Norbert
TSLA will win
I disagree. Obviously. Leaving can be as bad, or worse, as coming, even if coming was wrong.
EDIT: Especially if coming was wrong, there is an obligation to leaving in a good way.
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I disagree. Obviously. Leaving can be as bad, or worse, as coming, even if coming was wrong.
EDIT: Especially if coming was wrong, there is an obligation to leaving in a good way.
Looks like it's already working out as the Kurds are making a deal with Syria for protection. Not every hotspot in the world is our responsibility.
America’s Former Allies in Syria Team Up With Damascus Government America’s Former Allies in Syria Team Up With Damascus Government
Imagine how much $8T over the last 20 years could have been used domestically?
When he was teaching law at the University of Chicago, one of his colleagues and close friend was Rashid Khalidi, who now is at Columbia. I had the distinct pleasure of teaching his 2004 book, Resurrecting Empire, for a few years at the end of my active teaching. It is a really clear picture and critique of US policy, so I know at one point Barry was well informed. Unfortunately for the main stream Khalidi is of Palestinian extraction and has been attacked by the Israeli lobby. Later it has been said Obama was straightened out by Penny Pritzker before he entered politics. She served as his Secretary of Commerce.
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Possible, evidence? Britain was known for its imperial experts. Check out Khalidi's British Policy towards Syria and Palestine 1906-1914: The Antecedents of the Hussein-McMahon Correspondence, the Sykes-Picot Agreements and the Balfour Declaration (1980).
Source: Khalidi bio referenced above.
Norbert
TSLA will win
Sure, the Kurds will just drink Vodka instead of Whisky, and we'll get a thank you note from Putin as a reciprocity.
Meanwhile, I suppose the number of troops recalled is smaller than the number sent to Saudi Arabia. Imagine how much money we could save if didn't need oil.
Off Shore
Off Topic Member
Apparently Putin is telling Arab media that everyone has to be back inside their own borders by curfew, whenever that is. New cop in town. Failing oil-state props up failing oil-region. What could possibly go wrong?
I haven't read that book but would like to. I bull a lot, but don't catch that in your writing.
My first and only formal education qbout the M.E. was a graduate seminar offered by a visiting professor at Harvard in the summer 0f '58 or '59 on the history and politics of the M.E. He was from the UK and was much more objective on the Palestine question, like Khadili. I once remarked in class there was more diverse opinions by Jews in Israel than those in the U.S. and held out the popularity and coverage of Haaretz. A young woman who took a negative view of Khalidi's book admitted late in the class her family read only the Jerusalem Post.
You may have time to read Khalidi'a book. I have a series of study questions for students you might like which I'll send by Private post.
Ron Paul gets it right and Washington got it wrong.
Washington is Wrong Once Again – Kurds Join Assad to Defend Syria
Norbert
TSLA will win
Generic argumemts and excuses for a situation that is not generic at all. This looks like an excuse for support of a russia-friendly agenda, and you don't seem to mind.
Amazing. The Democratic Party is officially the party of war. Is this like a declaration of war? Against Turkey? A NATO member? Interested to see where Bernie votes on this.
https://nypost.com/2019/10/13/schumer-wants-senate-vote-to-reject-trumps-syria-troop-withdrawal/
https://nypost.com/2019/10/13/schumer-wants-senate-vote-to-reject-trumps-syria-troop-withdrawal/
The questions about foreign policy with the Middle East have always been complicated and there are rarely any clear cut answers. Making decisions about the ME usually involve weighing a whole lot of bad options and picking the best of the bad ones.
There are many roots to the problems and most of them go back deep into history.
1) Start with Israel/Palestine - The Jewish people have an ancient claim to that land. They were there for over 1000 years before the Romans moved most of them to the fringes to the Empire to end the rebellion. After they were moved, the people of the region moved into the vacuum and became the indigenous people. If someone can document a claim to land that hasn't been exercised in nearly 2000 years, is it still valid?
