Questions On The Forthcoming Syria Strike.

So now this has taken a diplomatic course where Assad gets a chance to give his stockpiles to the UN in exchange for 'Murica not attacking and Russia keeping their ally, can we cancel the apocalypse? Looks like WWIII will wait for another day.

Looks like Assad gets back to his conventional war sooner rather than later.

Yes yes yes. Obama got to come on TV again and tell everyone that his "calculated" diplomacy has produced a result where Syria has agreed to give up their chemical weapons. Good for him, the low information voter can now tune out, Obama has told everyone that he's come to the rescue. Although there's no way we could ever actually verify the results of this ourselves, the whole thing will be dependent on what Russia tells us. Assad in the meantime gets the US off his back, more time and breathing room he'll use to keep himself in power by killing his people and their children.

Hey, weren't we just about to rush in there "for the children" a few days ago? I guess that's not important anymore, Obama musta cleared all that up. What a great president, he's amazing.

On the whole WWIII idea:

Does anyone really contest that at this time in our life, the most likely series of events history will record is a minor conflict most likely started over interests in the middle east that eventually spiraled out of control?

I don't think anyone denies that if WWIII happens it'll be because of something that goes down in the Middle East but the feverish pining for the apocalypse to bring forth itself in the West is just disgusting and clearly from people who don't know about war and loss of life. We go livid over the Boston bombing which wasn't even a major attack in the first place and somehow I'm supposed to be cool with discussing "simulations" of Russia attacking the US, thermonuclear war, neo-axis powers and whatever other theorycraft people can conjure up.

Any discerning mind knew that this whole thing wasn't about the children of Syria because we wrote them off years ago when this whole thing started. Geopolitics doesn't care about innocents sacrificed for the greater goal and the greater goal here was to punish Assad for using Sarin gas. The question was:

Were we ready to attack Syria and own the problem when ***spiraled out of control?
Was the attack really going to do anything to affect Assad/the war?

For now we have a tenuous solution where Russia takes the nasty toys away from their pal Syria which plays well for them and Obama gets to say that he 'punished' Assad by forcing the UN to act. Putin wins, Obama wins, Syria continues to burn.

On to the next news cycle drama.

a) You heard it here. Liberals think that the Boston Bombings was not a big deal and we should ignore it. Another one of those "made up scandals" against Obama it seems like...

b) We should not have to play police to the rest of the world. This policing needs to retire.

c) We should also not have to play Child-protection services to the rest of the world either. Which is Obama's reasoning as to why we should go in...to "protect the children..."

d) You also forgot the third question: Were we really wanting to deal with whatever fallout happens if we did strike Assad?

Not talking about Russia, but I'm sure that Syria would have attacked /retaliated against us.

Now to call Obama's latest blunder a non-issue and carry on (according to Sparth that is)

Any discerning mind knows Obama drew the red line too but you wouldn't know it from looking at this thread, its full of people who do nothing but look the other way.

Obama hasn't won anything except a pass from those who don't pay attention (which is the only thing Putin gave him). For anyone paying attention, the solution has dissolved itself because Assad, and Obama have fawned over Russia flexing it's muscles. Regan solved an international crisis by being elected. Obama looks to Putin.

Also no one's pining for WWIII, it is not hyperbole to anticipate the global downfall in respect to the current administration which is so inept and incompetent on the global stage. God forbid something sparks from the middle east when the entire area is soaked with gasoline. I'm just saying Putin's hardcore bod might not be able to actually put out a fire if one actually blazed.

It's really not a big deal. Much worse things happen all over the world, practically every day even. You just don't hear nor see them inside the little safe bubble that surrounds most Americans. Live overseas for a few years, travel the world a bit, does wonders to remove that bubble.

You get bent out of shape because dozens die in a politically motivated attack. I know of a place not too far away that hundreds die due under much more horrific conditions, makes the holocaust look tame.

The Boston Bombing was a small attack in the grand scheme of things and the over-the-top response following it mirrored the attitude we as Americans had leading up to the Iraq debacle. You're either with us or you're with the terrorists.

We see how that turned out. Loss of life is always regrettable but lets put things into perspective here. More people die on a daily basis within our own country in our cities and the response to that is "acceptable losses".

The US isn't going to stop being the world police so long as capitalism is our name and globalization our game. When oil needs to get from point A to point B you bet we're going to defend our interests even if it means putting brutal dictators in the positions of power over those we deem irrelevant. The same goes for other natural resources located across the globe. When Iraq used chemical weapons on Iran our response was in our interests and thus not an international outrage.

"Think about the children" is just shorthand rhetoric for those who choose to not think of geopolitics. It's short, sweet and is the effective emotional argument used to justify just about anything.

Russia wasn't going to attack us. China wasn't going to declare war. World War III wasn't going to happen if we attacked Syria. Assad has his hands full and you expected me to believe he was going to attack US interests in the aftermath? What was likely was us inheriting a mess after the quick 'n dirty regime change, the smoke clears and the jihadists start to pile up in the country, pouring in from Iraq.

Make no mistake, Obama bungled this whole thing but unless we want to "own" Syria, this is best left to the diplomatic channels. Tying ***up in bureaucracy is what the UN was designed for.

