DebateGate
General Category => 3DHS => Topic started by: Christians4LessGvt on August 24, 2014, 02:47:25 PM
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Was Putin right about Syria?
By Ishaan Tharoor
August 22, 2014
(http://img.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/files/2014/08/grumpyputinobama.jpg)
What a difference a year makes. Around this time last year, the West was gearing up for military action against the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who was accused of carrying out chemical weapons attacks on his own people. That intervention never came to pass, not least because domestic public opinion in countries such as Britain and the United States was opposed to further entanglements in the Middle East.
Now, the U.S. is contemplating extending airstrikes on Islamic State militants operating in Iraq in Syria, fighters belonging to a terrorist organization that is leading the war against Assad. The Islamic State's territorial gains in Iraq and continued repression and slaughter of religious minorities there and in Syria have rightly triggered global condemnation. "I am no apologist for the Assad regime," Ryan Crocker, a former U.S. ambassador to Syria, told NPR. "But in terms of our security, [the Islamic State] is by far the greatest threat."
The irony of the moment is tragic. But to some, it doesn't come as much of a surprise. Many cautioned against the earlier insistence of the Obama administration (as well as other governments) that Assad must go, fearing what would take hold in the vacuum.
One of those critics happened to be Russian President Vladimir Putin, who warned against U.S. intervention in Syria in a New York Times op-ed last September. He wrote:
A strike would increase violence and unleash a new wave of terrorism. It could undermine multilateral efforts to resolve the Iranian nuclear problem and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and further destabilize the Middle East and North Africa. It could throw the entire system of international law and order out of balance.
Some of the crises Putin catalogs have worsened anyway, no matter American action or inaction. But Putin's insistence was couched in a reading of the conflict in Syria that's more cold-blooded than the view initially held by some in Washington. "Syria is not witnessing a battle for democracy, but an armed conflict between government and opposition in a multireligious country," Putin wrote, suggesting that the nominally secular Assad regime, despite its misdeeds, was a stabilizing force preferable to what could possibly replace it.
Putin decried the growing Islamist cadres in the Syrian rebels' ranks:
Mercenaries from Arab countries fighting there, and hundreds of militants from Western countries and even Russia, are an issue of our deep concern. Might they not return to our countries with experience acquired in Syria?
That's a concern very publicly shared now by U.S. and European officials, who are alarmed by the considerable presence of European nationals among the Islamic State's forces. A British jihadist who spoke with a London accent is believed to have carried out the shocking execution of American journalist James Foley this week.
That Western attention has shifted so dramatically from the murders carried out by the Assad regime to those carried out by the militants fighting it is a sign of the overwhelming complexity of the war, which is collapsing borders and shaking up politics in countries across the Middle East.
Nor is it necessarily vindication for Putin, who in the past year has turned into the hobgoblin of the liberal world order. As my colleague Adam Taylor wrote this year, the Russian president's op-ed makes awkward reading for Moscow when held up against its own aggressive meddling in Ukraine. Putin's solemnizing over the integrity of international systems is hard to take seriously considering his government's controversial annexation of sovereign Ukrainian territory in March and continued obstruction of a diplomatic resolution to the Ukraine crisis in the U.N. Security Council.
Others skeptical of Putin's stance on Syria point to Moscow's vested interests in the Assad regime, which furnishes Russia access to a naval base on the Mediterranean and is a frequent buyer of Russian military hardware.
In March 2011, in the shadow of pro-democracy uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, Syrian protesters took to the streets. Their largely peaceful demonstrations were met by heavy-handed, violent crackdowns by state security forces. Eventually, the upheaval turned into conflict and now a full-blown sectarian civil war that has claimed the lives of at least 191,000 people, according to the U.N. this week.
