To be fair, independent Egypt has always been an army with a state. From it's beginnings to the Mamluks to modern day Egypt where the army has its hand in maybe 20% of national GDP (involved in everything from banking to making macaronis).
Anyway. Jordan is pretty stable, peaceful and progressive. Sure, it's run by a despot, but he's a pretty enlightened despot.
"The western world sips from a poisonous cocktail: Polarisation, populism, protectionism and post-truth"
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
To be fair, independent Egypt has always been an army with a state. From it's beginnings to the Mamluks to modern day Egypt where the army has its hand in maybe 20% of national GDP (involved in everything from banking to making macaronis).
Anyway. Jordan is pretty stable, peaceful and progressive. Sure, it's run by a despot, but he's a pretty enlightened despot.
Jordan is a bit of an oasis. But just looking at the demographics makes me think it can't last. Over a million Palestinian refugees and their descendants, and now over 2 million refugees from Syria. In a country of less than 10 million people.
I really despise this idea that just won't go away. Most recently it was best addressed by de Bellaigue's Islamic Enlightenment which I'll recommend and quote the intro.
In an era when a great many atrocities have been committed in the name of Islam, our ability to appraise Muslim civilisation has been impaired by a historical fallacy propagated by triumphalist Western historians, politicians and commentators, as well as some renegade Muslims who have turned on the religion of their births. These people are united in demanding that the religion of Muhammad re-examine its place and conscience in the modern world. Islam, they say, should subject itself to the same intellectual and social transformations that the West experienced from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, and which laid the foundation for contemporary society. Islam needs its Enlightenment. Islam needs a Reformation, a Renaissance and a sense of humour. Muslims should learn to take insults to their prophet in good part and stop looking at their holy book as the literal word of God –just as many adherents of Christianity and Judaism have done.
The idea behind these counsels is a simple one. Internal deficiencies have barred Islamic civilisation from a number of indispensable rites of passage, without which it will never emerge from its state of backwardness. But these commentaries say more about the people who make them than they do about Islam.
If you think that modern Islamic civilisation has been untouched by reform, it stands to reason that a whole range of characters familiar from your own history will be absent from the pages of the Islamic past: that the world of Islam continues to await its secular philosophers, its feminists, its scientists, its democrats and its revolutionaries. Equally, who can dispute that an Islamic history bereft of intellectual and political reform will inevitably miss out on social and cultural modernity? Politics, education, science, medicine, sex –for more than 1.5 billion Muslims on the earth today (almost a quarter of the world’s population) the list of areas that have yet to be smiled on by modernity is literally endless.
It is not necessary to be a specialist of Islamic societies to grasp that this line of thinking leads to a cul-de-sac. It does not escape the attention of inquisitive Westerners who travel to Muslim countries that for the people there the challenge of modernity is the overwhelming fact of their lives. The double imperative of being modern and universal, on the one hand, and adhering to traditional identities of religion, culture and nation, on the other, complicates and enriches everything they do. There is something wonderfully earnest and yet wholly irrelevant about Westerners demanding modernity from people whose lives are drenched in it.
Something wholly irrelevant about Westerners sounds right. That what you need attitude born is born from a deep ignorance and a lack of anything but the most superficial understanding of the history of the middle east.
I'm kinda of going in the other direction - the West itself is losing "modernity," following in the reactionary footsteps of the Middle East.
I read about the rejection of Liberalism in Saudi Arabia in the 1970s through to today, and I look at our own society now in the US. We're going through the same rejection of Liberalism as they did.
Which is, well, hilarious. Our Right complains of the same "immorality" of Liberalism that Wahhabi did.
Jephery on
}
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
Oh I haven't been saying that Islam is incompatible with Liberalism. I'm saying that the people in those cultures have not been indoctrinated with Liberal values like we are in the West.
We don't even realize our own indoctrination, so we talk down to cultures that lack Liberal ideology. Instead of trying to spread education of Liberal ideas in those cultures, we're trying to impose Liberal structures of government that they have no ideological basis of understanding.
If anything, we've been allowing the opposite to happen. We've allowed countries like Saudi Arabia to fund Islamic schools all over the Middle East and Africa, where the people are given an Islamic education and indoctrinated into Islamist ways of understanding law and governance.
What we could do is fund Liberal institutions of education, by tying that into our funding for their militaries. I.E. if Egypt wants billions of dollars of military aid, then they also have to accept a few million dollars for schools in Western philosophical tradition.
Edit: Just think about how you refer to "modern values." Those modern values are Liberal values! When we talk about "Democracy" or "Human Rights" or "Self Determination", we're referring to ideals based on Liberalism.
This is literally what every single Salafi and Qutbist since Sayyid Qutb himself have fought against. This is literally in the writings of Qutb which formed the ideological foundation of Al Qaeda.
Something like this would only feed the ideology of jihadist groups, and very likely help them appeal even more to the ideologically motivated.
But at the moment we've completed ceded the ideological battle ground to Islamism, so they've already won the battle of ideas.
We've not even self aware enough to project our Western ideas as a coherent ideology anymore. In speeches, our politicians repeat platitudes like "Freedom!", "Democracy!", "Rule of Law!"
It seems like after the fall of Communism, we just assumed we won forever, and that everyone was a Liberal by default now.
When ISIS, Al Qaeda, and other Jihadist groups are defeated, the states we leave behind are going to be Islamic Republics and Kingdoms, that will play lip service to liberal ideas like human rights and democracy, but in fact have no basis in Liberalism, and will trample all over human rights and have no real respect for democracy.
I guess if we aren't going to actually fight an ideological battle against Islamism, we should never have intervened in the Middle East and Africa in the first place.
This is an interesting discussion. Roughly taking it as: why is the middle east bereft of peaceful, stable and successful states? Because a lack of national unity? Or a lack of Liberal traditions? My short response would be "yes". My longer one would lean to national unity.
China is a neat example here. An authoritarian country, run by ostensible communists, who nevertheless instituted free market reforms (a tenant of Liberalism) under Deng in the 70s which propelled the country back to one of the great powers of the world. That democracy, freedom of the press, rule of law and other tenants didn't make it in is instructive. Will China require these to continue its growth? Or are these tenants not actually required for a stable trading state? Its an open question at this point.
