CNN: ISIS Takes Libyan City.

[grahamhgreen]

Last edited Wed Nov 19, 2014, 12:53 AM - Edit history (1)

Can we leave now?

We destabilized the entire region and it's turned to crap.

We are the problem not the solution.

Edit: link http://www.cnn.com/2014/11/18/world/isis-libya/index.html?c=&page=3

[CJCRANE]

1. We need the 28 pages released

and the CIA Torture Report and the Iraq Inquiry.

It's time to get to the bottom of all this, and shine a light on this age of madness and absurdity.

[KG]

2. the DU supporters of US intervention must be feeling all warm and fuzzy

[Ravenna44]

3. We didnt make it any better but

...but I gotta point out that it was pretty crappy in most of the middle east before we got there. We just didn't see the crap on our tv screens, because back then it was just foreign crap in some faraway place we didn't know or care about.

Qaddafi: insane dictator. Very big on rape and murder. Lots of his people rose up and fought to get rid of him. The militias have been fighting over the spoils ever since - long before iSIS came along. "We" are not the problem.

Hussein: sane but still a dictator. Though kinda secular, so he didnt destroy civil society too badly (just killed anyone who disagreed with him.) Didn't the locals cheer when the US first toppled him?
Assad: Possibly insane dictator (it's hard to tell if someone is pulling his strings). Plenty of his people are fighting to oust him. I have family from Syria, and they were very glad when the war ignited. Though Less glad now.

So lets please share the blame out equally. The people there do have agency ya know - they are not passively being acted upon like children. They are out there forming governments, armies, allegiances. They are choosing religious beliefs; they have built their own cultures along certain lines. I know we all agree that the Iraq invasion should never have happened. But I am bothered by the constant drone of "all that goes wrong in the ME is because of American meddling.". I think it patronizes the breathing thinking choice-making people who live there.

[grahamhgreen]

4. By any metric, all of these countries were better off before we meddled.

That's a fact.

It's a straw man to suggest that anyone is saying ALL that goes wrong in the middle east is because of America.

But I believe it is correct that everyone was better before we wiped out the socialist dictatorships.

It's part of the neo-con plan to steal the wealth of these countries in the name of costly market capitalism.

Can you provide data that would suggest we have made things better for the people of these countries?

If not, accept that we are one of the biggest problems in the Middle East, and one of the solutions must be our withdrawal.

Worse, we are making things horrific in these countries while our own retirees are forces to live on the streets and eat garbage.

If we want to honor the "breathing thinking choice-making people who live there", we need to leave and let them choose their own fate.

[Ravenna44]

7. Yes I think you and I think roughly the same

But as I remember, in Libya the only meddling was a no fly zone to protect civilians and rebels (who had started their own rebellion) from getting carpet bombed by the Libyan air force. When it comes to Syria, it's been pretty much the same thing: their choices and their war.

I agree that leaving other people alone to work things out (which will probably mean slaughtering each other for a good long while, just as I think it did in western Europe) is what makes most sense. But then we have to go public with that announcement: "America will not intervene; Russia can invade anything it wants; Yazidis can be slaughtered; Mexico can fall to its drug lords... We will stand by and let it all burn." And it may burn all the faster once aggressive players realize the US and it's massive military are no longer likely to intercede on any victim's behalf..

I think bowing out makes sense
- but I also remember the reports of the Rwanda slaughter and the handwringing that followed: the west "let" this happen; the west "didn't care about African lives.". And the west did blame itself for missing an opportunity to rush in when the corpses first started flowing downstream. Later, when it came to protecting the Muslim Bosnians from the Christian Serbs for humanitarian reasons (thinking of rwanda), we were pretty successful weren't we? I remember tht the Muslim branch of my family was much in favor of US protection. Similarly, rebel voices in Syria have also long been clamoring for US protection. So in the same country some people yell
"America get out!" while others yell "America come in!". And some of the same people who say "America is evil for meddling in everyone's business" will also angrily shout, "America, why don't you help us in our noble fight?"

So if we are going to leave the world to its own messes, let's have a clear understanding that those messes will be bloody - and we will probably be as much blamed for staying safe and watching from a distance, as we are currently blamed for wading in.

