@hippofant please edit any 2016 things out of your posts. I’m know I’m both a mod and I’m taking part of this conversation, but are you unfamiliar with the rules regarding this or did you just decide they didn’t apply to you?
Message me back or an admin if you’re confused about this.
That unplanned wars and unplanned exits are both bad seems like something that's said just to be said now, that people are concerned about the unplanned pullout. Because I remember the haphazard building up of US troops in Syria, and that seemed to a pretty niche topic (that pulled a decent amount of defenders for war). Pulling out, though, that's something I'm reading about in places that I've seen mention the past years of no plans in Syria about 0 to -20 times. That an unplanned war has resulted in an unplanned and haphazard withdrawal has produced, in days, more conversation that I've seen about the war itself in years. It's really something.
This seems like a pretty dumb and disingenuous equivocation. The US's Syrian intervention was extensively planned. It just didn't involve you or me, because, for whatever reason, it was done almost entirely behind closed doors.* It wasn't as if the very first day that shit went down in Syria, Obama was sending troops over. It wasn't until Sept 2014 that the US openly intervened in the then-three-year-old conflict, after various CIA efforts failed, and since that time, the US's involvement there has been ever-evolving. There have been plans. They just weren't plans to your liking.
That's distinctly different than Trump decided to withdraw in a FIVE MINUTE PHONE CONVERSATION WITH ERDOGAN.
* It's almost as though the US public and Congress have entirely checked out with disinterest after 17+ years in Afghanistan and 15+ years in Iraq.
Oh, it’s planned? Give me the plan to get out. I’d love to hear it.
Unless the goal was to send troops in for perpetual warfare, and in that case pretending to have an achievable plan is really unnecessary. Send troops in, keep them stationed forever, state that your goals are always changing. Is that the plan.
You're moving the goalposts.
A plan you don't like isn't the same thing as no plan. That was my exact criticism in the first place. Banging on that particular drum again in response isn't a response at all.
I don’t consider a plan to that doesn’t have a clear and achievable exit strategy to be worthy of the name. This is how I always defined the term when it comes to war, I’m pretty sure even previously in this forum, and that’s entirely reasonable and defensible.
Obviously we have a difference of opinion, whether or not a plan to have a war forever is a plan or not, but I’m not really shifting the definition I use or the “goalposts.”
That unplanned wars and unplanned exits are both bad seems like something that's said just to be said now, that people are concerned about the unplanned pullout. Because I remember the haphazard building up of US troops in Syria, and that seemed to a pretty niche topic (that pulled a decent amount of defenders for war). Pulling out, though, that's something I'm reading about in places that I've seen mention the past years of no plans in Syria about 0 to -20 times. That an unplanned war has resulted in an unplanned and haphazard withdrawal has produced, in days, more conversation that I've seen about the war itself in years. It's really something.
This seems like a pretty dumb and disingenuous equivocation. The US's Syrian intervention was extensively planned. It just didn't involve you or me, because, for whatever reason, it was done almost entirely behind closed doors.* It wasn't as if the very first day that shit went down in Syria, Obama was sending troops over. It wasn't until Sept 2014 that the US openly intervened in the then-three-year-old conflict, after various CIA efforts failed, and since that time, the US's involvement there has been ever-evolving. There have been plans. They just weren't plans to your liking.
That's distinctly different than Trump decided to withdraw in a FIVE MINUTE PHONE CONVERSATION WITH ERDOGAN.
* It's almost as though the US public and Congress have entirely checked out with disinterest after 17+ years in Afghanistan and 15+ years in Iraq.
Oh, it’s planned? Give me the plan to get out. I’d love to hear it.
Unless the goal was to send troops in for perpetual warfare, and in that case pretending to have an achievable plan is really unnecessary. Send troops in, keep them stationed forever, state that your goals are always changing. Is that the plan.
You're moving the goalposts.
A plan you don't like isn't the same thing as no plan. That was my exact criticism in the first place. Banging on that particular drum again in response isn't a response at all.
I don’t consider a plan to that doesn’t have a clear and achievable exit strategy to be worthy of the name. This is how I always defined the term when it comes to war, I’m pretty sure even previously in this forum, and that’s entirely reasonable and defensible.
Obviously we have a difference of opinion, whether or not a plan to have a war forever is a plan or not, but I’m not really shifting the definition I use or the “goalposts.”
If two days ago, you had said the US intervention in Syria had no plan, I'd have been completely fine with that in a colloquial manner. Except now you're putting that next to a situation in which there very literally is no plan, and that's just deceptive.
Sometimes I get students who come in to do group presentations, and they've clearly just divided the presentation into parts then just stapled it back together, and I'll critique these students as being unprepared. And then I get students who come in who literally have nothing prepared. There is a difference between the two, and once I say the latter group is "unprepared," I cannot also say that the first group is "unprepared" in the same way. One of those groups will probably pass. The other group will fail. There is a difference between them.
In this new context of December 21, 2018, saying/implying that the two are both similarly unplanned is fallacious. Lumping together a decision made by President Trump by himself in 5 minutes with a decision that was debated by national security and foreign policy people in and around the Obama administration for multiple years under the same word "unplanned" is not a reasonable thing to do. Obama did not decide to go into Syria in a 5-minute conversation with... whoever. That distinction is key to why there is so much consternation in the first place; if you ignore the distinction, then yeah, you're not going to understand the consternation.
There's another point, given that the "process" means having the entire NatSec apparatus blocking any attempt to stop the eternal war, why should anybody care?
Borrowing some words from this thread, letting Bin Salman and Bibi deal with protecting the Kurds (and let's be honest, fight the proxy war) is a plan, even if is a plan that you don't like.
EDIT : Also is funny how dumping troops on the most volatile spot of the Middle East isn't reckless.
It could also be that modern warfare is so complicated that it's actually an unworkable foreign policy. Like, it doesn't matter how much you plan, you're going to fail
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
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FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
He was making that shit up as he went along! That isn't a fucking plan!
There's another point, given that the "process" means having the entire NatSec apparatus blocking any attempt to stop the eternal war, why should anybody care?
Borrowing some words from this thread, letting Bin Salman and Bibi deal with protecting the Kurds (and let's be honest, fight the proxy war) is a plan, even if is a plan that you don't like.
EDIT : Also is funny how dumping troops on the most volatile spot of the Middle East isn't reckless.
Except that is only a plan in your imagination. It is a plan some of us here in this thread fanwanked up out of nothing, has no basis in reality, and will have no actual effect on reality.
Like, are you anti-colonialist types this desperate that you'll latch on to anybody in power who even remotely hints at agreeing with your positions, even if only by coincidence or, worse, camouflaged maliciousness? Trump's not withdrawing from Syria because he's anti-colonialist. He's withdrawing because Erdogan wants to invade. How is there less colonialism and imperialism here?! Is not withdrawing from a colonized region as soon as shit gets tough and leaving the natives to deal with whatever the repercussions are exactly one of the major moral failings of colonialism? Is not trading remote territories back and forth for favours precisely one of the major characteristics of an imperialist world?
Trump is colonialist as fuck! He views other countries and people as nothing but chits to be bandied about to enrich the United States (and himself). That this particular bandying happens to coincidentally, superficially align with your anti-colonialist preference to not be in the Middle East at all doesn't make this anti-colonialist. This isn't a victory for the good guys! It just turns out that Emperor Palpatine happens to agree with you, which really should make you question whether your position, not throw in on the Emperor Palpatine bandwagon!
Edit: Also, is funny how people think that criticizing one "side" means agreeing with the other "side." There's more than enough criticism to go around. But the errors of the past are sunk costs. Making another error now that is the opposite of an error in the past isn't righting a historic wrong. It's just making another error.
