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Is There Anything Ethical America Can Do in Syria Now?

#11
Magical Realist Offline
Quote:I also said Russia claims this Syrian chemical attack was faked, not perpetrated, by the UK. Learn to read. If they don't believe Putin,

I see. So you have no evidence most leftist media outlets believe Putin. You're just making shit up to demonize liberals again. Once again, all about politicizing an essentially non-political incident just to suit your alt-right conspiracy agenda.
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#12
Syne Offline
Again, learn to read. I said "it seems", not that it was so. I don't have to have evidence for subjective impressions.

You're the one making shit up about "liberals" and "the UK poisoned the Syrians". Wait, that's just your illiteracy.

With no good options, the president [Obama] made a persuasive case over the weekend for taking action against the “heinous” crime of chemical warfare, and assured a war-weary nation that any military action would be “limited in duration and scope.” An immediate response was ruled out when he wisely vowed to seek congressional approval for a strike, even though that is likely to entail an ugly debate involving attacks on the administration’s policies and credibility from the political left and the right.
...
Mr. Obama also is a victim of his own rhetoric. He first drew a “red line” last year, vowing that any use of weapons of mass destruction by Bashar al-Assad would be unacceptable. It seems clear, say lawmakers who have been briefed, that Mr. Assad ordered the most recent attack, and it wasn’t the first.
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/02/us/po...66&gwt=pay


So Democrats are wanting the same chance for complete inaction we saw in 2013.
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#13
Yazata Offline
(Apr 13, 2018 06:42 PM)C C Wrote: EXCERPT: . . . I spoke about America’s ethical responsibility with some of the world’s leading moral philosophers. These are people whose job it is to ascertain the right thing to do in any given situation.

I'm skeptical about that. Philosophers who specialize in ethics are better off trying to ascertain what (if anything) 'good' and 'evil' mean (beyond 'hooray' and 'boo'). They are of more value when they try to explain how and why humans intuit these kind of values. So I see ethics in the academic philosophical sense as primarily metaethics.

I don't really think that philosophers are in any better position than anyone else to cast moral judgement on everything: "Evil! Evil! Evil! Sin! Sin! Sin!" Unless they can justify how and why they are doing it, they are little better than fundamentalist preachers wagging their fingers in other people's faces.

Quote:All of them suggested that, years ago, America might have been able to intervene in a moral way to stop the killing in the Syrian civil war.

I'm skeptical about that too.

We probably shouldn't have promoted the "Arab Spring" quite as forcefully as we did. We probably should have recognized that the Middle East's secular tyrants aren't the worst things that can happen in those countries and what replaces the tyrants might be a lot worse (ranging from failed states hosting 'Mad Max' style wars of all against all to rule by Salafists like ISIS.) We probably shouldn't have imagined that "Oh, they are just like us!", a view that ignores other cultures' peculiarities and their unique histories, and imagines ourselves as a global paradigm with our own desires and moral intuitions the global standard. (That's just imperialism in a new guise.)

That was Bush's mistake in Iraq, assuming that the Iraqis were "just like us", that they would welcome our troops as liberators and would organize free and fair elections in months, making Iraq a shining beacon of Western "liberalism" in the Middle East. Except that once freed from Saddam, the Iraqis turned to their diverse religious and ethnic identity politics and set about settling scores.

It was Obama's and Hillary's mistake in Libya, in Egypt, in Yemen as well. And it was the mistake that led to their initially supporting the "rebels" in Syria, calling for the overthrow of the Assad regime. All we accomplished was destabilizing countries that were (kinda) peaceful as they were (with strongmen to keep a lid on things) producing power-vacuums and ongoing civil wars all over the region.

And it was the motivator of Angela Merkel's mushy moralism ("Oh, they are just like us!") that threw Europe open to millions of hugely culturally-dissimilar "migrants" and may well have doomed the European Union ideal.

Quote:But asked what America should do now, they all gave the same startling response: They don’t know.