[Throd]

10. Welcome to DU. Your last paragraph sums things up quite well.

[grahamhgreen]

12. All true. What I have sadly come to believe is that Little of

What the American military is forced to do on behalf of multinational corporations has anything to do with human rights.... It's about oil (as Greenspan admitted), and privatization of resources so that they can be stolen.

Indeed, if these interests really cared about human rights, I would not have to see 65 year old homeless grandmothers eating out of trash cans on my way to work.

[CJCRANE]

13. Our allies supplied extremist fighters and weapons in both those cases.

Turkey opened their borders to allow foreign fighters to stream into Syria. Gullible idiots, psychopaths and criminals have streamed in from all over the world. We and our allies have overtly and covertly trained rebels.

It's more reassuring for us to think that these people en mass have a tendency to fight each other, without looking at the enormous amount of weapons, funding and propaganda that goes into this.

The fact that foreign powers had to intervene and pour in weapons and fighters indicates to me that both Gadaffi and Assad were/are reasonably popular in their countries or at least not unpopular enough to be toppled by their own populations.

I have Libyan acquaintances who didn't like Gadaffi but told me that everything we saw on our MSM about Libya at the time was propaganda. They were more worried about their country falling apart.

Christians, women in general and minorities had it much better under Saddam, Gadaffi and Assad.

However, I agree with you that not everything is America's fault. There is a large coalition of countries all with contradictory agendas that are involved in all this.

Our choice is to decide if we want to go along with these agendas or forge a new path.

[CJCRANE]

16. I agree with most of your points

except I think that Assad's side was the one providing stability.

Our "side" and our interventions destroy stability. If we didn't initiate or support those interventions there would be less instability.

It seems that we are merely on a "side" with a whole bunch of countries which often have little in common at best and conflicting or hostile interests at worst. We don't stand for anything or at least no one believes us anymore when we say we do because the people we partner with, the techniques we use and the results we achieve don't match our rhetoric.

All our promises of liberal democracy ring hollow. Liberal democracy is being dismantled in the west and we are in no position to implement it anywhere else both morally, practically, militarily or financially.

And in fact, all the assumptions that there is a "we" are false. You and I and nearly everyone else has no real input on what happens. We are not part of this "we" that we talk about when we talk about American or western interventions. These decisions are made somewhere else outside of democratic control or oversight. The various countries involved (where they are "democracies&quot try to involve their voters as little as possible in these decisions and make plans and forge alliances behind the back of, and over the heads of their populations.

So, if "we" are going to get involved , I'd like it to be a real democratic "We the People" who inform these decisions with informed consent, not "We the Oligarchs" as it currently is. This is not possible at the moment because the MSM is owned by "We the Oligarchs", who have no intention of informing the populace of the real facts of any situation.

[daleo]

6. If the people there have agency

We should butt out and let them settle things themselves. That's what having agency means.

[LittleBlue]

5. We need to drop moar bombs

Bombs are so successful in that part of the world.

[bigwillq]

8. We need to get the heck out of the Middle East.

Some much wasted money and lives.

[Comrade Grumpy]

9. This happened more than a week ago. Glad CNN finally noticed.

From November 10:

"ISIS Establishes Stronghold in Derna, Libya"

http://www.ibtimes.com/isis-establishes-stronghold-derna-libya-1721425

[grahamhgreen]

11. Nice..... Looks like the factions that came to power when we helped destabilize Libya have joined

with ISIS.

Great plan, this new world order idea of the neocons

[Rhinodawg]

14. grumpy....

Syria, Iraq , Egypt and now Libya.

Notice SA ,Egypt, Jordan don't send any forces anywhere.

They want the US to do it.


Whats your solution?

[Tommy_Carcetti]

17. We've occupied Libya?

News to me.

[grahamhgreen]

19. We've destabilize every semi-socialist semi-secular Arab country for the new world disorder, only

to give the people radical islam, which they prefer to Exxon stealing their oil, apparently.

[Rhinodawg]

18. K&R

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

20. Yep. And, we expected gratitude for killing their people and wrecking their countries.

And, now, we're expecting the same gratitude for killing their people and wrecking their countries.