Some in Washington argue that if only the Obama administration had started arming and empowering the "moderate" Syrian opposition sooner, the extremist forces now in the news would not wield such influence and power. But that, as Middle East scholar Marc Lynch explains over at Monkey Cage, is a hopeful and naive assumption. It's hard to imagine any scenario where more direct U.S. involvement in the Syrian conflict, aimed at toppling Assad, would not somehow also play into the hands of the Islamist factions committed to the struggle.
More than three and a half years later, there is a lot of water, and blood under the bridge. But it's worth considering what Putin's government insisted not long after the violence began. In his New York Times op-ed, Putin reminded readers that from "the outset, Russia has advocated peaceful dialogue enabling Syrians to develop a compromise plan for their own future." That "plan for the future," the Russians insisted, had to involve negotiation and talks between the government and the opposition, something which the opposition rejected totally at the time.
In November 2011, Putin's foreign minister Sergei Lavrov criticized other foreign powers, including the United States, for not helping pressure opposition forces to come to the table with the Assad regime. "We feel the responsibility to make everything possible to initiate an internal dialogue in Syria," Lavrov said at a meeting of APEC foreign ministers in Hawaii.
The Arab Spring was in full bloom and U.S. officials thought regime change in Syria was an "inevitable" fait accompli. That calculus appears to have been woefully wrong. Now, the conflict is too entrenched, too polarized, too steeped in the suffering and trauma of millions of Syrians, for peaceful reconciliation to be an option. Russia could very well have been window-dressing the Assad regime's crimes by parroting Damascus's calls for dialogue, which the opposition has long considered insincere. But the chance for that sort of earlier rapprochement, in hindsight, seems a thin ray of light in the darkness that has since engulfed Syria.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/08/22/was-putin-right-about-syria/
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Mercenaries from Arab countries fighting there, and hundreds of militants from Western countries and even Russia, are an issue of our deep concern. Might they not return to our countries with experience acquired in Syria?
Well Mr. Putin, what did your advisement and actions do to prevent this?
I feel sorry for anyone in Syria that has a pro-democracy attitude democratic government seems to be off the table and the choice now is between very bad government and worse government.
I guess we can stay away from the trash until it has attracted a lot of flies and then burn it all.
But we may never know if it would have worked to support the well educated and democratic Syrians who are mostly dead now.
I don't think Putin is a great philosopher nor prognosticator, his vision is pretty narrowly expressed in what he thinks will profit Russia, especially his own faction of Russians.
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The US did not waste all that much in Syria and sent no troops. Had President Obama followed the usual warlike advice of John McCain, we would be in an even worse situation. The Syrians are not likely to adopt any sort of democratic government until and unless those who prefer dictatorship are expelled or deceased, neither of which seems likely. Putin simply wants to use one or more of Syria's Mediterranean facilities, and perhaps thinks that Muslims killing one another off cannot do Russia any damage. So I agree with Plane on this.
I imagine that most of Syria's greater intellectuals are somewhere outside Syria by now, Such people tend to be a bit elderly to take up arms, and tend to flee when in danger.
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I imagine that most of Syria's greater intellectuals are somewhere outside Syria by now, Such people tend to be a bit elderly to take up arms, and tend to flee when in danger.
This must not be true in every case , or there would never be a free country anywhere.
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As a rule, the intellectuals are not the ones who overthrow the governments. Note that the Ayatollah was the main force behind the overthrow of the Shah, and he was in exile for decades. The same was true of Michelle Bachelet of Chile, and Lenin.
The revolutionaries who end up at the helm of the revolution, whether it is democratic or not, are only occasionally the people who deal with the mechanics of the movement. Mandela was the inspiration of the South African revolution, but he was not running the show from prison. Most of those who were running the show were in Mozambique and other neighboring countries. It can be dangerous for the intellectual to lead the troops into battle José Martí did this and never saw the triumph.
I am not sure what you mean by "free country". I suppose you mean country with civil liberties, since not one country anywhere is free economically from influences outside the country.
It is not necessary to live in a country to serve as the inspiration for a democratic revolution. Revolutionaries tend to be pretty well-traveled, regardless of their ideals.
