[Syria] Coalition strike 'kills government forces'
52 replies, posted
[QUOTE=Cypher_09;49265345]Why the absolute living fuck would you just conveniently choose to ignore hundreds of years just so it better fits your argument?
No, fuck that
All the atrocities still unaccounted for should be accounted for. You ask the same of the Armenian genocide, right? You ask the same of [B]other[/B] governments who assassinate other people?
What makes the US unaccountable? I'm not saying they're total evil or anything but why do they answer to nobody while it feels like the whole world answers to them. And is not a real friend or Ally to them, but a controlled extension of the system designed to keep the US as #1.[/QUOTE]
In my statement I was only referring to post-1991 wars. Of course I don't think we should ignore that, I was just stating that I thought you were accusing the US in Iraq of going around consciously killing as many civilians as possible, which is more common than you may think. I just addressed the atrocities of the US in a past post though.
[editline]7th December 2015[/editline]
[QUOTE=Conscript;49265350]This uncompromising and self-righteous attitude about assad is why there has been no political solution for Syria and why many non-sunni minorities turn to his protection. Besides, we've been eying his overthrow long before 2011.
In this thread we are seeing the same naive liberal democratic views that led to disastrous de-baathification in Iraq and the destruction of that nation-state. People seem to think they're fighting for justice and the people by, for example, handing power over to a majority of Islamic conservative Sunni 'moderates'. That's not even why your politicians are doing what they do.
I'd like to remind everyone that the likes of turkey, the gulf monarchies, and other ultra-reactionary Sunni muslim states (as well as jihadists themselves) view their proxies the same way. This isn't 1776 and I suggest you stop relating your western liberal ideals to Syria, it's that kind of smoke screen that our governments use to enforce their regional interests, insisting on the myth of the FSA and the '70,000' that was just used to justify British intervention.
This is not a democratic revolution, it was never going to be. It was impossible, too much is across ethnic and sectarian lines. This is a war between population groups over who controls Syria, and God willing it won't be Sunni muslim peasants and their sponsors in a miserable marriage between US imperialism, Sunni ideology and influence, and Israeli security interests. There is your real axis of evil and sponsors of terrorism.[/QUOTE]
Still better that the anti-government and Kurdish forces win
[QUOTE=FlashMarsh;49265211]What has his government done? I don't recall when the US started intentionally bombing and killing civilians. Or when it started chucking chemical weapons around.[/QUOTE]
American Indian Wars, Indian Genocides
Filipino-American War, Filipino Genocide
WW1
WW2 (Atom Bombs, Dresden)
Shit done by CIA against civilians everywhere
Korean War
Vietnam War (Agent Orange, random execution of civilians permitted)
Iran-Iraq War (Backed Saddam who used chemical weapons)
Gulf War/Iraq p2 (White phosphorus on civilian targets)
The leading Republican candidate Donald Trump has explicitly stated that the US military should target the families of terrorists because they don't value their own lives.
[QUOTE=FlashMarsh;49265286]Did you just claim that Assad is a 'stabilising force'? I'm done.[/QUOTE]
He is a stablizing force. All of them were horrible people that oppressed their people but Nassir, Saddam, Assad and all those other tyrants put the leash on sectarianism and ethic conflict.
The whole region is clusterfucked though and I don't see a good solution that makes it better anytime in the next 50-100 years anyway, so now we have to deal with that as a global community, and whatever it brings.
[QUOTE=Rangergxi;49265374]American Indian Wars, Indian Genocides
Filipino-American War, Filipino Genocide
WW1
WW2 (Atom Bombs, Dresden)
Shit done by CIA against civilians everywhere
Korean War
Vietnam War (Agent Orange, random execution of civilians permitted)
Gulf War (White phosphorus on civilian targets)
The leading Republican candidate Donald Trump has explicitly stated that the US military should target the families of terrorists because they don't value their own lives.[/QUOTE]
How about you read my posts instead of making the same replies
[QUOTE]Still better that the anti-government and Kurdish forces win[/quote]
Why do you lump Kurds in with them? They're not anti-government. The Sunni rebels and their sponsors especially have nothing to offer to them.
[QUOTE=Conscript;49265397]Why do you lump Kurds in with them? They're not anti-government. The Sunni rebels and their sponsors especially have nothing to offer to them.[/QUOTE]
They are anti-Government as long as they are denied a state, lol.