I see Iran as a potential China in miniature. Not big enough to have the same clout, it does however have a long history as a nation, and usually a state as well. While right now under a theocracy, they've still been pragmatic. Along with the nuclear deal came trade liberalization-- Iran opening itself to trade with the world is appealing for the EU and many in Iran itself, despite the usual threats to wages and jobs that such deals bring. Why, its election season in Iran, and Rouhani's rivals call him a neoliberal! The neoliberal president of a theocracy! Anyway, my point is that if communists can pick and choose liberal tenants, and theocrats can think of doing the same, I'd argue a long tradition of liberalism isn't required for a stable and successful state. It might help, and we might see these attempts collapse if something like democracy is not brought in. But such attempts can't even be made where there is no unified state.
**
For further reading on this discussion, look to The Clash of Civilizations by Huntington. The title is famous, and has become synonymous with conflict between the west and muslims, though its about world-wide geopolitics, with lots of time spent on Russia and China.
The book itself is really quite interesting. The author goes a bit off the deep end later in the book, where it becomes clear he's really not a fan of muslims. I'd still recommend it, because it steps back in this same way, by pointing out that our values are not universal values shared by all peoples. Written shortly after the fall of communism, it provides an interesting perspective on politics, and also made some accurate (and some inacurate) predictions about what would happen next. It is quite relevant today.
This feels much closer to reality imo. I think there can be discussion about the myriad reasons for it but I think the main factor in a lot of these places under discussion is a lack of national identity of any sort. You can keep this underwraps via force (or via bribery to some extent too) a lot of the time but when that fails it all seems to fall apart. You see countries like Iran that, at least from anything I've seen, exhibit a strong sense of national identity despite what we might call a lack of many "liberal" institutions, ideas or viewpoints. And even that's overly simplistic considering the push and pull within Iran over these kind of things, but there's definitely a strong sense of stability there imo.
And once you start looking at the issue as something like national identity and unity, then you start looking at where that comes from in a lot of the "western world" and such and it's not all sunshine and liberal values that lead to the situation as it exists now.
Hell, as an aside to the above, I think there's a real possibility that the rise of right-wing movements we are seeing in many places in the western world is a reaction to globalization trends that run counter to many of the less savoury ways in which national unity was created in the first place.
I really despise this idea that just won't go away. Most recently it was best addressed by de Bellaigue's Islamic Enlightenment which I'll recommend and quote the intro.
In an era when a great many atrocities have been committed in the name of Islam, our ability to appraise Muslim civilisation has been impaired by a historical fallacy propagated by triumphalist Western historians, politicians and commentators, as well as some renegade Muslims who have turned on the religion of their births. These people are united in demanding that the religion of Muhammad re-examine its place and conscience in the modern world. Islam, they say, should subject itself to the same intellectual and social transformations that the West experienced from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, and which laid the foundation for contemporary society. Islam needs its Enlightenment. Islam needs a Reformation, a Renaissance and a sense of humour. Muslims should learn to take insults to their prophet in good part and stop looking at their holy book as the literal word of God –just as many adherents of Christianity and Judaism have done.
The idea behind these counsels is a simple one. Internal deficiencies have barred Islamic civilisation from a number of indispensable rites of passage, without which it will never emerge from its state of backwardness. But these commentaries say more about the people who make them than they do about Islam.
If you think that modern Islamic civilisation has been untouched by reform, it stands to reason that a whole range of characters familiar from your own history will be absent from the pages of the Islamic past: that the world of Islam continues to await its secular philosophers, its feminists, its scientists, its democrats and its revolutionaries. Equally, who can dispute that an Islamic history bereft of intellectual and political reform will inevitably miss out on social and cultural modernity? Politics, education, science, medicine, sex –for more than 1.5 billion Muslims on the earth today (almost a quarter of the world’s population) the list of areas that have yet to be smiled on by modernity is literally endless.
It is not necessary to be a specialist of Islamic societies to grasp that this line of thinking leads to a cul-de-sac. It does not escape the attention of inquisitive Westerners who travel to Muslim countries that for the people there the challenge of modernity is the overwhelming fact of their lives. The double imperative of being modern and universal, on the one hand, and adhering to traditional identities of religion, culture and nation, on the other, complicates and enriches everything they do. There is something wonderfully earnest and yet wholly irrelevant about Westerners demanding modernity from people whose lives are drenched in it.
Something wholly irrelevant about Westerners sounds right. That what you need attitude born is born from a deep ignorance and a lack of anything but the most superficial understanding of the history of the middle east.
But that's also ignoring that the islamic world did have it's own enlightenment, they did have their own intellectual and social enlightenments, they did have their own secular philosophers, scientists, humanists, and revolutionaries. And instead some sects of islamists turned their backs on it entirely. The original Muhammed Ibn Abd-al-Wahhab movement was a reaction to innovation within islamic communities and a rejection of what they considered "non-muslim ideas" that were really a lot of ideas that were born of Islam in places like Baghdad. The modern Wahhabist movement has gone beyond even that.
These are conservative movements that try to impose a strict order on a religion and culture that has historically always been changing and advancing. Islam isn't backwards, but there's a number of conservative groups that have been allowed to dominate regions and made it their missions to kill anyone they think deviates from their very strict conservative concepts. New conservative movements keep being created throughout the history of Islam because Muslims keep evolving as a culture and Islam as a religion. Those conservative movements are direct responses to specific innovations, ages of enlightenment, and advances in learning and science from within the community. This has been a recurrent theme in the islamic world as it has been in the christian world. Westerners don't have to demand modernity, Muslims keep demanding it themselves.
I really despise this idea that just won't go away. Most recently it was best addressed by de Bellaigue's Islamic Enlightenment which I'll recommend and quote the intro.
In an era when a great many atrocities have been committed in the name of Islam, our ability to appraise Muslim civilisation has been impaired by a historical fallacy propagated by triumphalist Western historians, politicians and commentators, as well as some renegade Muslims who have turned on the religion of their births. These people are united in demanding that the religion of Muhammad re-examine its place and conscience in the modern world. Islam, they say, should subject itself to the same intellectual and social transformations that the West experienced from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, and which laid the foundation for contemporary society. Islam needs its Enlightenment. Islam needs a Reformation, a Renaissance and a sense of humour. Muslims should learn to take insults to their prophet in good part and stop looking at their holy book as the literal word of God –just as many adherents of Christianity and Judaism have done.
The idea behind these counsels is a simple one. Internal deficiencies have barred Islamic civilisation from a number of indispensable rites of passage, without which it will never emerge from its state of backwardness. But these commentaries say more about the people who make them than they do about Islam.
