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Rime posted:Serious question: can they even be stopped by conventional means? That's kind of the point, though. The American Empire now has its boogeyman they can use to justify perpetual invasions/interventions in the Middle East and war creep. Here's a very good article on how the West was, intentionally or accidentally, behind the formation of ISIS.
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Sep 22, 2014 19:46
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bird cooch posted:Hey Brown Moses or anyone else following this closely: Is there a primer list for twitter or youtube floating around? I feel like im just trowing poo poo at the wall trying to follow this conflict. Honestly I just get most of my news from the thread and mostly stay out of the arguments.
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Sep 22, 2014 19:49
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bird cooch posted:Hey Brown Moses or anyone else following this closely: Is there a primer list for twitter or youtube floating around? I feel like im just trowing poo poo at the wall trying to follow this conflict. For a military angle start with CharlesLister, MemlikPasha, EjmAlrai, JoelWing2, ajaltamimi, johnnyrocket69 and ShamiWitness for shits and giggles.
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Sep 22, 2014 19:53
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Rime posted:Quite frankly, unless they burn themselves out due to internal ideological strife and fracture, or we commit to a WW2 level of engagement, ISIS is getting their caliphate. Even that level of engagement probably wouldn't work. It harkens back to openly colonial times and it's not like that stopped because the US and Europe had a moral crisis.
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Sep 22, 2014 19:56
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One Thing People dont seem to get about the IS atrocities is that those atrocities fullfill a clear internal IS goal. They burn any bridges to the outside world possible defectors could have. IS is, as I said before, pretty heterogenous. They are keeping together because they know full well that their enemies have completely excellent reasons to execute them all, so they fight. Oh, considering "People disillusioned with IS" credible reports exist that they simply jail foreign deserters, until they repent. Such unreliable guys propably get a Mission to go out with a bang and thats it. The "evilist terrorists ever" narrative is Kind of true, but also counterproductive if you want to degrade IS from within. The positive "role" I see for Russia in this is to offer some of the ex Baathi parts of IS some kind of way out. It may also be more feasible to Infiltrate IS with a "Russian" Chechen Company then with individuals. Such a Company could also do some work to estrange the actually Jihadi Chechen shocktroops from the non Caucasians. Coming from Russia, it may be credible enough for them, especially since Russias hard ball tactics elsewhere gained Russia some respect in such quarters.
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Sep 22, 2014 19:57
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Rime posted:Quite frankly, unless they burn themselves out due to internal ideological strife and fracture, or we commit to a WW2 level of engagement, ISIS is getting their caliphate. I basically agree with you here. I have no clue how viable it would be to intentionally sow discord amongst the IS leadership. There appear to be defectors, but the type of intelligence or influence they could bring is probably nil. The flow of oil could be limited, but it appears there are already people purchasing Syrian oil under the table. I guess the actual oil wells could be blown up, but that would create hazards for the civilians in the area.
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Sep 22, 2014 19:58
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Job Truniht posted:That's kind of the point, though. The American Empire now has its boogeyman they can use to justify perpetual invasions/interventions in the Middle East and war creep. I know. That article is great, but IMO it doesn't even go back far enough. The situation start boiling when the British arbitrarily re-drew borders following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and every subsequent intervention by outside powers has just hosed it up a little more each time. You'd have to be willfully ignorant to not see that ISIS exists because of US meddling from 1980 to today, I just don't see how there's any action which can legally be taken that won't empower ISIS further. When you start having young white Canadians give up their cushy life for religious extremism, that should be a gigantic red flag that things are different this time.