2) The crusades - In modern times the west has been interfering in the ME since WW I. In part the French and British thought they could expand their empires there and continue the Great Game. But western credibility in the region is not so great because the long memories of the peoples there about the last time westerners came to the ME during the Crusades. That didn't end well for either side. Western kingdoms eventually got driven out, but Islamic culture began to unravel from the strains of the conflict. The ME was the most learned part of the world when the Crusades began, but the aftermath started a long decline in learning. The Turks conquered much of the ME and had their time of empire. Many Islamic terrorist groups cite the Crusades as one of their rallying points.
3) The split between Shia and Sunni that goes back to the death of Mohammad. There was a split over who would control Islam after Mohammad's death. This split was also cultural. The Persians, modern day Iranians, formed the Shia sect. The Arabs mostly became Sunni. Religion is an expression of spiritual belief, but it's also an expression of the culture that spawned it and the Arabs and Persians are distinctly different cultures with distinctly different histories. Different Arab countries have different flavors of Sunni Islam, but mostly they get along with one another's religious differences. The animosity between Iran and Saudi Arabia today does have its roots in modern events, but there are also roots that are very ancient.
4) The Ottoman Empire - Largely forgotten by westerners today, the Ottoman Empire was the predominant government in the region only 100 years ago. Erdogan, being a fairly classic authoritarian dictator, wants to take Turkey back to it's heyday. This was even a theme in Nazi Germany with the Nazi's referring back to past glories of the German people. With Erdogan having influence over Trump and his desire to "put the band back together again" Turkey could be at the beginning of an attempt to rebuild the Ottoman Empire.
5) Hitler - This is something most westerners are not aware of, but the ideas of Hitler and the Nazis are very popular in the ME. The anti-Jewish messages really took hold as a rallying cry to stop what is seen by some as a modern western Crusade in the ME with a western culture transplanted to Palestine: Israel. Germans were generally well liked in the ME during the 19th century as western archeologists came to the region to do research. German archeologists tended to treat the natives with more respect then their counterparts from other western countries. When Hitler came along, his ideas got a listen because of the respect for Germans in general.
6) The Cold War - Both the USSR/Russia and the US meddled in the ME during the Cold War. The US mostly won the dominance game, but was kept in check by the USSR. Both made some big blunders we're still paying for. Among them the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the US response and the US/British coup in the 1950s that overthrew a democratically elected leader in Iran to put the Shah on the throne. In the aftermath of the Cold War the neocons misinterpreted the geopolitical situation and thought the US could do anything it wanted there which resulted in the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.
7) Oil - This forum has a lot of talk about getting off oil and that is definitely a great goal to work towards for many reasons. Among them is the geopolitical balance. The world's economy is entwined with oil like a vastly complex tumor with many arms. Too fast a withdrawal from the oil economy would be disastrous for the world economy. Much of the world's oil reserves are sitting under some unsavory players. The Russians have some significant reserves, Venezuela has quite a bit of heavy oil, and several ME countries not only have a lot of it, but also have some of the best quality crude in the world. Adding to this the US got the value of the US dollar directly linked to the value of oil in the 1970s. The US economy and the value of the US dollar are both heavily dependent on the oil market. The US has gone a long ways towards producing more of its oil domestically or with friendly allies (like Canada), but the dollar is still tied to oil. The oil industry is also a global industry. Even though the US does get by on Western Hemisphere oil for the most part, the price of domestically produced oil is determined by the global market. Anything that cut off ME crude exports would cause global oil prices to skyrocket and would impact the cost of fuel in the US just as hard as Europe, even though the oil was produced domestically.
All of these factors come into play with every ME decision. Good western leaders are aware of all these factors and more that I haven't listed. Bad western leaders may only see 1 or 2 and are completely ignorant of the minefields around the rest of the issues.
In the US there are different factions who have different opinions about what to do. The neocons think the US going to war over everything is the answer. There is a faction who think these are the "end times" and we need to let the end of the world play out. There are some who want to bury their head in the sand and hope it all works out. There are those who are ignorant of the background issues, but want to do something and end up advocating things that will make things worse. Then there are those who understand the problem quite well, know that some kind of action is needed, and try to come up with a plan that reduces the blowback knowing that some is inevitable.
