Officially, the position of the state department is-- “we really shouldn’t care about who wins your election, as long as they’re free and fair.” Privately, well, things are different. The art of statecraft involves speaking out of both sides of ones mouth while seeming not to.
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From what I’ve read, the military is supporting the libertarians in Rojava, the state department is supporting certain Islamists, and the Erdogan regime is supporting Daesh against Rojava.
Strategy?
Nato has all the strategies!
Nato is using several strategies at once!
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Remember when George W. Bush proclaimed that the US was leading a Crusade against Islamic terror and every informed person cringed in horror? There have been ongoing conflicts between the “free world” and various Muslim states for centuries, with the “free world” being the aggressor more often than not. There’s no innocent party, and your view of history is poorly informed.
And the “free world” is determined to have power regardless of others may have done, or will do.
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Let’s start with the conspiracy to suppress support for Bernie and move on from there.
I see. And would this new knowledge qualify as a good thing? The sort of thing that changed how primary voters selected their candidates? The sort of thing that would let Bernie change his campaign tactics?
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blah blah blah.
distraction from the singular issue that we are lied to for gain and that people die as a result.
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You got me!
But who created the papacy?
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Or so the State department maintains. This is about maintaining our global hegemony, though, not about spreading democracy.
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Saint Peter?
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smash the state, etc.?
At the point when the server was hacked the election polls were fairly close, or at least early enough to be inconclusive. At the point of the release, the post-convention bump had put Trump in a very competitive position, and the timing was well aimed to defuse a post-convention bump for Clinton, even if it failed once the forensics provided a large body of evidence showing the hacks were likely by the FSB/GRU. The sheer amount of forensic data all consistently pointing to those sources is incredibly damning. You should look into it.
Russia would stand to gain massively by a Trump presidency, so I can see why FSB/whoever would have gauged it to be worth a shot, esp. at the time when it was tried. Trump not only wants to effectively destroy NATO, but had top staffers who were being paid indirectly by Russia, and Trump’s single contribution to the Republican platform was softening the GOP’s position on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Besides that, an utterly corrupt, incompetent, and easily manipulated leader in the US who is also highly pro-Russia would stand to give Russia a much stronger international position on many fronts at the expense of the US’s decline.
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The Emperor Constantine, of course. : p Presumably the earlier history was a later fake. Chick doesn’t say whether the Donation is real, though it looks like an anachronistic fake.
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Yes, The KLA was oddly classed as a terrorist organisation by the USA, at the same time as the USA was bombing Serbia (and Bulgaria) in support of the KLA. But of course, we have always been at war with Eurasia.
I don’t think that bombs falling on Belgrade saved lives in Kosovo. There was an upsurge in violence when the bombing started, which only subsided when troops went in. The idea of winning a war entirely from the air has always been very popular with military planners, but it never seems to work out as planned.
Also, without the unilateral military action from NATO, we also would have avoided almost starting world war three. Again.
Also, the alternative to unilaterally bombing another country wasn’t “Do nothing”. What I would have like would have been a repeat of what should have happened in Bosnia, A UN peacekeeping mission with proper support and backup that could have enforced a ceasefire.
I really don’t think that there was case to take sides in a conflict between Serbian ultra-nationalism in reach of a greater Serbia, and Albanian ultra-nationalism in search of a greater Albania, Unless of course we count peace and the civilian population as a “side”.
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Ah! I thought you were talking about intervention more broadly as opposed to just bombing… I suspect you’re correct on that issue, so fair enough. Sometimes, you need boots on the ground to get stuff done.
The difference is in the history and in the military both sides had at their disposal, though. Without denying a strain of ultra-nationalism, you have to remember the decades of the slow ethnic cleansing during the Yugoslav period of Albanians (removal as “foreign nationals” or “Turkish” Albanians - Muslims), which let up in the 1970s with autonomy. Plus, the Serbs had a well-equipped military at their disposal, which the KLA most emphatically did not have access to. I think the history and the fire power issue matters here.
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History? LOL.
You speak of ethnic cleansing of Albanians, while the data shows ethnic cleansing of Serbs: Demographics of Kosovo - Wikipedia . Communists even enacted a law in the wake of WW2 preventing the return of any Serbs that were forced out of their homes during the Greater Albania of WW2.
The only real cleansing of Albanian population started after the NATO bombing began, see the discussion around this post for a timeline: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/16/syria-western-intervention-belgrade#comment-27040097 .