That unplanned wars and unplanned exits are both bad seems like something that's said just to be said now, that people are concerned about the unplanned pullout. Because I remember the haphazard building up of US troops in Syria, and that seemed to a pretty niche topic (that pulled a decent amount of defenders for war). Pulling out, though, that's something I'm reading about in places that I've seen mention the past years of no plans in Syria about 0 to -20 times. That an unplanned war has resulted in an unplanned and haphazard withdrawal has produced, in days, more conversation that I've seen about the war itself in years. It's really something.
This seems like a pretty dumb and disingenuous equivocation. The US's Syrian intervention was extensively planned. It just didn't involve you or me, because, for whatever reason, it was done almost entirely behind closed doors.* It wasn't as if the very first day that shit went down in Syria, Obama was sending troops over. It wasn't until Sept 2014 that the US openly intervened in the then-three-year-old conflict, after various CIA efforts failed, and since that time, the US's involvement there has been ever-evolving. There have been plans. They just weren't plans to your liking.
That's distinctly different than Trump decided to withdraw in a FIVE MINUTE PHONE CONVERSATION WITH ERDOGAN.
* It's almost as though the US public and Congress have entirely checked out with disinterest after 17+ years in Afghanistan and 15+ years in Iraq.
Oh, it’s planned? Give me the plan to get out. I’d love to hear it.
Unless the goal was to send troops in for perpetual warfare, and in that case pretending to have an achievable plan is really unnecessary. Send troops in, keep them stationed forever, state that your goals are always changing. Is that the plan.
You're moving the goalposts.
A plan you don't like isn't the same thing as no plan. That was my exact criticism in the first place. Banging on that particular drum again in response isn't a response at all.
I don’t consider a plan to that doesn’t have a clear and achievable exit strategy to be worthy of the name. This is how I always defined the term when it comes to war, I’m pretty sure even previously in this forum, and that’s entirely reasonable and defensible.
Obviously we have a difference of opinion, whether or not a plan to have a war forever is a plan or not, but I’m not really shifting the definition I use or the “goalposts.”
If two days ago, you had said the US intervention in Syria had no plan, I'd have been completely fine with that in a colloquial manner. Except now you're putting that next to a situation in which there very literally is no plan, and that's just deceptive.
Sometimes I get students who come in to do group presentations, and they've clearly just divided the presentation into parts then just stapled it back together, and I'll critique these students as being unprepared. And then I get students who come in who literally have nothing prepared. There is a difference between the two, and once I say the latter group is "unprepared," I cannot also say that the first group is "unprepared" in the same way. One of those groups will probably pass. The other group will fail. There is a difference between them.
In this new context of December 21, 2018, saying/implying that the two are both similarly unplanned is fallacious. Lumping together a decision made by President Trump by himself in 5 minutes with a decision that was debated by national security and foreign policy people in and around the Obama administration for multiple years under the same word "unplanned" is not a reasonable thing to do.
Fair enough, about the difference in degree of unplanning going on, but I don't think the hardon for having a planned foreign policy is the source of remarkable backlash. Nor is humanitarian concerns for our dear friends, the Kurds, who are being defended by brave troops risking their lives to save them. The idea that Americans would react this strongly out of concern for the lives of some people in the middle east is laughable, so why pretend.
The reaction is mostly understandable because people are invested in the renewed new US-Russia cold-war, and in that the reaction makes sense. Syria, less as a place where people live and Americans are somehow concerned about them, and more as a battleground between nations is why there's a reaction to a potential pullout, but not so much when it starts. Send a bunch of of weapons to Syria, and along with your allies become of the primary arms suppliers in a nasty civil war? No one is going to seriously care, the only negative consequence that came of this is that a bunch of people died and that's not something to get up in arms about. But leaving Syria affects something that people are emotionally invested in, which is ceding space to Russia.
That's it. Some Americans (apparently not Trump) consider the Syria their place to do battle with Russia, and Russians are wedded to winning their war there to an even more fanatical degree.
In this new context of December 21, 2018, saying/implying that the two are both similarly unplanned is fallacious. Lumping together a decision made by President Trump by himself in 5 minutes with a decision that was debated by national security and foreign policy people in and around the Obama administration for multiple years under the same word "unplanned" is not a reasonable thing to do. Obama did not decide to go into Syria in a 5-minute conversation with... whoever. That distinction is key to why there is so much consternation in the first place; if you ignore the distinction, then yeah, you're not going to understand the consternation.
I'm with Elki on this one. I understand your distinction between unplanned and really-unplanned-knee-jerk, but I think the broader argument is the more interesting part.
Syria, and Afghanistan even moreso, clearly lack a coherent strategy behind them. Obama put more thought into his actions than Trump seems to, but so what? The ostensible reason for being in Syria (which includes constructing bases in the country) is to defeat ISIS, which of obviously absurd. And in Afghanistan the US is defeating the Taliban, supposedly.
Ekli's point was that the clear lack of coherent strategy barely gets brought up in media or anywhere else. When reports emerged the US was stationing troops in Syria semi-permanently, you'd think there would have been a firestorm of talk and criticism: why is the US building bases in a famously complicated warzone? On what conditions will they withdraw? What happens to the Kurds? What if the US gets sucked into yet another quagmire? And so on.
These were issues that desperately needed to be discussed, all the more so because it didn't seem like the US government had thought it out. Instead they got a pass, under Obama as well as Trump. Trump pulling out with zero notice is a scandal. The US being there in the first place, on a secret basis, should have also been a scandal, even if it involved a tad more thought put into it.
That unplanned wars and unplanned exits are both bad seems like something that's said just to be said now, that people are concerned about the unplanned pullout. Because I remember the haphazard building up of US troops in Syria, and that seemed to a pretty niche topic (that pulled a decent amount of defenders for war). Pulling out, though, that's something I'm reading about in places that I've seen mention the past years of no plans in Syria about 0 to -20 times. That an unplanned war has resulted in an unplanned and haphazard withdrawal has produced, in days, more conversation that I've seen about the war itself in years. It's really something.
This seems like a pretty dumb and disingenuous equivocation. The US's Syrian intervention was extensively planned. It just didn't involve you or me, because, for whatever reason, it was done almost entirely behind closed doors.* It wasn't as if the very first day that shit went down in Syria, Obama was sending troops over. It wasn't until Sept 2014 that the US openly intervened in the then-three-year-old conflict, after various CIA efforts failed, and since that time, the US's involvement there has been ever-evolving. There have been plans. They just weren't plans to your liking.
That's distinctly different than Trump decided to withdraw in a FIVE MINUTE PHONE CONVERSATION WITH ERDOGAN.
* It's almost as though the US public and Congress have entirely checked out with disinterest after 17+ years in Afghanistan and 15+ years in Iraq.
Oh, it’s planned? Give me the plan to get out. I’d love to hear it.
Unless the goal was to send troops in for perpetual warfare, and in that case pretending to have an achievable plan is really unnecessary. Send troops in, keep them stationed forever, state that your goals are always changing. Is that the plan.
You're moving the goalposts.
A plan you don't like isn't the same thing as no plan. That was my exact criticism in the first place. Banging on that particular drum again in response isn't a response at all.
I don’t consider a plan to that doesn’t have a clear and achievable exit strategy to be worthy of the name. This is how I always defined the term when it comes to war, I’m pretty sure even previously in this forum, and that’s entirely reasonable and defensible.
Obviously we have a difference of opinion, whether or not a plan to have a war forever is a plan or not, but I’m not really shifting the definition I use or the “goalposts.”
If two days ago, you had said the US intervention in Syria had no plan, I'd have been completely fine with that in a colloquial manner. Except now you're putting that next to a situation in which there very literally is no plan, and that's just deceptive.
Sometimes I get students who come in to do group presentations, and they've clearly just divided the presentation into parts then just stapled it back together, and I'll critique these students as being unprepared. And then I get students who come in who literally have nothing prepared. There is a difference between the two, and once I say the latter group is "unprepared," I cannot also say that the first group is "unprepared" in the same way. One of those groups will probably pass. The other group will fail. There is a difference between them.