The problem is that among this last group, every idea has large and negative implications. The arguments are about how bad each implication will be and inevitably everybody is going to get something wrong.
The ME is the Kobiashi Maru scenario of modern politics. Every option for a western power is bad and even those deeply in the know are at loggerheads about which options are worse than others.
There are many roots to the problems and most of them go back deep into history.
1) Start with Israel/Palestine - The Jewish people have an ancient claim to that land. They were there for over 1000 years before the Romans moved most of them to the fringes to the Empire to end the rebellion. After they were moved, the people of the region moved into the vacuum and became the indigenous people. If someone can document a claim to land that hasn't been exercised in nearly 2000 years, is it still valid?
2) The crusades - In modern times the west has been interfering in the ME since WW I. In part the French and British thought they could expand their empires there and continue the Great Game. But western credibility in the region is not so great because the long memories of the peoples there about the last time westerners came to the ME during the Crusades. That didn't end well for either side. Western kingdoms eventually got driven out, but Islamic culture began to unravel from the strains of the conflict. The ME was the most learned part of the world when the Crusades began, but the aftermath started a long decline in learning. The Turks conquered much of the ME and had their time of empire. Many Islamic terrorist groups cite the Crusades as one of their rallying points.
3) The split between Shia and Sunni that goes back to the death of Mohammad. There was a split over who would control Islam after Mohammad's death. This split was also cultural. The Persians, modern day Iranians, formed the Shia sect. The Arabs mostly became Sunni. Religion is an expression of spiritual belief, but it's also an expression of the culture that spawned it and the Arabs and Persians are distinctly different cultures with distinctly different histories. Different Arab countries have different flavors of Sunni Islam, but mostly they get along with one another's religious differences. The animosity between Iran and Saudi Arabia today does have its roots in modern events, but there are also roots that are very ancient.
4) The Ottoman Empire - Largely forgotten by westerners today, the Ottoman Empire was the predominant government in the region only 100 years ago. Erdogan, being a fairly classic authoritarian dictator, wants to take Turkey back to it's heyday. This was even a theme in Nazi Germany with the Nazi's referring back to past glories of the German people. With Erdogan having influence over Trump and his desire to "put the band back together again" Turkey could be at the beginning of an attempt to rebuild the Ottoman Empire.
5) Hitler - This is something most westerners are not aware of, but the ideas of Hitler and the Nazis are very popular in the ME. The anti-Jewish messages really took hold as a rallying cry to stop what is seen by some as a modern western Crusade in the ME with a western culture transplanted to Palestine: Israel. Germans were generally well liked in the ME during the 19th century as western archeologists came to the region to do research. German archeologists tended to treat the natives with more respect then their counterparts from other western countries. When Hitler came along, his ideas got a listen because of the respect for Germans in general.
6) The Cold War - Both the USSR/Russia and the US meddled in the ME during the Cold War. The US mostly won the dominance game, but was kept in check by the USSR. Both made some big blunders we're still paying for. Among them the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the US response and the US/British coup in the 1950s that overthrew a democratically elected leader in Iran to put the Shah on the throne. In the aftermath of the Cold War the neocons misinterpreted the geopolitical situation and thought the US could do anything it wanted there which resulted in the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.
7) Oil - This forum has a lot of talk about getting off oil and that is definitely a great goal to work towards for many reasons. Among them is the geopolitical balance. The world's economy is entwined with oil like a vastly complex tumor with many arms. Too fast a withdrawal from the oil economy would be disastrous for the world economy. Much of the world's oil reserves are sitting under some unsavory players. The Russians have some significant reserves, Venezuela has quite a bit of heavy oil, and several ME countries not only have a lot of it, but also have some of the best quality crude in the world. Adding to this the US got the value of the US dollar directly linked to the value of oil in the 1970s. The US economy and the value of the US dollar are both heavily dependent on the oil market. The US has gone a long ways towards producing more of its oil domestically or with friendly allies (like Canada), but the dollar is still tied to oil. The oil industry is also a global industry. Even though the US does get by on Western Hemisphere oil for the most part, the price of domestically produced oil is determined by the global market. Anything that cut off ME crude exports would cause global oil prices to skyrocket and would impact the cost of fuel in the US just as hard as Europe, even though the oil was produced domestically.
