baboon2004
Darned cockwombles.
So are you saying that bombing a country to make it even more fucked up (we can agree on this, it seems) is not crazy? Not even getting into the motivations for said aggression.
Iraq - Still, In Fact, Going On
- Thread starter padraig (u.s.)
- Start date
So are you saying that bombing a country to make it even more fucked up (we can agree on this, it seems) is not crazy? Not even getting into the motivations for said aggression.
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
I'm not sure this is true though, even broadly. There are plenty of high-profile right-wing pundits in America whose ideas of what their country's military should be doing in the Middle East and wider Muslim world make Obama look like a peace-loving hippie socialist (which is pretty much what they think he is, anyway).
I was talking about people like Wolf who've let their hatred for their government tip from the rational into the irrational when they start blaming it for the active belligerence of other groups (ISIS) or natural disasters (Ebola). And OK, governments are not cultures, but it is pretty common for people to bewail their whole culture, as if other cultures have got everything all nicely figured out.
Sorry, shouldn't have brought this up in the Iraq thread as it's a much broader subject, it just happened to come up in the context of NW's loony conspiracy ramblings.
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Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
No, I'm not saying that at all - just that the fucked-up-ness dates back a bit further than 2003. Who was it on here saying years ago that there was no significant Sunni-Shi'ite divide in Iraq prior to the invasion? I mean honestly.
luka
Well-known member
id like to quote oliver craner re ebola and this discussion
On the campaign trail in 2000, Africa was not important to the national strategic interest, said W.: "there's got to be priorities". Then two years ago the US Middle East Adventure became less secure, less assured, and Dick Cheney predicted that West Africa would become the fastest growing provider of oil and gas to the US. Untapped oil fields were marked throughout the Gulf of Guinea. These are ready to be extracted by advanced drilling techniques and massive multicorporate spending by ExxonMobil and ChevronTexaco, amongst others.
The geopolitical balance veers. New military bases, new money. "We can't just rely on these Saudi punks." "We gotta go where nobody is watching."
The US has indentified increasing African oil imports as an issue of 'national security' and has used diplomacy to court African producers regardless of their record on transparency, democracy or human rights.
Ian Gary, Bottom of the Barrel: Africa's Oil Boom and the Poor
www.catholicrelief.org/africanoil.ctm
On the campaign trail in 2000, Africa was not important to the national strategic interest, said W.: "there's got to be priorities". Then two years ago the US Middle East Adventure became less secure, less assured, and Dick Cheney predicted that West Africa would become the fastest growing provider of oil and gas to the US. Untapped oil fields were marked throughout the Gulf of Guinea. These are ready to be extracted by advanced drilling techniques and massive multicorporate spending by ExxonMobil and ChevronTexaco, amongst others.
The geopolitical balance veers. New military bases, new money. "We can't just rely on these Saudi punks." "We gotta go where nobody is watching."
The US has indentified increasing African oil imports as an issue of 'national security' and has used diplomacy to court African producers regardless of their record on transparency, democracy or human rights.
Ian Gary, Bottom of the Barrel: Africa's Oil Boom and the Poor
www.catholicrelief.org/africanoil.ctm
haji
lala
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
OK, I'll have a go:
there is oil in West Africa
there is also ebola in West Africa
America is quite keen on oil
it isn't quite so keen on ebola
How am I doing?
luka
Well-known member
A number of readers have read reports that the CIA was active in West Africa just prior to the ebola outbreak, and some have read reports that the ebola strain is a weaponized version engineered to spread by air and surface contact. Some readers ask me to confirm or refute these reports, and others want to know if the One Percent or the Bilderbergers have started the process of eliminating the surplus population.
baboon2004
Darned cockwombles.
1/ You're seriously suggesting that US foreign policy isn't far closer to the right-wing political pundits? 
Come on....US foreign policy is an imperialist one based upon accrual of global power and resources, that shows little to no regard for what gets in its way. While the right wing pundits may want *more* destruction and wanton disregard for just about anyone else, they'd be pretty happy overall at the way the US has behaved since 2001. Anyone remotely close to the left wing, would not be at all happy.
2/ Naomi Wolf, however mental what she said, was merely proceeding (to a very extreme degree) along the line of argument that the US government would stop at nothing to find crooked ways to excuse its belligerence. Whereas of course (mostly) they're just opportunistically and incredibly cynically taking advantage of what's happening to justify further 'intervention', rather than creating these scenarios themselves. She wasn't criticising or bewailing a whole culture (American or otherwise), at least as far as I've read. It's an entirely different line of argument.
3/ My major point is really that if we want to criticise looniness, then let's look at people who are running things, not Naomi Wolf. But Ive said that before, so I'll leave it at that.
Come on....US foreign policy is an imperialist one based upon accrual of global power and resources, that shows little to no regard for what gets in its way. While the right wing pundits may want *more* destruction and wanton disregard for just about anyone else, they'd be pretty happy overall at the way the US has behaved since 2001. Anyone remotely close to the left wing, would not be at all happy.2/ Naomi Wolf, however mental what she said, was merely proceeding (to a very extreme degree) along the line of argument that the US government would stop at nothing to find crooked ways to excuse its belligerence. Whereas of course (mostly) they're just opportunistically and incredibly cynically taking advantage of what's happening to justify further 'intervention', rather than creating these scenarios themselves. She wasn't criticising or bewailing a whole culture (American or otherwise), at least as far as I've read. It's an entirely different line of argument.
