At the very least, a good start might be not continuing to do exactly what created the situation in the first place. I.e. stay the hell out.

What's the best way to "fix" the enormous damage the US did and continues to do to the Middle East?

Go home. Don't go back.

Ok. Sorry.

**** off

don't care if I get infracted or banned for this, I assume Birdman will get about 10 times as long

Here's how I do, D.

I ask posters not to characterise each other's posts. I don't make judgements about the truth or otherwise of those characterisations. I just ask for you not to make them.

I have my view on whether what you posted was racist but in keeping with the ethos I am enforcing here, I keep it to myself.

That's not a solution at all. At least if you give the slightest **** about a few million actually innocent people.

So it's OK to insult someone by calling them a racist when they're clearly not, as long as they're taking your side in an argument?

If that's "how you do", then resign as a moderator right the **** now and lock this thread up.

If you will review, I never called you a racist.

He received a warning for doing it.

As I said, i don't make judgements about the truth or otherwise of characterisations. If you want to discuss that privately, then I'm willing. Birdman can do the same.

Now what I suggest is you stop flailing around and take a deep breath. I don't enjoy disciplining people who really ought to know better but if you insist, I will.

I replied by PM. In the meanwhile, if you'd like to discuss actual solutions to the present-day problem (which I'll remind you, I am no more personally responsible for than you are), we can do that.

"Abandoning millions of refugees to be murdered by ISIS" is not an actual solution.

Pro tip: when your primary concern is the millions of people being killed (not by the United States, mind you), and that's the people you're supposedly being racist against, there's something fundamentally psychotic about your evaluation of the situation.

This is definitely something MB said

Are millions of people being murdered?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternalism

Please. What I attempt to do here is not make the thread about the thread. I try to get posters not to talk about what x said or y said but about the ideas that are shared.

I know you can understand what I am trying to do and I hope you will support it. Some can't, that's fine. They'll either get themselves permabanned from our forum or get the message and cause drama somewhere else.

Of course, interventionists believe it's essential to intervene. Let's talk about the rights and wrongs of that position. I think it causes more problems than it solves in nearly every instance.

I'd invite DWetzel, rather than accusing me of not caring who gets killed, to more clearly point out why he thinks the current policy is preventing it and how he sees the next few years, ideally. I get that we will not see the ideal. We can also talk about that.

well, yes, abandoning was exactly the suggestion.

A misspeak on my part. Obviously there haven't been millions of murders. Is "tens of thousands of murders and millions of displaced people who would be murdered if they didn't literally flee for their lives" significantly better? I thought matters of degree were irrelevant, which is how we got on this whole topic again in the first place.

You know why I ask people not to characterise each other?

Because it's never very helpful. It only ends in conflict and upset. Now, I'm not disputing that conflict can be a lot of fun, and winding each other up is a part of politics, but it's that conflict that I've undertaken to lessen and I am resolute in doing that.

It particularly upsets DWetzel to be characterised in particular ways and I think you know that. I can't allow you to continue doing it so I'm going to ping you if you ignore this.

BTW, I gave VMF an infraction because driveby attacking other posters is just not going to happen and he's on a short leash.

My feeling is that the US's intervention in the Middle East has never, will never, and can never be about humanitarian reasons. In a totally hypothetical sense I wouldn't be against that. But even stipulating that point, humanitarian aid is clearly not what the US is doing over there. Notwithstanding, as I indicated before, and this is why the discussion was important, imperialism is not a policy. You can't just elect someone who isn't imperialist or just choose not to be imperialist. Our intervention in foreign affairs will always be about supporting the interests of Western finance capital. Someone saying they want the US to stop being imperialist would be like saying they want their business to not care about profits. It's silly and paradoxical.

That is why any discussion of a "solution" is purely hypothetical in nature. Because the only real way to stop what is happening is to stop imperialism. And imperialism will always exist under capitalism.

Okay but I'd ask, are millions going to be murdered by ISIS if they don't flee and is what the US doing actually preventing that?

Do ISIS just turn up and murder everybody? If that's your view, why do you think they do that?

Not even were the US more principled? Are you saying that it's structurally impossible (any intervention is less likely to have good ends than make things worse) or just that the way things are, you can't see it?

I think the US has in fact intervened in disasters with good effect. Do you not accept that? I also think that even some of its ideologically motivated work has done some good. I've met Peace Corps volunteers who are doing genuinely good things in the Third World. Would other ways of helping people be better? Maybe. Of course, rather than using American volunteer teachers, it's much better to empower and pay local teachers, but given the state of ruin of most postcolonial countries, you have to take what you can get.


You don't think there's an element of that, albeit misguided?

I still think your view of "imperialism" is too narrow.