All of these factors come into play with every ME decision. Good western leaders are aware of all these factors and more that I haven't listed. Bad western leaders may only see 1 or 2 and are completely ignorant of the minefields around the rest of the issues.
In the US there are different factions who have different opinions about what to do. The neocons think the US going to war over everything is the answer. There is a faction who think these are the "end times" and we need to let the end of the world play out. There are some who want to bury their head in the sand and hope it all works out. There are those who are ignorant of the background issues, but want to do something and end up advocating things that will make things worse. Then there are those who understand the problem quite well, know that some kind of action is needed, and try to come up with a plan that reduces the blowback knowing that some is inevitable.
The problem is that among this last group, every idea has large and negative implications. The arguments are about how bad each implication will be and inevitably everybody is going to get something wrong.
The ME is the Kobiashi Maru scenario of modern politics. Every option for a western power is bad and even those deeply in the know are at loggerheads about which options are worse than others.
Since when is keeping the status quo a declaration of war?! That's some seriously twisted logic!
Norbert
TSLA will win
Given your knowledge about the Middle East, what role do you see in the ME's own struggle for democracy and human rights? How much of a relevant component of events is it?
Speaking of light at the end of the tunnel of impeachment...Christmas!
Charlize Theron and Nicole Kidman look unrecognisable in new Bombshell trailer
Charlize Theron and Nicole Kidman look unrecognisable in new Bombshell trailer
There are different types of democracy. The liberal democratic republics common in western Europe, US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, etc. are the gold standard in governing. Liberal democracies share power between many elected members of government and have some kinds of checks and balances on power. The US has some of the best defined checks, but most liberal democracies have some kind of checks baked in.
Another key factor in a healthy system is when a check is employed, the other members of government accept that they have been checked and comply. All it takes is for a leader to ignore the checks, go their own way, and not be stopped by the rule of law. (The US is perilously close to this right now.)
Once leadership decides to ignore the rule of law, the democracy is dead. This is what happened in 1933 in Germany. Germany in the Wiemar Republic had an elected president who then appointed the Chancellor. Paul von Hindenburg was elected in 1925. The Nazis were agitating enough that Hindenburg appointed Hitler Chancellor in 1933 to mollify the Nazis. Hitler then started tearing down the democratic institutions and when von Hindenburg died in 1934, Hitler just took his job without an election and after dissolving the Reichstag he became a dictator.
Russia is technically a democracy today. Government leaders are elected, but the process is very corrupt. A liberal democracy in Russia is difficult because their entire history is one of strong singular leaders and they have little tradition of power sharing. Putin is fairly popular because the national psyche likes strong men leaders.
In many Middle Eastern countries, they also have a tradition where life was fairly predictable when there was a strong man running the country and chaos when they tried power sharing between branches of government. They also don't have the traditions of rule of law that many western countries have.
Democracy may also be in decline. I hope not, but extremists have been coming to the fore in many countries who do not respect the rule of law and propose major changes that would break it. At minimum the problems in the UK and US in governing the countries in recent years have given ammunition to anti-democratic forces in weaker democracies to move away from liberal democratic traditions.
I hope liberal democratic forces (not liberals, but those who believe in liberal democratic institutions) can come back to the fore and put the once stable democracies back on track soon. As for the Middle East, the best we can hope for is benevolent dictators who slowly move their countries to democratic institutions, but it will likely be a slow process at best.
Really? I was just babbling as usual.
Norbert
TSLA will win
If and while you are still in a "babbling" mood
, please allow me to ask a follow-up question:What is the relevance and dynamic of free markets in the Middle East? And the importance of trading with the West?
(Also in relation to the absence of democracy and/or the rule of law, which I would expect to result, for example, in exploitation and corruption, and in other obstacles to their efficiency for the people.)
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