King Kreole
natural blondie like goku
What the US did was kick a hornets next and then execute the beekeper. Now people are shocked that everyone is getting stung.
Trump's self-destruction has begun
- Thread starter Dusty Bake Activate
- Start date
What the US did was kick a hornets next and then execute the beekeper. Now people are shocked that everyone is getting stung.
Very well said.
I HAVE NOT CAPED FOR THE UNITED STATES ANYWHERE.
Ya'all are just like Trump. You don't even listen to what the other person is saying and just start saying shyt in the hopes that someone who isn't paying attention will believe it is true.
If you haven't noticed, it is TRUMP who was praising Saddam for how he was handling those internal/regional differences. HE was the one who was claiming they were relevant. Now you're turning around and saying none of it is relevant because they didn't pose a direct threat to the US (let's ignore the GHW Bush assassination plot, of course). But that destroys Trump's whole point that Saddam cracked down on terrorists well (which was false anyway - he sponsored the terrorists with money, land, and training, he didn't crack down on them).
And it is only TRUMP, not myself, who ever supported an interventionist war in Iraq.
Saddam would be 80 years old right now so his days in power might have been up soon anyway, and his oldest son was a freaking psycho. He'd spent half his time in power at war and HE was heavily responsible for prompting the US invasion and causing his own downfall. His insanely brutal reign and the manner in which he wielded violence is one of the things that messed up the region so bad and eventually led to the anti-Sunni backlash that led to his former officers running to Isis.
Saddam didn't stop Isis because Isis didn't even exist. It was formed in reaction to the war that he helped create, due to the conditions that he helped to create. Saddam wasn't immortal - he was going to die sooner or later anyway, likely sooner, and the brutality that grew out of the terror the region had gone under was going to surface sooner or later anyway.
Here were my points:
1) Saddam didn't give a crap about terrorists, he actually supported them. The guys he had a strong arm against were his own political opponents, who generally weren't terrorists.
2) Saddam's techniques didn't keep the region from violence, he kept the region in almost constant violence and created the conditions for even more violence later.
3) Trump supported taking out Saddam before the Iraq War started, and supporter taking out Ghaddafi before that happened too. He's straight up lying to you in order to look smart.
I don't think invading Iraq was the right thing to do, because massive acts of violence tend to beget more violence. Both Saddam's wars and violent oppression AND the United States' wars and violent oppression (let's through al-Assad in there too) are what caused the region to descend into the horrific violence we see today.
Iraq would have been better off without Saddam in power. Iraq would have been better off without a US invasion. BOTH of those things are true. Doing one of them (the US invasion) in order to create the other (Saddam out of power) is stupid as hell and counterproductive. But the fact that a US invasion was a bad idea does NOT mean that Saddam being in power was a good thing, it just means that our options for changing that were limited and probably not actionable.
But I didn't post to talk about the invasion. I posted to take about whether Trump was right that Saddam kept terrorism under check. And that idea is ridiculous at every level. The fact that an even worse terrorist group started getting control of land after the Syrian Civil War in the 2010s doesn't tell you shyt about whether Saddam was doing things right or wrong in the 1990s.
It's like claiming the US intervention in Cambodia was successful because they kept the Khmer Rouge out of power. No, that would be a stupid opinion because a decade of US intervention in Cambodia created the conditions for the Khmer Rouge to gain power once they left. In the same way, two decades of Saddam Hussein's rule created some of the conditions for Isis to gain support and control once he left. If he had never trained his officers to brutalize and torture and kill, had never destabilized the region with constant major wars, had never psychologically terrorized his own civilian population for decades, and had never goaded the US into their actual invasion, then Isis wouldn't have happened. That doesn't make him the ONLY one responsible - the Iranians, the Mujahudeen, the 1980s Soviets, 1980s US government, 1990s US government, 2000s US government, and 2010s Russian government are all responsible in their own way too. But pointing out "the US and others did stupid and horrible things" does not absolve Saddam from having done stupid and horrible things.
What do all of you think of Trump's praise of the Tiananmen Square massacre?
Whatever man....You are not even making sense right now even with your long ass paragraphs of nonsense.
Keep it consise next time.
King Kreole
natural blondie like goku
I agree that in a perfect world, the US invasion and Saddam's brutality wouldn't have to exist. But we're dealing with an imperfect world, and I think it's historically inaccurate to say that Saddam was the source of the problems through his brutality. What Saddam did was keep ideologies in check, and for better or worse, the ideologies that have sprung up in his aftermath are more violent and chaotic than his own. Under Saddam, Iraq wasn't the no man's land that it is right now. It should be self-evident that a power vacuum in the wake of a brutalist regime will probably end up even worse. I don't mean to downplay the fukked up shyt he did, but Saddam's Iraq was a better place than it is right now. And no one has a way of making it better. Iraqis are bitter at the invasion because if you can't make it better, at least don't make it worse.
Because of the abuse and resource rape in the region that started long before Saddam's reign, there was always going to be a level of discontent that needed to be checked. And the checking wasn't going to be a nice process. That's Trump's point when he says Saddam was a bad guy but preferable to current circumstances. I don't see how anyone, Middle Eastern or Western, could prefers current circumstances to the strongman era.
