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Juffo-Wup posted:So I guess my question is: why is it that a non-interventionist consensus has coalesced around the Obama administration, seemingly with the Iraq War experience as a rationale? Why has it become the conventional wisdom that the US must not get involved in other nations' affairs at all, rather than that it has to be done right, with the right incentive structure in place? Was Klein's analysis totally wrong, or are the lessons of Iraq being distorted? It hasn't, really. He's pushing his legacy, taking note of the fact that nobody remembers anything about his foreign policy except for Iran, Libya, Syria, and his pro-Muslim speeches way back at the beginning of his term, and spinning a narrative that conveniently omits most of his first term. Since opposition to the Iraq War was the most famous foreign policy he held prior to the election, he's using that as the root of his narrative by claiming that it shows his views were always non-interventionist. Also, the real lesson the US learned from Iraq is "don't get drawn into a ground invasion, leave the boots-on-the-ground work to the local faction you're backing so the aftermath will be their responsibility rather than ours", which is certainly a lesson Obama took to heart in his numerous Middle Eastern interventions. An "analysis" of Obama's foreign policy that only mentions Pakistan once in passing, drops a vague reference to Egypt without mentioning Morsi and al-Sisi and completely omits the word "Yemen" is a puff piece, not genuine journalism. A detailed puff piece, to be sure, with plenty of quotes, tales from numerous insiders close to the president, and snippets from what appears to be an in-person interview with the president himself. But as deep as it goes on the things it does cover, it only covers about things the Obama administration wants to talk about or feels that it can't avoid talking about. At the same time, it makes a lot of statements that simply don't seem to be backed up by reality or outright contradict the evidence he offers - the most charitable interpretation I can come up with is that he's making the cardinal mistake of judging a politician's intentions based on what they say rather than what they do, but I have serious trouble believing that a guy who's well-connected enough to have a private lunch with the President of the United States is really that naive about politics. Griffen posted:A lot of my criticism of Obama's foreign policy (or really either party's foreign policy as of late) is that it has no semblance of a plan. I think Hillary hit the nail on the head when she said that "don't do stupid poo poo" does not constitute a plan, and the fact that Obama got mad at her for saying that reveals how limited his view or thinking on foreign policy is. To me, foreign policy (FP) is not a play book, it is not a list of actions you take for a given set of circumstances. Our nation's FP should be more like a chess game, where we plan our moves out in advance, yet alter what we do in response to the actions of others to meet the needs of the situation. Not sticking our junk into the hornet's nest that is Syria: smart move, and it constitutes "not doing stupid poo poo." However, Obama had no follow up after that, he simply watched passively from the sidelines as things spiraled out of control with no contingency plans. Our reliance on Turkey (a rather unsavory and unreliable "ally" at best) and a reluctance to actually make use of some of the few capable players on the ground (the KRG and YPG) is laughable. In short, Obama has no end-game, no exit strategy for Syria - he simply is hoping the pot doesn't boil over all over himself. Now, if this is something where you never plan on getting involved with in any form, whatsoever (e.g. if the Syrian war was, say, an Uzbek civil war) then fine. However, US FP history clearly shows that we can practically never walk away from a war in the Middle East for some reason. Therefore, letting the Syrian mess spill over was incredibly short-sighted, as eventually we'd have to wade in even if we didn't want to. Syria would have been another Iraq or Vietnam for sure - there was simply no way any intervention could have had any real effect, short of an all-out military invasion which would find itself facing a permanent insurgency and unable to establish a strong and stable puppet government. There's no realistic "exit strategy" for sticking our noses into a civil war where we don't like any of the participants and don't want any of them to win. Obama's problem in Syria wasn't that he was too non-interventionist, as his administration is trying to portray it. The reason he's been burned so badly by Syria is because, even though he realized the ultimate futility of intervening in the Syria conflict, he couldn't resist involving the US anyway. Since he realized it was a bad idea with a lot to lose and basically nothing to gain, he tried to compensate for that by restricting the scope to throwaway efforts so we could cut our losses and bail if needed rather than escalating into yet another Middle East quagmire. Instead, the resulting vague, non-committal involvement ended up looking worse than just pretending the conflict didn't exist in the first place.