I do not know who the inspirational figures are behind the overthrow of Assad. They seem to keep a pretty low profile, in any case.
The fact that there is no single figure that serves as an inspiration to a majority of Syrians (as the Ayatollah Kholmeini did in Iran) is one reason why Assad is still holding on.
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Would Simon Bolivar count as an intellectual?
There needs to be a vision , and it has to be one that can be explained to a lot of troops.
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I don't think Putin is a great philosopher nor prognosticator, his vision is pretty narrowly expressed in what he thinks will profit Russia, especially his own faction of Russians.
And US President's are great prognosticators?
And US President's vision are not related for what is good for the US?
Putin was against US Iraq invasion.
And look where we are now.
Iraq is in chaos.
Putin was against US Libyan actions.
Libya is now in chaos much like Iraq.
Putin was against US agenda of toppling Assad.
Now US faces threat of something worse than Assad in Syria.
Putin knew that you can end up much worse off with what comes after a "bad guy" is overthrown.
I only wish our own President's would understand this prognostication.
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Simon Bolivar was an inspirational figure, but Francisco de Miranda was the major inspirational figure in Venezuela.
The independence of the Spanish colonies was provoked by several forces: the replacement of the Spanish king by Napoleon Bonaparte's brother José, who was French, the fact that the deposed Spanish king was an oppressive fool, and the desire of the American born aristocracy to replace the Spanish viceroys with themselves. The English did all they could to mess things up for the French, of course.
Bolivar was effective as a general and a strategy person, but he was unable to rule after the battles were over. Miranda died in a Spanish prison.
The inspirational leaders of the Mexican independence struggle, Padre Hidalgo and Padre Morelos, died, and Mexico's first independent government was a guy named Agustin Iturbide, who named himself emperor and ruled for a couple of years.
The American colonies were separated by less distance and fewer obstacles, such as mountains and jungles, and there were essentially two factions: the New Englanders and the Southern Plantation aristocracy. In South America, there were more factions, and less unity between them.
Bolivar was allied with the the Haitian leader Petion, and promised to end slavery in South America, and actually did so. Note that Washington, Madison, Jefferson, Monroe and the rest of the Virginia aristocrats did nothing of the sort.
Bolivar was from a very wealthy plantation family that also had a fortune from mining. But his father does when he was two, and his mother when he was nine, and he was educated by Simon Rodriguez, Andres Bello and others who were opposed to the Spanish monarchy. Bolivar and Miranda were both in exile for several years, by the way. He gave away his fortune to support the revolution.
Bolivar's goal was to maintain the unity of Gran Colombia (Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador and what is Panama today) and he was unable to do this and after a failed attempt on his life, he left in exile and died of tuberculosis before departing Cartagena for Europe .
Bolivar was rather short, perhaps 5'4" or so, and the painters who painted him from life all seem to have made him look much less European than those who painted him that never met him, who also painted him as taller.
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Putin acted in the interests of Russia. Russia does not want Libya's oil, and sees it as extra competition. He sees Assad as a guy who will allow Russia to keep a naval base on the Mediterranean.
It is absurd to blame President Obama for anything that has happened in Syria. The US did not finance the Syrian revolution to overthrow Assad.
I do not think that Presoidenr Obama acted incorrectly to prevent deaths in Libya, either.
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Simon Bolivar was an inspirational figure, but Francisco de Miranda....
Hey , this includes several things I didn't know.
Thank you.
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And US President's are great prognosticators?
As a rule no, only a few have been better prognosticators and/or visionaries than the common run. Wilson was good at understanding what was happening, FDR was excellent, and Lincoln was incomparable.
Washington was also very good , but he was in a class of stars, strange to have a bunch of visionaries together in such a time and place that they are effective rather than frustrated.
And US President's vision are not related for what is good for the US?