The terrorism that Saddam kept under check was the ideological extremism that spread throughout the region in the wake of his removal. Because he had already imposed an order, albeit brutally, there was no space for the radical Wahhabism of ISIS/Al-Qaeda to take hold. He kept the Sunni generals that ISIS now relies on busy. In my opinion, peace in the Middle East is about a balance of power between Shiite Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia, and anything that goes towards heavily tilting those scales, like the removal of Saddam/Gadaffi/Assad, is directly contributing to chaos. I'm not sure how you can point to Saddam as creating conditions for ISIS to form when the spark was lit by his unwilling removal. If he had never been removed, ISIS would most likely never have taken hold. That's like saying the President is responsible for the economic turmoil that would result from his assassination. And Saddam didn't goad the US into invasion, the Bush administration had to make up a bullshyt link between the 9/11 attacks and WMDs to justify the invasion.
My point is not that Saddam was a good guy or that he should be absolved for the crimes against humanity he perpetrated, just that he had a stabilizing effect in a very combustible region, and removing that jenga piece to carelessly caused more harm than good. I prefer Bush 41 to Bush 43. Saddam surely contributed to the combustibility, but I think you're overestimating the degree.
It's part of the same worldview. Whereas the Clinton/Powers doctrine is based on exercising the US' power to protect/intervene, Trump believes that there will always be a certain element of hell that needs to be suppressed, and thank god it's not the US' job to do so. Clinton will be running around the world trying to put out fires, Trump is saying let the locals put out their own fires and let's not complain too much about their methods.
Dusty Bake Activate
Fukk your corny debates
What does the beekeeper have to do with a hornet's nest?What the US did was kick a hornets next and then execute the beekeper. Now people are shocked that everyone is getting stung.
the next guy
Superstar
This man might explode brehs.
King Kreole
natural blondie like goku
Well there's no such thing as a hornetkeeper now is there?What does the beekeeper have to do with a hornet's nest?
But there isn't any evidence that there was some massive storehouse of ideological extremism in Iraq to begin with. Nearly everyone significant who has been involved in Isis is either a foreigner or one of Saddam's former officers.
The radical Wahhabism of Isis/Al-Queda didn't "take hold". Even AFTER the invasion, AFTER the deposing all of Saddam's officers, AFTER five years of war in Iraq....Isis was almost completely powerless from 2008-2010. If there was some wellspring of religious extremism in Iraq that Saddam was barely keeping under wraps, where were they?
Isis didn't gain significant power until after the Syrian War started. They took advantage of a power vacuum in some areas to gain land/resources/recruits, and then used those resources to turn around and re-invade Iraq around 2013 or so. Until that point, they had lost nearly all their Iraqi support even though Saddam had died a full TEN YEARS earlier
The idea that Iraq was a hotbed of religious extremism that Saddam was keeping in check is completely false. The vast majority of the Iraqis who are fighting for Isis are just mercenaries trying to get paid (Isis for years was paying better than the other armies fighting), or traumatized revengeful Sunni men who lost a father/brother/etc. and want payback. The vast majority of the power structure is foreigners and secular former military officers. And they are still a tiny minority of the Iraqi population.
Saddam helped turn the area into a massive extended warzone, full of traumatized young men with nothing to lose, deepened the Sunni/Shia divides to create desire for payback left and right, and basically invited the US to invade twice. He couldn't live forever - the powder keg he was fueling was going to erupt sooner or later, and it's a figment of imagination to believe that he could have just brutalized the population into submission indefinitely. He (with American and Syrian help) created the conditions that caused the current situation, and the religious extremism is just the helpful face for a movement that isn't about much more than power and control.
The exact same way I blame America for the Khmer Rouge taking hold in Cambodia, even though it didn't happen until after they left. They had screwed up the country bad enough that something like that was going to happen once they inevitably left...just like Saddam's reign of violence and oppression was going to blow up once he inevitably lost power...hell, it was a constant disaster even when he was in power.
It's part of the same worldview. Whereas the Clinton/Powers doctrine is based on exercising the US' power to protect/intervene, Trump believes that there will always be a certain element of hell that needs to be suppressed, and thank god it's not the US' job to do so. Clinton will be running around the world trying to put out fires, Trump is saying let the locals put out their own fires and let's not complain too much about their methods.
But Trump DID advocate for going into Iraq.
But Trump DID advocate for going after Ghaddafi.
The idea that Trump has some sort of consistent non-interventionist worldview is a complete lie. It's just something he made up recently. Generally, the only consistent foreign policy view he's expressed over any significant length of time is "power is good" and "human rights aren't important to me, they get in the way of power". His praise of Saddam, Putin, Kim Jong-Un, and the Chinese Communists is all built around that view. Other than that he knows very little regarding foreign policy at all, and much of what he does say has been made-up for the sake of this election.