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Sep 22, 2014 19:58
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The Iron Rose posted:Honestly I just get most of my news from the thread and mostly stay out of the arguments. I have been following this thread in its various iterations for a few years, but it has fallen off in the information department lately. MothraAttack posted:For a military angle start with CharlesLister, MemlikPasha, EjmAlrai, JoelWing2, ajaltamimi, johnnyrocket69 and ShamiWitness for shits and giggles. Thanks
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Sep 22, 2014 19:59
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icantfindaname posted:You didn't answer my question. How, exactly, will replacing Assad accomplish anything positive? Positive means better than what would happen if we did nothing. This isn't (or shouldn't be) a difficult question, and if you can't answer it don't complain about people dismissing your opinions as poo poo Well lets see. He's a butcher who has killed well over 100,000 people, tortured to death well over 10,000 people, and dropped chemical weapons on well over 1,000 people. He's also a sectarian warlord who has monopolized the government to give himself and his family complete control of the government. As he has no interest in stepping down, or yielding an inch of power, a war began based around his current occupation of the Presidency. That war cannot end as long as he is President for the aforementioned reasons. Therefore, by removing Assad earlier in the war, the conditions driving the war no longer exist, and reconciliation and negotiations for the new coalition government could begin. The only condition the opposition wants is for Assad and his family to be out of the government, so there's no reason that talks wouldn't have begun following his removal. This would be looking a lot more like Libya if that would have been an objective years ago. But we couldn't do that, because people thought the FSA were everything ISIS is, and they would massacre the alawites. It wasn't until ISIS came along that this started to look like quite a silly position indeed.
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Sep 22, 2014 19:59
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Volkerball posted:Well lets see. He's a butcher who has killed well over 100,000 people, tortured to death well over 10,000 people, and dropped chemical weapons on well over 1,000 people. He's also a sectarian warlord who has monopolized the government to give himself and his family complete control of the government. As he has no interest in stepping down, or yielding an inch of power, a war began based around his current occupation of the Presidency. That war cannot end as long as he is President for the aforementioned reasons. Therefore, by removing Assad earlier in the war, the conditions driving the war no longer exist, and reconciliation and negotiations for the new coalition government could begin. The only condition the opposition wants is for Assad and his family to be out of the government, so there's no reason that talks wouldn't have begun following his removal. This would be looking a lot more like Libya if that would have been an objective years ago. But we couldn't do that, because people thought the FSA were everything ISIS is, and they would massacre the alawites. It wasn't until ISIS came along that this started to look like quite a silly position indeed. You know that would involve US occupation, Alawite insurgency, and Iraq 3.0, right?
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Sep 22, 2014 20:03
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Volkerball posted:This isn't about you opposing regime change, dumbass. You aren't even addressing anything I'm saying because you're so sucked into the neocon/liberal narrative of the world that you aren't even slightly aware of how out of touch you are. Rwanda, Iraq, Vietnam, Srebrenica... Iraq and Syria aren't Rwanda, and the fact that you're just throwing out random massacres that happened that bear no relation to what's happening right now is not making your case look good. What level of involvement will it take for the US to win a proxy war in Syria against Assad's foreign supporters? And even if the commitment of blood and treasure to ensure a total FSA victory is worthwhile (or even politically possible), and that our proxy war doesn't drag out into a protracted struggle that kills even more civilians than staying out of it, what is there to stop ISIS from returning the second we pull out? How will the FSA maintain control of the country when they're fighting an ISIS insurgency even now? Why don't you ever answer any of these questions? Pointing to dead civilians does not an argument make: civilians are going to die no matter what we do so let's see the case that intervening will actually accomplish your humanitarian goals and not kill catastrophically more civilians? What does Vietnam have to do with any of this, and why are you bringing up a conflict that killed 50,000 US soldiers, millions of civilians, caused untold damage to the environment, severely damaged American credibility abroad, and in the end didn't even accomplish a single US objective as an example of how the unkempt anti-war leftists are out of touch, of all things, when it was a complete failure of hawkish foreign policy to establish democracy*. It's incidentally kind of funny that you bring up the horrible consequences of putting US foreign policy objectives above civilian life when we've got MIGF arguing that we should be putting the bloodiest dictator we can find in charge of Syria as long as he swears allegiance to us. *Dictatorship, but it's our dictatorship VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 20:22 on Sep 22, 2014 |
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Sep 22, 2014 20:07
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Panzeh posted:You know that would involve US occupation, Alawite insurgency, and Iraq 3.0, right? We are getting Iraq War 3.0 whether we like it not. US should get hosed forever into Libya. I would love se people justify that intervention after this.