That's honest at least. And surprising coming from academics, who always act like they have all the answers. That's why our countries are supposed to fund academia so lavishly, it's where people are supposed to go for answers.

I don't think that there's anything we can do to impose a solution on the Syrians.

I'm inclined to perceive Assad as more attractive than the rebels, most of whom are fundamentalist Salafists (some of which are outgrowths of Al Qaeda) intent on enforcing radical Islam and Shariah on what had been a reasonably secular (if autocratic) country. I like the Kurds the best, but they are caught between Assad on one side and Turkey on the other. So they are probably doomed without outside support and I don't think that the US needs to be dragged into that war.

Quote:The usual framework philosophers would use to answer this question—the so-called just-war theory—isn’t providing clear answers. The theory’s first principle is that if you’re going to go to war, you need to have a just cause.

Which presumes that we have a handle on what 'just' means. That probably looks very different to different players. Assad sees himself as defending Syria's territorial integrity and his internationally recognized Syrian government, as well as trying to protect religious minorities from an Islamic fundamentalist resurgence. The rebels (who are hugely divided among themselves) see themselves as fighting Assad's tyranny and increasingly as fighting for what they imagine was the pure Sunni Islam of the early rightly guided Muslim community and for the supremacy of Islamic Law over secular law (which is totally discredited in their eyes). And the Europeans and many in the United States see themselves a the world's moral judges in a position to enforce outcomes everywhere that offends our sensibilities.

Quote:At this point, the humanitarian crisis in Syria is so severe that most people would probably agree that condition has already been met.

Of course it was our intervention in support of the Arab Spring "rebels" in Syria that exacerbated everything. Maybe it's time to admit that was a huge mistake and to keep our hands off.

Quote:But there are other conditions that have to be satisfied for a war to be considered just or moral. One is that an intervention has to achieve more good than harm. And it’s not clear, according to the ethicists I spoke to, that any military action the United States can take in Syria now will fulfill that condition...

Right. We aren't in any position to impose a solution on Syria.

I still think that the best outcome for the Syrian people might be a victory by Assad and a return to something like the conditions that prevailed before any of this happened (if that's possible any longer, given all the hatreds, resentments and scores to settle, to say nothing of all the destruction and the ruined economy).
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#14
Syne Offline
Past errors aside, I do think the international community is justified in stopping WMDs used on civilians. Syria is a party to the Geneva Convention.
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#15
C C Offline
(Apr 16, 2018 05:14 PM)Yazata Wrote: . . . We probably shouldn't have promoted the "Arab Spring" quite as forcefully as we did. We probably should have recognized that the Middle East's secular tyrants aren't the worst things that can happen in those countries and what replaces the tyrants might be a lot worse (ranging from failed states hosting 'Mad Max' style wars of all against all to rule by Salafists like ISIS.) We probably shouldn't have imagined that "Oh, they are just like us!", a view that ignores other cultures' peculiarities and their unique histories, and imagines ourselves as a global paradigm with our own desires and moral intuitions the global standard. (That's just imperialism in a new guise.)

That was Bush's mistake in Iraq, assuming that the Iraqis were "just like us", that they would welcome our troops as liberators and would organize free and fair elections in months, making Iraq a shining beacon of Western "liberalism" in the Middle East. Except that once freed from Saddam, the Iraqis turned to their diverse religious and ethnic identity politics and set about settling scores.

It was Obama's and Hillary's mistake in Libya, in Egypt, in Yemen as well. And it was the mistake that led to their initially supporting the "rebels" in Syria, calling for the overthrow of the Assad regime. All we accomplished was destabilizing countries that were (kinda) peaceful as they were (with strongmen to keep a lid on things) producing power-vacuums and ongoing civil wars all over the region.

And it was the motivator of Angela Merkel's mushy moralism ("Oh, they are just like us!") that threw Europe open to millions of hugely culturally-dissimilar "migrants" and may well have doomed the European Union ideal.


