When I read this article at The Daily Beast on how clueless Washington is about our war with ISIS/ISIL, I could only think of Tom Magliozi’s wisecrack.
Are 535 people who are clueless more or less clueless than one person who is clueless?
When I read this article at The Daily Beast on how clueless Washington is about our war with ISIS/ISIL, I could only think of Tom Magliozi’s wisecrack.
Are 535 people who are clueless more or less clueless than one person who is clueless?
This is more of a rhetorical question, but what is going on?
People like me were correct about the good rebels. Am I ever going to get an apology?
I noticed where Rand Paul was calling Libya a “jihadist wonderland”. Did he see me refer to it as Disneyland for terrorists? And you all thought I was being outrageous.
Now that the Republicans have won the elections, what is the plan? I know:
Sen. McCain was in the Navy. I wonder if he had a bell.
There has been no consistency, courage, or clarity in dealing with the ME eruptions of violence. It’s like we’re stammering our way reluctantly though battle, trying to politically look good, while only skimming the surface in making any decisive progress. This includes exercising the option of getting out altogether, rather than making half-hearted attempts to blend in with a coalition of unwilling nations.
There’s all kinds of cluelessness about. Just saw a lefty tweeting in protest of extraction industries. Not sure what was worse, the smugness of a lefty getting paid (by some Occupy related org) working to increase unemployment & general poverty, or the sheer blinkered stupidity of protesting via the internet.
Check out @YourAnonGlobal’s Tweet: https://twitter.com/YourAnonGlobal/status/533775429241679872?s=01
Actually the US record of turning desolate wretched wildernesses with stinking poor governments into places that are pretty reasonable prosperous civilized states is quite a good one. 70 years ago, Germany was a hellhole, Japan wasn’t much better, and Korea was pretty sad place 60 years ago. We went in — with a few million friends and allies, of course — and planted our boots and shot some people who needed it, and imposed our notions of law and civil morality, and gave money hand over fist to get things running again. And pretty much it worked.
Well, okay, we kept the troops around for a while — 70 years in Europe, 70 years in Japan, 60 years in Korea. But it seems to have worked reasonably well.
So. Could we “fix up” the Middle East, if we worked at it? Strikes me we could. We could build a Swiss-style Kurdish homeland. We could carve Iraq and Syria and Afghanistan into some sort of federalized states. Have our military and poltical leaders ever had the wit and wisdom to accomplish such ends, or even the slightest interest in doing so? No.
Yeah, massive bombing will do that to a country. I think we need to distinguish between nation-building and nation-rebuilding. Germany, Japan, and Korea all had strong national identities 70 years ago. Germany and Japan, at least, had been industrialized and urbanized.
In the Middle East we’ve tried to create nations where there had only been lines drawn on maps. That’s quite a different proposition.
Also, I’m wary of the enthusiasm about the Kurds because I think the West may be being sold a bill of goods on them. Maybe I’m overly suspicious but when the leaders of the two major political parties are, coincidentally, the hereditary leaders of their two largest tribes it makes me wonder if the Kurds are quite as moderate and liberal as they’re being portrayed.
You will need to convince Turkey and Syria to cede parts of their country to the new Kurdish state. The Syria portion may be possible if you can get rid of Assad, but even though Turkey would like to see Assad gone, they do not want a Kurdish state.