Ah yes, the we are the center of the universe complex. All positive outcomes are because of what others do, all negative outcomes are sources from our actions in a historical frame. The locals? Puppets on a string, mindless automata that have no actual agency of their own, they are merely playing out the deterministic happenstance we set in motion…
We mucked up Iraq, but let's not pretend that was a country with eternal stability, the butchering and blood debts were kept in check by Sadaam ramming a steel cleated boot onto the necks of the Shia. But correct me if I'm wrong, I don't believe that man was an immortal, something would eventually give, and we could easily have seen another terrible outcome.
We invaded Japan and that did not turn into a shit hole. We fought the Korean war, again, south korea is the opposite of a shit hole while the North is the land if literal darkness, where American influence FAILED to penetrate.
Why? Populations matter, it’s NOT all about what we do, a lot of it, most of it is about what THEY are, their culture, their beliefs, their attitudes, and yes, SOME of our influence, but not all and certainly not most.
Islamic dominated culture and Christian dominated culture have had conflict on and off for 1400 years. The Ottoman wars in Europe lasted from 1299-1908 depending on how you count it. Then there was the crusades plus the muslim conquests of the levant and northern Africa from 600AD to the founding of the Ottoman empire.
Calling it one war or a series of independent conflicts is a matter of semantics.
It is not semantics, it is not being ridiculous, else we should say that the christian world has been at war for 2000 years with the non christians, all of them… it is a stupid idea.
In the case of the ottoman, for example, sometimes they allied with other christian powers and even against other muslim local powers. Only by actively being ignorant and distorting history can one pretend to the idea of a 1500 years war. that is stupid, it is also exactly how the takfiri like the DAESH think. They are wrong as well.
Cherry picking, super majorities in all the other countries and regions polled there oppose that.
So the imams and other leaders that do condemn this action are not risking anything? And all of them are not sincere?
It is not political correctness to point at what is going on, it is just to set the record straight. True, there is a lot of bad guys, but if we do not look to support the good guys we end up driving them also to the dark side.
Even in the cherry picked poll cited early by the other poster the truth is that the vast majority does condemn terrorism, for all other items other solutions will have to be applied, as I can see a lot of those Muslim nations that are undemocratic and finance terror got to be as powerful as they are because the west intervened. I remember, for example, that part of the deal of allowing the west to develop the oil industry was to allow Wahabism (that is more radical version of their religion and has many members supporting insurgent movements elsewhere) in Saudi Arabia to not be disturbed.
Well, I do think we should ween off our fossil fuel addiction and to tell them that indeed we will disturb their ideology more if they do not deal with their irrational members. It does not need to be a military intervention as many on the right would like to do, but it can be an economical and more sophisticated propaganda intervention.
It depends how you define ‘good guys’, even Al-Qaeda hates ISIS. To stand up and protest local terrorism you have to be pretty fucking scary or powerful yourself, otherwise you end up dead.
This is, not to put too fine a point on it, bullshit. During the initial invasions of Syria and Egypt in the Seventh Century, many local.Christians welcomed and even assisted the Muslim invaders because they were a different sect of Christianity than the Byzantines, who persecuted and oppressed them. During the First Crusade, the Fatimid Caliphate supported the European invasion of their Turkish enemy, and many Turkish Muslim mercenaries fought for the Crusader armies. And from 1500 or so until Napoleon’s time, France was actually allied to the Ottoman Caliphate, including during the famous “siege of Vienna” in 1683 (so beloved of Islamophobes as the time when Christian Europe stopped the ravaging Muslim hordes) was not just supported by the King of France, but encouraged by him as a blow against his Christian Habsburg enemy.
Hence my long-held stance that there’s really no such thing as a “religious” war. The aim of every war there has ever been has been to get one’s mitts on the other guy’s stuff.
Yeah, I think my premise that most of the people are nice and want peace was wrong. Apparently those that did have largely fled the country, and maybe there weren’t enough of them to put up a good resistance movement to begin with. Those that are left don’t have enough power to do much. Shitty situation.
Thanks for the replies. I’ve been following the thread, but didn’t have much to add, because like I said, my knowledge regarding all this is limited.
There is no 1500 year old war except in the minds of the occasional rabble rouser, (Muslim or Christian), who chooses to argue nonsense in order to direct attention away from internal issues by creating external enemies, then pretending that they have “always” been enemies.
Most people are too busy for jihad and revolution. They have jobs and kids to take care of. If there’s 30% unemployment and no prospects for the future the young men might have time for other things. Even then, doesn’t bombing and shooting people preclude them from being “nice”? Do nice people gun down civilians or bomb buildings or sit around in rubble in sweltering heat all day so they can snipe one enemy? That’s how you take down governments. Or maybe I misunderstood and “nice” in this case just means “agree with America.”
If you thought America was going to hell in a hand basket would you start emulating Timothy McVeigh?
Dick-head warmongers tend to win power, being dick-heard warmongers. That’s true in every part of the world. You can’t blame the nice people for that.
You’re wrong - there are plenty of non-dickhead warmongers in charge. You just don’t notice them because everyone is talking about the dickheads. Look at a chart of countries by Muslim population and you’ll get more perspective.
The fact that a dozen or so terrorist assholes shot up Paris doesn’t mean 99% of the Muslim world is dickheads. ISIS is a small organization of probably less than 100,000 or so supporters. You are doing exactly what they want you to do - think they are bigger and more powerful than they are through acts of terrorism.
