Brussels Terrorist Attack

[KevinM1]

Tragic, but hardly surprising.  This is what happens when the West continually meddles in a region for generations, leaving it progressively worse every time.

That or our intervention has actually helped and beaten back full-blown armageddon. That's more what I think. We have to constantly push back against the forces of anti-humanism and anti-civilization. If we stop, those forces will build up and mount the biggest attack possible and destroy us. Sorry for the Godwin, but it's kinda like if we hadn't done the whole appeasement thing before WWII and we had actually beaten back Hitler, and people like you would have been like "god damn us for our fucking meddling, that is why Hitler is so angry in the first place, it's our fault, why can't we just leave him alone?" And it's because of these voices, who you can never convince that people may have bad intentions for us for no reason, that things always have to get worse and worse until they cross a threshhold of true existential threat, at which point it is too late to handle without causing hundreds of millions of deaths and entire countries reduced to corpses and rubble.

I love how 'people like you' comes out when I wrote a total of two sentences.  It's funny, since you don't really know what kind of person I actually am from that.

Anyhoo....

I have no problem trying to make the world a better place for all.  But, we need to:

1. Understand the region(s) and people(s) we're dealing with.  Our policy in the Middle East has been woefully naive, where we assume that the people there view things through a Western lens.  Remember, there were people who legitimately thought that we'd be 'welcomed as liberators' after we ousted Saddam Hussein.  That didn't happen, at least, not with the people that mattered.  What did happen was that the sectarian conflicts that Hussein ground beneath his heel bubbled back to the surface as each faction tried to fill the power vacuum, which anyone who was actually paying attention knew would happen.

2. Stop making alliances of convenience.  The enemy of my enemy isn't necessarily our friend.  See: Bin Laden of the 1980s, Saudi Arabia in general, the various warlords we paid off during the surge, etc.

3. Have an actual long term (as in, generational, because that's what it'll take) plan for post-regime change.  We did a piss poor job of it in Iraq, and didn't even bother in Libya (true fact: drones don't do much after a leader is toppled).

We keep going in, fuck with established power structures, and either leave or stay as an occupying force (complete with puppet government that the locals don't feel is legitimate) that just sits in place for a while before leaving.  We don't actually accomplish anything.  Even the best of post-Hussein Iraq was the result of a bribe, and untenable.

So, if we're going to do it, we need to do it right.  It needs to be a total commitment, one that will likely last generations because people are stubborn and it's hard to change minds.  And we need to be prepared to deal with the fallout of being an occupier/expansionist government.  Anything less than that creates a ton of instability, as we're currently seeing.