In this new context of December 21, 2018, saying/implying that the two are both similarly unplanned is fallacious. Lumping together a decision made by President Trump by himself in 5 minutes with a decision that was debated by national security and foreign policy people in and around the Obama administration for multiple years under the same word "unplanned" is not a reasonable thing to do.
Fair enough, about the difference in degree of unplanning going on, but I don't think the hardon for having a planned foreign policy is the source of remarkable backlash. Nor is humanitarian concerns for our dear friends, the Kurds, who are being defended by brave troops risking their lives to save them. The idea that Americans would react this strongly out of concern for the lives of some people in the middle east is laughable, so why pretend.
IMO, this is exactly the feeling and motivation of some Americans who post here, myself included. You might consider those feelings to be shallow and/or hypocritical, but there it is.
(And no, I don't have another, better plan. I'm genuinely upset that we're apparently about to fuck over another bunch of people counting on American support on a fucking whim of Trump's, though. Again.)
Commander Zoom on
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FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
One of the reasons it is so hard to leave is because we usually need a lot of planning to withdraw without negatively affecting the region we occupy.
In short, the whole outrage, besides Lockheed mouthpieces speaking off, is all about sending soldiers to the Middle East to "not lose against Putin and his orange cockholster". So basically the tone of this criticism:
That unplanned wars and unplanned exits are both bad seems like something that's said just to be said now, that people are concerned about the unplanned pullout. Because I remember the haphazard building up of US troops in Syria, and that seemed to a pretty niche topic (that pulled a decent amount of defenders for war). Pulling out, though, that's something I'm reading about in places that I've seen mention the past years of no plans in Syria about 0 to -20 times. That an unplanned war has resulted in an unplanned and haphazard withdrawal has produced, in days, more conversation that I've seen about the war itself in years. It's really something.
This seems like a pretty dumb and disingenuous equivocation. The US's Syrian intervention was extensively planned. It just didn't involve you or me, because, for whatever reason, it was done almost entirely behind closed doors.* It wasn't as if the very first day that shit went down in Syria, Obama was sending troops over. It wasn't until Sept 2014 that the US openly intervened in the then-three-year-old conflict, after various CIA efforts failed, and since that time, the US's involvement there has been ever-evolving. There have been plans. They just weren't plans to your liking.
That's distinctly different than Trump decided to withdraw in a FIVE MINUTE PHONE CONVERSATION WITH ERDOGAN.
* It's almost as though the US public and Congress have entirely checked out with disinterest after 17+ years in Afghanistan and 15+ years in Iraq.
Oh, it’s planned? Give me the plan to get out. I’d love to hear it.
Unless the goal was to send troops in for perpetual warfare, and in that case pretending to have an achievable plan is really unnecessary. Send troops in, keep them stationed forever, state that your goals are always changing. Is that the plan.
You're moving the goalposts.
A plan you don't like isn't the same thing as no plan. That was my exact criticism in the first place. Banging on that particular drum again in response isn't a response at all.
I don’t consider a plan to that doesn’t have a clear and achievable exit strategy to be worthy of the name. This is how I always defined the term when it comes to war, I’m pretty sure even previously in this forum, and that’s entirely reasonable and defensible.
Obviously we have a difference of opinion, whether or not a plan to have a war forever is a plan or not, but I’m not really shifting the definition I use or the “goalposts.”
If two days ago, you had said the US intervention in Syria had no plan, I'd have been completely fine with that in a colloquial manner. Except now you're putting that next to a situation in which there very literally is no plan, and that's just deceptive.
Sometimes I get students who come in to do group presentations, and they've clearly just divided the presentation into parts then just stapled it back together, and I'll critique these students as being unprepared. And then I get students who come in who literally have nothing prepared. There is a difference between the two, and once I say the latter group is "unprepared," I cannot also say that the first group is "unprepared" in the same way. One of those groups will probably pass. The other group will fail. There is a difference between them.
In this new context of December 21, 2018, saying/implying that the two are both similarly unplanned is fallacious. Lumping together a decision made by President Trump by himself in 5 minutes with a decision that was debated by national security and foreign policy people in and around the Obama administration for multiple years under the same word "unplanned" is not a reasonable thing to do.
Fair enough, about the difference in degree of unplanning going on, but I don't think the hardon for having a planned foreign policy is the source of remarkable backlash. Nor is humanitarian concerns for our dear friends, the Kurds, who are being defended by brave troops risking their lives to save them. The idea that Americans would react this strongly out of concern for the lives of some people in the middle east is laughable, so why pretend.
The reaction is mostly understandable because people are invested in the renewed new US-Russia cold-war, and in that the reaction makes sense. Syria, less as a place where people live and Americans are somehow concerned about them, and more as a battleground between nations is why there's a reaction to a potential pullout, but not so much when it starts. Send a bunch of of weapons to Syria, and along with your allies become of the primary arms suppliers in a nasty civil war? No one is going to seriously care, the only negative consequence that came of this is that a bunch of people died and that's not something to get up in arms about. But leaving Syria affects something that people are emotionally invested in, which is ceding space to Russia.
That's it. Some Americans (apparently not Trump) consider the Syria their place to do battle with Russia, and Russians are wedded to winning their war there to an even more fanatical degree.
This seems to be reaching past the more obvious answer: people are against it because Trump is doing it and they don't trust Trump.
That unplanned wars and unplanned exits are both bad seems like something that's said just to be said now, that people are concerned about the unplanned pullout. Because I remember the haphazard building up of US troops in Syria, and that seemed to a pretty niche topic (that pulled a decent amount of defenders for war). Pulling out, though, that's something I'm reading about in places that I've seen mention the past years of no plans in Syria about 0 to -20 times. That an unplanned war has resulted in an unplanned and haphazard withdrawal has produced, in days, more conversation that I've seen about the war itself in years. It's really something.
This seems like a pretty dumb and disingenuous equivocation. The US's Syrian intervention was extensively planned. It just didn't involve you or me, because, for whatever reason, it was done almost entirely behind closed doors.* It wasn't as if the very first day that shit went down in Syria, Obama was sending troops over. It wasn't until Sept 2014 that the US openly intervened in the then-three-year-old conflict, after various CIA efforts failed, and since that time, the US's involvement there has been ever-evolving. There have been plans. They just weren't plans to your liking.
That's distinctly different than Trump decided to withdraw in a FIVE MINUTE PHONE CONVERSATION WITH ERDOGAN.
* It's almost as though the US public and Congress have entirely checked out with disinterest after 17+ years in Afghanistan and 15+ years in Iraq.
Oh, it’s planned? Give me the plan to get out. I’d love to hear it.
Unless the goal was to send troops in for perpetual warfare, and in that case pretending to have an achievable plan is really unnecessary. Send troops in, keep them stationed forever, state that your goals are always changing. Is that the plan.
You're moving the goalposts.
A plan you don't like isn't the same thing as no plan. That was my exact criticism in the first place. Banging on that particular drum again in response isn't a response at all.
I don’t consider a plan to that doesn’t have a clear and achievable exit strategy to be worthy of the name. This is how I always defined the term when it comes to war, I’m pretty sure even previously in this forum, and that’s entirely reasonable and defensible.
Obviously we have a difference of opinion, whether or not a plan to have a war forever is a plan or not, but I’m not really shifting the definition I use or the “goalposts.”
If two days ago, you had said the US intervention in Syria had no plan, I'd have been completely fine with that in a colloquial manner. Except now you're putting that next to a situation in which there very literally is no plan, and that's just deceptive.
Sometimes I get students who come in to do group presentations, and they've clearly just divided the presentation into parts then just stapled it back together, and I'll critique these students as being unprepared. And then I get students who come in who literally have nothing prepared. There is a difference between the two, and once I say the latter group is "unprepared," I cannot also say that the first group is "unprepared" in the same way. One of those groups will probably pass. The other group will fail. There is a difference between them.