3/ My major point is really that if we want to criticise looniness, then let's look at people who are running things, not Naomi Wolf. But Ive said that before, so I'll leave it at that.
baboon2004
Darned cockwombles.
Er, I don't know.
Well, I think we agree on that. My point is just that bombing a country to get rid of a group of people with a horrible modus operandi (Isis) who sprung up in the chaos caused by previous campaigns of aggression, is 100% insane as a 'strategy to enhance democracy', or whatever the US would laughably call it. What would Britain (for example) be like if it had been similarly bombed? Can you even imagine**?! Extreme circumstances can create extremists (still don't like that word, but hey) of otherwise *relatively* tolerant people.
**and this, to me, links in with what you said previously about 'crypto-racist' assumptions, or whatever you want to call them - too often there is the implication that the 'Others' are somehow not human enough to be affected on a deep emotional level by appalling things happening around them, and that they somehow are supposed to be able just 'get on with it', like automatons. Thinking about what would happen here (UK in my case) in similar circumstances is therefore a vital 'thought experiment'.
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Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
1/ You're seriously suggesting that US foreign policy isn't far closer to the right-wing political pundits?
From any kind of remotely sane viewpoint? No, of course not. But they haven't nuked Tehran yet, and it wouldn't be hard to find people in America - high-profile pundits and members of the public alike - who think that'd probably be a pretty great idea.
OK, fair enough. I still think the loony-fringe conspiracy theorists are perhaps not as harmless as all that though, because they can end up discrediting by association more intelligent thinkers whose criticisms of the political and corporate establishment are entirely valid. It also gives Naomi Wolf - who I'm sure considers herself left-wing in most important respects - a certain amount of common ground with the likes of Alex Jones, who (to the extent that he can be classified according to a conventional political spectrum) is pretty clearly on the extreme right.
I guess people with no prior extremist tendencies could find themselves getting swept along with a fanatical movement. But ISIS grew out of a group originally led by al-Zarqawi that was active years before the invasion. It's the power vacuum left by the fall of Saddam's regime, the chaos following the invasion and the corrupt and incompetent government that followed that's allowed ISIS to flourish, agreed - but the ideology was there already.
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baboon2004
Darned cockwombles.
True. But I think if you went back to 2000, then people would be gobsmacked at quite what has become possible in foreign policy since 2001. The goalposts have shifted radically towards right-wing nutjobbery, even if it hasn't fulfilled their wildest expectations.
yeah, there is the possibility that excessive conspiracy theories will discredit better thinkers on the left, it's true. But people still take right-wing thought seriously despite the pretty high profile (in the US at least) of the extreme right wing nutjobs.
Ok, agreed that the ideology didn't spring out of nothing, but the support for it intensified to a critical point because of what has been happening in Iraq, and the power vacuum created the conditions for Isis to flourish. You also only need to look at what's happened in Europe recently to see that extreme conditions create the conditions where many people let their more extreme tendencies/views come out into the open. Has any journalist written a decent piece regarding Isis member backgrounds/previous political history? Obviously not an easy piece to pull off....
and (not directly relating to any of your points, just saw on Facebook):
http://www.5pillarz.com/2014/10/16/...slamophobic-witch-hunt-over-anti-isis-motion/
yeah, there is the possibility that excessive conspiracy theories will discredit better thinkers on the left, it's true. But people still take right-wing thought seriously despite the pretty high profile (in the US at least) of the extreme right wing nutjobs.
Ok, agreed that the ideology didn't spring out of nothing, but the support for it intensified to a critical point because of what has been happening in Iraq, and the power vacuum created the conditions for Isis to flourish. You also only need to look at what's happened in Europe recently to see that extreme conditions create the conditions where many people let their more extreme tendencies/views come out into the open. Has any journalist written a decent piece regarding Isis member backgrounds/previous political history? Obviously not an easy piece to pull off....
and (not directly relating to any of your points, just saw on Facebook):
http://www.5pillarz.com/2014/10/16/...slamophobic-witch-hunt-over-anti-isis-motion/
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
A bit like how it was the devastation of WWI, the annihilation of the German economy by the punitive measures imposed by the victorious Allies and widespread dissatisfaction with the corrupt Weimar government that created the social conditions that allowed the Nazis to rise to power. By themselves, those factors sound rather like the ingredients for a Marxist revolution - but it was the far right that took power instead because of the other ingredients: a combination of militarism, ethnic nationalism and reactionary mysticism that began in the previous century, and a popular anti-Semitism dating back to time immemorial.
All of which starts to sound a bit familiar in the context of ISIS, doesn't it? Not so much the ethnic nationalism, but certainly the other bits.
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Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
And now they're assisting the Peshmerga! Or at least, no longer actively obstructing them. Weird times we live in...
Turkey opens corridor for Kurdish fighters to relieve Kobani