Syria

DannyL

Wild Horses
Both of those answers strike me as simply ways of avoiding the hard work of actually finding out specifics.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
Read a few books on Bolivia? Obviously too hard, would take ages, weeks at least.

Find out who the major unions are in Bolivia and what they're saying? Well, I don't speak um.... "Bolivian?" so I can't do that, can I?

Get a range of opinion from Bolivian press, find out who are the major press outlets are? As above.

Parrot something I read on social media that fits my vague Rage Against the Machine inspired distrust of "the man"? Sorted, that'll do nicely!
 

luka

Well-known member
Both of those answers strike me as simply ways of avoiding the hard work of actually finding out specifics.

Nobody cares Danny. It's ridiculous. All this concern for 'facts' and 'research' is utterly delusional. Forget about it. You're wasting your time.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
Anyway, you should all watch that documentary you horrible racists. it's actually what I'm talking about here, a detailed account from eyewitnesses that humanises and makes real an event that we might otherwise experience only as an abstract. It's fucking hard going though. Very brutal.
 

luka

Well-known member
Craner read everything he could on Iraq in order to draw all the wrong conclusions. We've seen it all before and it doesn't work.
 

luka

Well-known member
No you're not Craner, and Bolivia is not opium war China and sometimes you can't see the trees for the wood and sometimes you can't see the wood for the trees. I don't have a position on Bolivia, God forbid, but I can certainly understand why people have been jumping to conclusions based on historical precedents.
 

luka

Well-known member
If I was able, despite myself, to stop being a horrible racist for the time it took to accurately gauge opinion across the whole of Bolivia what I expect I would find is a whole range of reactions corresponding to fairly predictable economic, ethnic, regional, political and class antagonisms. Power is, as a rule, grounded in specific coalitions. Dissatisfactions can arise within those coalitions if particular constituent groups feel they are being sidelined and of course there is always opposition from without, from the various groups without direct representation within the ruling party and these groups will have various complaints ranging fron the specious to the compelling. In politics there are always winners and there are always losers. However, it is my uncontroversial belief that the game is rigged in favour of those with money. Rage against the machine, sure.
 

sufi

lala
Cauldronisation

"One can only hope that we turn the region into a cauldron, and faster, please. If ever there were a region that richly deserved being cauldronised, it is the Middle East today."Ledeen 2002

the most horrible and depressing and simplistic and revealing and true US policy statement i ever heard
 

luka

Well-known member
"One can only hope that we turn the region into a cauldron, and faster, please. If ever there were a region that richly deserved being cauldronised, it is the Middle East today."Ledeen 2002

the most horrible and depressing and simplistic and revealing and true US policy statement i ever heard

Having not read a single word about Bolivia I'm willing to entertain the possibility that this particular military coup in Latin America is the good kind of Latin American military coup and this particular democratically elected socialist leader was the very bad kind of democratically elected socialist leader but there are precedents for this kind of thing, and people, lazy and racist as they are, fall into lazy, racist generalisations.

Long live the generalissimo up the revolution
 

craner

Beast of Burden
"One can only hope that we turn the region into a cauldron, and faster, please. If ever there were a region that richly deserved being cauldronised, it is the Middle East today."Ledeen 2002

the most horrible and depressing and simplistic and revealing and true US policy statement i ever heard

Here's the original essay, which is no longer up on the National Review website which is interesting. The framing of that quote is a full-frontal attack on a statement made by Brent Scowcroft who was at the time seen as a mouthpiece for the true tendencies and opinions of George H. W. Bush and Kissinger, in opposition to George W. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and their new neoconservative friends. Therefore it was a policy statement on another policy statement: that is, US foreign policy was an area of dispute, not consensus.
 

luka

Well-known member
It's always reassuring to hear Brent Scowcroft attack one's cherished convictions; it makes one cherish them all the more. Here's a guy who still says he was right to advise his president to allow Saddam Hussein to survive in 1991; a guy who fought mightily to preserve the Soviet Union by advising his president to support Gorbachev against Yeltsin and the democrats; a guy who went home early the night Iraq invaded Kuwait because he refused to believe such an attack could take place; and a guy who pooh-poohs the very idea that Saddam Hussein might be part of the terror network.

So it's good news when Scowcroft comes out against the desperately-needed and long overdue war against Saddam Hussein and the rest of the terror masters. As usual, Scowcroft has it backwards: He's still pushing Saudi Arabia's Prince Abdullah's line that you've just got to deal with the Palestinian question. Blessedly, President Bush knows by now that the Palestinian question can only be addressed effectively once the war against Saddam and his ilk has been won. And then Scowcroft says "Saddam is a problem, but he's not a problem because of terrorism."

This is the head of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Commission? Doesn't he read the newspapers? He doesn't seem to realize that Saddam is actively supporting al Qaeda, and Abu Nidal, and Hezbollah.

However, nobody is perfect, and Scowcroft has managed to get one thing half right, even though he misdescribes it. He fears that if we attack Iraq "I think we could have an explosion in the Middle East. It could turn the whole region into a caldron and destroy the War on Terror."

One can only hope that we turn the region into a cauldron, and faster, please. If ever there were a region that richly deserved being cauldronized, it is the Middle East today. If we wage the war effectively, we will bring down the terror regimes in Iraq, Iran, and Syria, and either bring down the Saudi monarchy or force it to abandon its global assembly line to indoctrinate young terrorists.

That's our mission in the war against terror.

The most dangerous course of action is Scowcroft's: Finesse Iraq, and squander our energies fecklessly trying to broker peace between Israel and the terrorists.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Ok so the reasons are belonging to an armed terrorist organisation — translation: the organisation has not even been specified so most probably trumped up charges as part of bureaucratic fabrications to be seen to be dealing with the governments ever more need for new internal enemies. I don't see them holding him for long, unless he's been offered as a sacrificial lamb for whatever reason, but Omar has not been involved in any political issues in Turkey, as far as I know. And there is no ban on singing songs in Kurdish anymore — if that is indeed the reason they are doing this symbolically to make an example out of him, which I wouldn't put past the current govt...
 
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