In this new context of December 21, 2018, saying/implying that the two are both similarly unplanned is fallacious. Lumping together a decision made by President Trump by himself in 5 minutes with a decision that was debated by national security and foreign policy people in and around the Obama administration for multiple years under the same word "unplanned" is not a reasonable thing to do.
Fair enough, about the difference in degree of unplanning going on, but I don't think the hardon for having a planned foreign policy is the source of remarkable backlash. Nor is humanitarian concerns for our dear friends, the Kurds, who are being defended by brave troops risking their lives to save them. The idea that Americans would react this strongly out of concern for the lives of some people in the middle east is laughable, so why pretend.
The reaction is mostly understandable because people are invested in the renewed new US-Russia cold-war, and in that the reaction makes sense. Syria, less as a place where people live and Americans are somehow concerned about them, and more as a battleground between nations is why there's a reaction to a potential pullout, but not so much when it starts. Send a bunch of of weapons to Syria, and along with your allies become of the primary arms suppliers in a nasty civil war? No one is going to seriously care, the only negative consequence that came of this is that a bunch of people died and that's not something to get up in arms about. But leaving Syria affects something that people are emotionally invested in, which is ceding space to Russia.
That's it. Some Americans (apparently not Trump) consider the Syria their place to do battle with Russia, and Russians are wedded to winning their war there to an even more fanatical degree.
This seems to be reaching past the more obvious answer: people are against it because Trump is doing it and they don't trust Trump.
Sure, that's the other one.
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FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
You seem to assume that because people don't want to leave in this manner, they want to be there in the first place and stay
My feeling is there was never a good option in Syria beyond accepting refugees.
The most important thing about the withdrawal is it's another piece of evidence for the Mueller thread. And that Mattis will stand for all sorts of other fucked up things, but not this, confirming my opinion of that man.
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
Wether you agree we should leave Syria or not, Trump’s “plan” is asinine. A fucking week?
It’s like having a leg amputated. Want it or not, once it’s decided to remove it, you have to decide how it’s gonna get done.
One way involves time and preparation. You get to the hospital, have a surgery team, and try to make the process as painless with as little damage as possible.
Trump’s way is to go into the kitchen, grab a cleaver, and start whacking away.
It’s not gonna turn out how you hope.
Battlenet ID: MildC#11186 - If I'm in the game, send me an invite at anytime and I'll play.
That unplanned wars and unplanned exits are both bad seems like something that's said just to be said now, that people are concerned about the unplanned pullout. Because I remember the haphazard building up of US troops in Syria, and that seemed to a pretty niche topic (that pulled a decent amount of defenders for war). Pulling out, though, that's something I'm reading about in places that I've seen mention the past years of no plans in Syria about 0 to -20 times. That an unplanned war has resulted in an unplanned and haphazard withdrawal has produced, in days, more conversation that I've seen about the war itself in years. It's really something.
This seems like a pretty dumb and disingenuous equivocation. The US's Syrian intervention was extensively planned. It just didn't involve you or me, because, for whatever reason, it was done almost entirely behind closed doors.* It wasn't as if the very first day that shit went down in Syria, Obama was sending troops over. It wasn't until Sept 2014 that the US openly intervened in the then-three-year-old conflict, after various CIA efforts failed, and since that time, the US's involvement there has been ever-evolving. There have been plans. They just weren't plans to your liking.
That's distinctly different than Trump decided to withdraw in a FIVE MINUTE PHONE CONVERSATION WITH ERDOGAN.
* It's almost as though the US public and Congress have entirely checked out with disinterest after 17+ years in Afghanistan and 15+ years in Iraq.
Oh, it’s planned? Give me the plan to get out. I’d love to hear it.
Unless the goal was to send troops in for perpetual warfare, and in that case pretending to have an achievable plan is really unnecessary. Send troops in, keep them stationed forever, state that your goals are always changing. Is that the plan.
You're moving the goalposts.
A plan you don't like isn't the same thing as no plan. That was my exact criticism in the first place. Banging on that particular drum again in response isn't a response at all.
I don’t consider a plan to that doesn’t have a clear and achievable exit strategy to be worthy of the name. This is how I always defined the term when it comes to war, I’m pretty sure even previously in this forum, and that’s entirely reasonable and defensible.
Obviously we have a difference of opinion, whether or not a plan to have a war forever is a plan or not, but I’m not really shifting the definition I use or the “goalposts.”
If two days ago, you had said the US intervention in Syria had no plan, I'd have been completely fine with that in a colloquial manner. Except now you're putting that next to a situation in which there very literally is no plan, and that's just deceptive.
Sometimes I get students who come in to do group presentations, and they've clearly just divided the presentation into parts then just stapled it back together, and I'll critique these students as being unprepared. And then I get students who come in who literally have nothing prepared. There is a difference between the two, and once I say the latter group is "unprepared," I cannot also say that the first group is "unprepared" in the same way. One of those groups will probably pass. The other group will fail. There is a difference between them.
In this new context of December 21, 2018, saying/implying that the two are both similarly unplanned is fallacious. Lumping together a decision made by President Trump by himself in 5 minutes with a decision that was debated by national security and foreign policy people in and around the Obama administration for multiple years under the same word "unplanned" is not a reasonable thing to do.
Fair enough, about the difference in degree of unplanning going on, but I don't think the hardon for having a planned foreign policy is the source of remarkable backlash. Nor is humanitarian concerns for our dear friends, the Kurds, who are being defended by brave troops risking their lives to save them. The idea that Americans would react this strongly out of concern for the lives of some people in the middle east is laughable, so why pretend.
The reaction is mostly understandable because people are invested in the renewed new US-Russia cold-war, and in that the reaction makes sense. Syria, less as a place where people live and Americans are somehow concerned about them, and more as a battleground between nations is why there's a reaction to a potential pullout, but not so much when it starts. Send a bunch of of weapons to Syria, and along with your allies become of the primary arms suppliers in a nasty civil war? No one is going to seriously care, the only negative consequence that came of this is that a bunch of people died and that's not something to get up in arms about. But leaving Syria affects something that people are emotionally invested in, which is ceding space to Russia.
That's it. Some Americans (apparently not Trump) consider the Syria their place to do battle with Russia, and Russians are wedded to winning their war there to an even more fanatical degree.
I'm with Elki on this one. I understand your distinction between unplanned and really-unplanned-knee-jerk, but I think the broader argument is the more interesting part.
Syria, and Afghanistan even moreso, clearly lack a coherent strategy behind them. Obama put more thought into his actions than Trump seems to, but so what? The ostensible reason for being in Syria (which includes constructing bases in the country) is to defeat ISIS, which of obviously absurd. And in Afghanistan the US is defeating the Taliban, supposedly.
Ekli's point was that the clear lack of coherent strategy barely gets brought up in media or anywhere else. When reports emerged the US was stationing troops in Syria semi-permanently, you'd think there would have been a firestorm of talk and criticism: why is the US building bases in a famously complicated warzone? On what conditions will they withdraw? What happens to the Kurds? What if the US gets sucked into yet another quagmire? And so on.
These were issues that desperately needed to be discussed, all the more so because it didn't seem like the US government had thought it out. Instead they got a pass, under Obama as well as Trump. Trump pulling out with zero notice is a scandal. The US being there in the first place, on a secret basis, should have also been a scandal, even if it involved a tad more thought put into it.
e: less combative-sounding language
I cannot really comment on what's going on in the mass media discourse right now, nor what happened there over the past few years. (I'm also about to head out to a holiday shindig, so can't do the research.) In this thread and other foreign-policy-interested communities, I think there was extensive talk about the intervention in Syria, but scattered over a long period of time as there was no "moment" of public debate about it.
