Syria Uproar?

Off Topic Politics & World Issues
121

[quote]Quasi-Tech wrote:
Obama continually looks worse and worse. He won the Nobel Peace prize and during his campaign talked about pulling out troops of the Middle East. Then he made claims about chemical warfare in Syria and how he’ll intervene on their behalf for human rights. Chemical weapons are used and Obama backs down and looks to Congress to be his scapegoat. IF they do attack, he’s already informed Syria of how the attack will occur, what and where the targets will be, and when.

He’s losing credibility both here and especially internationally. I’m sure Putin is laughing his ass off.[/quote]

He ran off his mouth and now put us in a tough position. He now needs Congress to hide behind, to share the political blow-back if/when things go wrong.

An amateur coward at best.

122

[quote]MaximusB wrote:

[quote]Quasi-Tech wrote:
Obama continually looks worse and worse. He won the Nobel Peace prize and during his campaign talked about pulling out troops of the Middle East. Then he made claims about chemical warfare in Syria and how he’ll intervene on their behalf for human rights. Chemical weapons are used and Obama backs down and looks to Congress to be his scapegoat. IF they do attack, he’s already informed Syria of how the attack will occur, what and where the targets will be, and when.

He’s losing credibility both here and especially internationally. I’m sure Putin is laughing his ass off.[/quote]

He ran off his mouth and now put us in a tough position. He now needs Congress to hide behind, to share the political blow-back if/when things go wrong.

An amateur coward at best. [/quote]

I’ll agree that it seems he’s turtling now. Most likely to make sure that if this does fail, the blame isn’t put solely on him, but on the Repubs as well.

However, the “red line” was not his, it’s been well known for decades. He just answered a question. And really, what else could he say…“We’lllll I don’t really have an opinion on that…”

Edit: Also, my vote is no. I do not believe we should be interfering with this.

123

http://www.julianlewis.net/commons-speeches/3773:syria-and-the-use-of-chemical-weapons-29-august-2013-2013-08-29

Great speech from a Conservative MP during the House of Commons discussion regarding our options in Syria.

“I began my speech by referring to the First World War. Next year, we will commemorate the centenary of the events of August 1914. Those events have a worrying parallel. At that time, a series of actions and reactions drew in, in an escalating fashion, one country after another. Nobody thought that the assassination of an obscure archduke would lead to a world conflagration. As Admiral Lord West has said, this is a powder-keg, and we should not be lobbing weapons into the heart of such combustible material.”

124

[quote]florelius wrote:
Here is my opinion.

I hope USA and any other country stays the fuck out of Syria because I am afraid the consequenes could be horrible and beyond
horrible in dead civillians( wich is horrible enough ), but as in making the situation in the region even more tense.
I also think the question everyone should ask themself is; how will killing some people over there with bombs improve the situation?

Also its cheaper not to go in, I have registered that most folks here are concernded about the decifit.

[/quote]

I think you’d find a bunch of people that agree with you. I certainly do, on all counts this time. There’s really not a win situation for us other than to have the chem weapons gone (listen to Ambassador Bolton and one of those Charles Krauthammer pieces I think was posted earlier). There are only a couple viable reasons to go to war, and this isn’t hitting either of them.

Krauthammer makes the point that you only–ever–strike for 1 of 2 reasons: 1) “surgical strike”, a slap on the wrist for political reasons or to accomplish something very specific (get rid of weapons capability) or 2) to set up a more favorable political situation for national interests–requiring a strategic war rather than tactical strike.

In these cases half of reason #1 is moot because the only time you strike for political reasons is to make a plausible case that you would enforce your will–nobody is scared of the US, so that doesn’t work. That only leaves specific objective (chem weapons) and #2.

Only #1 is growing less and less realistic because the target and time of a potential strike was leaked 3 days before it was supposed to happen, and the more we talk the more Assad has time to move the weapons to where we either can’t get to them easily or don’t know where they are: see Hussein’s strategy while we blustered on TV over 10 years ago.

#2 is not viable or proper here and there is exactly zero chance we make things better for us over there by going in OR by crippling Assad’s military capabilities. We DON’T want to hand either side a win.

