RE: The Historian in me weeps
July 10, 2014 at 12:44 pm
(This post was last modified: July 10, 2014 at 12:55 pm by Anomalocaris.)
(July 10, 2014 at 12:24 pm)Minimalist Wrote: Are you suggesting we should have intervened on Assad's side?
He's as bad as the rebels. There are no good guys over there.
No, he would not have been as bad as the rebels had the rebels not been encouraged to grow by us. It's relative social stability under an authoritarian, but not yet brutal regime, vs all out, no holds barred civil war of regime survival against a jihadist enemy.
Hilary Clinton saw the authoritarian part, and decided on a course to a no holds barred civil with possibility of victory by a fundamentalist Jihadist movement.
Yeah, she was a real Bismarck statesman in skirts there.
I think the world is at the moment undergoing fundamentalpolitical and economic transformation that is every bid as profound as the end of cold war, and with potential for deeper impact on the lives of more people in more places in the world than any other single event in human history. Foreign policy guided by simple minded rights and wrongs stemming from student movements of 1960s slightly modified by the intoxication from the heady days of surplus military strength in the 1990s will not stand us in good stead to come out even in this transformation.
