General Politics Thread

(hops in from other thread and waves)

I wasn’t saying anyone in the conversation was saying America is the best ever, but that’s what’s used as justification for its militant invasions.

I mean for as long as we’ve been in the Middle East, our reconstruction efforts sure haven't gotten close to covering as much damage as we’ve done or helped exacerbate.

Edit: Also “maybe we shouldn’t imperialism” has nothing to do with “let assholes be assholes.” Not sure where that interpretation comes from.

Edited by ILikeRobots on May 7th 2019 at 12:28:03 PM

Well, how much of that is the US responsible for?

Take Afghanistan, for example. It’s the number one recipient of US aid money, around $7-10bn a year, every year, since like 2002. So it’s not like we’re not trying here. Now, I personally believe that our aid money could be better spent, but the point I’m making is that your hypothetical “US shows up, beats up a dictator and vanishes” scenario isn’t really playing out here, and that aiding a country isn’t always easy and quick. Afghanistan was always going to be a 50-year effort.

And if your definition of imperialism includes basically all forms of international influence, then the argument might as well be “let assholes be assholes.”

Edited by archonspeaks on May 7th 2019 at 12:32:38 PM

The fun thing is that I wasn't arguing that USA has magical rights invade any country they want.

And that if anything, USA fault in the Middle east is that they didn't stay enough.

x2 At that point it gets the question of if it’s justified to effectively ruin a country for decades if not more with intervention.

If a country is economically stable, is it better for us to invade and destroy that stability just because of a dictator or the country isn’t an American-model democracy?

Isn’t that causing a lot more suffering than good?

It’s not “let assholes be assholes.” It’s “maybe don’t effectively fuck over this country beyond repair.”

Edited by ILikeRobots on May 7th 2019 at 12:36:32 PM

Again, what intervention are you talking about? Afghanistan wasn’t in any way stable prior to 2001, there was basically nonstop civil war from the day the Soviets left. 400,000 Afghan citizens died between 1995 and 2001, and that’s not counting the 2 million who died in the years prior to that. At the time we showed up Afghanistan was essentially a failed state. It’s estimated that around 147,000 civilians have been killed since 2001, which is a marked improvement over what they had before even if it’s still horrendous.

The same could be said in Iraq too, considering how busily Saddam Hussein was massacring minority populations in the late 90s and early thousands.

Edited by archonspeaks on May 7th 2019 at 12:43:53 PM

Iran was stable under the shah and had a high quality of life prior to the coup. It was set backwards immensely as a result of the overthrow.

And again. The Soviets’ involvement and subsequent leaving served to highly destabilize the region. It all comes back to militant foreign involvement.

Edited by ILikeRobots on May 7th 2019 at 12:44:58 PM

By a certain definition of stable. Brutal suppression of political dissent and economic bottlenecking along with pressure from Islamist factions would have doomed him one way or another.

But I mean, that’s one example. I agree with you that the US’s meddling in Iran is particularly shameful, but since then we’ve had Kuwait and Somalia and Kosovo and more than a few others, not to mention Iraq and Afghanistan.

And I’m not really sure what point you’re trying to make about the Soviets. The US can’t go back in time and keep them out of Afghanistan, so recognizing that an unsuccessful military intervention caused a lot of these problems shouldn’t prevent future interventions, simply inform them.

Edited by archonspeaks on May 7th 2019 at 12:49:16 PM

Also what intervention? Afghanistan was a war against an aggressor, Iraq was just a raw war of aggression on the part of the US and allies.

Like yeah, let’s not do Iraq again, but people take Iraq and try and use it as a reason to embrace totally military isolationism, it’s a strong argument for not invading dictatorships that haven’t attacked you and aren’t facing an internal rebellion where the rebels are asking you to get involved, but that’s not all cases of military action.

In the end though, a lot of these countries are already a mess, largely because of things either the US, UK or France have done, “don’t set fire to a country” is a good lesson and all, but the fire is there and we set it decades ago, we kinda owe it to the people living in it to try and out the fire out if they ask.

Staging/aiding a coup begin bad is another one we can ad to the list, but again there’s no real dispute for that, there’s plenty of room for global military action beyond coups and invasions.

Edited by Silasw on May 7th 2019 at 7:58:36 PM

x2 Fair. I dont think the US should never be involved in world politics since that’s an impossibility in our current world, but I just wish our approach was a bit different. It’s like causing a ton of problems to fix one. Things spiral out from the US’ presence.