In the early stages of the Arab Spring, before it turned sour, some of the either "not-quite-extinct-yet" Bush acolytes or just plain anti-Obama columnists were trying to give credit of the development to his prior legacy. Fortunately for them slash him (in terms of "later"), various outraged commentators on the southpaw side of the political spectrum ridiculed the notion and divested *W* of any claim to being responsible.

Communist states like Cuba aside, there used to be more pragmatism in American foreign policy, seemingly regardless of which party dominated. Like biting the bullet and establishing relationships with either strong or tyrant leaders for the sake of cutting good deals and maintaining stability in regions fraught with feuding tribal, political, or religious factions.

But then they started jumping on that missionary-descended high horse, an idealistic view of culture and nation redesigning / rebuilding. Similar "evangelical-cause" influences infect the secular but still wizardly-like thinking attributed [pejoratively] to utopian socialist reformations: "Don't scorn any abrupt revolution we may trigger. Come in with good intentions and respect the sensibilities of the oppressed natives, and magic will happen! Things will work out to the betterment of everybody." Arguably a backdoor ancestry from the latter via the neocon route:

Michael Kazin: There is nothing conservative about these statements. They would have distressed major thinkers on the right [or traditionalism] -- from Edmund Burke at the end of the eighteenth century to Robert Nisbet two centuries later -- who believed the sudden overthrow of authorities inexorably leads to anarchy and long periods of war. Nor, contrary to conventional wisdom, did Bush's grand ambitions originate in the minds of neoconservatives. During the 1990s, some commentators argued that the thinking of Leon Trotsky had a major influence on leftists who became neocons, such as Irving Kristol, Sidney Hook, Nathan Glazer, and Joshua Muravchik. These thinkers, according to John Judis, writing in Foreign Affairs, “came to see foreign policy as a crusade, the goal of which was first global socialism, then social democracy, and finally democratic capitalism.


~
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#16
Secular Sanity Offline
It's weird, though, C C, the huge role that social media has played in this crisis. 

Quote:Our perceptions of reality have always been shaped by narratives, but social media has opened up a whole new battleground of competing narratives, which leaves us in a weird and unstable place.

Social media was sold to us as this information utopia, this network that was transnational but would bring us all together. In many ways this is true — if you and I are friends on Facebook and I'm in London and you're in New York or DC, we can hop on Messenger and chat instantly with each other. And that brings people together.

But social media also cocoons us: It self-organizes us into groups of like-minded believers who share the same views, the same beliefs, and the same prejudices. And they post articles. Most people now, especially young people, get their news from social media.
So people aren't going directly to the news sources; they're getting cherry-picked answers.

This is what makes it such a powerful tool of propaganda and exploitation. In wartimes, it yet again reinforces your worldview. And when this happens, when you're on this social media platform and all your friends are sharing largely similar stuff, a compromise with people of opposing views becomes harder. The ability to even understand an opposing view becomes harder. Because with everything you're reading, not only are the opposing views wrong, it's mendacious, it's evil, it's a lie.

Obviously, there’s a point at which there has to be some acknowledgement of the realities, but where is that line? I don’t know. People seem quite able and happy to live in parallel universes. My honest feeling is that it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets any better, if it gets better at all.
Social Media and War

I don’t have a Twitter account or Facebook.  I always thought it was stupid and here we are with our world leaders communicating through tweets.  Weird, I tell ya.
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#17
RainbowUnicorn Offline
(Apr 14, 2018 09:10 PM)Syne Wrote: The question of America's ethical responsibility in the matter  (similar to how they now love Comey, who similarly lost Hillary the election).

conspiracy theorist logic
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#18
C C Offline
(Apr 17, 2018 01:49 AM)Secular Sanity Wrote: It's weird, though, C C, the huge role that social media has played in this crisis. [...] I don’t have a Twitter account or Facebook.  I always thought it was stupid and here we are with our world leaders communicating through tweets.  Weird, I tell ya.


The White House situation / tweet output is like something from one of those zany or screwball comedies of the '30s. I really have to pinch myself occasionally to make sure that the reason reality is unraveling is not because I'm in a dream.

~
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