The only thing I would support–echoing Bolton–is sending strikes and special forces perhaps to kill off the chemical weapons so they can’t find their way out of the country and into backpacks of al Qaeda members everywhere to kill more of us or you guys.

But the longer we talk and bluster the more likely it is we won’t be able to find them when we need to with that small strike package.

125

Stupid ass shit like this is why I left the Army.

Good people are going to die because Obama talked smack to impress . . . someone, got called on it, and now has to go fight in the schoolyard after the bell. In short, Obama is trapped in Junior High level of maturity.

Look, I fought in both Iraq and Afganistan. Our enemy is Iran. (Not Russia, not China, they’re just trying to maintain influence and don’t care with whom.)

These proxy fucking wars are stupid. Vietnam taught us that. Korea should have taught us that.

If you go into a war, go in heavy, or don’t go in at all.

Either bring this to Iran, or fucking stay out of it.

126

At this point I think this is shaping up to look similar to Iraq in that the situation in “victory” is actually worse than if we had never went at all. If you create power vacuums in Mid-Eastern countries then you get all kinds of truly dangerous men filling those roles and typically they are not our friends. I think our best course of action, if we must take some, would be to essentially block aid to either side and let them fight it out. Maybe put boots on the ground in case this spills over into Israel as that is really the only country over their I would trust to be consistently friendly with us.

127

[quote]thethirdruffian wrote:
Stupid ass shit like this is why I left the Army.

Good people are going to die because Obama talked smack to impress . . . someone, got called on it, and now has to go fight in the schoolyard after the bell. In short, Obama is trapped in Junior High level of maturity.

Look, I fought in both Iraq and Afganistan. Our enemy is Iran. (Not Russia, not China, they’re just trying to maintain influence and don’t care with whom.)

These proxy fucking wars are stupid. Vietnam taught us that. Korea should have taught us that.

If you go into a war, go in heavy, or don’t go in at all.

Either bring this to Iran, or fucking stay out of it.

[/quote]

You think we would learn.

128

[quote]kinein wrote:

George Galloway is my favorite Member of Parliament, and may just be my favorite politician ever.

If we were to genetically fuse Alan Grayson, Ron Paul and Billy Connolly, we would have our very own George Galloway in the House of Representatives. If only.

He made one error, however. The Aum Shinrikyo cultists responsible for the Sarin nerve gas subway incident in Tokyo were Buddhists, not Shintoists as Galloway claimed.

131

[quote]thethirdruffian wrote:
Stupid ass shit like this is why I left the Army.

Good people are going to die because Obama talked smack to impress . . . someone, got called on it, and now has to go fight in the schoolyard after the bell. In short, Obama is trapped in Junior High level of maturity.

Look, I fought in both Iraq and Afganistan. Our enemy is Iran. (Not Russia, not China, they’re just trying to maintain influence and don’t care with whom.)

These proxy fucking wars are stupid. Vietnam taught us that. Korea should have taught us that.

If you go into a war, go in heavy, or don’t go in at all.

Either bring this to Iran, or fucking stay out of it.

[/quote]

I contend that they are setting up a pincer on Iran. What do you think of that?

132

[quote]SkyzykS wrote:

[quote]thethirdruffian wrote:
Stupid ass shit like this is why I left the Army.

Good people are going to die because Obama talked smack to impress . . . someone, got called on it, and now has to go fight in the schoolyard after the bell. In short, Obama is trapped in Junior High level of maturity.

Look, I fought in both Iraq and Afganistan. Our enemy is Iran. (Not Russia, not China, they’re just trying to maintain influence and don’t care with whom.)

These proxy fucking wars are stupid. Vietnam taught us that. Korea should have taught us that.

If you go into a war, go in heavy, or don’t go in at all.

Either bring this to Iran, or fucking stay out of it.