I think it’s a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” scenario. I want to clarify since I think it’s an important point that the US doesn't cause all of the issues in the region or in other countries, but their actions and the actions of other foreign powered often do exacerbate them.

What would be a small civil conflict might be escalated to a full blown large scale war with heavy weaponry with the US involved. What might have been a small fringe group of extremists with little power becomes dominant with US aid and training. I mean plenty of Al-Qaeda operatives were US-trained and US-supplied, the group ended up grabbing power and made a lot of people suffer.

The regions themselves often have their infrastructure and economies near destroyed for decades if not centuries, and people are killed in the crossfire. Nobody wins basically. Sure, they killed a dictator best case scenario, but you also left a power vacuum where another can rise and take advantage of peoples’ pain and resentment.

Edited by ILikeRobots on May 7th 2019 at 12:58:58 PM

The damage is already done. We can’t go back to the 70s and fix things. Leaving it alone isn’t going to change history.

Saying we should stay out of Afghanistan because foreign intervention is what messed it up 50 or 100 years ago doesn’t make any sense.

And again, global world. That “small civil war” isn’t going to keep to itself, Afghanistan’s failure in the 80s and 90s gave militant groups breathing room to expand their operations and orchestrate attacks on other countries. Syria’s civil war has exported terror around the world and overwhelmed Europe’s immigration system. We don’t live in a world where things stay localized any more, which makes non-intervention a losing strategy.

Also this. Though we probably should have known better than to trust Pakistan.

Edited by archonspeaks on May 7th 2019 at 1:07:11 AM

No they weren’t.

I’m really sick of the urban legend that the US trained AQ against the Soviets, I get that it makes for a fun story about the ally of today being the enemy of tomorrow, but it’s not true.

What the US did was decide to arm groups against the Soviets, to avoid the risk of WW3 the US didn’t arm or train groups directly, instead it gave weapons and money to Pakistan with the understanding that Pakistan would train and arm good people.

Pakistan being Pakistan then gave the money and weapons to AQ, The US government then went “fuck, we should have seen that coming” and cut the supply to Pakistan. Still wanting to arm groups against the Soviets the US teamed up with the UK to find actual ‘good’ people in Afghanistan to arm against the Soviets, they did so, said groups then remained friendly with the US, tried to warn the US about 9/11 and today form part of the Afghan government that was set up post invasion.

The US never trained AQ, it’s a fucking myth parroted by people who want history to be simple and either for people helped by the US to have no loyalty to the US (thus proving that America should always go it alone) or for the US to have inflicted 9/11 on itself in some kind of weird karma story.

Edited by Silasw on May 7th 2019 at 8:07:23 AM

x2 We can’t change it but we can try to learn from our mistakes. We can and should at least try to clean up our messes, but we can at least refrain from more destructive meddling in the future.

So we don’t have another Middle East scenario on our hands.

Okay, but the point is that the problem was largely caused by Soviet invasion as well as the US’ responses to it spiraling out from there.

Edited by ILikeRobots on May 7th 2019 at 1:10:34 AM

What "other Middle East"? I'm wondering...

Nope. That's the Soviet fault. Honestly, mainly due to being gone, everyone forgets how much the URSS and Friends damaged the world as a whole.

Edited by KazuyaProta on May 7th 2019 at 3:15:16 AM

Intervention is always risky. Particularly if it is basically to decapitate a government, sack/ criminalise most of it that even has a clue how to govern and then leave.

It doesn't matter if it is done in the name of freedom, promoting democracy, to make a statement to other world powers, to sell infrastructure the place can't run or because it's fun wearing jackboots and you think some of the loot would look good in a museum.

Destabilization is highly unlikely to lead to general freedoms (or access to general amenities) for the people made destabilized. And, power vacuums tend to get filled by egoists, not proceduralists with an urge to serve.

It takes time and their own fuck-ups for any population of a decent size to work out their own quirks, procedures, checks and balances.

If they ask for help, that's great — be careful, though. Well-intentioned, well-planned intervention can still backfire, because group behaviour is full of opposite reactions seven steps down the line.

If you get told to fuck off by a lot of institutions within the place... Maybe take the hint?