If you think that modern Islamic civilisation has been untouched by reform, it stands to reason that a whole range of characters familiar from your own history will be absent from the pages of the Islamic past: that the world of Islam continues to await its secular philosophers, its feminists, its scientists, its democrats and its revolutionaries. Equally, who can dispute that an Islamic history bereft of intellectual and political reform will inevitably miss out on social and cultural modernity? Politics, education, science, medicine, sex –for more than 1.5 billion Muslims on the earth today (almost a quarter of the world’s population) the list of areas that have yet to be smiled on by modernity is literally endless.
It is not necessary to be a specialist of Islamic societies to grasp that this line of thinking leads to a cul-de-sac. It does not escape the attention of inquisitive Westerners who travel to Muslim countries that for the people there the challenge of modernity is the overwhelming fact of their lives. The double imperative of being modern and universal, on the one hand, and adhering to traditional identities of religion, culture and nation, on the other, complicates and enriches everything they do. There is something wonderfully earnest and yet wholly irrelevant about Westerners demanding modernity from people whose lives are drenched in it.
Something wholly irrelevant about Westerners sounds right. That what you need attitude born is born from a deep ignorance and a lack of anything but the most superficial understanding of the history of the middle east.
But that's also ignoring that the islamic world did have it's own enlightenment, they did have their own intellectual and social enlightenments, they did have their own secular philosophers, scientists, humanists, and revolutionaries. And instead some sects of islamists turned their backs on it entirely. The original Muhammed Ibn Abd-al-Wahhab movement was a reaction to innovation within islamic communities and a rejection of what they considered "non-muslim ideas" that were really a lot of ideas that were born of Islam in places like Baghdad. The modern Wahhabist movement has gone beyond even that.
These are conservative movements that try to impose a strict order on a religion and culture that has historically always been changing and advancing. Islam isn't backwards, but there's a number of conservative groups that have been allowed to dominate regions and made it their missions to kill anyone they think deviates from their very strict conservative concepts. New conservative movements keep being created throughout the history of Islam because Muslims keep evolving as a culture and Islam as a religion. Those conservative movements are direct responses to specific innovations, ages of enlightenment, and advances in learning and science from within the community. This has been a recurrent theme in the islamic world as it has been in the christian world. Westerners don't have to demand modernity, Muslims keep demanding it themselves.
And yet it still seems that the Islamic world is behind in terms of modernity?
While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
I really despise this idea that just won't go away. Most recently it was best addressed by de Bellaigue's Islamic Enlightenment which I'll recommend and quote the intro.
In an era when a great many atrocities have been committed in the name of Islam, our ability to appraise Muslim civilisation has been impaired by a historical fallacy propagated by triumphalist Western historians, politicians and commentators, as well as some renegade Muslims who have turned on the religion of their births. These people are united in demanding that the religion of Muhammad re-examine its place and conscience in the modern world. Islam, they say, should subject itself to the same intellectual and social transformations that the West experienced from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, and which laid the foundation for contemporary society. Islam needs its Enlightenment. Islam needs a Reformation, a Renaissance and a sense of humour. Muslims should learn to take insults to their prophet in good part and stop looking at their holy book as the literal word of God –just as many adherents of Christianity and Judaism have done.
The idea behind these counsels is a simple one. Internal deficiencies have barred Islamic civilisation from a number of indispensable rites of passage, without which it will never emerge from its state of backwardness. But these commentaries say more about the people who make them than they do about Islam.
If you think that modern Islamic civilisation has been untouched by reform, it stands to reason that a whole range of characters familiar from your own history will be absent from the pages of the Islamic past: that the world of Islam continues to await its secular philosophers, its feminists, its scientists, its democrats and its revolutionaries. Equally, who can dispute that an Islamic history bereft of intellectual and political reform will inevitably miss out on social and cultural modernity? Politics, education, science, medicine, sex –for more than 1.5 billion Muslims on the earth today (almost a quarter of the world’s population) the list of areas that have yet to be smiled on by modernity is literally endless.
It is not necessary to be a specialist of Islamic societies to grasp that this line of thinking leads to a cul-de-sac. It does not escape the attention of inquisitive Westerners who travel to Muslim countries that for the people there the challenge of modernity is the overwhelming fact of their lives. The double imperative of being modern and universal, on the one hand, and adhering to traditional identities of religion, culture and nation, on the other, complicates and enriches everything they do. There is something wonderfully earnest and yet wholly irrelevant about Westerners demanding modernity from people whose lives are drenched in it.
Something wholly irrelevant about Westerners sounds right. That what you need attitude born is born from a deep ignorance and a lack of anything but the most superficial understanding of the history of the middle east.
But that's also ignoring that the islamic world did have it's own enlightenment, they did have their own intellectual and social enlightenments, they did have their own secular philosophers, scientists, humanists, and revolutionaries. And instead some sects of islamists turned their backs on it entirely. The original Muhammed Ibn Abd-al-Wahhab movement was a reaction to innovation within islamic communities and a rejection of what they considered "non-muslim ideas" that were really a lot of ideas that were born of Islam in places like Baghdad. The modern Wahhabist movement has gone beyond even that.
These are conservative movements that try to impose a strict order on a religion and culture that has historically always been changing and advancing. Islam isn't backwards, but there's a number of conservative groups that have been allowed to dominate regions and made it their missions to kill anyone they think deviates from their very strict conservative concepts. New conservative movements keep being created throughout the history of Islam because Muslims keep evolving as a culture and Islam as a religion. Those conservative movements are direct responses to specific innovations, ages of enlightenment, and advances in learning and science from within the community. This has been a recurrent theme in the islamic world as it has been in the christian world. Westerners don't have to demand modernity, Muslims keep demanding it themselves.
And yet it still seems that the Islamic world is behind in terms of modernity?
At least partially due to being the playground for foreign world powers like the british empire and so on, I would say.
I am fairly anti religion in general, but i don't think you can lay the blame for state of middle east, in comparison to west, on Islam (though it probably does play a part, even if only as an enabler).
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FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
I really despise this idea that just won't go away. Most recently it was best addressed by de Bellaigue's Islamic Enlightenment which I'll recommend and quote the intro.
In an era when a great many atrocities have been committed in the name of Islam, our ability to appraise Muslim civilisation has been impaired by a historical fallacy propagated by triumphalist Western historians, politicians and commentators, as well as some renegade Muslims who have turned on the religion of their births. These people are united in demanding that the religion of Muhammad re-examine its place and conscience in the modern world. Islam, they say, should subject itself to the same intellectual and social transformations that the West experienced from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, and which laid the foundation for contemporary society. Islam needs its Enlightenment. Islam needs a Reformation, a Renaissance and a sense of humour. Muslims should learn to take insults to their prophet in good part and stop looking at their holy book as the literal word of God –just as many adherents of Christianity and Judaism have done.
