This is the part of the narrative that really gets me.
I will accept Conservative hate of the President as a given; but what about all the men and women of our intelligence and military communities; risking their Lives everyday and/or working diligently to insure our security…reading constantly that they are doing “nothing”?
I will also never, ever show more respect for a despot like Putin more than I do our President.
If we all took the general attitude you do, Mufasa (and I admit that I often don’t), we’d be much better off.
I’m going to go ahead and answer for him: yes. Yes, he absolutely does. It’s kind of his thing.
I just wrote a very long post to Gkhan every single word of which was in one way or another made necessary by this same oblivious reductivism. I don’t need to know the details. I don’t need to know how these things generally go. I don’t need to know how to evaluate outcomes in complex, non-binary systems. I don’t need to know what other resolutions have been achieved under similar conditions. I don’t need to know who, what, when why, where, how. I don’t need to know what constitutes an advancement of American interests along a multivariate, multivalent scale of action and consequence. I don’t need to know anything whatsoever. I have built a short and fantastically juvenile series of fact-free, fourth-grade-level sentences in my mind, and now I’m going to lock myself in the bathroom and escape through the toilet.
To be clear - you are saying that if a person does not have the multi year experience of working in a field, or the education/research background from Masters level dissertation up to policy formulator / facilitator, or is not at a government level high enough to be privy to a briefing produced by one of the aforementioned - they are somehow disallowed to have (& Heaven forbid) voice their opinion on the this weight lifter chat board?
I will use your post to Gkhan (whom I happen to like) as an example. Instead of an article long diatribe against his intelligence or lack of knowledge you could have said
we arrive at 5.316 dead per day before Obama’s response to the red line…and less than 0.092 after it. That’s a greater than 98 percent decrease in Syrian chemical-attack deaths, effective the very day on which Obama did his mystically consequential “nothing.”
Even in its brevity, that is sufficient to convey your position’s basis.
[quote=“treco, post:771, topic:210298, full:true”]
To be clear - you are saying that if a person does not have the multi year experience of working in a field, or the education/research background from Masters level dissertation up to policy formulator / facilitator, or is not at a government level high enough to be privy to a briefing produced by one of the aforementioned - they are somehow disallowed to have (& Heaven forbid) voice their opinion on the this weight lifter chat board?[/quote]
No, it’s clear that I’m not saying that. I’m saying that opinions forged in utter ignorance are worthless. I’m saying that if you’re going to loudly argue a point, you need to understand the relevant details in a high-school-graduate kind of way. “You should be baseline decent to ball here” is not “GO AWAY IF YOU AREN’T LEBRON JAMES.” It simply means that if you have never handled a basketball before, you shouldn’t waste others’ time in a pickup game.
The post made quite a number of other substantive points, but yes, of course I could have left them bare and brief, cutting away the preface and insults. I am aware of that. I do it all the time, and I’d have done it if I’d been discussing this matter with Aragorn or Drew or Push or USMC or whomever. But I wasn’t, so I chose not to…because I didn’t want to. You like Gkhan; I don’t. He lost this particular debate more than a year ago and hasn’t stopped whining about it since. Much worse, he is intellectually dishonest. Not only does he waste others’ time by forcing them to teach him basic things about what he is trying to argue with them: he also wormishly slithers away from his (many) objective errors without owning, correcting, or even acknowledging them. He tried this with me only a few days ago.
In short, he nagged at me in an attempt to draw me into this. I accepted, and I decided to get my money’s worth. I’m happy with the result.
Of course not. They should, however, be basically literate in the subject matter under discussion. What happens ad nauseum is that individuals loudly opine on American foreign policy and national security without having made the effort to obtain a 101 understanding of the underlying theoretical concept, history, and relevant facts of the issue at hand. Learn the rudimentary basics before attempting to play the game. That isn’t an elitist standard by any means.
[quote=“smh_23, post:766, topic:210298”]
Furthermore, it isn’t actually in our interest to start creating chaos in Syria by bombing Assad. This is the kind of thing that an idiot like you can’t generally wrap his head around, but it is possible and even common for us to come face to face with bad people whom we want to corral and whom we don’t want to help but whom we also don’t want to directly eliminate. Again, Obama took the correct lesson from his catastrophically disastrous predecessor’s adventure in Iraq, wherein we created a vacuum in the world’s most volatile region and watched it fill with layer upon layer of cancer, regional disputes stitched into social problems (275,000 arms-bearing men out of a job in one single swoop – an actual presidential blunder with actual, material consequences) drizzled over two transnational century-spanning religious wars…out of the middle of which came AQI, its small detachment dispatched to Syria, and one final name change. ISIS does have a nice acronymic elegance to it.[/quote]
To this I say bull shit. If we didn’t want to create chaos in Syria we wouldn’t push for regime change, we wouldn’t have made the red line threat to begin with. You say the Russians thought we were going to bomb… would that not have created chaos? Getting rid of Assad would certainly have caused a power vacuum, no?
