You Know What? Fix Your Own Fucking Problems

[Minimalist]

Why does the West keep getting dragged into this muslim shithole?  Because they keep asking.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/...w-it-must/

Libya's new prime minister has accused the West of abandoning the country after helping oust dictator Moammar Gaddafi and says it bears a responsibility for helping solve the resulting chaos, in an article in the Telegraph.

Fayez al-Sarraj said the international community’s subsequent lack of support left the country mired in civil war , in some of his first comments since his UN-brokered unity government was formed in December.

[The Grand Nudger]

Damned if we do, damned if we don't....and then people wonder why we don't give a shit who damns us and for what. It's just noise, for us, at this point.

[Minimalist]

As I recall the whole point of the limited NATO action was to stop Qaddafi from massacring the civilian population of Benghazi. 

As noted, that seems to have been the only thing that the UN could agree upon.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/07...09756.html

In 2012, you hailed the NATO operation in Libya as a model for intervention. Do you still perceive it that way?

The intervention at the time was designed to do three things: to make sure there was an arms embargo enforced on Gaddafi, that the people who were being attacked by government forces were protected and in some ways to provide the space and time for the people of Libya to decide their own future.
If you look at those goals they were all met. The impending disaster of an attack by Gaddafi’s forces on Benghazi was halted, over time the ability of Gaddafi’s forces to attack civilians declined, the arms embargo was kept in place and the people of Libya were given the opportunity to decide matters about their future by themselves.
Unfortunately, the way Libya has evolved demonstrates that just because you give people the opportunity to decide their own future they don’t always decide in the right or best way — in the way that we would have wanted. So the situation in Libya has gone from bad to worse and is horrific in many dimensions. The future doesn’t look much brighter.

Luckily for us when the Syria situation rolled around we had a man in the White House with a sense of pattern recognition and not a fucking crazy warmongering shitball like Bush.  Obama learned the painful lesson that you just cannot help some people.

[Wyrd of Gawd]

Maybe it's too bad NATO didn't step in to prevent Nixon from killing Kent State students.  https://www.awesomestories.com/images/us...9d09c7.gif

[brewer]

Do we get to send in a hand picked dictator of your own choosing? We've done it before.

[Minimalist]

That rarely works out in the long run, either.

[abaris]

Why does the West keep getting dragged into this muslim shithole?  Because they keep asking.

Well, we helped creating this shithole. By ousting the stabilizing factor. I know, I know, cynical, but if you haven't got any plans for the day after, better keep your hands off the hot plate. That's my major problem with western interventions anyway. Not knowing shit from shinola, but still feeling the need to intervene. Because Gaddaffi bad, Ugha, Bugha.

[Minimalist]

I keep wondering what else we can do with these people.

1-  Somalia.  Bush the Smarter sought to send in troops to protect aid workers who were trying to feed starving Somalis in the middle of a civil war.  Didn't work.  Eventually every one pulled out and the situation was worse than ever.  There was no government to deal with, only a clique of feuding warlords.

2-  Afghanistan.  We backed one group of shitheads (the Northern Alliance) against another group of shitheads (the Taliban) who overthrew the government and took over.  They were as big a bunch of scumbags as the Taliban.  Bush the Dumber lost interest when bin Laden got away which has led to a Taliban resurgence.

3-  Iraq.  Bush the Dumber - for reasons of his own - fucked up the whole region for the next century by overthrowing the government and trying to give "democracy" to assholes who think "majority rules" means you can exterminate anyone you don't like.   They have behaved accordingly.

4-  Libya.  The government was blasting rebels and we joined in preventing ( France actually carried out more airstrikes than anyone else in the coalition probably because we were up to our armpits in the two aforementioned disasters)   Qaddafi's army from exterminating the people of Benghazi and points east.  Having been given that breathing space the rebels turned out to be every bit as bunch a primitive fuckwits as Qaddafi's troops.  See #3, above.

5  Yemen- This time we did almost nothing but watched our Saudi allies make a mess of things.  We threw in an occasional drone strike when we could pretend that we had identified an actual enemy.

6- Egypt.  A popular uprising resulted in the election of a radical islamic government which we did not like.  We sat by quietly while the Army moved to put the oppressors back in power.

7-  Syria.  The government was blasting rebels and Obama actually observed what had happened in Libya and decided not to get involved in spite of his own rhetoric to the contrary.  Republicunts hate him for that but they already hated him so no loss there.  We did try a couple of almost comical attempts to recruit "moderate elements" to form a fighting force against Assad.  I'm sure the 50 guys we ended up with scared him into pissing his pants. 

So, you tell me.  What's left.  We've tried doing nothing.  Doing everything.  And half-measures and none of it has worked.  At what point do we finally fucking realize that you cannot solve every problem in the world by dropping bombs on it?

[brewer]

That rarely works out in the long run, either.

Did they ask for a permanent fix?

[account_inactive]

Should have left Qaddafi alone.