The idea behind these counsels is a simple one. Internal deficiencies have barred Islamic civilisation from a number of indispensable rites of passage, without which it will never emerge from its state of backwardness. But these commentaries say more about the people who make them than they do about Islam.
If you think that modern Islamic civilisation has been untouched by reform, it stands to reason that a whole range of characters familiar from your own history will be absent from the pages of the Islamic past: that the world of Islam continues to await its secular philosophers, its feminists, its scientists, its democrats and its revolutionaries. Equally, who can dispute that an Islamic history bereft of intellectual and political reform will inevitably miss out on social and cultural modernity? Politics, education, science, medicine, sex –for more than 1.5 billion Muslims on the earth today (almost a quarter of the world’s population) the list of areas that have yet to be smiled on by modernity is literally endless.
It is not necessary to be a specialist of Islamic societies to grasp that this line of thinking leads to a cul-de-sac. It does not escape the attention of inquisitive Westerners who travel to Muslim countries that for the people there the challenge of modernity is the overwhelming fact of their lives. The double imperative of being modern and universal, on the one hand, and adhering to traditional identities of religion, culture and nation, on the other, complicates and enriches everything they do. There is something wonderfully earnest and yet wholly irrelevant about Westerners demanding modernity from people whose lives are drenched in it.
Something wholly irrelevant about Westerners sounds right. That what you need attitude born is born from a deep ignorance and a lack of anything but the most superficial understanding of the history of the middle east.
But that's also ignoring that the islamic world did have it's own enlightenment, they did have their own intellectual and social enlightenments, they did have their own secular philosophers, scientists, humanists, and revolutionaries. And instead some sects of islamists turned their backs on it entirely. The original Muhammed Ibn Abd-al-Wahhab movement was a reaction to innovation within islamic communities and a rejection of what they considered "non-muslim ideas" that were really a lot of ideas that were born of Islam in places like Baghdad. The modern Wahhabist movement has gone beyond even that.
These are conservative movements that try to impose a strict order on a religion and culture that has historically always been changing and advancing. Islam isn't backwards, but there's a number of conservative groups that have been allowed to dominate regions and made it their missions to kill anyone they think deviates from their very strict conservative concepts. New conservative movements keep being created throughout the history of Islam because Muslims keep evolving as a culture and Islam as a religion. Those conservative movements are direct responses to specific innovations, ages of enlightenment, and advances in learning and science from within the community. This has been a recurrent theme in the islamic world as it has been in the christian world. Westerners don't have to demand modernity, Muslims keep demanding it themselves.
And yet it still seems that the Islamic world is behind in terms of modernity?
At least partially due to being the playground for foreign world powers like the british empire and so on, I would say.
Also, the Mongols destroying Baghdad and completely fucking up Iraq's irrigation system set the reactionary forces in a way that we are still feeling today.
Trump will be giving a speech on radicalization and Islam in Saudi Arabia, and I don't know how to do the punchline to that joke. I'm gonna tune in, for sure.
it was talked about a bit in the foreign policy thread and the SE++ politics thread, it definitely happened, there's at least a few videos of the assaults on the internet:
I really despise this idea that just won't go away. Most recently it was best addressed by de Bellaigue's Islamic Enlightenment which I'll recommend and quote the intro.
In an era when a great many atrocities have been committed in the name of Islam, our ability to appraise Muslim civilisation has been impaired by a historical fallacy propagated by triumphalist Western historians, politicians and commentators, as well as some renegade Muslims who have turned on the religion of their births. These people are united in demanding that the religion of Muhammad re-examine its place and conscience in the modern world. Islam, they say, should subject itself to the same intellectual and social transformations that the West experienced from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, and which laid the foundation for contemporary society. Islam needs its Enlightenment. Islam needs a Reformation, a Renaissance and a sense of humour. Muslims should learn to take insults to their prophet in good part and stop looking at their holy book as the literal word of God –just as many adherents of Christianity and Judaism have done.
The idea behind these counsels is a simple one. Internal deficiencies have barred Islamic civilisation from a number of indispensable rites of passage, without which it will never emerge from its state of backwardness. But these commentaries say more about the people who make them than they do about Islam.
If you think that modern Islamic civilisation has been untouched by reform, it stands to reason that a whole range of characters familiar from your own history will be absent from the pages of the Islamic past: that the world of Islam continues to await its secular philosophers, its feminists, its scientists, its democrats and its revolutionaries. Equally, who can dispute that an Islamic history bereft of intellectual and political reform will inevitably miss out on social and cultural modernity? Politics, education, science, medicine, sex –for more than 1.5 billion Muslims on the earth today (almost a quarter of the world’s population) the list of areas that have yet to be smiled on by modernity is literally endless.
It is not necessary to be a specialist of Islamic societies to grasp that this line of thinking leads to a cul-de-sac. It does not escape the attention of inquisitive Westerners who travel to Muslim countries that for the people there the challenge of modernity is the overwhelming fact of their lives. The double imperative of being modern and universal, on the one hand, and adhering to traditional identities of religion, culture and nation, on the other, complicates and enriches everything they do. There is something wonderfully earnest and yet wholly irrelevant about Westerners demanding modernity from people whose lives are drenched in it.
Something wholly irrelevant about Westerners sounds right. That what you need attitude born is born from a deep ignorance and a lack of anything but the most superficial understanding of the history of the middle east.
But that's also ignoring that the islamic world did have it's own enlightenment, they did have their own intellectual and social enlightenments, they did have their own secular philosophers, scientists, humanists, and revolutionaries. And instead some sects of islamists turned their backs on it entirely. The original Muhammed Ibn Abd-al-Wahhab movement was a reaction to innovation within islamic communities and a rejection of what they considered "non-muslim ideas" that were really a lot of ideas that were born of Islam in places like Baghdad. The modern Wahhabist movement has gone beyond even that.
These are conservative movements that try to impose a strict order on a religion and culture that has historically always been changing and advancing. Islam isn't backwards, but there's a number of conservative groups that have been allowed to dominate regions and made it their missions to kill anyone they think deviates from their very strict conservative concepts. New conservative movements keep being created throughout the history of Islam because Muslims keep evolving as a culture and Islam as a religion. Those conservative movements are direct responses to specific innovations, ages of enlightenment, and advances in learning and science from within the community. This has been a recurrent theme in the islamic world as it has been in the christian world. Westerners don't have to demand modernity, Muslims keep demanding it themselves.