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Sep 22, 2014 20:08
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Rime posted:You'd have to be willfully ignorant to not see that ISIS exists because of US meddling from 1980 to today.... I dislike this type of argument because it does two things: ignores the agency of the people participating in the IS organization, and it creates some kind of post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. Like what are we supposed to do with that tidbit, jump in our time machines? I do not see anything particularly exceptional with what IS is doing, it reminds me of the Russian revolution. Clearly the US should make up for past mistakes and support the reds.  It kind of appears like IS is attempting to purge the different local sources of power to make the likelihood of getting usurped less likely. Whatever the outside world is going to do, it should probably happen before IS cleans out its nest of the not-quite-so-ideologically-driven.
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Sep 22, 2014 20:09
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Panzeh posted:You know that would involve US occupation, Alawite insurgency, and Iraq 3.0, right? Not early on it wouldn't have. Russia boosted Assad's air defense and weapons shipments throughout 2012 and 2013 because of the implication of airstrikes, which made the situation more complicated. Even today, the US says most of the anti-aircraft weapons Assad has don't even have mandatory pieces to work, so back then, it was nothing. The FSA were also woefully under equipped in the early days. A combination of blocking off Latakia, arming the rebels, and a no fly zone would have probably had Assad falling in a matter of weeks. Keep in mind that this was also the period when top officials were defecting en masse. People were scared. It didn't look like Assad had control of the situation. Also keep in mind that we took out Saddam very quickly. It was debaathification and the occupation which dragged time out. The SNC established quickly out of the Muslim Brotherhood that was already prevalent in Syria. After Assad was gone, in the fervor of the Arab Spring, when JaN was a rumor, and ISI was strictly against going into Syria, I find it extremely hard to believe that negotiations between them and the regime wouldn't have ended with a better result.
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Sep 22, 2014 20:13
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Volkerball posted:Not early on it wouldn't have. If we're solving everything by getting in our time machines, why are we only going back to 2012? Are we short on time-machine fuel? Why aren't we going back to 2003 and stopping the invasion of Iraq in the first place, or at least telling the neocons how to do it right? Actually, why aren't we just going to 1918 and knocking heads together over Sykes-Picot?
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Sep 22, 2014 20:16
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VitalSigns posted:If we're solving everything by getting in our time machines, why are we only going back to 2012? Are we short on time-machine fuel? Why aren't we going back to 2003 and stopping the invasion of Iraq in the first place, or at least telling the neocons how to do it right? Actually, why aren't we just going to 1918 and knocking heads together over Sykes-Picot? Go back to the start and pour bleach in the primordial ooze.
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Sep 22, 2014 20:17
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So wait, who are we blaming for the lack of political will to intervene in Syria in 2012? Are we blaming "anti-imperialists" or the folks who stuck their dicks in the blender in the first place? Maybe if we had listened to "anti-imperialists" in 2002 we'd be in a better position.
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Sep 22, 2014 20:18
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poo poo! The military-industrial complex thwarted again, by slovenly leftists. Is there no end to their influence 
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Sep 22, 2014 20:20
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Blue Footed Booby posted:Go back to the start and pour bleach in the primordial ooze. Even the ooze was a bad idea, everything started going to poo poo once we failed to stop an agglomeration of dust from igniting into a G2 yellow star.
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Sep 22, 2014 20:20
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VitalSigns posted:It's incidentally kind of funny that you bring up the horrible consequences of putting US foreign policy objectives above civilian life when we've got MIGF arguing that we should be putting the bloodiest dictator we can find in charge of Syria as long as he swears allegiance to us. Where do you get that I am arguing for the bloodiest to rule? I am arguing for the most in-line with American interests to govern. Or, the Egypt option. SedanChair posted:poo poo! The military-industrial complex thwarted again, by slovenly leftists. Is there no end to their influence Influence cannot end when here has been none to begin.
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Sep 22, 2014 20:28
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My Imaginary GF posted:Influence cannot end when here has been none to begin. Wait a minute are you suggesting that leftists have no influence 
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Sep 22, 2014 20:29
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SedanChair posted:Wait a minute are you suggesting that leftists have no influence In matters of state security? Yes.
