Senate The Middle East Discussion Thread

The only thing I am confident about is that you have literally no idea what's happening.

 

lol @ the Islamic State being a threat to "us."

 

a little bird told him so

 

Well, no, let's not be too silly here. The conditions created in the wake of the Islamic State tsunami may create the kind of fertile breeding grounds that Soviet Afghanistan created, for which the downstream effects are hard to wholly judge but we could comfortably label "not great".

ISIL may not in practical terms itself be preparing to mount an attack, but to argue that there's no threat emerging from their behavior is a bit extreme. There is significant risk from the destabilisation they've created and that should be acknowledged.

Can we not cheapen the term just because it feels good to use an emotionally laden concept out of context, purely so we can shame another person? At no point is there an effort to eliminate, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.
The Middle East is comprised of a number of racial, ethnic and religious groups. Using nuclear weapons in the manner Ezio flippantly and non-seriously described would constitute a war crime under the Rome Statute.
Unless you wish to, in defiance of the clearly established legal definition of Genocide under both the 1948 UN Convention and later the 1998 Rome Statute, label Hiroshima an act of Genocide your rebuke was baseless. I congratulate you on perpetuating the Left's incessant cheapening of the term to score political points. I'm reasonably sure the victims of unrecognised genocides, such as the 1.5 million Armenians from 1915 or the scores of Aboriginal Australians who are denied legal recourse would thank you for using the term as if it meant the same thing as "lots of dead people", purely because it contains emotional weight of unconscionable evil. Like, you know, America's "genocide" in Iraq or Israel's "genocide" in Palestine?
If you are going to hold Ezio to account for advocating mass murder you should be prepared to be held to account for the incorrect use of the term genocide.
FWIW, I had the same conversation with a journalist over the term.

 

Why is the solution to a group spreading and killing lots of innocent people to up the ante and kill even more innocent people? Is this like so we get them first or something?

 

I think a lot of people see the Middle East in Kissinger terms, i.e. a basket case, because of the number of difficulties the region faces. Most of which can be basically put down to weak governance, weak government, poor mechanics for upword mobility and Islam (in the sense that it's not had a period of political dilution a la the Enlightenment, so it's still a political religion).

The assumption being that if we turn it into a glass crater (get it! All that sand!) life will somehow get better. Because no more troublesome Ay-rabs.

 

I mean, the one way I'll cut it slack as I've thought for some time that the whole region would be better off if we evacuated Jerusalem, nuked it, and let whoever wants to fight over a radioactive ruin do so while the rest of the world moves on.

I like to think of it as a sort of a king Solomon approach, so I think they'd be okay with it.

 

Lowie, you're too rational. These parties fundamentally aren't, so I'm pretty sure that you'd just make history in uniting these groups against Lowie.

Unless you told them your name was beezel...

 

Perhaps, but make no mistake that Iran (at least the government) still hates the US as much as ever. Still, I suppose this is a start.

 

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2014/08/liberalism-and-isis

Democracy in America
American politics


Liberalism and ISIS

Fight the powers that be


Aug 28th 2014, 22:40 by M.S.