And yet it still seems that the Islamic world is behind in terms of modernity?
At least partially due to being the playground for foreign world powers like the british empire and so on, I would say.
Also, the Mongols destroying Baghdad and completely fucking up Iraq's irrigation system set the reactionary forces in a way that we are still feeling today.
Yeah, the Mongols going full ape-shit on the Abbasid caliphate pretty much single handedly shut down the Islamic Golden Age in the Middle East and North Africa, and issued in a nearly 600 year dark age (comparatively speaking, after the intellectual trajectory of Islam from 700-1250) for any Muslims that weren't directly under the Mamluks or Ottoman/Osmanian Turks. And even the Turks didn't really modernize much at all from the capture of Constantinople in 1453 till the late 19th century, when western European powers kinda forced it to by introducing railroads and heavy industry.
BlackDragon480 on
No matter where you go...there you are. ~ Buckaroo Banzai
And even the Turks didn't really modernize much at all from the capture of Constantinople in 1453 till the late 19th century, when western European powers kinda forced it to by introducing railroads and heavy industry.
You do know that in terms of metallurgy (mining, smelting, etc), mechanical design and architecture (buildings, bridges, roads) the Ottoman empire remained on par with the European states for almost the entirety of its existence?
The Ottoman empires main problem was most likely in their inability to root out the corruption in the administration (or to make it work for them). The internal intrigue between the sultan, the various beys and the internal court politics crippled the empire. Especially the frequent wars of succession. For its entire history the Ottoman empire never managed to make the transition from one sultan to the next a painless experience.
"The western world sips from a poisonous cocktail: Polarisation, populism, protectionism and post-truth"
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
And even the Turks didn't really modernize much at all from the capture of Constantinople in 1453 till the late 19th century, when western European powers kinda forced it to by introducing railroads and heavy industry.
You do know that in terms of metallurgy (mining, smelting, etc), mechanical design and architecture (buildings, bridges, roads) the Ottoman empire remained on par with the European states for almost the entirety of its existence?
The Ottoman empires main problem was most likely in their inability to root out the corruption in the administration (or to make it work for them). The internal intrigue between the sultan, the various beys and the internal court politics crippled the empire. Especially the frequent wars of succession. For its entire history the Ottoman empire never managed to make the transition from one sultan to the next a painless experience.
The Ottomans kept up in some ways, but fell behind in others. Scientific advances, industrialization, their navy, all were very lacking compared to European powers. I agree with you about infighting being a major cause of this; the empire was never held together particularly well.
And even the Turks didn't really modernize much at all from the capture of Constantinople in 1453 till the late 19th century, when western European powers kinda forced it to by introducing railroads and heavy industry.
You do know that in terms of metallurgy (mining, smelting, etc), mechanical design and architecture (buildings, bridges, roads) the Ottoman empire remained on par with the European states for almost the entirety of its existence?
The Ottoman empires main problem was most likely in their inability to root out the corruption in the administration (or to make it work for them). The internal intrigue between the sultan, the various beys and the internal court politics crippled the empire. Especially the frequent wars of succession. For its entire history the Ottoman empire never managed to make the transition from one sultan to the next a painless experience.
Turns out having dozens of wives with a dozen kids each is a succession shit show, who knew?!
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BlackDragon480Bluster KerfuffleMaster of Windy ImportRegistered Userregular
And even the Turks didn't really modernize much at all from the capture of Constantinople in 1453 till the late 19th century, when western European powers kinda forced it to by introducing railroads and heavy industry.
You do know that in terms of metallurgy (mining, smelting, etc), mechanical design and architecture (buildings, bridges, roads) the Ottoman empire remained on par with the European states for almost the entirety of its existence?
The Ottoman empires main problem was most likely in their inability to root out the corruption in the administration (or to make it work for them). The internal intrigue between the sultan, the various beys and the internal court politics crippled the empire. Especially the frequent wars of succession. For its entire history the Ottoman empire never managed to make the transition from one sultan to the next a painless experience.
Yeah, poor framing/phrasing on my part. They were able to remain apace in technology and science somewhat, but they stagnated politically and by the time of the rise of the Prussian Reich and the build up to WWI they were as out of fashion and backward as the Estates General was in 1789.
And the break-up of the Ottoman states in the Treaty of Versailles and the San Remo conference and the mishandling of the various mandates by France and Britain certainly didn't set the stage for Middle Eastern nationalism to get a very good start in the 20th century. Most states in the area have been playing various forms of political and social catch-up since they were individually granted their independence over time from Iraq and Saudi Arabia in 1932 to Oman and the UAE in 1970 and 71 repsectively.
BlackDragon480 on
No matter where you go...there you are. ~ Buckaroo Banzai
And even the Turks didn't really modernize much at all from the capture of Constantinople in 1453 till the late 19th century, when western European powers kinda forced it to by introducing railroads and heavy industry.
You do know that in terms of metallurgy (mining, smelting, etc), mechanical design and architecture (buildings, bridges, roads) the Ottoman empire remained on par with the European states for almost the entirety of its existence?
The Ottoman empires main problem was most likely in their inability to root out the corruption in the administration (or to make it work for them). The internal intrigue between the sultan, the various beys and the internal court politics crippled the empire. Especially the frequent wars of succession. For its entire history the Ottoman empire never managed to make the transition from one sultan to the next a painless experience.
Turns out having dozens of wives with a dozen kids each is a succession shit show, who knew?!
Actually that's generally a myth. Most Sultans were very careful about who they had kids with and generally only had a few consorts/wives with whom they had sex. Normally they had no more than 3-5 sons who grew to adulthood (which is a sensible practice given child mortality).
The myth of Ottoman decadence was spread by the rumormill, western orientalism and the very few exceptions to the norm.
In fact, before the 19th century I can only name two sultans who had more than a very small number of possible successors:
Ibrahim Sultan, aka Ibrahim the Mad, who was used as a political tool by his mother and kept distracted by the harem.
Ahmed III. Financial and administrative genius but also an eccentric who had a notorious appetite for women and luxury.
"The western world sips from a poisonous cocktail: Polarisation, populism, protectionism and post-truth"
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
And even the Turks didn't really modernize much at all from the capture of Constantinople in 1453 till the late 19th century, when western European powers kinda forced it to by introducing railroads and heavy industry.
You do know that in terms of metallurgy (mining, smelting, etc), mechanical design and architecture (buildings, bridges, roads) the Ottoman empire remained on par with the European states for almost the entirety of its existence?
