Stopping Daesh, our help played a major role in their massive reduction in power.
Also, the idea that we "weren't bothered to 'win it'" as if we were too lazy to end the war is just ridiculous. That would require not just deposing Assad but also deploying troops to begin another occupation, it simply was not in the cards.
Edited by Fourthspartan56 on Jan 30th 2019 at 7:55:07 AM
"Einstein would turn over in his grave. Not only does God play dice, the dice are loaded." -Chairman Sheng-Ji Yang![]()
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Defeating ISIS, who are on the run but far from finished. Protecting the Kurds, who are a valuable regional ally. Denying Assad and Putin, both of whom need to be put in their place.
We have more business in Syria than we did in Iraq in 2003. It’s an intervention we should actually be keeping at.
Edited by archonspeaks on Jan 30th 2019 at 4:52:22 AM
They should have sent a poet.Trump keeps trying to scrap it so as to help both Putin and Turkey, luckily the military seem to be holding him off, presumably via the old “yes sir, right away sir, we’ll just need that order in triplicate both tomorrow and a week from now sir, once we have that we will begin evaluating a plan to present to you sir, once you’ve evaluated that plan we will take your feedback and reformat the plan and bring it back to you at a secondary stage at a date of your determining sir.” method.
Because while the entire situation is underfunded and not fully supported it’s still better than nothing.
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranThe military footprint is pretty light as far as US deployments go, with around 2,000 troops and civilian staffers in Syria itself. There have been genuine issues with the intervention; for example, the airstrikes on the IS capital of Raqqa were conducted with loose oversight and killed way more civilians than excusable, and some Kurdish units of the SDF have been reported to forcefully evict Arab civilians from their villages as part of a revenge campaign. And then there's the recent IS bombing in Manbij, which killed four US personnel and numerous locals. But for most parts, the troops deployed to Rojava mainly provide a supporting role to a motivated local partner that does a fairly good job at stabilising the region. If nothing else, the presence of US troops there is a deterrent against SAA, Russian and Turkish incursion, and that's well worth the operational costs.
One day, we will read his name in the news and cheer.As for stopping Daesh, the Russians and the Turks have excellent track records in crushing insurgencies. If that were the priority, then the USA could simply lose. But it isn't would rather keep the blood flowing and the civil war open than let their opponents take the cake for themselves. If anything, IS's continued presence is a useful pretext.
"we "weren't bothered to 'win it'" as if we were too lazy to end the war is just ridiculous. That would require not just deposing Assad but also deploying troops to begin another occupation, it simply was not in the cards."
Exactly. Not worth committing what it takes to win, not worth losing what a loss would entail to get out, instead the bare minimum is made by all large parties to not lose and keep the others playing, while people keep getting killed and displaced.
I get it. All I ask is that we stop it with the apologetics.
Its not apolagism to point out that despite the biased motive for it and the goal being geopolitics over anything else, it still helps, the situation there is still better than without US troops.
Yes the US largly does good things for selfish reasons, I don’t care about the aparent hipocracy, I care that the world is made a safer and more peaceful place.
I can stomach some US hypocracy if the world improves because of it, I don’t understand why so many of my fellow leftists can’t.
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranI can stomach meat just fine, but I'd rather it not be served on my plate.
As for making the world a safer and more prosperous place, there's a lot of number-fudging, and an enormous rhetorical effort, needed to achieve that image. It's still fairly shallow. I understand that it makes you happy to think that US Foreign Policy is 'altruistic by accident'. I'll try and put forward some evidence over time as to the contrary. I appreciate your patience in this.
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Because unlike Syria, so often we aren't making the world a better place. We end up breaking things and/or then leaving before its fixed (see Iraq shortly before the rise of ISIS, or Yemen). Or deliberately make things worse because its not beneficial to us (See half of the Cold War).
Now, I'll agree that there's some Cold War-era distrust of the USA's motives, but that distrust isn't entirely unfounded. Because it's easy enough to say we're "better" now if we never actually had a reckoning or even truly regret many of the shitty things we did.
Which is why I'll agree that the USA being involved in places may be better than the PRC or Russia, but its not something that should be celebrated (like some of the Tropers have been doing). Its a symptom of a wider problem.
The awful things he says and does are burned into our cultural consciousness like a CRT display left on the same picture too long. -FighteerLeftists overall have a tendency to treat hypocresy as the ultimate worse crime ever, likely due to interacting with religious bigots. That is why they get so much Not True Scottman and infighting.
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Yes the US often messes things up (either deliberately or out of (possibly malicious) incompetence) but that’s not a reason to stop trying to make the world better, it’s a reason to get better at it.
Failing shouldn’t mean giving up and never trying again, it should mean learning from ones msitakes and vowing to do better going forward.
It’s because of the US (and others) past misdeeds that it (and others like France and the U.K.) has a duty to make the world a better place, it’s can’t undo all the death and destruction is that bought upon innocents over many many years, so it had a duty to try and undo some of that damage, to try and save some lives as a penance for the many lives that it has taken.
X4 Often I wouldn’t say it’s by accident, it’s a small factor that leader have from time to time deliberately gone with, it’s not that they don’t care, it’s that they care about other things more, when they can do some good without doing harm to a dozen other things (which includes their national geopolitical interests that enable them to be in a positon to do good) there are times when US leaders will push to do good.
People forget but government isn’t run my mindless drones, it’s run by people, as much as bureaucracy tries to strip away all emotions from decision making it can’t always succeed, the horrifying secret behind politics is that the vast majority of politicians aren’t card carrying villains, they are honestly trying to help and are simply so disconnected from the real world that they think that’s what they’re doing.