But one major part of it that you're leaving out is that Obama intentionally kept the Syrian intervention on the down-low. We weren't even aware of the CIA's arm + fund programs until long after they'd gotten under way, and maybe even not until they failed IIRC. The presence of special forces in Syria were kept a secret for a long time, the DoD denied that there were any American troops in Syria - and I think they still did, technically, until recently - and I think we still don't have a full scope of understanding of what sorts of advanced munitions the US has brought to bear in Syria. By using only special forces, not regular forces, on the ground, and positing the intervention as one against ISIL, thus rolling up the action under the War on Terror AUMF, the Obama administration effectively strangled any public discussion on the intervention strategy at all.
For better or for worse, Obama handled Syria in a way much different than Iraq and Afghanistan. As such, I don't think it's necessarily hypocritical for some people to be having very strong opinions now but not back then. Even if they had had strong opinions back then, there was never a public discourse about US engagement in Syria because of the way the information about it trickled out so slowly over the years.* It's an apples-to-oranges comparison here.
* Actually, the major part of the discourse on Obama's Syrian intervention primarily revolved around how he backed off his "red line" and that the US wasn't going in hard enough. In that respect, the US media discourse has been quite consistent, as it was when Trump lobbed some missiles into Syria too.
---
None of this is to say I support the US intervention in Syria. Just a couple pages back, I was commenting on how there was no exit plan for the intervention. I see it as a fairly intractable situation too, but @Commander Zoom succinctly captures my sentiments on the situation:
IMO, this is exactly the feeling and motivation of some Americans who post here, myself included. You might consider those feelings to be shallow and/or hypocritical, but there it is.
(And no, I don't have another, better plan. I'm genuinely upset that we're apparently about to fuck over another bunch of people counting on American support on a fucking whim of Trump's, though. Again.)
The reason I was musing about what a Kurdish state would be like was because I was considering what the morally correct and "honourable" way for the Americans to treat the Kurds would be. And unfortunately, I don't think that ideal result is actually plausible. But viewing the American presence in Syria as a sunk cost - that is, a decision that was already made, a fact of the reality we are now in - just because I can't find an optimal solution to the situation doesn't make Trump's solution a good one. There may not be any solution that is 100% foolproof to generate 100% acceptable results, but Trump's solution is very far from that, and I can scarcely believe there's nothing better that could have been done, even if it did necessitate a prolonged US presence in what might be Kurdistan.
In short, the whole outrage, besides Lockheed mouthpieces speaking off, is all about sending soldiers to the Middle East to "not lose against Putin and his orange cockholster". So basically the tone of this criticism:
That unplanned wars and unplanned exits are both bad seems like something that's said just to be said now, that people are concerned about the unplanned pullout. Because I remember the haphazard building up of US troops in Syria, and that seemed to a pretty niche topic (that pulled a decent amount of defenders for war). Pulling out, though, that's something I'm reading about in places that I've seen mention the past years of no plans in Syria about 0 to -20 times. That an unplanned war has resulted in an unplanned and haphazard withdrawal has produced, in days, more conversation that I've seen about the war itself in years. It's really something.
This seems like a pretty dumb and disingenuous equivocation. The US's Syrian intervention was extensively planned. It just didn't involve you or me, because, for whatever reason, it was done almost entirely behind closed doors.* It wasn't as if the very first day that shit went down in Syria, Obama was sending troops over. It wasn't until Sept 2014 that the US openly intervened in the then-three-year-old conflict, after various CIA efforts failed, and since that time, the US's involvement there has been ever-evolving. There have been plans. They just weren't plans to your liking.
That's distinctly different than Trump decided to withdraw in a FIVE MINUTE PHONE CONVERSATION WITH ERDOGAN.
* It's almost as though the US public and Congress have entirely checked out with disinterest after 17+ years in Afghanistan and 15+ years in Iraq.
Oh, it’s planned? Give me the plan to get out. I’d love to hear it.
Unless the goal was to send troops in for perpetual warfare, and in that case pretending to have an achievable plan is really unnecessary. Send troops in, keep them stationed forever, state that your goals are always changing. Is that the plan.
You're moving the goalposts.
A plan you don't like isn't the same thing as no plan. That was my exact criticism in the first place. Banging on that particular drum again in response isn't a response at all.
I don’t consider a plan to that doesn’t have a clear and achievable exit strategy to be worthy of the name. This is how I always defined the term when it comes to war, I’m pretty sure even previously in this forum, and that’s entirely reasonable and defensible.
Obviously we have a difference of opinion, whether or not a plan to have a war forever is a plan or not, but I’m not really shifting the definition I use or the “goalposts.”
If two days ago, you had said the US intervention in Syria had no plan, I'd have been completely fine with that in a colloquial manner. Except now you're putting that next to a situation in which there very literally is no plan, and that's just deceptive.
Sometimes I get students who come in to do group presentations, and they've clearly just divided the presentation into parts then just stapled it back together, and I'll critique these students as being unprepared. And then I get students who come in who literally have nothing prepared. There is a difference between the two, and once I say the latter group is "unprepared," I cannot also say that the first group is "unprepared" in the same way. One of those groups will probably pass. The other group will fail. There is a difference between them.
In this new context of December 21, 2018, saying/implying that the two are both similarly unplanned is fallacious. Lumping together a decision made by President Trump by himself in 5 minutes with a decision that was debated by national security and foreign policy people in and around the Obama administration for multiple years under the same word "unplanned" is not a reasonable thing to do.
Fair enough, about the difference in degree of unplanning going on, but I don't think the hardon for having a planned foreign policy is the source of remarkable backlash. Nor is humanitarian concerns for our dear friends, the Kurds, who are being defended by brave troops risking their lives to save them. The idea that Americans would react this strongly out of concern for the lives of some people in the middle east is laughable, so why pretend.
IMO, this is exactly the feeling and motivation of some Americans who post here, myself included. You might consider those feelings to be shallow and/or hypocritical, but there it is.
(And no, I don't have another, better plan. I'm genuinely upset that we're apparently about to fuck over another bunch of people counting on American support on a fucking whim of Trump's, though. Again.)
Well if somehow a metric fuckton of manpads and ATGM mysteriously ended up in Kurdish hands I would feel a bit better about the situation.
You know those wacky logistics guys. Always messing up the shipping labels.
What should have happened is that the US troops stayed in place until a real peace settlement between everyone in Syria was agreed upon, with UN international peace keepers being stationed in the Kurdish and formerly ISIS held areas to prevent ethnic and religious cleansing like what is going on in Iraq now.
The peace Trump creates is not a real peace, it is the bad peace that leads to renewed conflict. I'm deeply suspicious of US international interventions, but I also recognize that the US is the pillar of global stability at the moment. There are dozens of world shattering conflicts that could break out without the weight of the US military on the one side of the scale, and that weight gets taken off the scale bit by bit by things like this.
My perception is that Obama acted with the hope that US action would spur European and other international support to follow, both in Libya and Syria, and that he was consistently disappointed when it did not.
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!".
So bear in mind this is just kind of a passing glance view of the situation:
The entire thing is a goddamn clusterfuck where ultimately I don't think the US ever even really knew what the fuck it wanted out of the war outside of "please god, don't destabilize further, and don't let ISIS get a foothold" and it's efforts have done little to really actually stabilize a country who has, for all intents and purposes, seen its cities turned into an apocalyptic hellscape thanks to a brutal and unrestrained war while it's citizenry are left homeless, injured, maimed and dead through all varieties of weaponized atrocity.
Ultimately we did little to make things better, because we never really cared too much about making things better in a meaningful way because doing so would risk broader war between the US and Russia thanks to Assad's alliance with Putin and now in pulling out we are doing so in the most half-assed and reckless way possible that will insure that our time spent in Syria has essentially been a "Why did you even fucking bother"-level clusterfuck.
