Some people are just ideologically opposed to the United States acting in it’s own best interest. To them, the CIA is a nest of evil, run by “rogue spies” and “corporate puppets”. They are incapable of grasping the concept that the world is complicated and sometimes we have to get our hands dirty to further our interests.
The world is not a black and white place, and your ivory towers are not tall enough to protect you from the people who want to kill you and destroy your society.
Yup, and this unthinking hatred makes me pretty glum. Often, it doesn’t need any evidence at all.
To boot, with the current branch of fuckups in charge, this negative view of everything the US says and does seems to me to be dancing far too close to the truth, which doesn’t make my chosen stance (we’re basically good, and try to do right, but the world is complicated and sometimes we make mistakes but never through evil intent) that easy to keep hold of.
No country has an unlimited right to do whatever is in its best interest.
Here’s a Slate that links to an NYT article (about 2/3 down). They characterize it as the beginnings of a civil war. Either way, I think it’s a mistake to fund the Baluchis, but it would be typical of the US’s “cut of your nose to spite your face” approach to foreign policy.
What do you base that on? An ideal that no country in the world will follow? If North Korea, Iran or any one of a dozen others had our military and economic power, do you think they would play nice?
Quite interesting.
I’ve been reading John Simpson’s books, he is a veteran BBC Television reporter, most memorable as the guy who turned up with the Northern Alliance in Kabul - also for sneaking into Afghanistan in a Burka.
According to him the borders are patrolled by locally raised regiments who are virtually indistinguishable from their forebears recruited and trained by the British. Spit and polish and uniforms that are anything but camou.
I infer that the idea was, to cream off the likeliest young thugs, train them well and pay them (comparatively) well so that they have a vested interest in keeping things quiet.
Those cites did not seem to mention them, but I’ve a suspicion that they would not appreciate ‘reinforcements’ from the South East.
I’m not sure, do you think leaving Saddam in power was a good decision? He had just invaded another sovereign state (actually he’d done that twice–though admittedly we weren’t too troubled by his invading Iran.)
Do I think said occupation would have gone better? I think so. For one, it wouldn’t be defined as a part of a “global war on terror” it’d be defined as a “major beef with Saddam Hussein for violating the peace of the world.” We would have had a much higher chance of wide-ranging support from the entire Western world, probably Turkey, Saudi Arabia, even Iran. Likewise, a huge portion of the population wanted Saddam gone in 1991, and Saddam’s Army was already crushed and beaten. We could very easily (compared to in 2003) have kept much of the existing Iraqi state intact while the international community weeded out those strictly devoted to Saddam.
You don’t see the value in keeping a major enemy like Iran embroiled in a war that keeps its attentions from straying too far from home??
Moral support doesn’t mean anything. I think some states did lend material support to the bombing of the USS Cole. Do I like that it happened? Of course not. Can I fault a state for funding an attack on an enemy’s military? Not at all.
In reading the full text of my post I fail to see how it contradicts anything I’ve said here. I’ve never said Saddam was a good guy. I also never denied that his keeping the Iranians busy in the 1980s was a good thing in my earlier post, either.
Our concern has to be how any intervention affects us geopolitically. Making any decisions based on how many people could be hurt is madness, stupid, and ridiculously naive. Should it factor in? Sure, it should factor in because we need to consider how the international community will react to any body count and how it will affect our political leverage in the future, but hand-wringing over civilian body count isn’t the business of states, but of NGOs like the Red Cross.
I’ve always viewed them as being somewhat different. Partisans in my usage are people fighting against a foreign occupation. Partisans are often made up primarily of guerrilla fighters but not exclusively, guerrilla fighters is a more general term which could include members of the regular military in certain types of special operations units in many cases.
For example the Germans in World War II had several groups that fought as guerrillas, but none that fought as partisans really, at least aside from some of the minor resistance of the allied occupation after the official surrender. By contrast the French had many partisans fighting for them during the occupation, not all of them guerrillas–but certainly most of them.
Anyway, whether or not they are synonymous seems mostly irrelevant to the discussion.
Certainly so. My original point is, I’m fine with unconventional warfare from a moral standpoint; so long as said unconventional warfare attempts to restrict itself to legitimate military targets (a term in and of itself which is hard to define.)
They did invade Afghanistan, and the website you’re linking to even says so. They sent troops in, and the KGB assassinated Amin (the leader of the “homegrown” Communist revolution) and installed Karmal as a Soviet puppet.
:dubious: :mad: Are you seriously suggesting states should never balance moral considerations, as such, against national interest?
Must . . . resist . . . urge . . . to . . . Godwinize . . .
I repeat: No state has an unlimited right to do whatever is in its national interest.
In other news, the U.S. is also encouraging Pakistani Balochi militants to make raids into southeastern Iran.