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Sep 22, 2014 20:30
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SedanChair posted:Wait a minute are you suggesting that leftists have no influence The anti-war left are laughable smelly hippies living in their mom's basement that no one listens to, and also single-handedly responsible for Rwanda, Iraw, Vietnam, Srebenica, and every other massacre in the world. My Imaginary GF posted:Where do you get that I am arguing for the bloodiest to rule? I am arguing for the most in-line with American interests to govern. Or, the Egypt option. Maybe you could hash this out with Volkerball because Volkerball posted:Rwanda, Iraq, Vietnam, Srebrenica. Every one of these disasters were attributable to the same exact thing. Foreign policy that put the US first, and didn't give two shits about what happened to the civilians. Whether it's bombing critical infrastructure to try and send a message that what America says goes, or watching 800,000 people get hacked to death with farm tools in 4 months because it's real complicated and facts on the ground. Selfish policy that the majority of Americans supported because they were more concerned with American lives, tax dollars, or Kony 2012 levels of detached, feel good anti-war protesting. I must say though that I find your honesty refreshing. None of this handwringing about civilian casualties or fantasies about how taking up the White Man's Burden will make the world a better place for all. Just strict realpolitik, pursual of American power and influence, heedless of the death toll, the kind of unflinching advocacy of achieving worldwide hegemony by blood and iron. The kind of unapologetic imperialism that you just don't get from the right in this day and age. VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 20:40 on Sep 22, 2014 |
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Sep 22, 2014 20:33
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SedanChair posted:So wait, who are we blaming for the lack of political will to intervene in Syria in 2012? Are we blaming "anti-imperialists" or the folks who stuck their dicks in the blender in the first place? Maybe if we had listened to "anti-imperialists" in 2002 we'd be in a better position. It's a bitch of a cycle. It was the same scenario in Rwanda. 18 Americans were killed in Somalia. Their bodies were tossed around like rag dolls on national television. It scarred people. Somalia wasn't anything coming close to resembling Iraq as far as reprehensibility goes, but the "failure" there still made people hesitant. When Rwanda rolled around, naturally the reaction was "War? In Africa? I don't fuckin think so." 90% of the peacekeepers in the country pulled out within the first few days of the genocide, and didn't come back until they Hutu's got bored. Then out of that you have the birth of Responsibility to Protect. We'll never let it happen again. That holds, roughly, until 9/11. Then you've got the tremendous gently caress up with the Iraq War, and bang. It's 1994 all over again. It's soul crushing, because I think Syria is going to be an outright genocide that turns into a disaster scenario, all in one conflict. We're going to have ignored a slaughter and "stuck our dick in a meat grinder" all in the same war. We'll probably come out of this one as a nation with a massive apprehension towards getting involved in foreign tragedies, and we'll ignore the next one, despite loving up the one right before it. 
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Sep 22, 2014 20:35
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VitalSigns posted:There is a huge difference between calling a 20-year-old kid who doesn't want to be drafted to fight a war he doesn't believe in a coward, and calling the heads of conservative think tanks or the vice president awarding no-bid contracts to his friends, who want to force that kid to fight on their behalf cowards. But anyway, that's not my argument. My argument is that the neocons are disastrously, catastrophically wrong. Mocking their cowardice and war profiteering is merely a bonus, and trying to conflate that with people who were literally locking up young men for refusing to carry on colonialism abroad is loving bizarre. Because that's simply the complaint of a child? You've decided to make Dick Cheney your poster child, is your position that he's cowardice is based entirely on his apparent unwillingness to enlist at the age of 64 in 2003? Maybe it was the fact his children weren't forced to enlist at 37 and 34? I mean the younger is lesbian and would have been thrown out anyways but surely his daughters should have been forced to enlist because he supported the war? But hey it's the apparently moral position that if you support the war you should have to fight it. This is what passes for logic and is not at all the purile rantings of someone who is upset that other people have different opinions than him. Which of course is what every post you have on this topic is, like when you told Volkerball to go join the Army because he dared disagree with you.
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Sep 22, 2014 20:35
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Vice has a pretty good new Syria piece up with a reporter in with the Islamic front. They discuss ideology, IS, funding and the complete destruction surrounding them. https://news.vice.com/video/ghosts-of-aleppo-part-1
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Sep 22, 2014 20:41
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As I've finally finished some of the digital rewards for my Kickstarter I've decided to celebrate by sharing this earlier video presentation I did for the Australian government all about open source investigations in conflict zones https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBXz7gJswRE
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Sep 22, 2014 20:42
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If it helps, I definitely think My Imaginary GF's shittiness is only matched by his stupidity. I hate how you guys approach foreign policy in general, but if I thought you were worse than how the no poo poo assholes like him approach it, I'd be posting on stormfront or breitbart or freep.  There's a difference between being wrong and unironically taking pride in trying to be every negative stereotype about the US geopolitical aims incarnated into one bad poster.