Yes , this is what we elect them to be, but don't we hope that the US will be a benefit to the whole world? We want leaders that lead the world in good directions. I do not have a perfect handle on the Russian character but I think Putin is a fellow of narrow focus and he seems quite popular doesn't he?
Putin was against US Iraq invasion.
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On what principals? Russians invade who they please, principals of self determination and good government do not seem to be high priority.
Putin knew that you can end up much worse off with what comes after a "bad guy" is overthrown.
I guess that is true, but are we talking about rolling the die or taking the reigns? If we refrain from deposing the Taliban they grow AlQueda like mushrooms, failing in action is not worse than failing in inaction......
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Putin so far has invaded only pieces of Ukraine and Georgia, all of which were at one time pieces of Russia.
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On what principals?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/06/12/russia-on-iraq-we-told-you-so/
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Putin so far has invaded only pieces of Ukraine and Georgia, all of which were at one time pieces of Russia.
He isn't nice to Chechens either.
So any territory that was ever a part of greater Russia shall always be so?
Should Finland and Latvia worry about this?
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Finland and Latvia were not part of Russia. Latvia was a Soviet Republic, Finland has been independent since 1919. Both are members of the EU and I do not think they need to be worried.
Chechnia is part of the Russian Federation and was part of Tsarist Russia as well. Chechnia is Muslim, as are several other areas.
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Your point being that even if a country has a seat in the UN , if it ever has been conquered by a Czar, Putin can demand it back?
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Putin knows that no one is going to prevent him from taking Crimea (which was not traditionally a part of Ukraine anyway) in any meaningful way. Europe depends on Russia to stay warm in the winter, and a lot of cars run on LNG from Russia as well. Europeans are not going to boycott Russia gas and oil. Due to logistics (gas pipelines cannot be run under the ocean) gas from the US is unlikely to replace gas from Russia.
It is not a matter of justice. Many Ukrainians in the Eastern part of the country see that Putin is a strong leader and Russia is increasingly prosperous, while Ukraine so far has only elected corrupt and incompetent leaders (ostensibly of two political persuasions) and the economy is in a shambles. Crimea is backward, most of the people are not Ukrainians, and the economy depends on tourism. There is not a lot of Ukrainian tourism because Ukraine is in a state of economic collapse: Russian tourists are the ones that many of Crimea's inhabitants would prefer.
Many Ukrainians would prefer to switch from being impoverished Ukrainians to being richer Russians. Ukraine did pretty well under the Soviet system. It has been mostly a corrupt disaster as an independent nation. And there is not all that much difference between Ukrainians and Russians anyway. They have different accents, but the understand each other. They have different recipes for kreplaks, kvass and borscht. The culture is not greatly different: think Manitoba and northern Minnesota.
Putin knows what he can do and what he cannot do. He understands Russians and Ukrainians quite well. I am sure that if I were Russians I would oppose him, but he is no dummy, and he knows what his limits are. And I am not a Russians and do not think like a Russian.
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Would any of those reasons work for converting some Caribbean or Middle American territory into US territory?
Somewhere that is not up to US standards of prosperity and honest government?
Putin is a skilled leader that knows his people well , but he is leading them to miss opportunities at advancement because he does not understand the benefits of democracy.
What he is winning for Russia is the kind of respect your worst neighbor gets for being strong and bad tempered.
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Would any of those reasons work for converting some Caribbean or Middle American territory into US territory?
Did XO use the same reasoning when President Reagan invaded Grenada?
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Welllll....
It really isn't personal, I like to challenge XO , but I like it best when he is up to the challenge.
In regards to going to war , XO is pretty dependably against it, that is what I expect .
That doesn't mean that his logic won't be interesting.
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The US believes that it has a right to invade any misbehaving micronations in the Americas that it wishes (Grenada and Panama being the latest) but it does not annex them, because it does not want Grenadians and Panamanians swarming into tthe US. It prefers to put in place a way by which American business interests can benefit economically without any cost to the US. Grenada is still a bit of an economic disaster, a tiny micronation where the main industry is tourism by very wealthy people where the resorts are owned by US and other foreign interests. Panama has become rather prosperous, since the US needs the Canal and an impoverished Panama would be bad business.
Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador were destabilized by goonish rightwing governments until the US managed to get a grip on the economic systems of these countries. Now there is a huge amount of urban gang violence that never existed before, as a result of the wars dislocating peasants to create free fire zones, and the result has been that children fleeing violence and wishing to live with their parents who work as underpaid servants in the US. Reagan's nasty secret wars are the cause of this, but somehow Obama gets the blame.
Putin does not need subterfuges like the US uses. The Russian people like to see the citizens of the former Soviet Republics suffer bad government and corruption. It serves them right. Putin is a strong figure and as such he is supposed to strut and posture.
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The Russian people like to see the citizens of the former Soviet Republics suffer bad government and corruption. It serves them right. Putin is a strong figure and as such he is supposed to strut and posture.
So what is wrong with our policy , and again what was it you didn't like about Reagan?
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Reagan was a shitass puppet of the oligarchy. He ruined millions of lives of people in Central America who posed no threat to him or any American. He or his handlers conspired with the Ayatollah to sabotage Jimmy Carter, who was tricked by Kissinger into that entire hostage crises.
There was not one goddamn thing that I liked about Reagan. He was simply a very good actor, playing his part for the thieves who wrote the scripts. He was not my kindly old grandfather, he was a hireling of the oligarchs that have ruined my country.
And don't tell me I have to prove that Reagan was a treacherous old lying sumbitch. I do not have any obligation to disprove that Reagan was as close to evil as it got until Cheney came along.
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The most amazing thing is that you do not think he was smart.
Handlers have been invented for him to retroactively explain how he could debate rings around his opponents .
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He could not do this. He was a great speaker only when he was rehearsed. He was ignorant of a huge number of facts.
His intelligence or lack of same was not what I hated about the evil old bastard. It was what he did to the country: he mongered unnecessary wars and invasions in Lebanon and Grenada, he ruined the S & Ls for the profit of his hirelings, he catered to racists and Klansmen, he started the deci=line of the middle class.
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His intelligence or lack of same was not what I hated about the evil old bastard. It was what he did to the country
Perhaps now, the good professor can start to appreciate how most of his critics see Obama.....with prescious little having to do with the color of his skin.
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He could not do this. He was a great speaker only when he was rehearsed. He was ignorant of a huge number of facts.
Walter Mondale made his living as a political speaker, How do you rehearse a debate?
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Oh, come on, they do it all the time. The issues are all defined, everyone has a pretty good idea of what they are going to hear the other guy say.
I did not find Reagan to be particularly good at that debate.
Reagan was an excellent actor, as I said. He was as shitty a president as this country has ever had the misfortune to have, but he played the part of grandfatherly old president very well. Americans do not like to think. They like to think they are thinking. Reagan was good at what he did: acting. He was very good at it.
But he left the country worse off when he left it.
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But he left the country worse off when he left it.
And boy oh boy, are we getting a boat load of that now.......in spades yet. And he hasn't even left office
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Denial is strong in this one, yes.
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Indeed, Jedi Master Plane
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Note please that both the DJIA and the S&P are at all time record highs.
When Obama was elected, experts said it would take ten years to return to 2008 highs.
Worshipping Reagan does not make the old bastard a hero./
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I also recall when both were reaching their highs under previous GOP Presidents, the issue became only the rich were getting richer, so yea, you can cherry pick a few of the better occurances happening under this President, despite his policies, though I noticed the issue of the amount of folks no longer looking for work wasn't brought up. The Debt wasn't brought up, nor the deficit, nor the spiraling out of control middle east conflict, or the disaster befalling our entire Foreign policy, as Russia & China start to bully more and more of the region. But at least Xo's getting his, and that's all that matters.