The Ottoman empires main problem was most likely in their inability to root out the corruption in the administration (or to make it work for them). The internal intrigue between the sultan, the various beys and the internal court politics crippled the empire. Especially the frequent wars of succession. For its entire history the Ottoman empire never managed to make the transition from one sultan to the next a painless experience.
But quality government and administration are aspects of socio-technological development too. In fact, it's arguably the core benefit of Western liberal democracy, that the stability generated by the combination of democratic representation and non-partisan civil service enables scientific progress, and then capitalism drives its propagation to deliver benefit to the masses.
The Ottomans probably kept up until about the 1600s, which is when the scientific revolution in Europe really took off, and by the late 1600s was when you saw Western Europe really diverge from not-western-Europe in a striking way.
Clash of Civilizations is a dangerously reductionist view, given that you see varying levels of success within each civilization, and that conflict and warfare are primarily built on *political* realism (realism in a foreign policy sense is impractical, because it assumes unified state actors who conduct their foreign policy purely in regards to other states, which is sometimes the case but the more reliable indicator is to follow ascendant political factions and see what they stand to gain from their foreign policy moves). The Muslim Turks teamed up with the Germans in World War I, while explicitly caucasian-chauvinist Germany teamed up with explicitly asian-chauvinist Japan in World War II because it suited the needs of the leadership factions: not set by ideology and culture and not a purely rational move (the rational move for Japan would've been to maintain their alliance with the British), but done because the forces of domestic politics mandated it.
So it is with the Muslim World. The Jihadists wage war with the west because it helps them gain standing at home, which is their more immediate goal. Bin Laden's audience for 9/11 was not the millions of Americans glued to their TV sets, but to al-Saud.
The Ottomans probably kept up until about the 1600s, which is when the scientific revolution in Europe really took off, and by the late 1600s was when you saw Western Europe really diverge from not-western-Europe in a striking way.
Clash of Civilizations is a dangerously reductionist view, given that you see varying levels of success within each civilization, and that conflict and warfare are primarily built on *political* realism (realism in a foreign policy sense is impractical, because it assumes unified state actors who conduct their foreign policy purely in regards to other states, which is sometimes the case but the more reliable indicator is to follow ascendant political factions and see what they stand to gain from their foreign policy moves). The Muslim Turks teamed up with the Germans in World War I, while explicitly caucasian-chauvinist Germany teamed up with explicitly asian-chauvinist Japan in World War II because it suited the needs of the leadership factions: not set by ideology and culture and not a purely rational move (the rational move for Japan would've been to maintain their alliance with the British), but done because the forces of domestic politics mandated it.
So it is with the Muslim World. The Jihadists wage war with the west because it helps them gain standing at home, which is their more immediate goal. Bin Laden's audience for 9/11 was not the millions of Americans glued to their TV sets, but to al-Saud.
Have you read the book? I'll only go so far in defending it, but the author goes over examples like yours right at the start.
I'm going to disagee with you on the bin Laden bit as well. He explicitly stated in speeches that his goal was to lure the US into a quagmire in the Middle East, which would sap its strength just as it had the Soviet's. Of course he wanted to mobilize muslims in the Middle East; but he also wanted to mobilize the US and the West.
So in southern Syria, along the borders with Jordan and then Iraq further east, US-backed Syrian rebels have taken some border areas and other positions in the desert from ISIS. Sparsely populated desert areas for the most part, not a lot of heavy fighting from what I've read, probably an easy place for the US Air Force to be decisive. But recently the Syrian government has been pushing east, against both ISIS and the US-backed rebels further south. One article described the rebel/government fighting as a "race toward Deir Ez-Zor," the eastern province which is ISIS's final major stronghold. I had assumed that the SAA would largely roll over the small US-backed factions pretty quickly.
But today, the US decided to escalate, and launched air strikes on pro-government forces advancing toward rebel positions at the border with Jordan, destroying government tanks and causing casualties. This is probably the most direct US/Syrian government confrontation yet, as it was meant to save a rebel faction and prevent the government from expanding its territory. This does not seem like a symbolic/deterrent/one-off attack, as the missile strike on the Syrian air base was frequently depicted.
The US officials stressed the defensive strike did not signal deepening US involvement in Syria's civil war.
You sure about that, officials?
A military source said the US-led coalition will not allow the Iranian militias to reach the border between Syria and Iraq in order to have an opportunity to connect with Iranian militias on the Iraqi side.
Because if that's the policy, I'd say that implies much deeper involvement than we've seen so far. Is the US really declaring that Syria can't reclaim its border with Iraq?
Russia, Iran, Syria, and probably Iraq itself aren't gonna like this one, I think.
edit - I'm of the opinion that this attack is much less defensible than the last one. "US launches missiles at Syrian Air Base after government forces launch chemical attack." Ok, I still don't think it was a good thing, but on its face I can see why some would regard it as justifiable. "US bombs Syrian government forces attempting to reclaim control of border from US-armed rebel proxies." This one... less so.
Yemeni Houthis fired a missile toward Riyadh earlier today
Yemen's Houthi movement said on Friday it had fired a ballistic missile toward the Saudi capital Riyadh and the Arab coalition waging war in Yemen said it had intercepted and destroyed a projectile around 200 km (120 miles) west of the city.
The burkan-1 system was used last October to successfully hit King Fahd airbase, ~500km from the border. Unless my geography is off, getting within 200km of Riyahd suggests the system's range is much further. (Or the Saudis didn't actually intercept it, since that would put it around the range of a SCUD D, per wikipedia)
The timing is interesting. Curious if they'll try again while Trump is there.
AFP has some Iranian results reported. They've got Rouhani with 59% of the vote with an estimated 64% or so counted. So seems like he's the winner, which is good news, I think?
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — President Trump arrived here Saturday for his debut on the world stage, hoping to turn a page on the scandal encircling his presidency back home as he embarks upon an ambitious, high-stakes journey through the Middle East and Europe.
After Air Force One touched down in Riyadh shortly before 10 a.m. local time, Trump was received as a royal guest by a kingdom eager to rekindle its relationship with the United States and shower the president with praise.
The city of Riyadh was awash in celebration for Trump’s visit, with hundreds of American and Saudi flags lining the major roads, along with billboards featuring his and King Salman’s official portraits with the slogan, “Together We Prevail.” The exterior of the Ritz Carlton hotel, where the president will stay, has been lit up with images of the two leaders.