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Sep 22, 2014 20:43
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Hezbullah is droning JaN and ISIS positions now. As in use a UAV to drop bombs on terrists in the middle of the desert while sitting in an air conditioned trailer in the middle of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GA0bWLkkdvQ EDIT: I'm bad at BBcode, click here to see more videos of armed Islamist militants using UAVs to bomb other armed Islamist militants from afar.
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Sep 22, 2014 20:58
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But, but, Hezbollah is a scary bad guy!
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Sep 22, 2014 21:01
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My Imaginary GF posted:Blowback is a potential future threat. ISIS are an actual current threat. We can reduce potential future threats by being selective with the groups we arm and train. See also: US/Turkish disagreements on which groups are which. This is the last straw, this has got to be a satire account.
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Sep 22, 2014 21:04
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farraday posted:Because that's simply the complaint of a child? You've decided to make Dick Cheney your poster child, is your position that he's cowardice is based entirely on his apparent unwillingness to enlist at the age of 64 in 2003? Ahaha, are you actually white-knighting Dick Cheney just so you can disagree with me? The man with no military experience who told General Eric Shinseki to shut the gently caress up when Shinseki submitted a report on how many troops were actually required to control Iraq and prevent an insurgency, and then proceeded to ahead with the massive clusterfuck the Pentagon warned him would result, profiting all the while? The guy whose reelection ticket made calling a war veteran and recipient of a Purple Heart and Silver Star a coward and a traitor? Dude, even Volkerball, who is calling me an idiot in every post and flirting with laying every massacre of the past 70 years at my feet told you how badly you're twisting my words out of all recognition. Think about that. farraday posted:But hey it's the apparently moral position that if you support the war you should have to fight it. Yes. It is. Volkerball posted:If it helps, I definitely think My Imaginary GF's shittiness is only matched by his stupidity. I hate how you guys approach foreign policy in general, but if I thought you were worse than how the no poo poo assholes like him approach it, I'd be posting on stormfront or breitbart or freep. Fair enough about MIGF, I won't throw him in your face then, but you're making a mistake in conflating opposition to a specific intervention with blanket isolationism. I agree with you that doing nothing in Rwanda was a tragic error, and I agreed with Obama's decision to intervene in Libya at the time. I just don't accept your case for intervention in Syria, especially since you are mainly trying to prove that intervention in 2012 would have been positive and you seem less interested in explaining why it's the right course of action in the present. VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 21:08 on Sep 22, 2014 |
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Sep 22, 2014 21:05
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My Imaginary GF posted:In matters of state security? Yes. You're seriously going with this aren't you. Volkerball posted:It's a bitch of a cycle. It was the same scenario in Rwanda. 18 Americans were killed in Somalia. Their bodies were tossed around like rag dolls on national television. It scarred people. Somalia wasn't anything coming close to resembling Iraq as far as reprehensibility goes, but the "failure" there still made people hesitant. When Rwanda rolled around, naturally the reaction was "War? In Africa? I don't fuckin think so." 90% of the peacekeepers in the country pulled out within the first few days of the genocide, and didn't come back until they Hutu's got bored. Then out of that you have the birth of Responsibility to Protect. We'll never let it happen again. That holds, roughly, until 9/11. Then you've got the tremendous gently caress up with the Iraq War, and bang. It's 1994 all over again. It's soul crushing, because I think Syria is going to be an outright genocide that turns into a disaster scenario, all in one conflict. We're going to have ignored a slaughter and "stuck our dick in a meat grinder" all in the same war. We'll probably come out of this one as a nation with a massive apprehension towards getting involved in foreign tragedies, and we'll ignore the next one, despite loving up the one right before it. Alternatively, humanitarian concerns are irrelevant and have always been irrelevant in the making of foreign policy, and public opinion is a matter of convincing Americans that we can triumph without facing humiliation. Nobody cared about Tutsis, any more than they care about Kurds. Somalia was supposed to be a cakewalk, it wasn't. Nothing is a cakewalk. It's possible that the American public, though ignorant, bigoted and callous, has learned one thing, that in the 21st century you can't fix things with hard power, and that even using hard power to prevent matters from getting worse requires clear strategic objectives (which we lack, think tank masturbation to the contrary).