IS and Assad are both the enemy. The Kurds I consider to be friends, and the assorted anti-Assad forces are a mix, but less bad than IS and Assad.
[QUOTE=OvB;49265376]The whole region is clusterfucked though and I don't see a good solution that makes it better anytime in the next 50-100 years anyway, so now we have to deal with that as a global community, and whatever it brings.[/QUOTE]
Annihilate ISIS and divide the region along ethnic/sectarian lines. If you're gonna intervene you're gonna have to take measures that resolve the issues.
[QUOTE=FlashMarsh;49265324]The US has done bad things. Doesn't make it a fundamentally evil regime that you are portraying it as. Saddam and Assad were murderous, and in Saddam's case, genocidal, dictators, following Baathism (essentially Arab nazism),[/quote]
I actually don't think the US is evil. I think certain people acting in the wrong interest pervert a good institution to do bad things. As for baathism I dunno what makes it comparable to naziism cept the actions by the people who practised it. I thought fundamentally it was nationalism (I dislike the idea but it is a common factor in western countries) + secularism (if anything the ME needs more of this).
[quote] whilst the US is a stable democracy that seeks to promote democracy (an honourable goal) whilst protecting its own national security (another perfectly honourable goal).[/quote]
I think the US intervention in Iraq wasn't about democracy. If it were they would have gotten involved sooner. It had been a plan for a while to invade iraq. Lots of money in war. Cheney was CEO of halliburton, he wanted to invade iraq, he then became vice pres and used his influence to get halliburton a no-bid contract worth 7bn for after the invasion. The US government wasn't evil they just let Cheney and greedy bastards use it for evil. Very rarely is someone evil for the sake of being evil, there's always some rationality or moral justification. The war was about money the moral "democracy makers" stuff was just to ensure public support.
[quote]You're trying to create moral equivalence between the US because the US has done stuff that is bad in the past, but that doesn't mean that who the moral actor is all murky, because to me and most people it is obvious. During World War II, the US dropped the atom bombs, interned Japanese civilians, carved up the world and along with us, killed thousands of civilians in bombings of Dresden. Whilst we should acknowledge these actions, condemn them (and try to avoid repeating them where possible), we should also not allow ourselves to be convinced that the evil was anything but the Axis powers. Nor should we try to strip all agency of non-Western actors and excuse their atrocities in order to stick it to the US. A similar situation applies here.[/QUOTE]
I purposely didn't bring up anything from more than a couple of generations back. If you dig deep enough every country has done shit and we shouldn't suffer for the sins of our fathers. On WW2 though, if it was about morality the US would have gotten involved a lot sooner (again). Being the good guys was a happy coincidence. Ultimately it was about money, power and influence. It catapulted them from being an isolationist debtor country into a power projecting creditor nation and they slipped comfortably into the shoes being vacated by Russia, Britain and France (they were already in the process of this from ww1 but the depression hit them back hard, a war economy + making loans to allies really helped them).
This won't be resolved through arguing, but I just don't agree that it wasn't about ideology, and although power, money and influence played a role in both WW2 and Iraq, they were, in my view, secondary to ideology of neo-conservatives who favoured the active promotion of democracy by armed force in Iraq, for example.
[QUOTE=FlashMarsh;49265406]They are anti-Government as long as they are denied a state, lol.
IS and Assad are both the enemy. The Kurds I consider to be friends, and the assorted anti-Assad forces are a mix, but less bad than IS and Assad.[/QUOTE]
Considering such westernized moderates, if they exist, fight side by side with Islamists, receive support from the same sunni sponsors, and likely share hatred of groups like the Alawites, it's not very mixed. They're Sunni rebels, just because some didn't go full retard doesn't mean they're not cut from the same cloth.
The Kurds are not enemies of assad, they are fellow travelers. When the Kurds seized territory assad simply gave it up, fueling speculation among the Sunni rebels when he already offered them autonomy. Part of the reason Turkey based Kurdish organizations are leading Syrian Kurds is because Syria allowed the PKK to organize as a measure against Turkish influence (which as we can see in Latakia, is part of the problem). The Kurds have little interest in the victory of the rebels, who complain Kurds don't fight the government enough. Further, the Kurds are the only group that isn't demanding Assad must go, instead just asking him to broadly commit to democracy.