[/quote]

I contend that they are setting up a pincer on Iran. What do you think of that?
[/quote]

We had the pincer till Obama pulled our troops out of Iraq. Next we will remove the other pincer in Afghanistan and we will have nothing. At least Iran is next to a body of water so we will be able to use our floating air bases to send in aircraft and not have to pay to use some other countries airspace (Pakistan in Afghanistan). Iran would be so fucked if they attacked us. I just do not think Obama would pull the trigger on a war with Iran. He would look to the UN. We need a commander in chief that actually has a set of balls.

133

[quote]SkyzykS wrote:

[quote]thethirdruffian wrote:
Stupid ass shit like this is why I left the Army.

Good people are going to die because Obama talked smack to impress . . . someone, got called on it, and now has to go fight in the schoolyard after the bell. In short, Obama is trapped in Junior High level of maturity.

Look, I fought in both Iraq and Afganistan. Our enemy is Iran. (Not Russia, not China, they’re just trying to maintain influence and don’t care with whom.)

These proxy fucking wars are stupid. Vietnam taught us that. Korea should have taught us that.

If you go into a war, go in heavy, or don’t go in at all.

Either bring this to Iran, or fucking stay out of it.

[/quote]

I contend that they are setting up a pincer on Iran. What do you think of that?
[/quote]

Bush II WAS setting up a pincher.

I’ve literally been within a click (or across accidently – it’s not exactly the Rio Grande as demarcation) Iran’s respective borders with Afganistan and with Iraq, both times watching as truck convoys of crap came across to kill us.

We had massive equipment in place to take them out; far more heavy stuff than was needed for the types of fighters in either country was in place.

The political will to do the job properly just wasn’t there.

So, no, this is not a pincer.

This is just a vanity war.

134

If Assad falls, the regime that will replace him will get his WMD.
Maybe we should actually try to destroy them before they get shipped all over the Ummah.

135

Who plans an air strike / attack and tells their target where, when, how, and oh by the way, if there are any issues, please give me a call?

I don’t know about you guys, but I’m totally down for spending millions of dollars to put on a light show for another country and making a hole in the ground where there won’t be anything to destroy for a significant impact.

136

[quote]SkyzykS wrote:

[quote]thethirdruffian wrote:
Stupid ass shit like this is why I left the Army.

Good people are going to die because Obama talked smack to impress . . . someone, got called on it, and now has to go fight in the schoolyard after the bell. In short, Obama is trapped in Junior High level of maturity.

Look, I fought in both Iraq and Afganistan. Our enemy is Iran. (Not Russia, not China, they’re just trying to maintain influence and don’t care with whom.)

These proxy fucking wars are stupid. Vietnam taught us that. Korea should have taught us that.

If you go into a war, go in heavy, or don’t go in at all.

Either bring this to Iran, or fucking stay out of it.

[/quote]

I contend that they are setting up a pincer on Iran. What do you think of that?
[/quote]

That may be the case, but even that is a totally ridiculous strategy. The capabilities of our Armed Forces to strike practically any target on the planet from practically any location on the planet is so overwhelming that I simply can’t imagine that the added advantage of having the enemy surrounded comes close to outweighing the massive amount of ways that such an endeavor can spin out of control and harm us more than help us. Combine that with the fact that Israel seems more than content to act with or without our help and it just doesn’t seem like anything other than an isolationist stance is the prudent course here.

I also don’t think this particular time in Iran’s history is the best time to be fucking with them any more than we normally do. We saw a few years ago that there are certainly a lot of Iranians willing to risk life and limb for a legitimate democracy in that country, and we can go all the way back to the election of Mossadegh if we need further evidence of this. Ahmadinejad and his ilk aren’t in power anymore. I don’t know much about this new leader there, and obviously the Ayatollah and his cronies are still the real policy-makers there, but they’ve moved in a positive direction from a political standpoint, however small that shift may be.

I fear that any direct fucking with Iran will seriously undermine our hopes of facilitating the move toward full-fledged democracy if/when Iran takes that step. They’ve inched toward doing so in the recent past. I don’t think they need us to shove them toward it any further, because we may push too hard and knock them into a pile of shit, however inadvertently it may happen.

137

[quote]DBCooper wrote:

[quote]SkyzykS wrote:

[quote]thethirdruffian wrote:
Stupid ass shit like this is why I left the Army.

