OK Hanna, I'll bite. I'll try to keep it respectful if you will.

Quote Originally Posted by Hanna View Post
Would you like the Marines to land in Damascus tomorrow, and subtract another number from the Axis of Evil list?
Should Russia and Putin broker a deal that makes everyone happy?
Or Kofi Annan and the Arab League?
Or Ban Ki Moon and the UN (but how to deal with the Chinese and Russians with veto powers....)
What I hope will happen is that there will be enough of a lull in the fighting to give the Assad government a bit of breathing space so that they can implement at least some of the reforms they've been promising for years and diffuse the situation enough that the violence will just fizzle out and fade away.

I really don't think that's likely though.

I think the most likely outcome is more violence and a messy civil war. I don't think we'll see any NATO bombing campaign unless Assad does something really stupid and alienates the Russians, but I wouldn't bet against Turkey getting involved unilaterally in a limited way.


Quote Originally Posted by Hanna
Or do you agree with my viewpoint, that each country is responsible for its own destiny and should be left alone to resolve its own problems.... or live with the consequences? It's not for us to meddle in the internal politics of Syria - it is between the Syrian people and their leadership. If the Syrians are unhappy enough, the situation will change, like it did in many other countries that had revolutions. It's patronising and meddling for one country to interfere in the affairs that take place within the borders of another sovereign state.
No, I profoundly disagree with this.

Firstly, countries do not and cannot exist in complete isolation. They have neighbours, ideological friends and enemies, trading partners and competitors, customers and clients. They interact in a million different ways with the outside world and vice versa. Every action a government takes has direct or indirect consequences well beyond its own borders. They cannot help "meddling" in each others affairs at some level - even just selling or providing food or medical supplies to one side in a conflict could be construed as support for that side and therefore "meddling" - so the question is not whether countries should be left alone, but to what extent they should be left alone. And once you've broken past that absolute, the world is all shades of grey from then on.

Secondly, countries are not gestalts - simple entities that act with a defined purpose and can be assigned "rights" - countries are chaotic collections individuals all pulling in different directions, most of whom are just trying to get on with their lives and mind their own business, and any "right" a country has is an expression of the aggregated rights of the individuals therein. To believe otherwise is to consider the citizen to be property of the state. And to treat the suffering of these people as none of our business simply because the conflict is confined within a single country is morally akin to knowingly allowing a woman to be repeatedly beaten by an abusive husband or a child to be repeatedly raped by an abusive father simply because the violence is "domestic", and therefore none of our business.

In fact, I find it incredible that someone who (rightly) expresses moral outrage at the suffering of the victims of US' crimes in such graphic and emotive terms can be so sanguine and dismissive and lacking in empathy concerning the suffering of victims of their own governments. It suggest to me that either your outrage at the crimes of the US is insincere, or else you've somehow lost track of the moral framework that caused you to develop that outrage in the first place.

Of course, just to avoid any possible confusion, I am not arguing that countries have a right to military interfere in each other at will, just that there are occasions where it can be justified and that absolute opposition to any such action is wrong-headed.


Quote Originally Posted by Hanna
"Axis of Evil members" - official map as of 2002




"Outposts of Tyranny" per Condolezza Rice's speech in 2005



Erm.... Zimbabwe and Belarus on the same map... reality check?


General Wesley Clark plan as of 2002:

Iraq --- Check
Syria ------In progress
Lebanon ----unsure
Libya --- Check
Somalia ------Check
Sudan ------In progress
Iran ------ Next likely target!

(Afghanistan, at that point was already taken care of. North Korea, which borders both China and Russia, interestingly did not make it onto the regime "take down" list. Wonder why?)

Based on the above, I for one think it's pretty obvious that Syria had it coming..... (and I am somehow not surprised that North Korea and Iran want nukes as a deterrent. None of the countries where the regimes were taken out, had it.)
This is absurd, deficient reasoning on so many levels.

You've taken an aggregate list of tinpot dictatorships towards which the last US government expressed antipathy and are now pointing at the few who have been overthrown as proof that the US is behind this particular case, completely ignoring a) any internal factors b) the actions, interventions, policies and "meddling" of every other country and super-national organisation on the planet, and c) all the other uprisings against various other tinpot dictatorships - some of which were allies of the US - that have happened during the same time frame. Over the last couple of years there have been mass protest movements right across the Arab world - in Bahrain, Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, Oman, and Yemen, and in the decade since the first axis of evil speech there have been domestic conflicts, revolutions or mass protest movements in lots of other places - in Azerbaijan, in Georgia (twice, actually), in Ukraine, in Madagascar, in Kyrgystan (also twice), in Niger, and in any number of other countries depending on your specific criteria.

There is no useful correlation at all here, except the rather obvious fact that revolutions tend to occur in tinpot dictatorships.

Besides which, the fact that there are countries on the lists you quoted that are of no strategic value to the US and which were sited solely on human rights grounds undermines your entire US-imperialist narrative right from the word "go" anyway. Of course, were the US to get directly involved in say Burma or Zimbabwe I'm sure it wouldn't take long for those of the America is responsible for everything persuasion to discover some strategic importance there too. I often think the oil companies are wasting their time employing geologists to find oil. They should employ conspiracy theorists instead, they can find oil anywhere.

And, once again just to be clear, I am not arguing that your general conclusions are incorrect, only that the evidence you are presenting here does not support them. I'm disagreeing with your reasoning, not your moral instincts.