instead of having allies, simply under cut your own position. But as Trump seems to excel in this last mode, it seems your preference here.
Trump isn’t doing anything right. He’s simply replacing the mistakes of the past administration with his own. And I’m fairly certain that this pull out is a consequence of John Kelly quitting.
(Wow, this thread is just like Syria: a quagmire of conflicting interests. )
I honestly think this is Trump trying to deflect from the increasingly tight noose about his and his administrations neck. Most of his advisers, most of his political allies and a bunch of foreign allies have told him, repeatedly (he first brought this idiotic move up 6 months ago) that it was a bad move, but I think he sees this as something to muddy the waters and move the discussion away from his embattled administration and the domestic threats he’s facing with the Russia investigation. Plus, he did actually campaign on getting us out of foreign entanglements, so he probably sees this as another bone for his base and those who voted for him.
Our intervention in Afghanistan promoted the rise of Islamic terrorism, since we directly funded the predecessors of Al-Qaida, including one Osama bin Laden. If we had just stayed out of it, the world would have been better off. If the Soviets turned Afghanistan into a parking lot in the process, I don’t care.
The only impact the Iraq War had on Syria was funneling the AQI insurgents from Iraq into Syria. Assad’s decision to kill his own people and start a civil war had absolutely nothing to do with them. Then those same AQI losers took advantage of the security vacuum ASSAD created to launch ISIS. If Assad hadn’t started a civil war, or if the Iraqis hadn’t alienated the Sunni after the US withdrawal, ISIS wouldn’t have appeared.
Last I checked, Assad still owns Syria and ISIS’s remaining territorial “caliphate” is a very narrow slice of the MERV. If we want to keep fighting ISIS, we can do it from our locations in Iraq.
I don’t care.
??? So the fuck what??? Putin still kills people with impunity, Russia practically owns Syria, and frankly
I don’t care if he turns the place into a graveyard. Obama was never interested in anything that happened in Syria, he never actually wanted to win, and Trump is just admitting what everyone else already knows.
No shit.
And you know where they retreated to? Tiny little rural villages in Al-Anbar. Duh. They are now a clandestine insurgency, which means we are no longer the best tool to combat them. Counterinsurgencies are won by local security forces exerting government power at the micro-level. If you understood the situation AT ALL you’d realize this is the point where Syrians and Iraqis take responsibility and our best course of action is to LET THEM.
Holy shit, you really have no idea what I do for a living, do you? Huh.
I find it abjectly hilarious that you follow your paragraph above with this. “If Trump wants it, it must be bad, because… Reasons.” Yeah. Okay.
Syria was not our interest, it never was, and it never will be. I’m MUCH more concerned with Iranian influence over Iraq, although at this point I can barely manage to care about that.
Why would I care about any of that? I don’t care if Assad gasses every man, woman, and child in that place. I’ve got friends deploying to Syria in the very near future, for no apparent reason any of them can understand. I mean, you get that the At-Tanf Garrison serves no strategic or tactical purpose except to piss in Russia’s Cheerios? And Manbij is barely more relevant than that. If the Orange-Shit-For-Brains is going to get them out of place they had no business being in the first place, GOOD.
I’m fed the fuck up with seeing Americans die in shitty corners of the world trying to help people who hate us. Let Russia do whatever they want in Syria. Let them fight ISIS’s remnants on that side of the border. They can pick up the tab for putting it back together if they feel like it. Unless Trump suddenly decides to fix the State Department and dump resources into fighting Iranian influence, we are wasting our time there, too.
The rationale I have heard is that we should stay until ISIS has been completely destroyed. Is that significantly different from saying we can never pull out? Maybe the Kurds and the rebels are screwed, but 2000 troops aren’t going to un-screw them, and there are no good guys in Syria. Assad is bad, ISIS is worse, the only good thing to say about the rebels is “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”. If we pull out, it will be bad, if we don’t, it will be bad in a different way, and maybe for longer.
I’m no isolationist, but can you ever say “Mission Accomplished” in the Middle East? We’re still in Afghanistan, for heaven’s sake.
“Trump’s doing it, so it must be wrong” is not much of an insight. YMMV.
I think the question of whether or not not having troops in Syria is a reasonable debate on which well informed people can disagree.
However a question on which I don’t think that any well informed person would up disagree is whether and leaving on a whim via tweet without prior consultation with our allies or preparations for smooth transition is a good thing.
But this is Trump’s modus operandi make a decision with his gut, wash his hands of the whole affair and leave someone else clean up the mess, which in this case is could easily to be a genocide the likes of which haven’t been seen since Rwanda. But I guess they’re all Muslims so fuck 'em.
Indeed it is humorous but probably not in the way that you’re thinking. The UPU is an international postal union. It’s correct to say that if you wish, but nobody does.
And nobody calls it the international postal union. There’s no shame in admitting you misspoke about an unfamiliar thing. I freely admit I was ignorant on the subject until a couple of months ago when the news hit the wire.
“You like what Trump likes” is not an argument.
Generally I am not a fan of Trump’s habit of taking the ball and going home. It’s almost always stupid and destructive. In the case of the UPU, we’re talking about a case where it takes a majority of 192 countries to agree on a change, which is incredibly difficult, and an additional 18 months to implement after getting such an agreement. In a case where the bulk of the benefit is going to China, and it’s so hard to get an agreement, walking away is a reasonable thing for the world’s largest (or 2nd largest) economy to do.
Reality bears out this position. The UPU has agreed to expedite the rate changes in response to Trump’s pullout threat. This is not a credit to a negotiating strategy that has failed almost everywhere else, just a nod to the fact that this is a situation of the stopped clock being right twice a day.
Well, James Mattis thinks it is a bad enough move to quit over it. I don’t know enough to have a strong opinion, but what do y’all think of this argument: Who are you going to trust, Trump or Mattis?
I’ll note that a thief wants to own and take more. That’s why Putin is out trying to grab territory.
One should ask why President Kleptomaniac / He Who So Aggressively Attempts to Grow His Businesses as to be in Constant Debt prefers a smaller, weaker, and less influential domain to control.
This just frustrates the shit out of me. For the last 18 years I’ve just heard a constant litany of people screaming about how we’re all warmongering imperialist racists with our automated flying death-bots murdering schoolchildren and reporters, and how we should just get out of Iraq and Afghanistan and everything else, and how we’ve done nothing but make the world worse with our genocides and our coups and getting involved in other people’s wars.
And now Trump says, “We’re done with Syria,” and everyone is screaming, “We can’t leave! We’re abandoning our allies! We’re letting Russia take control! Assad will do bad things!”
So what the fuck is it? Are we global imperialist interventionists this week or not? Am I supposed to suddenly care whether we stay in Syria when I spent two decades listening to people tell me I’m an evil criminal warmonger??? WTF?
I don’t know about others, but I might suggest that different voices are speaking now than the ones that you read before. I have always supported globalism, nation building, and world policing. The SDMB is not a monolithic whole.
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