That isn't the point.

Any loss of life is tragic. Hell, we almost went into WWIII because some children died in a civil war.

It is ok to decry the loss of children in another country, but loss of life of your own friends and family in your country, that isn't a big deal???

What kind of world are we living in??

I didn't look very hard but the second topic I brought up had this:
While it doesn't specifically say that Russia would support U.N. backed military action in the area it does say that they do consider supporting it if there is proof that Assad or his regime did in fact use chemical weapons...

Source: Link

On the other hand it also never specifically states that he would go to war with the US if the US did strike against Syria... He pretty much just says we have plans but its too soon to talk about them publicly...

Is this really the reality you live in?

omg Obama is killing bald eagles; hates america; more on MSN

lmao

/sigh

Wait, I thought that would be Bush's fault since those farms would have had to been built longer than 5 years ago.

either way

/sigh

What is really ridiculous now is 5 minutes have passed since a possible diplomatic "resolution" has been floated by Russia to bail the US out of this political disaster and the Obama administration has already forgotten the lesson about talking ***if you're not going to back it up. John Kerry and his "prospect of a hanging" bullcrap comment; already taking a victory lap as if their threats caused Syria and Russia to back down into this fake chemical weapons disarm agreement. So if this diplomatic plan falls through then what? Is he saying we will attack Syria? Yeah my butt.

So you think the threat of an attack by the US had no affect at all on the situation? Wasn't it Russia who floated the idea of having Syria abdicate to having their chemical weapons handed over to a third party that would reliably dispose of them? /sigh

Russia didn't say that until AFTER Kerry gave them that option.

Nothing has changed except the US wont attack Syria. Putin allowed Obama to back down and save some face from the empty threats he made at Syria with the red line he drew in disappearing ink. Do you really thing Syria is going to be without chemical weapons after this? That's just silly. The US threat of an attack was never a threat to begin with. They said it would be small. It would be measured. It would not be about regime change. Russia would replace everything we destroy then after provide a completed missile shield for Syria. The war will continue. the carnage will continue and Syria will retain their chemical weapons while giving Russia a token amount of them to verify the plan worked. /sigh wake up

Edit: So tell me, if this plan falls through do you really think Slowbama is going to attack Syria?

So what would you have done then?

I may have missed that in order but I was under the impression that Putin brought it to the table first... That being why Kerry responded the way he did in doubting that it could be done reliably...

Technically the US brought it to the table first, however that was over a year ago, Russia's foreign minister made the most recent proposal.




Don't even bother with it... some people are just determined to find fault in anything he does. They like to call someone weak for seeking a diplomatic solution AND say they are warmongering if they seek a military solution.

The situation has been poorly handled since day one, but nobody bitching about both possible outcomes has a better solution, period.

/rantmodeon

The US bird really should have never been the eagle anyway. Ben Franklin wanted the bird to be the turkey instead of the eagle. The eagle is essentially the *** of the sky, a scavenger. If a hunting bird snags a fish, eagles are notorious for swooping in and taking advantage of the hunting bird with its defensive down while holding the fish. It steals from the working bird and takes for itself.

/rantmodeoff

Guess you could call it a self-fulfilling prophecy though, since we've essentially become more like an eagle than anything else.

lol, your rants are good, break em' out more often.




after his speech last night, I tend to lean twords yes.

I guess we'll all see though.

Dibs on Russia Giving up Snowden as a "fair" trade to a peaceful resolution.

Appeal to emotion, invalid argument. It's arguments like that had us invading Iraq for no real reason other then to secure someone's reelection.

Wasn't appealing to emotion, was providing a statement.

Why should we care about somebody else's children if we don't care about our own neighbors?

Not talked trash in the first place. Then after Russia gave me an opportunity to back out of the fight I started I would then NOT immediately talk more trash about why the deal was proposed? Putin is playing Obama like a fiddle now and he really looks weak in front of the entire country and the world.

Sometimes civil war just needs to happen and you gotta let them fight it out. Making an artificial peace never solves the real underlying issues and it will be decades of constant tension until the fighting inevitably becomes hot again. If there is room for an outside nation like the US to help them reach a meaningful diplomatic resolution to the civil war then it should be done humbly and quietly as a good mediator. It shouldn't be done with red lines and smack talk in front of a podium threatening consequences you don't ever intend to carry out. The sides in a civil war can be so far apart philosophically that the middle ground is too far away from either side to be a reasonable solution. And in the case of Syria there seems to be more than two sides.

Can you imagine an outside superpower toppling Lincoln because he was slaughtering his own outgunned people? It's how it would have looked to them.

So you think this scared them? This threat of an "unbelievably small" strike?

You cant play "Finish the fight you started" and "Let them handle their own ***" at the same time. Either you believe its a civil war that should be handled by the Syrian people or you believe its a conflict that we somehow started and need to follow through on, not both. Also, Russia isnt doing ***to influence us in any way about this: The UN for the most part has been the deciding factor of whether most countries were going to go in or not and even if they did say he used chemical weapons or had stockpiles they may have not gone in anyway.


Can you imagine the French meddling in the affairs of the British in a time of civil unrest in one of their territories?