And what kind of fortune tellers did the US have working for them? You act like the events were all foretold somehow or this outcome was somehow meticulously planned. Was the removal of gas by the Russians part of a orchestrated plan by Obama or a spontaneous Russian reaction to save their ally?
Please explain how they knew this particular outcome would happen.
edited:
If this is true, doesn’t make Obama any less of a failure. All presidents have their triumphs and failures, but we weren’t talking about them, were we? If you want to make new threads and we can discuss all of them.
Yes Bush made major mistakes, I agree, but when he left office AQI was on the ropes. Had we kept on them, maybe ISIS would never have moved into Iraq, but Obama insisted ISIS was the J.V. team and soon it was too late. 1 of Obama’s many missteps…
The question you have to ask yourself is: is the Middle East and Europe better or worse in the last 8 years, better than the deplorable shape Bush left it in? I say worse or just as bad. Obama certainly didn’t improve the situation.
True, but if he threw pebbles at him, you would then take no action? Ok, at least we knew he feared you enough to get rid of the big rocks but not enough to stop entirely, I’m glad that counts as a victory to you. As long he can just sting the child it’s ok.
Neither would I. But after smh writes something like this:
It seems to me like Russia would like the world to return to status quo. Obama not so much. Russia thinks the status quo = security. The Americans, going back at least 16 years have caused the security of the status quo to run amok.
As I explained, had I been Obama, I would have tried to make Assad into an ally instead of threatening him, and used him to crush AQI who were in his country and morphed into ISIS.
Same thing in Libya with Qaddafi. Now both countries and Iraq are terrorist hot beds.
How is Putin wrong for standing by his ally and wanting to see the Middle East return to the old status quo?
[quote=“Gkhan, post:775, topic:210298, full:true”]
edited:
If this is true, doesn’t make Obama any less of a failure. All presidents have their triumphs and failures, but we weren’t talking about them, were we? If you want to make new threads and we can discuss all of them.[/quote]
No, my point is that if by the lights of your framework every president in American history has been an ineffectual failure (and they have: as I have already mentioned, see for but a few of the most recent examples Bush 43’s admonitions aimed at Iran’s nuclear program, N. Korea’s nuclear program, and Putin’s occupation of Georgia, against all three of which Obama’s red-line results in Syria constitute a shockingly unqualified victory), this says precisely nothing about every president in American history and everything about your framework.
For example, you keep using this reductive, juvenile language – talking about whether or not chlorine attacks are “ok,” as in “how is that ok?” The problem is that this is not a dispute among 8th-grade girls tittering about how it’s not okay for Becky to be studying with Trish’s bae after school. The “ok/not ok” framework is great for that kind of thing and fatuous idiocy for this kind of thing – for great power interests balanced against risks balanced against rewards balanced against precedent set into a multivariate equation and stretched along an irregular scale. I explained in great detail in my last post how many of these variables interact – and to what end – in the present situation. You did not address the details of this explanation, or really anything else. Maybe I will search through this pair of limp and oddly oblique posts for anything more I want to respond to. Maybe I won’t. Either way, the answers have already been provided to you.
By your own diagram the red line was an act of deterrence correct? At the time of the red line Assad was not using chemical weapons correct?
According to your previous post the Red Line was a failed attempt at deterrence and the Russian removal of chemical agents was a successful act of compellence.
Correct me if I’m wrong logically or misunderstood your argument.
Perhaps I should have phrased it as a practical option, obviously militarily it was a realistic option but practically what would have been the outcome of us deposing a dictator in an ISIS hotbed with large chemical weapons stockpiles?
Personally I couldn’t fully asses the outcome given my limited knowledge of the situation but from my perspective it seems similar to playing with matches next to a powder keg…
I think that comparing Assad and ISIS like for like is greatly simplifying the dynamic in the ME. I don’t believe Assad(or any other ME dictator) has retained power by underestimating foreign threats. I don’t even suspect that ISIS leadership underestimates foreign threats just that declaring war on the west was an expedient way to gain sway over their followers.