I feel like we’ve forgotten or are ignoring that some pretty horrendous shit was going down.
Assad was using nerve gas on people and ISIS were putting people into cages and setting them on fire. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Obviously things could have been done better in Syria, but it wasn’t without purpose.
Bill Clinton not intervening in the Rwanda genocide hasn’t exactly been forgotten. It’s always gonna be a lose/lose in these situations. Ignore massacres and genocides or intervention, it always comes down to the lesser of two evils, cause people are gonna die no matter what you do.
Mild Confusion on
Battlenet ID: MildC#11186 - If I'm in the game, send me an invite at anytime and I'll play.
What should have happened is that the US troops stayed in place until a real peace settlement between everyone in Syria was agreed upon, with UN international peace keepers being stationed in the Kurdish and formerly ISIS held areas to prevent ethnic and religious cleansing like what is going on in Iraq now.
The peace Trump creates is not a real peace, it is the bad peace that leads to renewed conflict. I'm deeply suspicious of US international interventions, but I also recognize that the US is the pillar of global stability at the moment. There are dozens of world shattering conflicts that could break out without the weight of the US military on the one side of the scale, and that weight gets taken off the scale bit by bit by things like this.
My perception is that Obama acted with the hope that US action would spur European and other international support to follow, both in Libya and Syria, and that he was consistently disappointed when it did not.
I think the problem there is we lost our cachet in that regard with Afghanistan and Iraq, particularly Iraq.
I think any real effort to fix things in that regard can't be spearheaded by the US as a unilateral intervening force, but with a specifically designated multinational coalition.
The problems are:
- is the UN equipped to handle this?
- You probably can't utilize NATO in this regard with Syria without pissing the hell out of Russia
What should have happened is that the US troops stayed in place until a real peace settlement between everyone in Syria was agreed upon, with UN international peace keepers being stationed in the Kurdish and formerly ISIS held areas to prevent ethnic and religious cleansing like what is going on in Iraq now.
The peace Trump creates is not a real peace, it is the bad peace that leads to renewed conflict. I'm deeply suspicious of US international interventions, but I also recognize that the US is the pillar of global stability at the moment. There are dozens of world shattering conflicts that could break out without the weight of the US military on the one side of the scale, and that weight gets taken off the scale bit by bit by things like this.
My perception is that Obama acted with the hope that US action would spur European and other international support to follow, both in Libya and Syria, and that he was consistently disappointed when it did not.
I think the problem there is we lost our cachet in that regard with Afghanistan and Iraq, particularly Iraq.
I think any real effort to fix things in that regard can't be spearheaded by the US as a unilateral intervening force, but with a specifically designated multinational coalition.
The problems are:
- is the UN equipped to handle this?
- You probably can't utilize NATO in this regard with Syria without pissing the hell out of Russia
Its really more about the EU being in political and economic chaos than anything else. If the EU had spent hundreds of billions on military intervention it would have destroyed all economic arguments for continued austerity and brought down multiple governments eventually (not that cowardice ended up saving Cameron).
This is an example of the criticism the EU was facing throughout this period. This hasn't been perceived as simply a failure of US leadership, but of European leadership. If we don't want the US to be the unilateral world police, then we need the EU to stand up alongside the US, but in two wars so far it has proven itself to be spineless.
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!".
The Trump administration is not going to give a shit about the kurds or the syrian people caught in the middle of this civil war. Hell we might start supporting Assad with money.
No government involved in this war ever gave a shit about the Syrian people stuck in the middle, so in this they are entirely unremarkable.
The number of humanitarian initiatives that are going to end when the US leaves is not zero. That politicians personally might not care about them does not mean that US soldiers in Syria and the US government in Syria is not providing assistance that is going to end.
That unplanned wars and unplanned exits are both bad seems like something that's said just to be said now, that people are concerned about the unplanned pullout. Because I remember the haphazard building up of US troops in Syria, and that seemed to a pretty niche topic (that pulled a decent amount of defenders for war). Pulling out, though, that's something I'm reading about in places that I've seen mention the past years of no plans in Syria about 0 to -20 times. That an unplanned war has resulted in an unplanned and haphazard withdrawal has produced, in days, more conversation that I've seen about the war itself in years. It's really something.
That's a fairly clear false equivalence. Trump decided to pull out of Syria without any discussion with his advisors or generals mid-phone call and announced it almost immediately. He directed them to pull out of Syria in a matter of like 4 weeks.
The US entry into Syria took place over the course of years. Large scale arming of rebels started two years into the Civil War after long months of planning in 2013. Substantial training started a year after that with Congressional approval. Another year after that direct action began to happen more. It was more than four years of planning and setting things up.
Hell one of the bigger anti-interventionist arguments is the gradual increase in involvement.
Fair enough, about the difference in degree of unplanning going on, but I don't think the hardon for having a planned foreign policy is the source of remarkable backlash. Nor is humanitarian concerns for our dear friends, the Kurds, who are being defended by brave troops risking their lives to save them. The idea that Americans would react this strongly out of concern for the lives of some people in the middle east is laughable, so why pretend.
The reaction is mostly understandable because people are invested in the renewed new US-Russia cold-war, and in that the reaction makes sense. Syria, less as a place where people live and Americans are somehow concerned about them, and more as a battleground between nations is why there's a reaction to a potential pullout, but not so much when it starts. Send a bunch of of weapons to Syria, and along with your allies become of the primary arms suppliers in a nasty civil war? No one is going to seriously care, the only negative consequence that came of this is that a bunch of people died and that's not something to get up in arms about. But leaving Syria affects something that people are emotionally invested in, which is ceding space to Russia.
That's it. Some Americans (apparently not Trump) consider the Syria their place to do battle with Russia, and Russians are wedded to winning their war there to an even more fanatical degree.
Who's pretending? Not all Americans are sociopaths who only care about themselves.
My sympathies with the Kurds has nothing to do with the new Cold War, and yet in the grand scheme of things the new Cold War is on and that type of war is difficult to hit the off switch once it's rolling. Under another president, like Obama, the circumstances for the withdrawal might not as bad, as he's not a moron and realises selling out allies is a bad idea - instead we're stuck with Trump, who will gladly throw the Turks to the wolves and literally is doing this without a plan because his good buddy Erdoğan whispered sweet nothing's into his ear.
How is ceding Syria to Russia any better for the Turks? I don't think they're going to spent that much effort trying to save them from Turkey's wrath. Erdoğan is an ally to Putin.
This is a new Cold War, if it's not Syria where the two sides will fight proxy wars it'll be somewhere else. Which could be anywhere from North Korea to Venezuela in the upcoming years.
In short, the whole outrage, besides Lockheed mouthpieces speaking off, is all about sending soldiers to the Middle East to "not lose against Putin and his orange cockholster". So basically the tone of this criticism:
Is not 2004 anymore, people aren't buying the need for eternal war.
First off it would be great if you stopped treating people, such as myself, that actually do care about the Kurds and their fight for a Kurdish state as Lockheed mouthpieces.
Second: Syria is different, albeit well-connected, to Iraq. The implications for broader geopolitics still exist regardless of if we're involved or not. Would having troops in Japan, for example, be a case of eternal war?
Trump's withdrawal from Syria is being done on the terms of what's best for Putin & Erdogan and any other shitty entities that benefit from a half-assed and poorly thought withdrawal done on the terms of those two fuckers. It's not being done on the terms that are best for the US interests. Whether you agree with the US being there or not, there is a right way to withdraw and there is a multitude of idiotic fucking ways of doing so. A week is not adequate and I'd probably do it in a way where our allies knew, but it wouldn't be immediately apparent to Putin, Erdogan, Assad Iran and ISIS that that was happening, until it was too late for them to get the most capital out of it.
China calls Trump:
Hey there's this island called "Formosa" that's ours, ever hear of it? No? It's cool, it's pretty small anyway. You mind telling your navy to stay away from it for a few weeks? 'k Thanks!