[url]http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/08/syrian-kurds-sets-terms-assad-partnership-150803191234786.html[/url]
[url]http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/syria-civil-war-kurdish-leader-says-collapse-of-assad-regime-would-be-a-disaster-despite-its-10515922.html[/url]
[url]http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2015/10/23/putin-assad-ready-to-work-with-rebel-groups-especially-kurds-against-isis/[/url]
[url]http://m.voanews.com/a/us-troop-deployment-to-syria-frustrates-anti-assad-rebels/3031092.html[/url]
[url]https://m.facebook.com/RadioFreeSyria/posts/740142662737610[/url]
Also ideological allies (and volunteers) to the leftist Kurds, within and outside Syria, are all pro-government.
But they're still less bad
[QUOTE=FlashMarsh;49265633]But they're still less bad[/QUOTE]
Only because they're smaller. Give them a void to fill and they might just fill it, like IS did. At 1 time Al-queda in iraq was a minor footnote in ME reports, now its rebranded and is headline news.
On a separate note that quote is super interesting.
[quote]the group stated that it would not have ties with the Syrian National Coalition, though a member of the political bureau of the group, Ahmad Musa, has stated that he hopes for recognition from the Syrian National Council in cooperation for what he suggested "the Syrian people want. They want a revolution and not politics and foreign agendas." Despite non-recognition of the authority of the Syrian Coalition[/quote]
1 of the 2 reasons he mentions is "no foreign agendas" if he's saying this he might believe that is a cause people will root for, implying that's what the people want (as in they want no foreign meddling, not necessarily extremist islam). If that view is representative of the whole sample then it might be a useful insight into the conflict.
[QUOTE=OvB;49264889]Assads terrorism is the reason we're in this mess. It's an example of what happens when the world is too scared of political backlash of intervention and watches a world leader destroy his own country.[/QUOTE]
Because we learned from Iraq and Afghanistan that rolling in for a 10 year war doesn't really help in the long run. There's nothing we could do that would improve the situation, we sit by and what happened happens. We invade and the entire world hates us and we get entangled in yet another unending conflict we shouldn't be in. And when we leave, this would happen anyway and all our efforts are all for naught.
[QUOTE=Cypher_09;49265101]Is this^ US world police attitude ever going to go away? Legitimate question with our own safeties in mind.[/QUOTE]The one time we had a president who wanted to talk and find not-war solutions and didn't go Team America on the Middle East it exploded into a civil war and now Europe is flooded with refugees.
[QUOTE=Cypher_09;49265195]Holy fucking shit look what your government has done.
When are all your leaders going to the hangman's noose for doing far worse? NONE OF THEM
That makes my blood boil.[/QUOTE]Cite your fucking sources, and use reputable ones too.
[QUOTE=FlashMarsh;49265204]There will never be stability in Syria as long as he remains in power. Assad has caused 95% of civilian casualties in the war so far. In my (hawkish) opinion we should have had a ground invasion to support the FSA before it became completely overrun by Saudi-funded Islamists, but there was never the stomach for it in the US, let alone in Britain after Iraq.[/QUOTE]What we should have done is treated the FSA like all the other rebel groups we armed, our guns, rockets, bullets, and bombs all come with a political price tag and that's keep the Islamist fundamentalists the fuck out. The only reason why they made a deal with them and agreed to not attack or fight with them was the FSA had literally no other option. Our indecision allowed that to happen, and it's the people going now "WELL WE ARMED ISIS!!!!!!!!!!!!!" that were the primary obstacle in the first place.
Also, for the last fucking time for everyone reading, we didn't arm ISIS aside from losing a few trucks (out of hundreds so far btw) of ammo and accidentally air-dropping some grenades and food during the siege of Kobane. If anyone is honestly upset about that then they should be furious that we accidentally air-dropped [B]tons[/B] of supplies on top of German troops during WWII.
[QUOTE=Cypher_09;49265218]Pick up a history/politics book and turn to page 1.[/QUOTE]So when are you going to pay the relatives of all those Germans you firebombed? Repeatedly? Dresden was largely a British raid, shall I show pictures of the thousands of innocent Germans British pilots burned alive? How about the complete fucking mess you made out of multiple continents and literally were so terrible that we had a fucking armed revolution to remove you motherfuckers from our soil? Or do the British atrocities not count?
