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Technician

Iraq, Round Three

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Wagi said:

#YesAllIraqis


#NotAllMilitants

but joking aside, we really need to stay out of this. We don't need to spend more tax payers money and have more troops and civilians die from all this. This is a lose-lose situation. We don't need to spend more time there, but I don't even think Iraq could survive without us, I fear it would fall into anarchy quickly.

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According to the news here, the U.S. is not going in. And looking at this all i think they should not do it anyway.
If nobody in iraq wants to protect their government and country by picking up a gun, and if an entire governmental
army gives up then they clearly do not want to fight and have nothing in their mind which seems worth protecting to them.

Intercepting this coup d'etat will only make the war last much longer,
with more deaths, and international problems.

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FireFish said:

Intercepting this coup d'etat will only make the war last much longer,
with more deaths, and international problems.

This is so simplistic and ignorant I don't even know where to start ripping it apart.

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What I find sad is that so many think the U.S. has the option of staying out of it when what we are seeing is the result of U.S. foreign policy and the actions of the U.N. (with its Gestapo One-World Police Force*).

I shudder when I see quotes from politicians stating that the negative effects of drone strikes are the growing anti-U.S. sentiment. Nevermind that the innocent men, women, and children being killed are fellow human beings.

*US Military, CIA, NSA, DHS, CFR, etc...

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Technician said:

Look at Afghanistan. That's what Iraq and Libya (and soon Syria) has become.

No way. You can draw comparisons between Iraq and Afghanistan all day, but Libya and Syria are a different league. This may sound weird from a dirty leftist of Eastern Europe, but it actually shows how interventions by Democrat presidents are worse than those by Republicans. Libya, which Obama bombed & left to vultures, is like Somalia, abandoned by Clinton. The result is a state that doesn't work as a state, ruled by gangs with a powerless, useless central government. Terrorists do whatever they want there and both the countries are important power bases for international criminal activities, be it terrorism or piracy. If anything, the bomb&forget policy of Democrats is even worse than invade&occupy of Republicans.

Iraq may be bad, but it's nowhere near the lawless hell of Libya. Syria will go down that road if Asad falls and "freedom" reigns. Right now, this is shit the US have caused, so they need to own the fuck up and deal with it. It won't solve itself, because America created localized hells on Earth. And the next time a situation pops up, don't act on your own, America. Thank you, signed, the Earth.

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dew said:

Right now, this is shit the US have caused, so they need to own the fuck up and deal with it. It won't solve itself, because America created localized hells on Earth. And the next time a situation pops up, don't act on your own, America. Thank you, signed, the Earth.

Also signed a sizable portion of the American people. Don't forget that many of us are opposed to both of these methods of dealing with these troubled regions and would rather we not get involved at all, instead focusing our resources on increasing quality of life and getting up-to-speed with the rest of the developed world. It's just that our politicians don't represent us, but rather they represent moneyed interests.

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dew said:

This is so simplistic and ignorant I don't even know where to start ripping it apart.

There is nothing ignorant about it, now go celebrate all the civil wars that formed your country. These countries have yet to find their balance and peace inbetween extremistic ideals and western influences being forced upon them. these extremists do no talk.
The easy and ignorant way would be to go in and kill kill kill, to then leave a exact same iraq like after the last war.

FireFish
You do not 'liberate' a country, a country changes itself when its people feel it is needed to gain a cultural and political change. It would mean a civil war, as no government or
party just dusts off into the distance. But these people have nothing left then a broken country as wrecked by western armies, a bunch of extremists, and a scared military force...

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FireFish said:

There is nothing ignorant about it, now go celebrate all the civil wars that formed your country. These countries have yet to find their balance and peace inbetween extremistic ideals and western influences being forced upon them. these extremists do no talk.

The last time my country had a civil war was the 10th century, maybe the 15th may count. Your patronizing quips are useless against me, buddy. Stop applying an universal view on everything, it won't work.

These countries have underwent decades of constant Western influence and they were in constant strife even before that. Packing our bags and leaving all of the sudden to lock ourselves inside our borders won't fix anything, that's a crazy belief held by crazy fundamentalists and autistic libertarians of the Internet corps. The entire western civilization has an obligation to set things straight in the Middle East, but we keep supporting the wrong parties, because we don't really want these countries independent and strong.

We don't even give a crap about terrorism and fundamentalism as long as the oil is flowing, which is also a reason why we will never stay out, at least until it all runs out or we find more somewhere else. The world went global and "leaving someone alone" is not an option anymore, so get real and don't feed me the bullshit that these countries will fix themselves.