The Saudis have planned an elaborate series of events to honor Trump, including a ceremonial medal presentation and luncheon at the Saudi Royal Court. Trump also was slated to meet with Crown Prince Muhammad bin Nayef, who visited Trump at the White House earlier this spring.
Can't say the Saudi's don't understand exactly how to manipulate him.
There's no plan, there's no race to be run
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — President Trump arrived here Saturday for his debut on the world stage, hoping to turn a page on the scandal encircling his presidency back home as he embarks upon an ambitious, high-stakes journey through the Middle East and Europe.
After Air Force One touched down in Riyadh shortly before 10 a.m. local time, Trump was received as a royal guest by a kingdom eager to rekindle its relationship with the United States and shower the president with praise.
The city of Riyadh was awash in celebration for Trump’s visit, with hundreds of American and Saudi flags lining the major roads, along with billboards featuring his and King Salman’s official portraits with the slogan, “Together We Prevail.” The exterior of the Ritz Carlton hotel, where the president will stay, has been lit up with images of the two leaders.
The Saudis have planned an elaborate series of events to honor Trump, including a ceremonial medal presentation and luncheon at the Saudi Royal Court. Trump also was slated to meet with Crown Prince Muhammad bin Nayef, who visited Trump at the White House earlier this spring.
Can't say the Saudi's don't understand exactly how to manipulate him.
Trump will be giving a speech on radicalization and Islam in Saudi Arabia, and I don't know how to do the punchline to that joke. I'm gonna tune in, for sure.
Trump will be giving a speech on radicalization and Islam in Saudi Arabia, and I don't know how to do the punchline to that joke. I'm gonna tune in, for sure.
Written by Stephen Miller, author of the Muslim ban
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Giggles_FunsworthBlight on DiscourseBay Area SprawlRegistered Userregular
Religious leaders must make this absolutely clear:
...
if you choose the path of terror, your life will be empty, your life will be brief, and you soul will be fully condemned.
In one sentence he says we must oppose "Islamic extremism, the Islamists, and Islamic terror of all kinds." It's among the most awkward things I've seen.
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Anyway. Jordan is pretty stable, peaceful and progressive. Sure, it's run by a despot, but he's a pretty enlightened despot.
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
Jordan is a bit of an oasis. But just looking at the demographics makes me think it can't last. Over a million Palestinian refugees and their descendants, and now over 2 million refugees from Syria. In a country of less than 10 million people.
The idea behind these counsels is a simple one. Internal deficiencies have barred Islamic civilisation from a number of indispensable rites of passage, without which it will never emerge from its state of backwardness. But these commentaries say more about the people who make them than they do about Islam.
If you think that modern Islamic civilisation has been untouched by reform, it stands to reason that a whole range of characters familiar from your own history will be absent from the pages of the Islamic past: that the world of Islam continues to await its secular philosophers, its feminists, its scientists, its democrats and its revolutionaries. Equally, who can dispute that an Islamic history bereft of intellectual and political reform will inevitably miss out on social and cultural modernity? Politics, education, science, medicine, sex –for more than 1.5 billion Muslims on the earth today (almost a quarter of the world’s population) the list of areas that have yet to be smiled on by modernity is literally endless.
It is not necessary to be a specialist of Islamic societies to grasp that this line of thinking leads to a cul-de-sac. It does not escape the attention of inquisitive Westerners who travel to Muslim countries that for the people there the challenge of modernity is the overwhelming fact of their lives. The double imperative of being modern and universal, on the one hand, and adhering to traditional identities of religion, culture and nation, on the other, complicates and enriches everything they do. There is something wonderfully earnest and yet wholly irrelevant about Westerners demanding modernity from people whose lives are drenched in it.
Something wholly irrelevant about Westerners sounds right. That what you need attitude born is born from a deep ignorance and a lack of anything but the most superficial understanding of the history of the middle east.
I read about the rejection of Liberalism in Saudi Arabia in the 1970s through to today, and I look at our own society now in the US. We're going through the same rejection of Liberalism as they did.
Which is, well, hilarious. Our Right complains of the same "immorality" of Liberalism that Wahhabi did.
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
This feels much closer to reality imo. I think there can be discussion about the myriad reasons for it but I think the main factor in a lot of these places under discussion is a lack of national identity of any sort. You can keep this underwraps via force (or via bribery to some extent too) a lot of the time but when that fails it all seems to fall apart. You see countries like Iran that, at least from anything I've seen, exhibit a strong sense of national identity despite what we might call a lack of many "liberal" institutions, ideas or viewpoints. And even that's overly simplistic considering the push and pull within Iran over these kind of things, but there's definitely a strong sense of stability there imo.
And once you start looking at the issue as something like national identity and unity, then you start looking at where that comes from in a lot of the "western world" and such and it's not all sunshine and liberal values that lead to the situation as it exists now.
Hell, as an aside to the above, I think there's a real possibility that the rise of right-wing movements we are seeing in many places in the western world is a reaction to globalization trends that run counter to many of the less savoury ways in which national unity was created in the first place.
But that's also ignoring that the islamic world did have it's own enlightenment, they did have their own intellectual and social enlightenments, they did have their own secular philosophers, scientists, humanists, and revolutionaries. And instead some sects of islamists turned their backs on it entirely. The original Muhammed Ibn Abd-al-Wahhab movement was a reaction to innovation within islamic communities and a rejection of what they considered "non-muslim ideas" that were really a lot of ideas that were born of Islam in places like Baghdad. The modern Wahhabist movement has gone beyond even that.
These are conservative movements that try to impose a strict order on a religion and culture that has historically always been changing and advancing. Islam isn't backwards, but there's a number of conservative groups that have been allowed to dominate regions and made it their missions to kill anyone they think deviates from their very strict conservative concepts. New conservative movements keep being created throughout the history of Islam because Muslims keep evolving as a culture and Islam as a religion. Those conservative movements are direct responses to specific innovations, ages of enlightenment, and advances in learning and science from within the community. This has been a recurrent theme in the islamic world as it has been in the christian world. Westerners don't have to demand modernity, Muslims keep demanding it themselves.
dw.com: Germany likely to pull troops out of Incirlik air base
And yet it still seems that the Islamic world is behind in terms of modernity?
At least partially due to being the playground for foreign world powers like the british empire and so on, I would say.
Also, the Mongols destroying Baghdad and completely fucking up Iraq's irrigation system set the reactionary forces in a way that we are still feeling today.
Not sure how reputable this website is, so take with as much salt as you would with other unknown sources.