King Kreole
natural blondie like goku
I don't visualize it as a massive storehouse, I see it as an encroaching presence. Saddam put up ideological borders around Iraq that made it inhospitable for extremist ideology to gain a foothold within Iraq. With Saddam gone, Al-Qaeda was more or less free to come in and set up shop, leading to Al-Qaeda in Iraq, leading to ISIS. When the dominant ideology falls, the actual people left behind had nowhere to turn, which made it ripe for an outfit like Al-Qaeda to garner support. They brought order and purpose to a bunch of people who just lost theirs in Saddam. The reason for the time lapse you're describing is because it took years until inter-organizational struggles caused ISIS to officially break away from Al-Qaeda. Obviously in the immediate aftermath the US was the dominant power, playing Atlas, but as soon as they started to ease up, external ideologies rushed in. Al-Qaeda in Iraq was operational as early as August of 2003. The main lesson that should be gained from the War in Iraq is that you don't invade unless you have a feasible exit plan. The US didn't/couldn't, so they shouldn't have invaded. So you're right when you say that Iraq wasn't a hotbed of religious extremism, precisely because of Saddam's brutal regime sucking out the oxygen of political and social freedom/chaos. The hotbed was all around Iraq, amorphous, being primarily funded by the Saudis, just waiting for opportunities to gain power. We're talking about turmoils hundreds, in some cases thousands, of years old. I'm not buying the idea that religious extremism wouldn't be an ever present spectre had Saddam not been so brutal. There are too many factors and forces pushing the world in the direction. Saddam and Gaddafi both said something to the effect of "You think we're bad, you should see the guys we're keeping at bay." Saddam was guilty of deepening the Sunni/Shia divide, but he wasn't responsible for putting the powder in the keg or lighting it.
This is the point. Knowing that this guy is the last barrier to the devastation of an even worse regime, why in god's name would it be prudent to take him out? What benefit was it to the American national interest to take Saddam out? It didn't make the Iraqis lives any better, and it didn't make American lives any better. If Saddam was running a regime that would invariably lead to breakdown, then let it happen. But it most likely would have been a slower, more controlled burn. What the US did was invoke the worst case scenario. I can't imagine a scenario in which Saddam dying of old age or being assassinated in a coup would lead to the absolute chaos we're seeing now. Again, the point is not that Saddam was a great ruler, it's that he was better than the alternative we're living. The US' actions only made the situation worse for everybody. If you believe Saddam's reign was a constant disaster, I would love to hear what you call modern Iraq.
Trump was initially ambivalent but he's been consistent with his critique of the decision to invade Iraq for the past decade. Much longer than Hillary, who is still trying to justify that worldview, pulling an Iraq 2.0 in Libya and licking her chops at the prospect of doing the same to Syria. That Trump comment on Gaddafi you linked to was foolish, but ultimately an inconsistent outlier with the vast majority of his rhetoric and actions since becoming a politician. Hillary, on the other hand, has a long history of actually taking actions that prove her interventionism. Not a single decade old soundbite from a radio station interview, but actual policy briefs and authorizations as the third most powerful executive in the United States government. I don't know how you can honestly assess Trump's actions and rhetoric and come to the conclusion that he's some crypto-neocon. The man who all but called Bush a war criminal. He's been much more forceful in his remonstrations of the interventionist philosophy that led to the turmoil in the Middle East than Hillary has. Probably because she's the most recent and active advocate of it.
88m3
Fast Money & Foreign Objects
We bike
What actions? He's been all rhetoric since he doesn't have much of a public record that we can look back in hindsight and critique like Hillary. Personally, I'm not confident he would have opposed the Iraq invasion, nor our involvement in Syria & Libya for that matter because his message is too inconsistent. It's easy to jump on an unpopular war now that we can see the blow back from our intervention. But he also talks about Obama not being tough enough on ISIS and suspected terrorists, and how other nations need to respect us more. How exactly that would manifest in a Trump administration, I don't know ... like I said, we don't really know what we'd get from him policy wise. And honest, I don't think Trump knows either.
King Kreole
natural blondie like goku
By actions I meant he could have chosen to ingratiate himself with the neocon establishment like every single other Republican nominee (minus Rand) did. If it was simply his rhetoric on this issue we had to judge him by, I would agree that it has been too skimp to have total confidence in. But Trump's entire ideology is predicated on American isolationism. His economic views don't work without isolationism. His social views don't work without isolationism. His foreign policy views don't work without isolationism. He's not a hawk. He had every chance during the Republican debates to outdo Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio with the neocon interventionist talk, but he instead chose to say taking out Saddam and Gaddafi was a bad idea. That wasn't the easy path in that environment. He got heavily rebuked for it, and is still getting heavily rebuked for it by the media, but he stood his ground. This isn't a hindsight is 20/20 thing.
Normally I would say ok, he has no governmental history so it's too risky to trust he would be dovish in the face of the Washington foreign policy status quo. But it just so happens he's running against the person with one of the worst records when it comes to this issue. Seriously, the only other people I would trust less than Hillary to not bring about foreign wars of adventurism are Cheney and Rumsfeld. So the choice is easy for me: the relative unknown in Trump or the known evil in Hillary. You can believe that Trump's whole campaign is a lie, but to suggest that Hillary's entire public service career was a ruse and she'll randomly become a dove in the face of all evidence is a hill too high for me to climb. Trump's worst case scenario is Hillary's most likely.