And now, the Serbs are effectively ethnically cleansed from Kosovo (and Croatia). But don’t let the facts get in the way of the narrative.
Hey, can we stop using the term ‘cleansing’ for mass murder and displacement? I’m tired of little bits of vomit coming up every time.
Shittest euphemism ever.
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Please. You likely know very well that it’s disputed historiography, bound up in competing nationalist narratives. You’re also ignoring the fact that during the first Yugoslavia, there was a tendency towards Serb domination (some think of the royal dictatorship under Alexander as a Serb power grab against other, ethnically defined political parties). Despite that law being passed during the communist era Albanians were indeed ethnically cleansed from Kosova nor were they given any real autonomy until the liberalization policies of the 1970s.
I’m not going to deny that many Serbians suffered during the wars, because they did. Most especially those in mixed marriages in Bosnia. That doesn’t mitigate the fact that a Serbian nationalist party was in political power and used nationalist rhetoric as a political tool and a cultural wedge to attempt to assert power over the whole of Yugoslavia… the Croat nationalist attempted the same.
The truth was that NO ONE won here. And everyone bears some blame, but Milosevic did all he could to light that match and much of the blame can be laid at his feet and the feet of the radical Serbian national party.
I agree. Mass murder is mass murder. The terms have become hopelessly politicized and employed to ignore the brutal reality of war.
But ethnic cleansing can also mean less violent processes, such as finding ways to get people to move out of a region (deportations, inducements, taxation) in order to ensure a particular ethnic make-up.
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Which historiography is disputed? Census data? Or the dates of the start of the bombing and the appearance of refugees on the Macedonian and Albanian borders? Those are both well documented in the archives of all major news organizations.
I agree with you that no one one won there (well, the criminal element did, in pretty much all parts of former YU), but it is both dishonest and intellectually lazy to blame the whole thing on one side, or a person for that matter.
I completely agree the modern lines of where countries lie isn’t helping things. I have said for awhile that the Kurds should have their own country, and I am sure there are other areas that I am just not aware of.
Though, again, redrawing lines might help those areas retain peace, but that isn’t to say that they won’t start feuding between one another again.
I don’t think most of the problems in the ME is about the US. For sure we are both complicating things and making things worse, but ISIL/ISIS, the Taliban, and other hard line groups aren’t doing what they are doing because of the US. They are doing what they are doing because of their belief that their way of doing things is the only way, and there is no other option. This is nothing new, it has been a problem for at least 500+ years. It isn’t only a problem in Islam, as Christianity has also had areas and eras with similar views. Just today they are no longer burning people at the stake for heresy.
I don’t think I ever trotted out “they are not ready for democracy”. It is more complicated than that. Clearly there are many factions within the ME who don’t want that, no matter what powers in the west want. I have repeatedly said that the US has been fine with dictators and monarchies as long as they are willing to play ball. Which is why we did nothing to help Egypt for so long, and are letting the Saudis do what ever. So you’re right that we have either undermined or turned a blind eye to oppression in US friendly areas.
But at the same time I see that even with out involvement from outside the ME, there are factions within it that want to tear it apart. The Sunni Shiite feud isn’t something one can easily fix because they are not represented equally in places like Iraq. So even if one were to vote in a government, one side would have power over the other from sheer numbers. (The opposite being true under Saddam’s regime.) Perhaps redrawing lines may help matters in that area. Then we have the issue of hardline groups wanting to basically make theocracies. Syria is a great example where if the populace united they could have overthrown Assad and taken over. But instead of two factions you ended up with 3 major ones, several smaller ones, fluxing alliances, and it is really really hard to decide who the “good guys” are in the whole matter.
So it isn’t that “they” aren’t ready for democracy - I bet a majority of people are, it is that certain groups don’t want that, they want to be in power and they are willing to kill for it. And yes, outside forces are making it worse in many/most cases.
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I think you’ve nailed the root cause nicely…and not just for them, but for all of us.
To take things one step further, isn’t the concept of everyone being stuck together and expected to be on the same page based on the geographical circumstances of their birth horribly naive and completely unsupported by centuries of evidence?
Being part of a civilization pretty much has to be a personal choice, and it can’t be a trap, otherwise you end up with a lowest-common-denominator race to the bottom. The bar ends up set low, and everybody says ‘why should -I- be awesome if -they- don’t have to be?’
And then we get endless war, climate change, lawsuits for decades over ‘happy birthday’, and a complete inability to progress unless we can figure out a way to monetize it.
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