WHAT do America's right-wing tea-partiers and left-wing progressives have in common? Enough, says the journalist Clive Crook, that they can both usefully be called liberals—in the global sense of the word. In a review of our former colleague Edmund Fawcett's book "Liberalism: The Life of an Idea", Mr Crook approves of the work's identification of four basic characteristics of liberalism: "acceptance of conflict, resistance to power, belief in progress and civic respect." America's right and left both broadly adhere to these liberal principles, and that separates their ideologies from authoritarian, totalitarian or theocratic ones.
Mr Crook is right that there are certain core values accepted on both the right and left sides of American politics. I'm particularly interested in the second one on this list, "resistance to power". One of the reasons why Americans have periodically been able to attain bipartisan agreement on foreign policy is that both parties can be rallied to oppose dictatorial or oppressive regimes. Broad bipartisan majorities supported America's Cold War against Soviet Communism and the invasion of Saddam Hussein's Iraq. At the moment consensus is forming for military action against the latest brutal regime to emerge in that part of the world, the so-called Islamic State or ISIS.
Unfortunately, the instinctive American reaction against oppressive government is not often accompanied by any coherent vision of how government is formed. Pace Public Enemy, "fight the power" is not a sufficient political philosophy. Resistance to power is necessary—but so is power. Americans often seem to think that by removing unjust governments, just governments will form naturally, via the process of voluntary social-contract formation assumed in 18th-century political philosophy. It's a vulgar version ofFrancis Fukuyama's "End of History"thesis from 1990, a moment when Communist governments were falling and democratic ones seemed to spring up effortlessly to replace them. This notion is a fairy tale. Even in central Europe, the post-Communist story has gone through wrenching ups and downs; across the former Soviet Union, authoritarianism still rules. Meanwhile, in Vietnam, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, America has found over and over that simply holding an election does not create a functioning or legitimate government. Energetic power structures with real roots, based on clans, religions, oligarchies, or ideological movements, have replaced the feeble and corrupt pseudo-democratic governments the US has helped put into place.
The fact that Americans are outraged by oppressive governments, but lack a realistic theory of how stable governments come into being, means that it is easy to generate political support for attacking undesirable states and organisations, but hard to generate support for building anything to replace them. For that matter, even if it were easy to generate political support for state-building, the evidence from Afghanistan and Iraq is that the country does not have the ability to do it. Instead, America repeatedly ends up with bombing campaigns intended to "deter" an enemy or "degrade" their capabilities, and nothing else. America bombs in the hope of something better arriving. It rarely does. In places such as Cambodia and Iraq, the powers that emerge in the wake of American military action often seem worse than their predecessors. This was what Michael Flynn, the outgoing head of America's Defence Intelligence Agency,warned of in July, when he said that if Hamas were "destroyed and gone, we would probably end up with something much worse...something like ISIS."
For all the war-weariness of the American public, the majority of the political establishment seems to be rallying towards a more aggressive military campaign against the self-proclaimed caliphate.Kevin Drumis shocked at the absence of any voices in the mainstream media cautioning moderation. More depressing still is the paucity of coherent thinking about what America's goals are, what its strategy is, and how military action fits into that picture.William Kristol, as ever, manages to distill the rot down to its ludicrous essence: "What’s the harm of bombing them at least for a few weeks and seeing what happens? I don’t think there’s much in the way of unanticipated side effects that are going to be bad there. We could kill a lot of very bad guys!"
No doubt the Americans could. Drop enough bombs and you are guaranteed to kill some very bad guys, and probably some good guys, as well as a lot of guys who, like most, fit somewhere in between. But simply bombing areas when the emerging powers prove bloodthirsty, and hoping that a better sort of power replaces them, isn't very promising. As Mr Fukuyama long ago recognised, democracy doesn't emerge naturally when you get rid of everything else. Mr Fukuyama's most recent work concerns the wide variety of human political orders, the difficulty of maintaining stable ones, and the extraordinarily fragile balance between top-down and bottom-up power required to sustain liberal democracies. A liberal democracy will not develop in Iraq or Syria any time soon. ISIS is the worst sort of regime imaginable, and may have to be eliminated or contained; but instinctive liberal antipathy for all non-democratic regimes must not get in the way of picking some kind of existing alternative power structure that can survive in the modern Middle East, and that Americans are prepared to live with. In the global sense, Americans may all be liberals, right- and left-wingers alike. But in illiberal places, liberals need to have some next-best political solution in mind.

Picture credit: Safin Hamed/ AFP

For my part, this sentence says so much: "The fact that Americans are outraged by oppressive governments, but lack a realistic theory of how stable governments come into being, means that it is easy to generate political support for attacking undesirable states and organisations, but hard to generate support for building anything to replace them."

 

Good article, but the internal situations in Libya and Syria "broke" those countries, not American interference. It was our intervention that brought about the chaos in Iraq and somewhat in Afghanistan, so we had some responsibility to at least help them set up governments and rebuild. With Libya and Syria, the people already acted and the civic order already collapsed without American interference, so America doesn't have a responsibility in those countries to set up their new governments or rebuild them, and it's ok to just have bombing campaigns in those countries.


Anyways, it seems like James Foley was waterboarded by the IS. I wonder if Republicans will call it torture?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/28/james-foley-tortured-isis-waterboarded_n_5732098.html



And a laptop recovered from the IS shows at least one of their members was researching how to weaponize the bubonic plague:
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articl..._plague_weapons_of_mass_destruction_exclusive

 

I still don't buy this. Both the Iranian people, and the current leadership.

 

Nice to see you around, Lowbacca_1977

 

So it looks like ISIS and Al Queda are at odds in Syria. Al Queda actually looks like the more reasonable group between the two. They certainly aren't what I would consider good guys, but ISIS is making them look tame lately.

I also recently read about a laptop that was recovered from an ISIS militant earlier this year (in January I think) that had plans laid out for the use of bio weapons. The bubonic plague was specifically mentioned as being a useful tool of terror. While that may not necessarily cause the end to humanity, it would certainly cause terror on an epic scale.

 

ISIS originated as a rogue branch of the Nusra Front. Zawahiri has never much liked them, just as he was privately quite at odds with Tawhid & Jihad's policy for fomenting sectarian violence during the Iraq War. However, his slightly better relationship with Zarqawi allowed them to keep the disagreement private, and the group mostly in line with Al-Qaeda Central's policy directives, although they pushed the line. Baghdadi, having come into serious jihadism during this period, has been about 15 steps beyond it, and was formally dismissed and denounced almost a year ago now (early October 2013, as I recall).

 

i'm helping to start up a group called IZISS (international zoo-idiot and sassy society). y'all all perfect for it - i implore you to join!!!

 

Yeah, that's been well know about the IS for a while (they have officially changed their name to just "the Islamic State" now).

And I posted that article about the laptop 3 posts above you

 

okay i just changed the name slightly to "international zoo-idiocy and sassification society", mainly to underscore the fact that we want to transform the entire world.

 

Didn't London just raise their terror threat?

 

You sure about that? Cause I'm pretty sure ISIS was formed from the ashes of Al Qaeda in Iraq.

 

breaking: IS has changed their name to an unpronounceable symbol, letters declared haraam

 

It's a reliable indicator after all.