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Sep 22, 2014 21:08
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VitalSigns posted:Ahaha, are you actually white-knighting Dick Cheney just so you can disagree with me? The man with no military experience who told General Eric Shinseki to shut the gently caress up when Shinseki submitted a report on how many troops were actually required to control Iraq and prevent an insurgency, and then proceeded to ahead with the massive clusterfuck the Pentagon warned him would result, profiting all the while? The guy whose reelection ticket made calling a war veteran and recipient of a Purple Heart and Silver Star a coward and a traitor? You demanded Dick Cheney enlist? this is a stupid position to hold regardless of Dick Cheney's positions. Or is he not allowed to advocate war in 2003 because he avoiding getting drafted in Vietnam? Your logic isn't. Volkerball is extending you credit in you don't deserve simply because you haven't actually explicitly said someone in the thread is a chickenhawk despite you're frequent allusions to such thinking. He's much kinder to your brand of idiocy than I. You remain an idiot, hold out hope you may one day change.
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Sep 22, 2014 21:20
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In what manner do ISIS transport their oil for sale? Is it by truck? By train? By pipeline? If the former two, could we not simply watch for transport and bomb without fear of civilian casualties since I'm assuming the oilfields aren't near population centres? Wouldn't that put a serious squeeze on their finances and force them to 'tax' their Sunni populations heavily, which would in turn make them increasingly unpopular?
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Sep 22, 2014 21:29
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Exioce posted:In what manner do ISIS transport their oil for sale? Is it by truck? By train? By pipeline? If the former two, could we not simply watch for transport and bomb without fear of civilian casualties since I'm assuming the oilfields aren't near population centres? Wouldn't that put a serious squeeze on their finances and force them to 'tax' their Sunni populations heavily, which would in turn make them increasingly unpopular? Well to being with bombing oil facilities tends to have serious harmful effects. Second, it isn't well to consumer pipeline of ISIS guys, they're selling oil into the preexisting local black market where it then gets sent everywhere.
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Sep 22, 2014 21:35
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farraday posted:Well to being with bombing oil facilities tends to have serious harmful effects. Hmm, but I'm assuming it isn't particularly economical to load barrels onto technicals, so at a minimum they'd have to load it onto a truck. Any truck coming for a pickup could be bombed at least a kilometre away from the actual pickup point, and after a certain amount of trucks are destroyed it gets near impossible to transport because they can't replace them and no-one is willing to drive them.
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Sep 22, 2014 21:39
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Exioce posted:Hmm, but I'm assuming it isn't particularly economical to load barrels onto technicals, so at a minimum they'd have to load it onto a truck. Any truck coming for a pickup could be bombed at least a kilometre away from the actual pickup point, and after a certain amount of trucks are destroyed it gets near impossible to transport because they can't replace them and no-one is willing to drive them. How are we seeing all of this?
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Sep 22, 2014 21:41
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Exioce posted:Hmm, but I'm assuming it isn't particularly economical to load barrels onto technicals, so at a minimum they'd have to load it onto a truck. Any truck coming for a pickup could be bombed at least a kilometre away from the actual pickup point, and after a certain amount of trucks are destroyed it gets near impossible to transport because they can't replace them and no-one is willing to drive them. There are a ton of problems with that, most noticably, identifying all the transport routes and not just totally knocking out production by killing all the workers, even if such a bombing campaign were practical. Honestly, I think most powers that be tacitly allow ISIS to put the oil on the black market so as not to disrupt the supply and increase prices which is part of the strategy of avoiding any domestic effect from foreign policy.
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Sep 22, 2014 21:42
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SedanChair posted:How are we seeing all of this? There are a finite number of wells, and I guess we'd be able to have drones watching over them. I'm no military guy, so this is all just assumption about USAF capabilities.
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Sep 22, 2014 21:44
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