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Point for a Western intervention:

  • This mess being largely our fault (mostly the Brits and Americans, though), we owe it to them to fix what we broke
Point for Western non-intervention:
  • Given our track record, we'd probably only make it even worse

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dew said:

...

and yet here you are confirming the stereotypes of people with a different opinion becoming nothing more then idiots that start to call names when they are safe behind their screen. If you want to support one giant western globalized ideal then that is your opinion and not a universal fact which counts for every human being on the planet.

Yes it is a difficult situation for the U.S. as they left a country in ruins, so they should fix it. But at the same time there are so many more factors playing here making it such a complicated ordeal. It is the U.S. that started and ended their war and not every other western country so do not even try to go 'the entire west' in this. But i do agree to the fullest about the fear the politicians have for a stronger mid-east, and that they would not want it to happen. They indeed have the bad luck that they are sitting on oil while the rest of the world is hunting the 'supposably' last drips of it before this natural resource is depleted.

but Looking at your style of flame responses i doubt i would even respond anymore.

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FireFish said:

It is the U.S. that started and ended their war and not every other western country so do not even try to go 'the entire west' in this.


Actually, it was an U.N. coalition. The U.S. didn't declare war on Iraq.

...which then gets into the constitutionality of the whole thing.

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dew said:

This may sound weird from a dirty leftist of Eastern Europe, but it actually shows how interventions by Democrat presidents are worse than those by Republicans. Libya, which Obama bombed & left to vultures, is like Somalia, abandoned by Clinton. The result is a state that doesn't work as a state, ruled by gangs with a powerless, useless central government. Terrorists do whatever they want there and both the countries are important power bases for international criminal activities, be it terrorism or piracy. If anything, the bomb&forget policy of Democrats is even worse than invade&occupy of Republicans.


I'm sorry man, but absolutely not. Obama completely led from behind on the Libyan excursion. So basically the coalition toppeled a strong-man government who had a known reputation of terrorizing the region by palling up to nomadic groups of extremists and passing himself off as a "common-man"? Is it all that hard to imagine that lawlessness and chaos would ensue when this decentralized executive got blown over? Just because the West decided not to occupy does not make it a great crime. The region barely had a cohesive central government when the Colonel was in power. It is a completely different situation in Iraq. Iraq, like Syria is an urbanized state with a considerable federal separation of powers but a strong, heavy-handed executive force. Libya, like Afghanistan is a completely different situation due it its harsh geography and physical isolation, compared to Iraq or Syria which are both heavily populated and fierce sectarian tensions are the prime great debates.

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bytor said:

Actually, it was an U.N. coalition. The U.S. didn't declare war on Iraq. ...which then gets into the constitutionality of the whole thing.

technically it could be called a U.N. decision while in reality it was mainly the U.S. and the U.K. while also being reported anywhere and everywhere as the U.S. its Iraq war, with U.S. troops,
U.S. bombs, U.S. prison camps. I could ask 300 people on the street at random and they all would say the U.S. started it. But i do not wish to continue on this because i already know where this is going, people read it as an anti U.S. statement and then 100 posts later it is a anti everything-not-in-the-U.S. warzone.

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MERRICA
FUCK YEAH
COMIN' AGAIN TO SAVE THE MOTHERFUCKIN' DAY YEAH

Oh wait we aren't because the companies that control our country told us not to, not the people or the government itself.

Osama took over a decade to kill and that was just one man so a full-blown terrorist cell that's actually DONE something would probably throw us in for a loop even more.

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Don't shit your pants quite yet, the previous administration of the US was by any metric the worst administration in recent history who had no sense to focus all its resources on al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and instead decided to START ANOTHER WAR IN IRAQ FOR FABRICATED REASONS. We're all sorry you grew up along with it. You were lied to. We all were lied to.

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bytor said:

Actually, it was an U.N. coalition. The U.S. didn't declare war on Iraq.

The 1991 Gulf War, yes. The 2003 Iraq War, nope. Not a U.N. thing. France, Russia, and China (which all have veto right as permanent members of the UNSC) were opposed to it.

The US and UK tried to argue that the UNSC resolution which permitted the 1991 Gulf War still applied, but that convinced nobody in the UN. The UN Secretary General at the time, Kofi Annan, explicitly said that the invasion was illegal.

The official term used for the so-called Coalition of the Willing was "Multi National Force - Iraq" or MNF-I.

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FireFish said:

technically it could be called a U.N. decision.

Choose to examine your wikipedia pages and history courses more closely along the actual timeline of events.


The 2nd invasion of Iraq was NEVER sanctioned by the UN, in fact the Secretary of State Colin Powell had the impossible job of lying to the UN General Assembly and UN Weapons Inspectors in order to establish credibility via the US case to implement an invasion of the sovereign territory of Iraq. The entire thing was a fabricated lie caused by a retarded politician without a superpower opponent to counter his sheer stupidity. Period.