But this is probably true.

doing nothing could be the best course of action

i think a reasonable narrative could be concocted that many of "our" actions have been in some sort of misguided good intentions plus self interest that just don't pan out

I mean, in my ideal case there wouldn't be a group of barbaric people* with large quantities of weapons who believed in establishing a global caliphate and laying waste to everything in their path and invading neighboring countries (after all, somewhat simplistically, if the "lack of power structure in Iraq" was the cause of this problem, why are they running the hell over Syria?), but here we are.

Quite obviously it's a mess, and a lot of people are going to die NO MATTER WHAT WE DO (and, probably, no matter what we would have done; it's not like Saddam Hussein was a bucket of rose petals and sunshine either -- such observation not to be construed as an endorsement of the original Iraq invasion. Unfortunately, right now you have a crapton of players in the area (ISIS, Assad, etc.) all perfectly willing to lay waste to people to get what they want.

What needs to be done is 1) identify moderate/reasonable elements in those areas, and 2) assist them into power (note: this does require military intervention, because the existing powers have proven that they aren't exactly going to go quietly), and 3) help them actually maintain power and put structures in place so THEY can deal with the remaining militants that are left, and yes "militarily" would be a part of that process too, and 4) providing a metric assload of aid (economic, humanitarian, and educational) so the people's primary thought isn't "I have to take whatever I can just to survive". You don't have to agree with those people on everything or have them specifically be Western-friendly; "willing to not murder their own populace and willing to prevent other people from doing that too" is a pretty reasonable bar IMO.

You're not wrong that abandoning Iraq was a dumb idea (we probably failed on all four points), though you're wrong that that's the reason all this is happening or that since it's now happened, every future generation is helpless to do anything at all about it so we should just give up and abandon them.

As far as how to prosecute the military intervention, I've already said on this forum that the most effective way to do that would be a full scale ground invasion. You can't effectively hold territory with drone strikes, which is necessary if you're going to do anything to protect the civilians (which unfortunately really isn't our goal in how we're prosecuting this, and it should be). Some civilians ARE going to die as a part of this, and that sucks, but news flash: they're going to die anyway. You don't blame the cops for killing two of the fifteen hostages in the bank robbery, and it's equally stupid to say "you killed them hostages, police, OMGWTFBBQ, so what if the bank robbers were executing hostages" for people living in a war zone (that will be a war zone whether we're there or not) in Syria and Iraq.

What you don't do (and this speaks a little bit to what others have said, and in this regard they aren't wrong, but they're not saying it to help people live, they're saying it as a gotcha, and that sucks a lot) is arm one group of nutjob militants to battle the other group of nutjob militants for you, so that hopefully it's "your" group of nutjob militants in charge. Those militant groups have not-at-all-surprising ways of deciding to act solely in their own interests, and now they have lots of good guns. You do it yourself, you do it right, and you put people in charge who aren't used to assembling and consolidating power by murdering people and grabbing territory, and then (and only then) you have a good chance of ending violence. Even if that means some of "your" people die. Why are "your" lives more valuable than "theirs"?

But that state of being isn't going to magically arise on its own, and if it will it will be generations down the road, and will probably result from a local strongman seizing power brutally (which, again, helps nobody) and then turning out to be sort of benevolent somehow.

I know the ways of doing this effectively are very very difficult. I'm not trying to gloss over that a fair number of people will die from this. But I think it's absurd to say we should just do nothing, because a lot more people are going to die that way.

*Note the distinction between this and the vast majority of Syrians and Iraqis, who aren't generally speaking trying to invade neighboring countries and murder people who disagree with them. They're obviously the biggest victims here.

What would happen if the US withdrew its military from Iraq/Syria?

First, what do we even mean by this? Combat troops? Intelligence operatives? Logistics and analytic support for local actors?

If we said "yes" to all, then we are leaving a massive power vacuum, which is what Monkey correctly identified as causing the ISIS problem to begin with.

As to the question of "what is the ISIS problem, really", I think it would be prudent to consider both "for now" and "for later" aspects.

Immediately, I don't perceive an immediate threat to US soil emanating from ISIS. I do see an immediate threat to US interests in the region, both in terms of economic/trading partners and of military allies with further-reaching geopolitical implications.

In the foreseeable future, the unmitigated growth of ISIS will likely aggravate the above-described, immediate concerns, and may very well develop into a more direct threat to the US at-home, though it would be more likely IMO to see growing humanitarian crises in the areas closer geographically to the IS (Turkey, the Balkans, Central Asia).

im told assad would retake control, possibly with a little help from the russians

it becomes murkier if we should meddle to prevent others meddling, i think

i only read the first bit of dwetz posts, but he seems to be remaking the same mistakes that have been made again and again