Democracy and Terrorism in the Middle East

wrath
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I have a friend who grew up next to a police station in Cairo. So, yes. I fucking do.

And actually, obama did nothing to stop the counter coup and fully cooperated with Sisi when he came into power, rather than cutting Egypt off, as he should have for overthrowing an elected official.

Democracy is better than dictatorship that tortures it’s own people. Always. You want the public to not support the brotherhood, then the opposition needed to pay attention to the rural, religious oriented population and tend to their needs, rather than cossetting yourself in Cairo and Alexandria, and trying to make the country into something that people don’t want. Democracy is always a trade off, which is what makes it work. Set up a system that has some basic guarantees involved, and you can make it work, even under a religious political party.

You do realize that the “covert actions” was a major factor in bringing about the Taliban, right? Our BFFs until they weren’t? These were not great dudes.[quote=“kkaishakunin, post:36, topic:101491”]
Yemen is interesting.
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You find war crimes, famine, and cholera outbreaks interesting? People are dying so the Saudis can rule the country and stick it to the Iranians.

And the process by which it came about started under Bush. At least Obama did a troop draw down, but, much like the economy, obama inherited a mess, not of his own making, which he had to do his best to clean up.

It doesn’t have to be either or, actually. We could cut funding and actually support democratic movements in the region. Stop sending arms and money to regimes that brutalize their own people instead of invading because of some daddy issues.

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There was a great chance to do just that in Iran, 2009. We missed it.

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True. And to be fair, we should have done it way back in 1953, and things would be very different in the region now, I suspect. But we felt like we had to support Britain’s claim to resources under Iranian feet.

Wait, did we just agree on something? :wink:

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I don’t disagree at all.

May 25th shall be commemorated by worldwide celebrations in future!

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The Saudis are willing to fight terrorism to the last dead American.

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I don’t really disagree. But aside from those actually fighting, I do think it can matter how the other people look at them, how much gets rationalized or supported as normal or inevitable. And I don’t think it’s uncommon to see the public accept conflicts because of course we’re still fighting them.

This post was a reaction to @ficuswhisperer saying millennia, and I feel maybe harsh on that; his defense is a fair one. But in mine, it didn’t really take long for others here to turn to history from the Barbary Wars back to the Visigoth loss at Guadalete of all things. Those are people who wouldn’t relate to half our words, our foods, how we spend our time; our ideas about the universe, about politics, about justice and how humans should be treated. I can’t imagine the Berbers were actually any more alien to them than an industrial democracy or Ariana Grande concert would appear.

Yet I doubt anyone is surprised to see them mentioned in the context of those things. They had crosses or labara or whatever was used back then, so it’s all part of the same. That’s just how people learn to see it.

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I think the Arab Spring really put these lofty ideals to the sword, almost literally. Democratic movements in the region are minorities; heck, they are minorities even in Israel, the most “democratic” country in the area, where people keep voting for strongman after strongman.

I think these countries have to develop their own models of self-governance, which won’t necessarily look like Westminster or Paris. Look at Iran; with all their problems, they are gradually getting over the need for a religious “big daddy” to tell them what to do; but it took decades in almost complete isolation.

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There is a very good argument to be made that Country A should not intervene in the internal affairs of Country B, no matter how undemocratic Country B’s strongman may be, as long as the strongman stays within his own borders.

This was pretty much the position of American isolationists in the decades prior to World War II, as well as the World War I peace movement (before Wilson stamped it out), with both of which I am very sympathetic.

But to have that position, one needs to be able to look the other way when an Assad gasses his own citizens. Neither Trump nor Obama seems to have that ability.

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That’s very Prime Directive a way of thinking. But that doesn’t work unless you can also guarantee that Country B will never be a threat to Country A.

More importantly IMHO, there needs to be a force that works against tyranny and for human rights in the world. That’s generally very difficult to do without the threat of arms as a backup.

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And they’re willing to fight terrorism that isn’t theirs… I suspect that there are some members of the family that probably are supporting some of the various groups at play here.

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But they aren’t really remembering history, but remembering how someone NOW is interpreting history, yeah? After all, we’re constantly updating our understanding of the past through the present.[quote=“chenille, post:48, topic:101491”]
They had crosses or labara or whatever was used back then, so it’s all part of the same. That’s just how people learn to see it.
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Agreed. It just isn’t particularly helpful for them to do so. History, like anything else has been deeply politicized.

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I think the problem is that we don’t know if that’s entirely true, because, as you note, there isn’t much democracy. Plus, we’re looking at this through our own conceptualizations of what a democracy should look like, a liberal secular democracy with some form of free market economy… it doesn’t have to look like what we have, of course. But as long as we’re backing people who don’t want any kind of democracy and actively supporting crack downs against democracy, it’s not going to happen. Whether or not we can actually “proselytize democracy” as we were supposedly doing during the Cold War, I couldn’t tell you. I do know that we spent far more time espousing our belief in democracy and ignoring our many allies who were enemies of it, much as we’re doing in the ME now. But then again, how democratic are we here lately?

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And we all know how well the Prime directive works in practice on Star Trek, don’t we! Pretty much every captain breaks it all the damn time!

I think that @lolipop_jones has a point about interventionism and the problems it causes. We do spend much time and effort intervening in other places over the past century and a half. The record, I think, is very mixed on how well that has worked out historically. There are some cases where I think we did good (primarily the people to people type programs) and some cases they have been disastrous (mostly those which involved overthrowing a government or using our military to shape events to our and corporate interests). And there are MOST certainly times where we should have intervened more than we did - Rwanda, taking in more Jews fleeing from the Nazis in the 30s, earlier in the conflicts in the Balkans, etc. Until we actually support democracy over markets, and human rights over corporate rights, we will continue to have this mixed record, I think.

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Now, the interesting thing, Mindy-san, is that I posted the exact same comment:

on one of the most virulently rightwing sites on the net. (Not Breitbart, but close) and got something like a 90-10 ratio of comments agreeing with me.

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And it’s not only difficult, but completely impossible, if the tyrants and human rights violators are members of that body and get a vote.

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I think there is overlap in the right and left on some issues, like non-intervention. I think the REASONS why they take that position are very different (ultra-nationalism vs. anti-imperialism).

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I think there is overlap on many issues, and if we could concentrate on outcomes rather than yelling about the reasons why, we’d all be happier and better off.

For one, I think the statement that “The current American political class is the most corrupt in its history, and the corruption is completely bipartisan”, would get an 80% upvote across the whole left-right axis.

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Sure… but the problem is that we might be able to agree on some specifics, but the CAUSES are what’s tripping people up. As long as there is no common acceptance of the root of problems, it’s hard to solve those problems. I mean, we all talk about how corrupt our politicians are, yet thanks in part to gerrymandering, we keep putting the same assholes in office.