Edited by Silasw on Jan 31st 2019 at 10:37:35 AM
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran![]()
See, I agree about penance, I just don't think finding more excuses to drop bombs is a functional form of penance.
Violence should be used as the last resort, when the talking stops and there's no other way to settle things peacefully. The interventions we're talking about are the ones that are us using weapons against some foe, real or imagined.
If you want proof of us not actually trying to make the world a better place, Myanmar is actively conducting genocide. We've barely paid any attention, haven't pushed them too hard, etc. On the flip side, we were up till recently (and we seem to still be doing this) sending bombs to Saudi Arabia so they could continue a disastrous siege in Yemen which is now creating famine. (Not to mention the drone strikes...)
That's not atonement. That's continuing the same old policies that turned so many off the idea of us getting involved in the world. We need to start being more careful with when and how we conduct these operations, and fuel conflicts, if we don't want this reluctance to intervene.
Its less the tech itself, more that we're bombing civilian areas with little or faulty intel.
Edited by AzurePaladin on Jan 31st 2019 at 9:15:09 AM
The awful things he says and does are burned into our cultural consciousness like a CRT display left on the same picture too long. -FighteerTo this day, I still don't get what's so uniquely bad about the drone strikes, USA is in war with Daesh, in war you try to bomb your enemy but sadly, even drones aren't fully 100% reliable, such is the nature of war.
Don't get me wrong, you can criticize USA's handling of the war, but the obsession particular with the drones is just like...Uh, what else then?
Edited by KazuyaProta on Jan 31st 2019 at 9:14:55 AM
Watch me destroying my countryThis is one of those utterly laughable statements leftists back themselves into trying to knock down the US.
Russia and Turkey emphatically do not have excellent track records with insurgencies. In fact, they both have very very bad track records. For anyone who’s bothered by civilian casualties saying we should let the two of them handle it is a particularly hypocritical statement, given neither of them have any qualms about massacring civilians quite on purpose.
It’s a new technology, and therefore scary.
Edited by archonspeaks on Jan 31st 2019 at 6:50:30 AM
They should have sent a poet.
That is not the reason, and I think you know that. People weren't okay with bombing Laos and Cambodia either, and those didn't use drones.
Edited by AzurePaladin on Jan 31st 2019 at 9:55:12 AM
The awful things he says and does are burned into our cultural consciousness like a CRT display left on the same picture too long. -FighteerOne of the concerns is that the fact drones (due being remotely controlled) garner even less of an empathy between their victims and the drone operators. So the concern is dehumanizes the people they're targeting even further and makes the operators even less culpable.
The concern of "the more we separate the soldier and his weapon from the person he's killing will lead to sociopathy on the soldier's part and dehumanization of his victims" has been a recurring one since the invention of archery and it went full-steam ahead with the invention of guns, and then air bombing and finally drone strikes, in which you effectively press a button and watch someone die.
People get unsettled with this automatization of killing, not without concern.
"All you Fascists bound to lose."It wasn't proven that they still experience the same PSTD rates as other soldiers?
Watch me destroying my country![]()
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No, that is the reason. A drone strike isn’t any less or more dehumanizing than a missile strike, or an air strike, or artillery, rockets, any of the dozens of technologies we have that allow impersonal death at a distance. We’ve had those technologies for decades or longer, and they’re not exactly a source of complaints.
Drones are something new, though. Unlike a missile or a bomb they represent humans being removed from the equation in a very visible way. That’s what scares people. I think a lot of people also don’t understand that what we call “drones” aren’t fully autonomous.
Edited by archonspeaks on Jan 31st 2019 at 7:05:43 AM
They should have sent a poet....They are a source of complaints though. Hence why Congress tried to stop us from sending weapons to the Saudis. Why there was outrage at the bombing of Laos and Cambodia. Why Napalm had opposition during Vietnam, why people were against the invasion of Iraq even before drones got involved.
Opposition to drone strikes is not necessarily because 'technology bad', its because we're dropping explosive ordinance on a bunch of countries. Or do you think if we dropped napalm instead that people would stop caring?
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Edited by AzurePaladin on Jan 31st 2019 at 10:27:41 AM
The awful things he says and does are burned into our cultural consciousness like a CRT display left on the same picture too long. -FighteerHey, you know how some languages have those one or two-syllable words that turn out to mean something incredibly complicated? "Drone strike" is an American English example of that. When we talk about "drone strikes", we're really talking about a specific government action that:
- Employs a remotely-piloted (not autonomous), medium-range military drone carrying laser-guided munitions. It's not a "drone strike" when you're using a drone to jam enemy communications or locate them, for example.
- Usually falls under the intelligence wing of the government rather than the military, making the program uniquely opaque.
- Covers conflict zones in the MENA region, South-Central Asia, and the Horn of Africa, usually where piloted military aircraft are already deployed in combat roles.
- Targets suspected leaders of terrorist and insurgent groups out of combat (when a Reaper drone provides tactical support to a US Army squad in combat, you don't see it discussed as a "drone strike").
- Uses a variety of intel-gathering methods to search for targets, with known cases of false positives.
- Uses the drone's on-board sensors (usually a FLIR camera) for final identification, which has led to many cases of misidentification and civilian casualties.
- Has led to questionable results in reducing the resilience of the target groups.
These issues all exist with older weapon systems, but the specific parameters of the drone warfare program keeps so much more of it in the grey zone; when the Israeli F-15s bombed a PLO headquarter in Tunisia with numerous civilian deaths,
for example, the world found out right away. It's not just a matter of tech; it's a question of military conduct, national sovereignty, media saturation, and so much more.

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Considering we actually have a good reason to be in Syria, we should certainly hope this isn’t another one.
They should have sent a poet.