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Mar 10, 2016 21:02
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Stultus Maximus posted:Obama has made some mistakes but I think he's set the correct path to go on. It's not an easy path and there will be a lot of points where it seems like a bad idea, but I think he's on the correct path of internationalism. It's a nice narrative, but it falls flat - Obama has had no problem going unilateral on things when it suited US interests. It's like people forget there's been more to US foreign policy this past eight years besides Libya, Iran, and Syria. Besides, this so-called "internationalism" is fundamentally incapable of being a complete foreign policy solution - all it really means is identifying where our allies' interests match ours and cutting our own costs and liabilities by strongarming them into doing the heavy lifting on those cases of shared interest. icantfindaname posted:You keep insisting that things would have been as bad as Vietnam or WW1 if we had intervened, but guess what, it's that bad despite us not intervening. It turns out that non-intervention, like intervention, is a conscious choice with distinct consequences, no matter how hard you stick your fingers in your ears and scream you can't hear it The reason we didn't intervene in the first place was because every faction involved was horrible, we didn't want any of them to win, and Iraq and Vietnam are perfect examples of what happens when we try to use military force to create a "good" faction out of essentially nothing. Backing one of the factions wholeheartedly and pushing them to a quick victory would certainly have ended the war faster and maybe even resulted in slightly less immediate death and destruction and deprivation, but when the choice is between backing Assad or backing ISIS then it's hard to spin non-intervention as the real immoral solution. When you're arguing that your solution might possibly have maybe resulted in fewer mass massacres of civilians and less thorough ethnic cleansing, I feel like maybe the time to make good choices was long before 2011. Sure, maybe a full military intervention really early in the civil war might have pre-empted the rise of ISIS, at least temporarily...but if anyone thinks it would have prevented ISIS or even really weakened them much, then they've learned nothing from the last century's worth of Imperial collapses. I wouldn't go so far as saying "nothing works", but we've been making bad decisions in the Middle East for decades, which is a big part of what created this situation in the first place, and it's downright silly to say that one single decision a few years ago could have instantly undone all that.
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Mar 11, 2016 16:22
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icantfindaname posted:There were a lot more moderates back in 2011/2012/2013 before Assad killed them all. But the problem with the bolded, like I said in my reply to Helsing yesterday, is that we're talking about Obama's presidency here. Yes, neocons have been loving up the middle east since at least the early 80s, this is true. But Obama had a chance to do something productive and he chose not to take it. It's baffling to me to see people doubling down on what was in hindsight obviously the wrong choice. You say "Obama made the wrong choice" and the response is "but but so did everyone else!" That's not an defense of Obama or his policies, it's attempt to deflect blame. I'm saying that there was no right choice. That it was far, far too late to fix the situation. We've already forced the car over a cliff, there's no decision we can make that'll stop it from hitting the ground one way or another. Maybe curling up into the fetal position or trying to shift the car's weight so it lands in its wheels might somehow increase the chances of a positive outcome a tiny bit, but the situation is so drat irreparably hosed that regardless of what's done, it'll take a miracle for the passengers to walk away under their own power.  ISIS matters because, for political and ideological reasons, the West cannot allow them to win. In terms of sheer human misery, any faction winning, no matter how horrible, would be better than this desperate, bloody, out-of-control civil war. But that's not a complete picture from a political perspective, which is what any discussion of foreign policy is really judging him on. If a US intervention led to an Islamist faction ending up in stable, undisputed control of Syria, that would cause far more political backlash against Obama than just standing around doing nothing while tons of civilians died. Remember, Iraq isn't considered a failure because a lot of civilians died - it's considered a failure because we failed to really establish a strong and stable, secular, loyal pro-Western government there despite the considerable time, resources, and personnel we invested into the attempt. A cold judgement, perhaps. But foreign policy is the art of figuring out how best to exact national profit from other people's misery.
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Mar 11, 2016 18:01
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icantfindaname posted:At this point sure. In 2012 there might have been. The stridency which which people are arguing that nothing could be done is very strange to me, especially in light how how awful things got without American involvement. Not intervening was an enormous mistake and people are desperate to justify that mistake 2012 was already far too late to meaningfully change the outcome. Even if Assad and all of his loyalists died in a mysterious explosion back in 2012, the civil war would only have become even more chaotic as various groups fought to be the one to rule Syria in the end, with the Islamist groups ultimately coming out on top after a shitton of sectarian violence, plenty of ethnic cleansing, and a total breakdown of the distinction between civilians and soldiers. Creating a power vacuum at the top by suppressing the government army or killing the evil dictator doesn't magically bring peace to a country in civil war - it just renders the situation safe for the various opposition groups to commence slaughtering each other without worrying about government troops or international intervention getting in the way, just like in Libya. There's a huge political difference between allowing something to happen through inaction and actively working to make something happen. Whether Assad or ISIS wins in Syria, at least we didn't give them the guns they won the fight with. Politically, it's better to be seen as someone who sat back and allowed the eventual Syrian winner to win through weak and ineffective policy than it is to openly sponsor either an enemy of America or a team that loses in spite of American assistance (and ends up handing that assistance over to the victors). JFairfax posted:Also the point is that American involvement in the middle east over the last 30 years has been a history of supporting awful people for a while and then disposing of them when they have outlived their usefulness. There is no reason to believe that any American action in the region now is for any other reason than self-interest. Goes back a lot farther than just 30 years. JFairfax posted:Yeah I get that, but what I am saying is that practically speaking, with the way the US uses drones - they may as well be inherently illegal because they're being used illegally all the time pretty much. This is not how law works - nor, for that matter, should it be. That same argument can be used to justify some pretty awful things! The legality of an airstrike should have nothing to do with where the pilot is sitting - an illegal airstrike is illegal regardless of whether it's a drone or a regular plane. Volkerball posted:I too think that a period in which 500,000 children starved to death is the best case scenario in Syria, because the Iraq War was the worst atrocity that has ever been seen on the face of the earth, and we must learn those lessons and use them wherever possible. Especially where they don't apply. What makes you think "taking out" Assad would somehow prevent this? All those countless disorganized anti-government rebels with radically different philosophies, values, and aims aren't just going to shake hands and make up as soon as Assad is out of the picture. Destabilizing a country is a big deal, and once order has broken down like this it's not easy to stabilize things.