Good people are going to die because Obama talked smack to impress . . . someone, got called on it, and now has to go fight in the schoolyard after the bell. In short, Obama is trapped in Junior High level of maturity.

Look, I fought in both Iraq and Afganistan. Our enemy is Iran. (Not Russia, not China, they’re just trying to maintain influence and don’t care with whom.)

These proxy fucking wars are stupid. Vietnam taught us that. Korea should have taught us that.

If you go into a war, go in heavy, or don’t go in at all.

Either bring this to Iran, or fucking stay out of it.

[/quote]

I contend that they are setting up a pincer on Iran. What do you think of that?
[/quote]

That may be the case, but even that is a totally ridiculous strategy. The capabilities of our Armed Forces to strike practically any target on the planet from practically any location on the planet is so overwhelming that I simply can’t imagine that the added advantage of having the enemy surrounded comes close to outweighing the massive amount of ways that such an endeavor can spin out of control and harm us more than help us. Combine that with the fact that Israel seems more than content to act with or without our help and it just doesn’t seem like anything other than an isolationist stance is the prudent course here.

I also don’t think this particular time in Iran’s history is the best time to be fucking with them any more than we normally do. We saw a few years ago that there are certainly a lot of Iranians willing to risk life and limb for a legitimate democracy in that country, and we can go all the way back to the election of Mossadegh if we need further evidence of this. Ahmadinejad and his ilk aren’t in power anymore. I don’t know much about this new leader there, and obviously the Ayatollah and his cronies are still the real policy-makers there, but they’ve moved in a positive direction from a political standpoint, however small that shift may be.

I fear that any direct fucking with Iran will seriously undermine our hopes of facilitating the move toward full-fledged democracy if/when Iran takes that step. They’ve inched toward doing so in the recent past. I don’t think they need us to shove them toward it any further, because we may push too hard and knock them into a pile of shit, however inadvertently it may happen.[/quote]

While we do have the ability to strike anything from anywhere, time and effort are also a consideration. A blitzkrieg isn’t a blitzkrieg (ala the Schwarzcopf ground war in iraq) when you have to stage airstrikes from X miles away and get tanks rolling in from LSTs through out the gulf. It would be way less logistically complex to have them staged and set to strike from right over both borders, with refueling and all other land based support services wait at the ready.

As for the people of Iran, its a shame. I will speculate that they would want that about as much as anybody in the US wants to go into Syria right now.

I don’t think it has anything to do with what the populace of any given country wants. It’s what the few people at the very top of a couple of countries want- consolidation of control of the regions energy resources.

It has nothing to do with the proliferation of democracy.

138

Can someone explain to me why we feel the need to try and share democracy anyways? It seems to be working out so incredibly well for us here. And good luck sharing it with Russia and China, or do we no longer bother with them because we know its a lost cause?

139

[quote]Quasi-Tech wrote:
Can someone explain to me why we feel the need to try and share democracy anyways? It seems to be working out so incredibly well for us here. And good luck sharing it with Russia and China, or do we no longer bother with them because we know its a lost cause?[/quote]

Who feels the need to share democracy?

The Joint Chiefs don’t sit around that big table in the Pentagon talking about how best to share democracy.

The State Department doesn’t map out the best policies for sharing democracy in the next decade.

The Army and the Navy and the Marine Corps and the Air Force are not fighting so that more democracy may be shared.

The only people who talk about sharing democracy are people who are paid with taxpayer dollars to say things such as this in front of television cameras for people who don’t really understand democracy but think that sharing it with people in other countries who don’t have it would be a pretty good idea.

What we offer other people a share of is our business model, our debt, and our protection. The Russians and the Chinese have no use of the third, have too much of the second, and are outdoing us already at the first.

140

Isn’t that one of the reasons claimed for Iraq, so that the people could elect their own leader and to remove a dictator? Isn’t that also the big to do in Egypt, about them finally being able to elect a leader, seeing it didn’t really work out, and wanting a second go at it?

Not being argumentative, just asking as I seem to recall those phrases being thrown around a lot. Most likely by our lovely media.