Your country has a far, [U]far[/U] longer history of horrific atrocities that pale in comparison to what we've done in the short time we've been a nation. People like you love to tell us that we're bold, brash, and arrogant which comes from being such a young, inexperienced nation full of immature people; yet the American [I]people[/I] contribute more humanitarian aid than your entire goddamn country does in it's entirety. We volunteer by the hundreds, and not only that but our government pisses away hundreds of millions of dollars every year trying to unfuck the mess that colonialism made, that [I]you[/I] made. Americans have contributed more toward fixing the problems of the world because maybe we are dumb and naive, but hey, at least we're not a nation chock full of arrogant cunts who scoff at everyone else. I feel sorry for every British person who isn't like you, I truly do, because if we didn't exist you'd be the world's punching bag for all the terrible shit you've done.
Get the fuck out of here with this anti-American bullshit, you're just stirring shit for no good reason.
[editline]7th December 2015[/editline]
Oh and if you're still unclear as to what my point is Cypher_09:
We're talking about what happened in [B][U][I]SYRIA[/I][/U][/B] with the [B]SYRIAN GOVERNMENT.[/B] Not the USA. Not the UK. Not anyone else. Even if we literally sacrificed a billion people to Satan that does not make the atrocities ordered by Assad, the Syrian government, or anyone who willingly carried out those orders against civilians okay under any circumstances.
[QUOTE=OvB;49265179]It makes my blood boil that people are willing to forgive that monster and grant him retreat.[/QUOTE]
Idealistic views of justice and righteousness don't work here. Actual politics are built on compromises, and if one side doesn't want Assad to be punished just yet, the other side either finds a compromise or damages relationship with the other one. "Forgiveness" and "justice" don't come into play at any point in this event. It doesn't matter if you or I forgive Assad. Or even Syrians, at this point, the conflict outgrew Syria.
Like, it's not even a topic to talk about. Russia and Iran don't want Assad stepping down, as long as international coalition isn't willing go all cold war on Russia and revert to previous relations with Iran, he's just not stepping down, end of story.
As shitty as some of his policies were, nobody can say that syria wasn't pretty fucking well off before the war. Assad claims extremists started the war, and at this point I'm not even sure it really matters who started the war. What matters is that there are currently frontlines being manned and maintained by Assad's command structure. Any destabilization in it would allow ISIS to push in and claim even more resources. Short of a billion man invasion to mop up every extremist we need to make sure what areas aren't currently being radicalized stay that way.
[QUOTE=gudman;49266406]Idealistic views of justice and righteousness don't work here. Actual politics are built on compromises, and if one side doesn't want Assad to be punished just yet, the other side either finds a compromise or damages relationship with the other one. "Forgiveness" and "justice" don't come into play at any point in this event. It doesn't matter if you or I forgive Assad. Or even Syrians, at this point, the conflict outgrew Syria.
Like, it's not even a topic to talk about. Russia and Iran don't want Assad stepping down, as long as international coalition isn't willing go all cold war on Russia and revert to previous relations with Iran, he's just not stepping down, end of story.[/QUOTE]
Why does the us need to get involved to be rid of Assad when the radicals seem to be doing the job for them?
I mean I do not get this. Why work harder then have to?
[QUOTE=JohhnyCarson;49266858]Why does the us need to get involved to be rid of Assad? Isn't the radicals doing the job for them?
I mean I do not get this. Why work harder then have to?[/QUOTE]
Well so far they have been doing a bad job of getting rid of Assad. Realistically, with overt and direct Russian and Iranian support, everyone but the coalition can only dream of removing the bastard.
Still not wise to get involved until the situation is no longer a cluster fuck.
[QUOTE=Sableye;49265178]Ya no, the thing that made it to the news was that Isis took a couple vans of ammo from the rebels, they siezed 1000x as much from when they raised Iraqi armories[/QUOTE]
People forget that they took Iraqi army vehicles/weapons into Syria and assume they somehow got it from rebels, as if they're going to have cut-down versions of m1 tanks.
[editline]7th December 2015[/editline]
[QUOTE=Cypher_09;49265218]Pick up a history/politics book and turn to page 1.
[editline]7th December 2015[/editline]
[img]http://media.syracuse.com/news/photo/2012/06/11123645-large.jpg[/img]
[img]http://uploads.neatorama.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/798.jpg[/img][/QUOTE]
Vietnam happened in 2015, gotcha.
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