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Mar 11, 2016 20:54
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icantfindaname posted:So basically we should let millions of Arab civilians get murdered because it's good PR for Obama and the Democrats? Replace "Obama" with "the current President" and "Democrats" with "the party in power" and you've got basically the dictionary definition of "American foreign policy" since, what, 1916? From the standpoint of effective foreign policy, it's just more of the same. From a moral standpoint, Obama has pursued US policies that have directly led to the torture or death of Arab civilians for the sake of US interests, so the only surprise in Syria is that he isn't in there actively making it worse somehow.
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Mar 11, 2016 21:09
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icantfindaname posted:The defense of Obama that you've given thus far has entirely been that he's better than previous presidents. So now you're saying you can't criticize him because he's no worse than previous presidents? If you tried to pivot any harder you'd break your neck Here's the thing. I'm not defending Obama at all. My perspective is that if he wanted to conduct effective foreign policy, he should have pretended the Syrian Civil War never happened, rather than repeatedly sticking his finger in and then yanking it out again as his common sense wrestled with his personal desire to get involved. If he wanted to be a moral and humanitarian president who did good by Arab civilians, he probably shouldn't have spent most of his term bombing Arab civilians and spreading chaos throughout the Middle East. His Syria policy was poor, with many mistakes that his advisers often had to talk him down from. However, his mistake was that he got involved at all. I see no way an American intervention in Syria in 2012 could have resulted in lasting peace. The US is simply politically incapable of taking the steps that would have been necessary for a lasting Syrian peace, and Obama could have done little to change that even if he were inclined to.
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Mar 11, 2016 21:52
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Volkerball posted:My view has nothing to do with the US in particular. I just believe in the responsibility to protect. Sovereignty is conditional, and the condition is that a nation must protect its citizens. If it isn't doing that, then the burden of protecting its citizens falls upon the international community. And I advocate based along those lines as a citizen of a democratic nation with the strongest military on earth. Now whether or not a country is adequately protecting its citizens is subjective of course, but I do think at a certain extreme, there's not much debate to be had. I doubt anyone would say that it would have been violating Nazi Germany's sovereignty to attack it if the primary reason for the attack was based around the operation of concentration camps, because that position would be accurately described as pro-holocaust. So there's a line that everybody draws at a certain point. In my opinion, the Syrian government is on the wrong side of that line. That's the fundamental aspect that dictates that Assad's claim to rule Syria is no more legitimate than my own. That's not even close to saying the US should be allowed to act with impunity wherever it wants. The problem with a so-called "right to protect" that invalidates national sovereignty and becomes a legitimate causus belli for the overthrow of a government is that it becomes a political tool. Since it isn't an obligation (and fundamentally can't be, since there is no body that can compel compliance and never will be) then nations will only intervene when it suits their interests, even if it means refusing to acknowledge obvious human rights abuses (for example, the way the US refused to admit the coup in Egypt in order to avoid legal restrictions on backing anti-democratic coups). On the other hand, if a nation wants an excuse to intervene for their own interests, they might concoct a humanitarian crisis where none exists and use it as an excuse to attack, since there is no body with the authority to judge such claims and never will be (for example, WMDs in Iraq). It simply becomes an excuse for the same old political shenanigans. It's not new, either. You cite the Nazis as a potential target of such concepts, but Nazi Germany itself claimed similar rights in some of its territorial acquisitions (for example, demanding the Sudetenland in response to made-up claims of oppression against Germans), while the international community went along with such claims. Volkerball posted:I tried to specify so you wouldn't make that first argument, but here we are. Assuming the Nazi's hadn't espoused aggressive expansion as an ideology, what then? Do you respect their sovereignty and let them do as they please with the Jewish people who were living within Germany? What about Rwanda? Should we have recognized their government as legitimate while it was a figurehead for the ruling militias that were out massacring people in the streets? They were in fact the leaders of Rwanda, after all. Should Belgium have been invaded for the excesses of the infamous Congo Free State? If the German Empire had invaded Belgium six years earlier, when hand-collecting under the brutal rule of Leopold II was still the norm, should the British have refused to honor their commitment to Belgian neutrality or even invaded Belgium themselves? Should Britain have invaded America in the 1850s to depose the government over the continuing existence of slavery or the ongoing extermination of the Native Americans? Or should it have invaded the US in 1942 to protest the internment of Japanese-Americans? As it turns out, the questions get a lot more difficult when you don't use "literally the Nazis" as your test case. crabcakes66 posted:Why doesn't your country? Because the US, as well as most European countries, would intervene in favor of Israel? The first rule of international politics for the last hundre-fifty years or more is that going against a Great Power is doomed to failure unless you have the support of another Great Power. Also, for various political reasons, most Western governments pretend there aren't any human-rights abuses there.
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Mar 14, 2016 21:53
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