Sen. Graham: Syria would be "Iraq on steroids" with a fast US withdraw
29 replies, posted
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/19/syria-lindsey-graham-iraq-on-steroids-trump
Senator Lindsey Graham said on Saturday he hoped Donald Trump would slow the US withdrawal from Syria until Islamic State is destroyed, warning that if not thought through, the pullout can create an “Iraq on steroids”.
Graham, from South Carolina, is a friend and ally of the president who regularly claims to have his ear. Speaking in Ankara, he also said he believed the chair of the joint chiefs of staff, Joseph Dunford, was working on a plan with Turkey to move Kurdish fighters away from the Turkish border.
“Here’s the good news,” said Graham. “Gen Dunford, I think, has a plan that he’s working on with the Turkish military that can accomplish these objectives and they are to move the YPG elements away from Turkey.”
What does a victory look like? 17 more years? 40? 100 years? until we run out of money? Until we glass entire countries and suck all their oil clean?
You cannot kill ISIS because ISIS is really an ideology. ISIS may cease to exist by name, but something else will pop up. The only way to truly win is to prop up a stable gov't which can fend for itself and continue to suppress extremist ideologies. Overtime the idea is the stability will create an environment where extremism is less prevalent due to opportunities, education, and prosperity.
As much as I disagree with Trump on everything, the US has the absolute worst fucking tracking record in the Middle East, and competition there is pretty much the Olympics of neo-imperialism. As much help as the region needs, I have zero faith in the United States' ability to contribute subtly or intelligently or positively to that end. So put Lindsey Graham down as my current number one contender with Joe Lieberman for picking the wrong opinion 100% of the time and "crossing the aisle" just to smell his own farts.
I agree as well, U.S track record has been pretty shit. We feed into a system which creates a negative feedback loop. We buy/sell/trade with countries which funds extremism which has attacked the U.S. We've destabilized entire regions and failed to prop up any viable gov't. All our work in Iraq was practically undone by ISIS, Afghanistan is a fucking joke, and Syria is a god damn wasteland now. We go into these places, bomb the shit out of them, create resentment, basically push people to extremism, and then ask why you do this?
We already know the only idea palatable to the US (the overthrow of the Russia-aligned Assad regime and the creation of a US friendly Syrian state) is never going to happen. ISIS is done. The Kurds and the Syrians are more than capable of fighting them. There's no reason for US troops to be there.
Yeah, but think of what it'd do for Erik Prince's business interests and Putin's geopolitical interests!
Lindsey Graham is one of the most hawkish senators in Congress right now and he takes plenty of cash from the defense industry. The entire Syrian intervention is a joke and it goes to show how much the United States acts above law. It's illegal under both UN and US law. We're fighting both Assad and ISIS, plus we're arming other groups of jihadists. The Syrians and the Kurds are already doing most of the ground work in fighting them. The two principle reasons we're in Syria is to serve the war economy and to flex geopolitical muscle at Iran and Russia.
doubt.wmv
Every single place the US troops ever stepped on got turned to garbage. Stay on your side of the pond.
Please don't encourage him, he's thinking about invading Venezuela.
We can all debate the merits of having got involved in the first place but let's be real now, we're there. And when the Iraq pull-out happened the whole country collapsed because we'd failed to properly enable them to fight the current and rising threats. To leave Syria to its own devices now could put us back to ISIS square 1 except this time with Turks on the sidelines murdering whoever they fancy as well. Obama was wrong to do it and Trump was wrong too; somehow it seems that politicians listening to their Generals and CoS advice has become unfashionable.
let's not beat around the GW bush here, Turkey has stated they will do whatever it takes to force the kurds to surrender their territorial gains and or destroy them since they see them as the terrorists. We pull out and our ally has promised genocide.
this would make sense if this paternalist attitude actually had success to it
afghanistan and iraq have found themselves incapable of defending themselves as their armies routinely desert and their government is barely capable of carrying out the basic functions of the state. this has not improved in the near two decades that America has intervened there. it's better to pull out to stop wasting time, resources, and making the people there hate you more than they already do
in this instance there is no reason to listen to the generals. they will always look out for themselves and they will always claim some bullshit about how we need to kill them there to stop the terrorists coming to america (if anything it does the opposite).
We have an obligation to aide the Kurds
why is america allied to two peoples who want to genocide each other?
It’s an atrocity that the Kurds will basically be genocided by the Turks once the US pulls out
Syria, like Iraq, like Afghanistan, and like Libya, is a
fucked up form of neo-imperialism planned and
coordinated by a select few in the US, where we
purposefully keep these places as shitholes so that we can continue to exploit them.
And people wonder why trust in any kind of
government here tanked to shit. Nobody's gonna
trust a government where both parties are secretly
planning unethical BS like this.
If they're such an ideologically aligned group with the west why have they been bombing major places in Turkey?
The Kurds in Syria and Iraq have been friendly to the US and have western aligned beliefs. They should not be punished for the actions of the Kurds in Turkey, of which we can all agree have not had a great time under Turkish rule (not that this justifies senseless bombings, but its surely a fair explanation of those actions).
>(not that this justifies senseless bombings, but its surely a fair explanation of those actions).
that sounds a little like youre trying to justify those events a little in your head hehe
IDK, We just pulled out of there with no sort of questions asked. If we leave now we'll just leave the region as more of a mess than it was before.
What it sounds like to your ears and what I have said are probably different then.
Justification of actions and explanation of actions are two separate things. The Kurds in Turkey have had their rights abused to hell and back, so a rebellion in some form is not just understandable but expected. That doesn't justify the use of violence. It only explains it.
And that is beside the point that I said of the Kurds in Syria and Iraq should not be punished by Turkey for those actions north of them.
Not to mention, the way we just decided to pull out rather than with any sort of consultance is disgusting, and dare I say, undemocratic.
I don't believe that the great reduction in ISIS activities in the West is coincidence and not at all related to our activities to disrupt terrorist activity and interdict ISIS and affiliated groups' ability to operate either as an organised group or as an insurgency. The sheer number of ISIS operatives killed by coalition airstrikes and hampered by SF operations must have made a contribution to preventing further attacks on the West. You can't possibly believe that the situation would have gotten better if the (completely apathetic) Syrian and Iraqi governments had been left to deal with their cancer and stop it being exported to Europe. The point is once you start an intervention like this there has to be a plan to finish it. We fucked up in Afghanistan and Iraq II, ran away, and left a more volatile situation than how it was when we came because of a lack of decent consistent strategy which is heavily documented by the people who were either there or in command at the time. What happens is: We go in, we destroy things, disrupt the terrorists but also upset the locals, fail all our strategic objectives to allow the locals to function outside of the control of terrorists, politicians decide the war has become too costly to their reputation and we finally pull out without leaving anything in place to prevent things going back to being worse than they were. This creates a power vacuum that the incompetent Government is unable to fill but the terrorist groups have been waiting eagerly to do so. At this point our interventions are predictable and groups like ISIS and the Taliban probably know us better than we do. I mean what I said - once you start something, you have to finish it. Our Governments' inability to do this properly does not detract from my basic point.
Where was the democratic vote to invade in the first place? This position frustrates the shit out of me. "Welp we're there now so we have to stay" is not a legitimate argument when the intervention was illegal in the first place.
Because Turkey has treated them like shit the entire time? That's going to breed resentment among the populace and radicalize some.
And you do realize bombing places doesn't mean they're not ideologically aligned with the west, right? Hell considering our track record, bombing places makes them ideologically aligned with the west.