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bytor said:

The U.S. didn't declare war on Iraq.

Who bothers to declare war nowadays? I suppose you could argue it was part of the "War on Terror", in which case a formal declaration was probably considered unnecessary, what with Saddam being in league with al-Qaeda and supplying them with Nigerian yellowcake for their terrorist nuke program.

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FireFish said:

and yet here you are confirming the stereotypes of people with a different opinion becoming nothing more then idiots that start to call names when they are safe behind their screen. If you want to support one giant western globalized ideal then that is your opinion and not a universal fact which counts for every human being on the planet.

I'm sorry, but I can't decypher this sentence. Am I bad for confirming the Western, or the Eastern stereotypes? Was that a passing threat implying I wouldn't stand by my words face to face? Your argument was to leave the Middle East alone and I'm saying it's at least a century too late for that, we don't get to wash our hands of this. Not that we can, given the oil interests and Europe's massive and growing immigration problem.

Yes it is a difficult situation for the U.S. as they left a country in ruins, so they should fix it. But at the same time there are so many more factors playing here making it such a complicated ordeal. It is the U.S. that started and ended their war and not every other western country so do not even try to go 'the entire west' in this. But i do agree to the fullest about the fear the politicians have for a stronger mid-east, and that they would not want it to happen. They indeed have the bad luck that they are sitting on oil while the rest of the world is hunting the 'supposably' last drips of it before this natural resource is depleted.

Yes, the entire west. Even countries like France may have protested Gulf War II, but they led the Libya campaign and Hollande pathetically called to arms for a Syria invasion. Even "innocent" countries like mine that joined late are guilty by the fact of joining NATO and therefore accepting the historical burden coming with it. The US may have been the driving force over the last two decades, but there's SO much more guilt to pass around - starting with, as Cupboard mentioned, the British and the French drawing those nonsensical borders just to delineate their zones of imperialist interest instead of historical fault lines.

but Looking at your style of flame responses i doubt i would even respond anymore.

You keep saying that, but you never, EVER produce. If you mean it, I dare you to finally stop answering. But don't threaten with it in every thread to anyone who makes you feel uncomfortable by not respecting your precious snowflake opinions.

TheCupboard said:

I'm sorry man, but absolutely not. Obama completely led from behind on the Libyan excursion. So basically the coalition toppeled a strong-man government who had a known reputation of terrorizing the region by palling up to nomadic groups of extremists and passing himself off as a "common-man"? Is it all that hard to imagine that lawlessness and chaos would ensue when this decentralized executive got blown over? Just because the West decided not to occupy does not make it a great crime. The region barely had a cohesive central government when the Colonel was in power.

This is good food for thoughts, however I have to disagree with some of the arguments you make. Yes, Libya isn't divided by religious borders, but rather by even more granular tribal ones. They seem as fierce, though, so I'm not so sure this will end with some self-correcting purgatorial process with a strong independent state on the output. Somalia is tribal like that and it's just not fixing itself and we can't possibly be leaving it alone more. We left it so much alone that Kenya and Ethiopia had to start stepping in.

The question is, can we do the same with Libya? Leave it to its own measures as long as the oil keeps coming? They're also the gateway country for African immigration to Europe. There are millions in Libyan refugee camps waiting to embark on shitty ancient ships that break and drown half the way to Malta. How can we NOT help? Italy is screaming by this point while Germany and the countries that bombed Libya gleefully play dead over the issue. Also Libya is the main power base for weapon and personnel supplies of the Syrian extremists, this is anarchy propagating itself in the name of the most hardline fundamentalism. U.N. Peace Corps in Bosnia may have created their share of mess, but I would've much preferred sending them to Libya after the toppling was done to the status quo.

Libya, like Afghanistan is a completely different situation due it its harsh geography and physical isolation, compared to Iraq or Syria which are both heavily populated and fierce sectarian tensions are the prime great debates.

I think Libya as a theatre of war is much more similar to Iraq than Afghanistan. There's literally nothing in the Libyan desert except smuggler routes, the entire war was concentrated along the coast - as is Libya's population.

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dew said:

The result is a state that doesn't work as a state, ruled by gangs with a powerless, useless central government. Terrorists do whatever they want there and both the countries are important power bases for international criminal activities, be it terrorism or piracy.


This sounds an awful lot like Iraq & Afghanistan, both Republican "creations". Maybe Iraq is a bit more controlled in select parts (oil fields) but for the rest it's just as fucked up as all the rest, with suicide bombings and terrorist strikes happening EVERYDAY ever since their "liberation". It was practically a GIVEN that you'd read about a new terrorist strike it Iraq EVERYDAY. Sometimes 5, sometimes 150 people dead, but always on schedule, like clockwork.