Worshipping Obama doesn't make him any better than that perhaps the worst modern day President, in our history, as he leaves it far worse off than when he took office...and he hasn't even left yet
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I am not worshipping Obama. I just like him a lot more than Reagan.
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I am certainly not the only one who is doing well in Obama's term.
It was inevitable that Russia, which has a huge amount of gas and oil, would have more political power once it was no longer in a state of chaos.
It was inevitable that once China took advantage of its ability to manufacture consumer products and export then cheaply.
It is not Obama's fault. This country has as coherent a foreign policy as it has ever had.
It is easy for Switzerland to have a coherent foreign policy, as its exports are few and its exporters have common interests.
It is difficult for the US, because we have and will always have contradictory interests. Big Oil wants us to make nice to the Saudis. AIPAC wants us to make nice to Israel. The Saudis and the Zionists cannot stand one another. Airlines want competition between Airbus and Boeing. Boeing wants the US to favor Boeing.
The Republicans have not had a balanced budget since the 1950's The Democrats came close at the end of Carter's term. And Juniorbush gave it away.
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Of course you're not the only one....the rich get richer. The folks that have the means to invest also get richer. And with all that bloviating, under this President, and Democrat party, our unemployment, debt, and economic situation is exponentially worse, than when he took office.
and you can pretend that everything that China & Russia is doing was "inevitable", but without a crystal ball, you have no fricken clue. I can be just as opionated, that under a President Romney, China & Russia would have done no such thing, noting a CnC, that would actually back up his word vs drawing imaginary lines, that even Syria can cross without repercussions
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Big Oil wants us to make nice to the Saudis.
They do not.
If I owned a Texas oilfield and I heard that the Saudis were angry enough to stop production < I would celebrate < enthusiastically.
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If you owned Exxon you would not celebrate. The major oil companies are close allies of the Saudis, as they market, transport and refine the stuff, which is where much of the profits are.
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And they do not celebrate when what they actually own triples in value?
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The various large oil companies around the world, except for, on occasion, Gazprom, are allies, since the refinery, delivery and retailing processes are as lucrative and occasionally more lucrative, than the pumping process.
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The Saudis have a lot of clout.
They run their country oil patch like a family business and they can produce enough to cheapen the oil.
So they run OPEC.
The companies of the world ,( including those owned by the nations government where they reside) cooperate, but not because they conspire, they just get told what to do by the big dog.
DeBeers does this same thing with diamonds, it is not necessary to corner a market to control it, just having enough to ruin the price for the other players is control.
When OPEC embargoed the US , the companies that had oil or gas to sell sold it dear. How could they do otherwise?
I can't see that the OPEC embargo cost domestic oil producers anything.
BTW Saddam Hussein broke the embargo and made a mint. The control of the Saudis through OPEC depends on market share control , pulling back like that improved the position of anyone not in the cartel with oil to sell.
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The oil embargo cost the Saudis a lot. That is why they tried it only once.
You have drifted far away from the subject.
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The dynamics of oil price have a bit to do with Putin Power .
But perhaps it is not central to this topic.
What would you call the center peg of what we are discussing in this thread?
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That the US is capable of having a coherent foreign policy was what I thought it was.
I say the US has NEVER had a coherent foreign policy, certainly not in recent years, no matter who was president.
This is a large and very diverse country economically and the government is overrun with lobbyists, many of whom conflict with one another.
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The dynamics of oil price have a bit to do with Putin Power .
But perhaps it is not central to this topic.
What would you call the center peg of what we are discussing in this thread?
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You mean it has never been better than now?
"We don't have a strategy yet......
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/president-obama-strategy-fight-isis/story?id=25164105
(http://a.abcnews.com/images/Politics/ABC_obama_press_conf_wy_140828_16x9_992.jpg)
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US policy has never been coherent. Perhaps this is for the best, actually.
Every period is different, with different influences both at home and abroad.
It is foolish to say that one is better than the other, except for one detail.
It is better not to be at war than to be at war. Always.