I know if the Kurds are better than others. Of course I don’t subscribe to saying whole populations of the Middle East are bad or that those in the Middle East should feel guilty and responsible for the Paris attacks, which is nonsense. This notion that minorities should speak out or else they are morally responsible is nonsense and racism. Of course Whites seem to be exempt, you never hear whites being asked to apologize and speak out for the sicko who shot up a movie theater or college campus.
Back to the Mid East, I don’t see things as black and white, or bad or good. Of course ISIS is bad, but in the region a portion will hold traditional ideas while others will be more modern, forward thinking.
Some Kurds are very tribal people, even by the region’s standards. And there have been reports of human rights abuses by Kurds against Arabs, Turkomens in Iraq and Syria.
It’s a myth that minorities in the Middle East are always fun loving, “good guys”. Take the Maronite Christians in Lebanon, some of their actions by their militias in the Lebanese civil war were among the worst committed.
Again I am not bashing one group over the other, but this notion of who is good and who is bad is really a fool’s errand and not accurate. Iranians are no more better than Saudis, or Kurds than Arabs, Muslims than Christians and on and on.
I just don’t like when one group is held above another. One example is Iranians who say something along the line of “Iranians should not be compared with Arabs, we are educated people”. Excuse me, Iranians are not better than Arabs, that is just bogus, racist crap talk! Oh and Iranians are living under one the worst regimes, even among regional standards.
It’s not a racial thing, it’s more an empirical observations about how the Kurds have handles themseles in Iraq. They are not perfect, but by comparison to others in the region they are veritable saints. Iran is ruled by a theocracy and actively exports terror to get its wait.
The Sunni and Shia in Iraq are in a blood feud and the MOMENT they got Sadaams boot off their neck they started taking revenge on Sunnis, with the latter allowing ISIS to take over their population centers. How did the Iraq kurds react? Taking in people being slaughtered by ISIS, everyone? no, but more than most. They stood firm against ISIS forces while the Shia Iraqi army cut and ran. They are the main group with a spine and seem to be slightly more altruistic than the Shia who gave zero f*cks about Sunni towns being overrun by ISIS, they were like, not our people so PEACE, not our problem.
Women fight with the men among the kurds where necessary, they are far more open and tolerant. Compared to liberals in California, no but we are talking about the middle east here.
You may not like one group being elevated above others, but that’s too bad. They ARE Better. That’s just a fact, not because if their race or theology, because of their actual behavior. So even though there are kurds who act out in Turkey in opposition to The Islamists in Erdogan, as a whole they are on the side of the angels compared to the rest of the groups in the region.
The american fetishization of the Kurds is not healthy, not for the Kurds where the reality is very less nice than the kind of the Disney version here presented and not for making informed decisions. (and yes I would ally with the Kurdish groups, but it is not needed to Disneyfy them as done here)
They actively are active in their neighborhood around what they consider their peoples (the Shia groups, regardless of the ethnicity).
I am sure they would prefer to use the drones like the americans do and target “patterns of movement” and say very sincerely sorry about wedding parties blown up, but…
The Iraqi national army that collapsed was not Shia [arab], it was the non-sectarian organization of the units. And it suffered from the massive corruption of the central state.
Saying Kurds stood firm and Shia [Arab] fled is to display gross ignorance even to misrepresentation (as is a simplified idea of the Kurds welcoming refugees, the Kurdish reaction to the arab-speaking refugees, many that the Kurds consider interlopers settled by Sadaam [often true] has not been nice)
Of course the allowing of the corruption and the undermining of the non-sectarian national army has to be blamed on the prior extremely sectarian administration of al Maliki, who also with his militia base destroyed the the reconciliation that had been done prior to him under the american sponsored Awakenings.
That is a very fallacious rendition of what happened, including a complete lack of understanding of how the mixed units of the national army broke apart and why - very much from the political acts of the then central Administration of al Maliki that was extremely sectarian and broke apart the fragile reconciliation built up to his administration (2010-2014). Sunni arab elements defected or melted away for real and specific reasons (no ammunition, corruptly sold, etc.).
The problem with these naratives is their simplification they disguise real fundamental issues and make the soldiers acting seem as if things happened for “eternal” reasons and not direct reasons.
When one starts from a circus mirror vision, one gets circus mirror results.
and of course when one starts with a lack of any understanding of the history
the Turkish Kurdish terror/guerilla group, PKK, was not “acting out” against Erdogan - in fact until this past year they had been at general peace with the Erdogan party. Their bloodiest actions were during the period of the pure Secular parties government rule in Turkey. Of course they have also been in bloody conflict with the more tribal Iraqi kurdish duopoly party in the past.
Talking about the PKK acting out against Islamists in Turkey is a gross distortion. It was with them they made peace until this year. The break apart is more about politics than ‘islamist’ (as whatever the veneer of the Marxist - secularism the PKK wears, the Kurdish reasons (language) of their revolt are the primary, the Kurdish regions being among the most culturally and religiously conservative in the real practice in Turkey).
The Kurdish groups remain the best allies against the DAESH, in the Kurdish areas, and neighboring, but Disneyfication of them to imagine they are something like Little Americans Struggling to Get Out is a too typical American error to make.