You could say that the only "successful" creation of US foreign policy in the last two decades is Kosovo, which also hits closer to home, in your and my case.

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I see Tony Blair is back in the limelight, trying to tell the world it wasn't his fault that Iraq is suffering it's current woes. Well, he always was a lying bastard... I'm not even surprised he can say it with a straight face. Boris Johnson may well be right in calling him mad - I can't imagine any sane person could deal with their legacy being what the current state of the Middle East and UK is.

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Phobus said:

I see Tony Blair is back in the limelight, trying to tell the world it wasn't his fault that Iraq is suffering it's current woes.


Well, it makes sense if you think of it as yet another variation of the "I was just following orders" defense (aka the "Nurnberg defense"), only that this time it's uttered by a country's former PM. He doesn't consider himself accountable, because obviously he was not the Head Hancho of the whole op. He was just "following orders".

And then we wonder why "terrorists" take on UK, USA or other citizens of involved countries: after all, they are "democratic" countries, right? So, their leaders are elected by the people of those countries, and the actions of said leaders are the will of the people, right? Therefore, if a country's PM goes to war, it's because his people wanted it, and that makes them legitimate targets, as they are directly responsible for starting this war. After all, in democracies, people have the power to make decisions, right? Therefore it's any woes that result from those decisions, should befall the people themselves. This has been used to justify austerity and other forms of "collective punishment", BTW.

So, if one of your former PMs admits that he was just "following orders", to the eyes of a "terrorist", it follows that his people (who elected him in the first place) are also passive order-following lackeys, and elected him because that's exactly what they were/wanted. So they deserve to be targeted for punishment, too.

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The only orders that Blair followed were those of George W Bush and any lobbyist with a sufficiently large bank balance. If he listened to the people, then 2 million of them marching on London would have dissuaded him. The UK is very notably run by an elite that is unaccountable through being the authorities and we merely pick the one out of a range of bad options who lies to us most appealingly every now and then and call it a democracy. They are under no obligation to stick to their pledges and voter apathy suggests we know it, too.

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And still, this is considered the "best of all possible worlds"...

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I've never liked the "Well you're a member of a democracy, so you're to blame for everything your country does," logic. Not to imply the terrorists are right either way. But you know, it doubly sucks to get blown up over the views of a group you're not a part of. No one in Washington gives a crap about what you have to say, but hey, at the same time, outsiders blame you for everything Washington does. I just... what are you supposed to do when you're asked to answer for a government that doesn't represent you?

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geekmarine said:

I just... what are you supposed to do when you're asked to answer for a government that doesn't represent you?


How the saying goes.... "there are no dead-ends in a democracy". So next time vote for one that represents you, amirite? Or is your right to vote purely a token one?

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To be fair this whole situation was destined to happen. Extremism is on the rise and, though these civil wars may have started with unhappy civilians, they are filled with a majority of neanderthals who absolutely cherish the opportunity to turn nations into Sunni dominated Sharia-states. We can take blame for Afghanistan and Iraq, the puppet governments, etc., but Sudan, Syria, Pakistan, central Africa and every other poorer country with a Muslim history (Philippines for example) are at the fate of an oil funded conquest for an Arab dominance of the Muslim world.

If you want to stop this you have to hinder the Arab nation's cash flow. And to do that you'll have to change the whole western economy. We're now hapless pawns in this situation, really. The absurd Arabian tooling of how we interact in the east has been passed from politician to politician to maintain our way of life. They are not trading oil under the USD for nothing. To stop this problem in the middle east, we'll have to sacrifice our way of life to save theirs. And, personally, I'd much rather play their games then to live at a much lower standard.

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Maes said:

How the saying goes.... "there are no dead-ends in a democracy". So next time vote for one that represents you, amirite? Or is your right to vote purely a token one?

Well I mean you can vote in every election and never once end up backing a winner, and yet still be blamed for the winner's decisions because you voted, is what I'm saying, so in some ways, yeah, the right to vote is a token one.

For instance, I'm currently a liberal living in Texas - no matter how many times I vote, it's not really gonna matter because Texas is such a conservative state. But try explaining the situation to an outsider. People not from Texas always seem a tad incredulous regarding my political beliefs, as if, if I were really a Texas liberal, the state would be liberal, too. Ugh, it's all a mess. Point is, I'd never hold the people blindly accountable for their leaders, even in the face of democracy, because democracy only means majority rules, not that everyone always gets a voice. That'd be something different entirely.

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