Yeah, the Mongols going full ape-shit on the Abbasid caliphate pretty much single handedly shut down the Islamic Golden Age in the Middle East and North Africa, and issued in a nearly 600 year dark age (comparatively speaking, after the intellectual trajectory of Islam from 700-1250) for any Muslims that weren't directly under the Mamluks or Ottoman/Osmanian Turks. And even the Turks didn't really modernize much at all from the capture of Constantinople in 1453 till the late 19th century, when western European powers kinda forced it to by introducing railroads and heavy industry.
~ Buckaroo Banzai
Critical Failures - Havenhold Campaign • August St. Cloud (Human Ranger)
You do know that in terms of metallurgy (mining, smelting, etc), mechanical design and architecture (buildings, bridges, roads) the Ottoman empire remained on par with the European states for almost the entirety of its existence?
The Ottoman empires main problem was most likely in their inability to root out the corruption in the administration (or to make it work for them). The internal intrigue between the sultan, the various beys and the internal court politics crippled the empire. Especially the frequent wars of succession. For its entire history the Ottoman empire never managed to make the transition from one sultan to the next a painless experience.
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
almost certainly not
The Ottomans kept up in some ways, but fell behind in others. Scientific advances, industrialization, their navy, all were very lacking compared to European powers. I agree with you about infighting being a major cause of this; the empire was never held together particularly well.
Turns out having dozens of wives with a dozen kids each is a succession shit show, who knew?!
Yeah, poor framing/phrasing on my part. They were able to remain apace in technology and science somewhat, but they stagnated politically and by the time of the rise of the Prussian Reich and the build up to WWI they were as out of fashion and backward as the Estates General was in 1789.
And the break-up of the Ottoman states in the Treaty of Versailles and the San Remo conference and the mishandling of the various mandates by France and Britain certainly didn't set the stage for Middle Eastern nationalism to get a very good start in the 20th century. Most states in the area have been playing various forms of political and social catch-up since they were individually granted their independence over time from Iraq and Saudi Arabia in 1932 to Oman and the UAE in 1970 and 71 repsectively.
~ Buckaroo Banzai
Actually that's generally a myth. Most Sultans were very careful about who they had kids with and generally only had a few consorts/wives with whom they had sex. Normally they had no more than 3-5 sons who grew to adulthood (which is a sensible practice given child mortality).
The myth of Ottoman decadence was spread by the rumormill, western orientalism and the very few exceptions to the norm.
In fact, before the 19th century I can only name two sultans who had more than a very small number of possible successors:
Ibrahim Sultan, aka Ibrahim the Mad, who was used as a political tool by his mother and kept distracted by the harem.
Ahmed III. Financial and administrative genius but also an eccentric who had a notorious appetite for women and luxury.
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
But quality government and administration are aspects of socio-technological development too. In fact, it's arguably the core benefit of Western liberal democracy, that the stability generated by the combination of democratic representation and non-partisan civil service enables scientific progress, and then capitalism drives its propagation to deliver benefit to the masses.
Clash of Civilizations is a dangerously reductionist view, given that you see varying levels of success within each civilization, and that conflict and warfare are primarily built on *political* realism (realism in a foreign policy sense is impractical, because it assumes unified state actors who conduct their foreign policy purely in regards to other states, which is sometimes the case but the more reliable indicator is to follow ascendant political factions and see what they stand to gain from their foreign policy moves). The Muslim Turks teamed up with the Germans in World War I, while explicitly caucasian-chauvinist Germany teamed up with explicitly asian-chauvinist Japan in World War II because it suited the needs of the leadership factions: not set by ideology and culture and not a purely rational move (the rational move for Japan would've been to maintain their alliance with the British), but done because the forces of domestic politics mandated it.
So it is with the Muslim World. The Jihadists wage war with the west because it helps them gain standing at home, which is their more immediate goal. Bin Laden's audience for 9/11 was not the millions of Americans glued to their TV sets, but to al-Saud.
Have you read the book? I'll only go so far in defending it, but the author goes over examples like yours right at the start.
I'm going to disagee with you on the bin Laden bit as well. He explicitly stated in speeches that his goal was to lure the US into a quagmire in the Middle East, which would sap its strength just as it had the Soviet's. Of course he wanted to mobilize muslims in the Middle East; but he also wanted to mobilize the US and the West.
But today, the US decided to escalate, and launched air strikes on pro-government forces advancing toward rebel positions at the border with Jordan, destroying government tanks and causing casualties. This is probably the most direct US/Syrian government confrontation yet, as it was meant to save a rebel faction and prevent the government from expanding its territory. This does not seem like a symbolic/deterrent/one-off attack, as the missile strike on the Syrian air base was frequently depicted.
You sure about that, officials?
Because if that's the policy, I'd say that implies much deeper involvement than we've seen so far. Is the US really declaring that Syria can't reclaim its border with Iraq?
Russia, Iran, Syria, and probably Iraq itself aren't gonna like this one, I think.
edit - I'm of the opinion that this attack is much less defensible than the last one. "US launches missiles at Syrian Air Base after government forces launch chemical attack." Ok, I still don't think it was a good thing, but on its face I can see why some would regard it as justifiable. "US bombs Syrian government forces attempting to reclaim control of border from US-armed rebel proxies." This one... less so.
http://mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKCN18F2D5
The burkan-1 system was used last October to successfully hit King Fahd airbase, ~500km from the border. Unless my geography is off, getting within 200km of Riyahd suggests the system's range is much further. (Or the Saudis didn't actually intercept it, since that would put it around the range of a SCUD D, per wikipedia)
The timing is interesting. Curious if they'll try again while Trump is there.
The little bas... *grits teeth*.... Trump must be loving the attention. It will feed right into his ego.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-gets-elaborate-welcome-in-saudi-arabia-embarking-on-first-foreign-trip/2017/05/20/679f2766-3d1d-11e7-a058-ddbb23c75d82_story.html
Can't say the Saudi's don't understand exactly how to manipulate him.
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
"A medal!? Oooh, is it shiny?" - Trash-It Trump
Oh no.
Written by Stephen Miller, author of the Muslim ban
Michael Beschloss is a Presidential Historian according to his Twitter bio, but seriously look at that fucking picture.
He says it is retribution for his political views; Kanter has been an outspoken critic of the Erdogan regime.
US State Department intervened and he's in London now.
http://deadspin.com/enes-kanter-detained-in-romania-says-passport-has-been-1795398366
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
In one sentence he says we must oppose "Islamic extremism, the Islamists, and Islamic terror of all kinds." It's among the most awkward things I've seen.
Today he truly became president!
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.