I do agree that no shits are given regarding their civilian population but I don’t think anyone here is arguing(except maybe Trump…) that they should be targeted.
The argument is that some military action should have been taken against the Assad regime after the threat was levied and ignored. That being said it’s much easier said then done given regional dynamic.
Would you actually consider the removal of said weapons after they had already been used punishment? If I may roll back to my previous example it seems similar to an individual shooting another and the enforcer merely taking the gun away. More to the point, the sequential chlorine attacks seem akin to said offender attacking their victim with a knife after their firearm had been taken away(it’s not like we can reasonably remove all access to knives right?).
I know this is obviously a greatly simplified example but it seems the closest logical equivalent to me.
I agree that Assad losing power and the subsequent vacuum would have been a very difficult situation, one that I wouldn’t have an answer for.
As for Russian intervention do you think that if we had acted militarily against Assad that the Russians would have intervened as they did on Assads behalf? I sincerely doubt it, just as we will not intervene now with Russian involvement. Additionally do you think it is reasonable to assume that during the Putin/Assad negotiation regarding the removal of chemical weapons Assad was assured Russian support should it be needed?
The end result that I took away from the incident was that Putin allowed Assad to work around the deterrent that the US put in place. This seemed to not only disrupt our influence with regard to Syria but more dangerously diminish our power posturing relative to Russia on a global stage.
My point exactly, sig,
The problem with this analogy is that we don’t hold jurisdiction over Assad and Syria. We aren’t the worlds police, right? That’s not a popular notion at least (don’t know where you stand on it).
This was ultimately an exercise in threat reduction. Of course, we would have preferred to stop Assad from using chemical weapons in the first place, but that just isn’t reality. So we took his most threatening weapons away without further destabilizing the Middle East.
Removing dictators, which I tend to support, has not worked out well for us. That isn’t to say we shouldn’t do it, but we need a plan for the aftermath. That was 43s biggest mistake.
As far as the Russian’s go, I tend to agree that they have outmaneuvered the Obama Admin pretty much at every turn.
AQI and ISIS are essentially the same. AQI stems from Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and from the very beginning was Al Qaeda in name only.
I don’t agree, usmcc.
Now…I am getting into territory that you understand MUCH more than I do; but I find it difficult to say that Putin “outmaneuvered” us when we have much different rules of engagement, and are taking into account much broader geopolitical considerations.
I doubt that Putin’s forces…and CERTAINLY not Assad’s…have as a fundamental tenet of engagement the limitation of collateral, civilian and infrastructure damage.
Putin also has a very narrow focus…keep Assad in power; while U.S. interest and concerns are much broader.
In terms of the narrow focus that Putin has; and the lack of concern that Putin and Assad have for anything else…then they are “winning”…
“Outmaneuvered” us?
It doesn’t take much military or political expertise or strategy to cluster, barrel-bomb and gas people, while reducing any semblance of a Country to rubble.
I think we are just looking at this a bit differently.
I do mean in a broad sense over the last 8 years. Not specifically related to the propping up of Assad. The annexation of Crimea, is another example, where Putin has outmaneuvered Obama, imo.
That is true, but not really what I was thinking.
I disagree. Yes, Putin is focused on keeping Assad in power, but that is not the extent of it. It’s his doorway to the Middle East. It’s trade relations with a state that has been closed off from the world for some time now. There are economic ramifications; oil, arms sales, etc… It’s also about influence, real and perceived. It’s about re-establishing Russia as a dominant force through real expansion (Crimea) and increased influence (Iran).
Agreed, but that doesn’t change the perception that Putin did what he set out to do and Obama did not. We see it in this very thread. Whether the red line was effective or not (I agree with Smh here) the perception by many is that Assad called our bluff and we backed off.
Russia doesn’t care if Assad has chemical weapons. Russia doesn’t care if Assad kills his own people in droves. He cares if Assad can be a trading partner and a doorway to the rest of the Middle East.
And as far as the nuclear agreement goes, Putin must love it for the aforementioned trade agreements. Even the EU is working on a trade deal with Iran.
Once that money starts flowing it will be very difficult for the U.S. to gain any support to re-establish sanctions in the future.
I see where you were coming from, usmcc.
I highlighted this statement for those who insist that “sanctions were working” against Iran.
They were. But the coalition that made the sanctions work was rapidly unraveling.
Whether we should have done “something else” than the deal that was made is certainly up for debate.
What that “something else” is, I’m unsure…but continued sanctions was not a sustainable option.