Edited by Euodiachloris on May 7th 2019 at 9:20:07 AM

Oh the US and others should certainly have known to not trust Pakistan, but that’s the lesson, it’s not that today’s rebels are tomorrow terrorists, it’s that arming known shitbag authoritarian regimes because we prefer the can-kicking of authoritarian stability to the mess of an emerging democracy that will need support for decades, is a bloody stupid idea.

Pakistan and the Taliban, Saudi Arabia and AQ, Yemen and AQAP, Egypt and Hamas, bloody Saddam once upon a time.

I wish it was some grand evil geopolitical plan, it’s not, in a way it’s much more basic, politicians would rather something be a big problem for the next guy than a medium problem for them.

We support these regimes because nobody wants to clean up the mess when they implode, it’s easier politically to avoid the elephant in the room than address it directly.

X3 The US’s response to the Soviets isn’t what did Afghanistan in, if anything connected to the US did it it was the US’s support for Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, two countries who exported extremism to Afghanistan for decades. Because it’s consider by many better to have an authoritarian dictatorship that shares no democratic values than a democracy.

In many ways the invasion of Iraq is the old one out, as the US actually tried (and failed) to build a democracy, unlike with other Middle East adventures where the US has generally favoured authoritarianism over democracy and gotten burned because of it.

Edited by Silasw on May 7th 2019 at 8:19:44 AM

x2

Thank you, that’s largely what I’ve been trying to get at but you explained it better than me.

Also the “another Middle East scenario” meaning another war-torn, unstable region that after decades of foreign powers mucking around with them are a breeding ground of extremists and violence.

Edited by ILikeRobots on May 7th 2019 at 1:16:52 AM

But what specific region

What? It was a metaphor.

X3 We used to have another one, it was called the Balkans, after one to many genocides we finally got off our arses and put in the work to try and fix things, we’re approaching three decades since we got involved and we’re still there, but it’s a dam sight more stable than it used to be, because we actually did the work instead of half-arsing it or abandoning things to whatever authoritarian asshole promised us short-term stability.

Edited by Silasw on May 7th 2019 at 8:22:36 AM

Fair point. I’d forgotten about that. If we could do more long term like that, then I wouldn’t be nearly so wary.

Leaving the Middle East to its own devices isn’t a realistic option here. Like I keep saying, these messes don’t stay local. You can say we should take the hint all you want, but you can’t escape the reality of globalization. The damage is already done and Russia and China sure as hell aren’t going to fix it.

As the most politically, economically and militarily powerful country on earth the US simply doesn’t have the option to not get involved.

And I’ll point out that our current involvement in the Middle East is us cleaning up our mistakes. It’s just not going to be easy, or pretty.

Edited by archonspeaks on May 7th 2019 at 1:33:18 AM

There are other ways. Like, working with other governments around the world to various forms of pressure on the countries putting pressure on whichever region is on fire this century (it's not always the Near East, the Balkans, the Niger-Congo or South East Asia, but it probably will be).

Finding other tech/ a new addiction/ whatever that renders the sticking point moot by circumventing the bottle neck. Cleaning your own house so that religious/ economic/ ideological fanatics don't froth at the mouth when the Rapture/ ultimate wealth/ the greatest whatever ever smiles coquettishly in their fever dreams...

Whatever it takes.

Learning from previous fuck-ups isn't just supposed to be a local thing. But, we all mess it up. Big countries, little countries, massive fuck you companies... we all need others to yank us back when we need it or to lend a hand.

Or we turn into the AAA video games industry.

Edited by Euodiachloris on May 7th 2019 at 9:49:35 AM

And what do you suggest we do when the alternatives fail? When we have to remove a dictator? When there’s a situation like what was going on in Afghanistan in 2001, or in Iraq and Syria more recently?

Are you really so averse to military intervention that you’d let people die to avoid it?

Like it or not the US occupies a prominent position in world politics, and we can’t ever truly avoid influencing the affairs of other countries any more.

Edited by archonspeaks on May 7th 2019 at 1:52:53 AM

I said. You didn't hear.

I also didn't say "no military intervention evvar".

But, knock yourself out if that's what you want me to have said.

Edited by Euodiachloris on May 7th 2019 at 9:54:19 AM

I understand the position fine, I just find it to be nearing moral bankruptcy. Non-interventionism stopped being a viable option for nations hundreds of years ago.

Can we do better? Absolutely. You can always do better, and the US sure as hell has a long way to go. But it’s a little too late for us to stop.