The merits or staying or pulling out seem pretty secondary to me in that the war is itself illegal. Obama decided to just start packing in military forces and it kept going under Trump.
If you want a war have congress declare one or knock it off.
Congress more told him they didn't want to take a choice because Paul Ryan is a fucking coward.
Also, for the record, there were like 500 US special forces in Syria before Trump's inauguration. Plenty of air strikes under Obama, but not many troops and no conventional ground troops.
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
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knitdanIn ur baseKillin ur guysRegistered Userregular
If you keep calling everyone who doesn’t support your position a Lockheed mouthpiece, I’m going to call you a Russo-Turkic stooge.
“I was quick when I came in here, I’m twice as quick now”
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
Another thing, "a Second Cold War"? Are you actually serious about this? Most people aren't up for WW3 over what, Facebook ads? Ridiculous.
Active political espionage involving the theft of the millions of documents of one political party, the hacking of state voter registration systems, and I'm betting we will eventually learn the actual alteration of votes and/or voter registration. It wasn't just Facebook ads.
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
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Message me back or an admin if you’re confused about this.
I don’t consider a plan to that doesn’t have a clear and achievable exit strategy to be worthy of the name. This is how I always defined the term when it comes to war, I’m pretty sure even previously in this forum, and that’s entirely reasonable and defensible.
Obviously we have a difference of opinion, whether or not a plan to have a war forever is a plan or not, but I’m not really shifting the definition I use or the “goalposts.”
If two days ago, you had said the US intervention in Syria had no plan, I'd have been completely fine with that in a colloquial manner. Except now you're putting that next to a situation in which there very literally is no plan, and that's just deceptive.
Sometimes I get students who come in to do group presentations, and they've clearly just divided the presentation into parts then just stapled it back together, and I'll critique these students as being unprepared. And then I get students who come in who literally have nothing prepared. There is a difference between the two, and once I say the latter group is "unprepared," I cannot also say that the first group is "unprepared" in the same way. One of those groups will probably pass. The other group will fail. There is a difference between them.
In this new context of December 21, 2018, saying/implying that the two are both similarly unplanned is fallacious. Lumping together a decision made by President Trump by himself in 5 minutes with a decision that was debated by national security and foreign policy people in and around the Obama administration for multiple years under the same word "unplanned" is not a reasonable thing to do. Obama did not decide to go into Syria in a 5-minute conversation with... whoever. That distinction is key to why there is so much consternation in the first place; if you ignore the distinction, then yeah, you're not going to understand the consternation.
Borrowing some words from this thread, letting Bin Salman and Bibi deal with protecting the Kurds (and let's be honest, fight the proxy war) is a plan, even if is a plan that you don't like.
EDIT : Also is funny how dumping troops on the most volatile spot of the Middle East isn't reckless.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Except that is only a plan in your imagination. It is a plan some of us here in this thread fanwanked up out of nothing, has no basis in reality, and will have no actual effect on reality.
Like, are you anti-colonialist types this desperate that you'll latch on to anybody in power who even remotely hints at agreeing with your positions, even if only by coincidence or, worse, camouflaged maliciousness? Trump's not withdrawing from Syria because he's anti-colonialist. He's withdrawing because Erdogan wants to invade. How is there less colonialism and imperialism here?! Is not withdrawing from a colonized region as soon as shit gets tough and leaving the natives to deal with whatever the repercussions are exactly one of the major moral failings of colonialism? Is not trading remote territories back and forth for favours precisely one of the major characteristics of an imperialist world?
Trump is colonialist as fuck! He views other countries and people as nothing but chits to be bandied about to enrich the United States (and himself). That this particular bandying happens to coincidentally, superficially align with your anti-colonialist preference to not be in the Middle East at all doesn't make this anti-colonialist. This isn't a victory for the good guys! It just turns out that Emperor Palpatine happens to agree with you, which really should make you question whether your position, not throw in on the Emperor Palpatine bandwagon!
Edit: Also, is funny how people think that criticizing one "side" means agreeing with the other "side." There's more than enough criticism to go around. But the errors of the past are sunk costs. Making another error now that is the opposite of an error in the past isn't righting a historic wrong. It's just making another error.
Fair enough, about the difference in degree of unplanning going on, but I don't think the hardon for having a planned foreign policy is the source of remarkable backlash. Nor is humanitarian concerns for our dear friends, the Kurds, who are being defended by brave troops risking their lives to save them. The idea that Americans would react this strongly out of concern for the lives of some people in the middle east is laughable, so why pretend.
The reaction is mostly understandable because people are invested in the renewed new US-Russia cold-war, and in that the reaction makes sense. Syria, less as a place where people live and Americans are somehow concerned about them, and more as a battleground between nations is why there's a reaction to a potential pullout, but not so much when it starts. Send a bunch of of weapons to Syria, and along with your allies become of the primary arms suppliers in a nasty civil war? No one is going to seriously care, the only negative consequence that came of this is that a bunch of people died and that's not something to get up in arms about. But leaving Syria affects something that people are emotionally invested in, which is ceding space to Russia.
That's it. Some Americans (apparently not Trump) consider the Syria their place to do battle with Russia, and Russians are wedded to winning their war there to an even more fanatical degree.
I'm with Elki on this one. I understand your distinction between unplanned and really-unplanned-knee-jerk, but I think the broader argument is the more interesting part.
Syria, and Afghanistan even moreso, clearly lack a coherent strategy behind them. Obama put more thought into his actions than Trump seems to, but so what? The ostensible reason for being in Syria (which includes constructing bases in the country) is to defeat ISIS, which of obviously absurd. And in Afghanistan the US is defeating the Taliban, supposedly.
Ekli's point was that the clear lack of coherent strategy barely gets brought up in media or anywhere else. When reports emerged the US was stationing troops in Syria semi-permanently, you'd think there would have been a firestorm of talk and criticism: why is the US building bases in a famously complicated warzone? On what conditions will they withdraw? What happens to the Kurds? What if the US gets sucked into yet another quagmire? And so on.
These were issues that desperately needed to be discussed, all the more so because it didn't seem like the US government had thought it out. Instead they got a pass, under Obama as well as Trump. Trump pulling out with zero notice is a scandal. The US being there in the first place, on a secret basis, should have also been a scandal, even if it involved a tad more thought put into it.
e: less combative-sounding language
IMO, this is exactly the feeling and motivation of some Americans who post here, myself included. You might consider those feelings to be shallow and/or hypocritical, but there it is.
(And no, I don't have another, better plan. I'm genuinely upset that we're apparently about to fuck over another bunch of people counting on American support on a fucking whim of Trump's, though. Again.)
In short, the whole outrage, besides Lockheed mouthpieces speaking off, is all about sending soldiers to the Middle East to "not lose against Putin and his orange cockholster". So basically the tone of this criticism:
Is not 2004 anymore, people aren't buying the need for eternal war.
This seems to be reaching past the more obvious answer: people are against it because Trump is doing it and they don't trust Trump.
Sure, that's the other one.
The most important thing about the withdrawal is it's another piece of evidence for the Mueller thread. And that Mattis will stand for all sorts of other fucked up things, but not this, confirming my opinion of that man.
It’s like having a leg amputated. Want it or not, once it’s decided to remove it, you have to decide how it’s gonna get done.
One way involves time and preparation. You get to the hospital, have a surgery team, and try to make the process as painless with as little damage as possible.
Trump’s way is to go into the kitchen, grab a cleaver, and start whacking away.
It’s not gonna turn out how you hope.
Battlenet ID: MildC#11186 - If I'm in the game, send me an invite at anytime and I'll play.
I cannot really comment on what's going on in the mass media discourse right now, nor what happened there over the past few years. (I'm also about to head out to a holiday shindig, so can't do the research.) In this thread and other foreign-policy-interested communities, I think there was extensive talk about the intervention in Syria, but scattered over a long period of time as there was no "moment" of public debate about it.
But one major part of it that you're leaving out is that Obama intentionally kept the Syrian intervention on the down-low. We weren't even aware of the CIA's arm + fund programs until long after they'd gotten under way, and maybe even not until they failed IIRC. The presence of special forces in Syria were kept a secret for a long time, the DoD denied that there were any American troops in Syria - and I think they still did, technically, until recently - and I think we still don't have a full scope of understanding of what sorts of advanced munitions the US has brought to bear in Syria. By using only special forces, not regular forces, on the ground, and positing the intervention as one against ISIL, thus rolling up the action under the War on Terror AUMF, the Obama administration effectively strangled any public discussion on the intervention strategy at all.
For better or for worse, Obama handled Syria in a way much different than Iraq and Afghanistan. As such, I don't think it's necessarily hypocritical for some people to be having very strong opinions now but not back then. Even if they had had strong opinions back then, there was never a public discourse about US engagement in Syria because of the way the information about it trickled out so slowly over the years.* It's an apples-to-oranges comparison here.
* Actually, the major part of the discourse on Obama's Syrian intervention primarily revolved around how he backed off his "red line" and that the US wasn't going in hard enough. In that respect, the US media discourse has been quite consistent, as it was when Trump lobbed some missiles into Syria too.
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None of this is to say I support the US intervention in Syria. Just a couple pages back, I was commenting on how there was no exit plan for the intervention. I see it as a fairly intractable situation too, but @Commander Zoom succinctly captures my sentiments on the situation:
The reason I was musing about what a Kurdish state would be like was because I was considering what the morally correct and "honourable" way for the Americans to treat the Kurds would be. And unfortunately, I don't think that ideal result is actually plausible. But viewing the American presence in Syria as a sunk cost - that is, a decision that was already made, a fact of the reality we are now in - just because I can't find an optimal solution to the situation doesn't make Trump's solution a good one. There may not be any solution that is 100% foolproof to generate 100% acceptable results, but Trump's solution is very far from that, and I can scarcely believe there's nothing better that could have been done, even if it did necessitate a prolonged US presence in what might be Kurdistan.
e: on the other hand, it is true that the national security apparatus was stonewalling his policies... but his policies were fucking dumb
So try catcher do you agree with Trump doing this without even consulting our allies or the DOD first?
The recklessness has our Kurd allies discussing turning 3000 some odd ISIS fighters
Well if somehow a metric fuckton of manpads and ATGM mysteriously ended up in Kurdish hands I would feel a bit better about the situation.
You know those wacky logistics guys. Always messing up the shipping labels.
The peace Trump creates is not a real peace, it is the bad peace that leads to renewed conflict. I'm deeply suspicious of US international interventions, but I also recognize that the US is the pillar of global stability at the moment. There are dozens of world shattering conflicts that could break out without the weight of the US military on the one side of the scale, and that weight gets taken off the scale bit by bit by things like this.
My perception is that Obama acted with the hope that US action would spur European and other international support to follow, both in Libya and Syria, and that he was consistently disappointed when it did not.
"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!".
The entire thing is a goddamn clusterfuck where ultimately I don't think the US ever even really knew what the fuck it wanted out of the war outside of "please god, don't destabilize further, and don't let ISIS get a foothold" and it's efforts have done little to really actually stabilize a country who has, for all intents and purposes, seen its cities turned into an apocalyptic hellscape thanks to a brutal and unrestrained war while it's citizenry are left homeless, injured, maimed and dead through all varieties of weaponized atrocity.
Ultimately we did little to make things better, because we never really cared too much about making things better in a meaningful way because doing so would risk broader war between the US and Russia thanks to Assad's alliance with Putin and now in pulling out we are doing so in the most half-assed and reckless way possible that will insure that our time spent in Syria has essentially been a "Why did you even fucking bother"-level clusterfuck.
Assad was using nerve gas on people and ISIS were putting people into cages and setting them on fire. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Obviously things could have been done better in Syria, but it wasn’t without purpose.
Bill Clinton not intervening in the Rwanda genocide hasn’t exactly been forgotten. It’s always gonna be a lose/lose in these situations. Ignore massacres and genocides or intervention, it always comes down to the lesser of two evils, cause people are gonna die no matter what you do.
Battlenet ID: MildC#11186 - If I'm in the game, send me an invite at anytime and I'll play.
I think the problem there is we lost our cachet in that regard with Afghanistan and Iraq, particularly Iraq.
I think any real effort to fix things in that regard can't be spearheaded by the US as a unilateral intervening force, but with a specifically designated multinational coalition.
The problems are:
- is the UN equipped to handle this?
- You probably can't utilize NATO in this regard with Syria without pissing the hell out of Russia
Its really more about the EU being in political and economic chaos than anything else. If the EU had spent hundreds of billions on military intervention it would have destroyed all economic arguments for continued austerity and brought down multiple governments eventually (not that cowardice ended up saving Cameron).
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/feb/27/syria-europe-moral-eu-helplessness
This is an example of the criticism the EU was facing throughout this period. This hasn't been perceived as simply a failure of US leadership, but of European leadership. If we don't want the US to be the unilateral world police, then we need the EU to stand up alongside the US, but in two wars so far it has proven itself to be spineless.
"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!".
The number of humanitarian initiatives that are going to end when the US leaves is not zero. That politicians personally might not care about them does not mean that US soldiers in Syria and the US government in Syria is not providing assistance that is going to end.
That's a fairly clear false equivalence. Trump decided to pull out of Syria without any discussion with his advisors or generals mid-phone call and announced it almost immediately. He directed them to pull out of Syria in a matter of like 4 weeks.
The US entry into Syria took place over the course of years. Large scale arming of rebels started two years into the Civil War after long months of planning in 2013. Substantial training started a year after that with Congressional approval. Another year after that direct action began to happen more. It was more than four years of planning and setting things up.
Hell one of the bigger anti-interventionist arguments is the gradual increase in involvement.
Four years is not four weeks.
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
Who's pretending? Not all Americans are sociopaths who only care about themselves.
My sympathies with the Kurds has nothing to do with the new Cold War, and yet in the grand scheme of things the new Cold War is on and that type of war is difficult to hit the off switch once it's rolling. Under another president, like Obama, the circumstances for the withdrawal might not as bad, as he's not a moron and realises selling out allies is a bad idea - instead we're stuck with Trump, who will gladly throw the Turks to the wolves and literally is doing this without a plan because his good buddy Erdoğan whispered sweet nothing's into his ear.
How is ceding Syria to Russia any better for the Turks? I don't think they're going to spent that much effort trying to save them from Turkey's wrath. Erdoğan is an ally to Putin.
This is a new Cold War, if it's not Syria where the two sides will fight proxy wars it'll be somewhere else. Which could be anywhere from North Korea to Venezuela in the upcoming years.
First off it would be great if you stopped treating people, such as myself, that actually do care about the Kurds and their fight for a Kurdish state as Lockheed mouthpieces.
Second: Syria is different, albeit well-connected, to Iraq. The implications for broader geopolitics still exist regardless of if we're involved or not. Would having troops in Japan, for example, be a case of eternal war?
Why in god's name are we comparing Japan and Iraq.
Hey there's this island called "Formosa" that's ours, ever hear of it? No? It's cool, it's pretty small anyway. You mind telling your navy to stay away from it for a few weeks? 'k Thanks!
If you want a war have congress declare one or knock it off.
Also, for the record, there were like 500 US special forces in Syria before Trump's inauguration. Plenty of air strikes under Obama, but not many troops and no conventional ground troops.
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
Active political espionage involving the theft of the millions of documents of one political party, the hacking of state voter registration systems, and I'm betting we will eventually learn the actual alteration of votes and/or voter registration. It wasn't just Facebook ads.