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In the bigger scheme of things.... a short lived storm in a tea cup.
Almost everyone in Europe said the same thing about the assassination of a certain Archduke in 1914, until "they" decided to make it neither a storm in a tea cup nor short-lived. (If for some reason you want more details, Barbara Tuchman has an excellent book on origins of WWI, and more recently, so does Holger H. Herwig.)
Trump, or the people trump wants to take credit from if it works or blame if it doesn't.
I call b&&@*@%~ on that. Sorry.
Considering the existence of reflex retaliation systems, nukes will be the last option for everyone involved. A conventional war will be fought first. Then of course, someone starts losing, and eventually, their enemies stand at the threshold of crossing the final border - which they know may provoke a nuclear strike. Most likely, they will not. It is just too risky. No American president wants a successful campaign against Russia to end with a nuclear strike against NYC. Nuclear weapons are a lot less useful than people think - but if the other option is oblivion...
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Russia can't not get involved if we decide to actively take their puppet down.
I actually don't believe that this is true. Putin is anything but stupid, and he knows that any war in foreign territory is extremely unpopular in Russia. He pulled the Ukraine stunt because no one was there to stop him. He pulled the Syria stunt because the U.S. decided that conflict wasn't worth their time and stayed out of it. But he is way too smart to risk any kind of conflict he knows he can't win. If the U.S. really went for regime change, he would try anything to sabotage that, but he would never go for outright war. And, by the way, he doesn't exactly care about Assad, so he certainly wouldn't draw any red lines in the sand (at least none he was serious about).
And by that, I'm not saying that the U.S. should risk this move, because at the moment, I actually trust a lot more in the rationality of Putin than in the rationality of Trump. Would be way to easy for Putin to provoke Trump to do something really stupid.
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Sounds like the airbase is already back in operation.
The good news: This attack won't trigger WW3.
The bad news: It's because this attack was probably only ever a facade. Russia was warned, Syria was tipped, and the attack accomplished nothing. There's a reason Russia's response was so "tepid", and it's not because Putin gives a damn about chemical weapons being used on his enemies.
Had the attack been genuine, of course, it would have still been a disastrous idea.
I hardly think a leader of the US would use a false military operation to prop up his faltering administration.
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Sounds like the airbase is already back in operation.
The good news: This attack won't trigger WW3.
The bad news: It's because this attack was probably only ever a facade. Russia was warned, Syria was tipped, and the attack accomplished nothing. There's a reason Russia's response was so "tepid", and it's not because Putin gives a damn about chemical weapons being used on his enemies.
Had the attack been genuine, of course, it would have still been a disastrous idea.
OK, that's not true. From the reports I'd read, it's very likely that a half-dozen or so Syrian planes (MiGs) were damaged or destroyed, so that's a few replacement planes that Pooty-Poot can sell to al-Assad. Also, Poots got to prove the value of his U.S. Puppet to the Syrian government and other Russian allies, and now gets the bonus of posturing to make himself look stronger.
No Puppet Trump got his distraction and "proved" he's a tough guy who doesn't follow Poot's orders. Bonus: Just like after Trump's first address to Congress, nearly all the media has again rolled over, saying Trump is Presidential and other niceties. Bonus x2: A bunch of those same media talking heads on all the networks got their warhawk boners (oh, Brian Williams, what are we going to do with you?).
Daesh/ISIL and other terrorist organizations just got plenty of free video and newsprint to recruit more terrorists for their perpetual war.
I'd say the attack accomplished quite a bit. It's just that absolutely nothing positive was accomplished (which I believe was your intent, KC), especially for the poor Syrians caught in the middle of this sh!tshow.
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In the bigger scheme of things.... a short lived storm in a tea cup.Almost everyone in Europe said the same thing about the assassination of a certain Archduke in 1914, until "they" decided to make it neither a storm in a tea cup nor short-lived. (If for some reason you want more details, Barbara Tuchman has an excellent book on origins of WWI, and more recently, so does Holger H. Herwig.)
To paraphrase: History is full of wars everyone knew would never happen.
And, by the way, he doesn't exactly care about Assad, so he certainly wouldn't draw any red lines in the sand (at least none he was serious about).
He does care about Assad, because he's got "property of putin" Stapled on him. Taking him out of power is a blow to russia/putins ego and power, which he can't allow...
If the americans do it. Or are seen as forcing the russians into it. If russia takes him out or he dies of pulonium (ie, russian natural causes, as pulonium naturally causes you to die) They can pick their puppet and its a win win.
I...um...don't think she's saying that. Even without nukes, nobody likes an avoidable war (except the MIC and its servants in the government, of course).Oh. So I guess there's no real reason not to get into direct conflict with Russian troops and air power.
Well, no more reason than any other war then.
I mean, we went to great lengths to avoid such direct clashes throughout the Cold War. Guess there was no reason. No one would ever let such a war escalate to the point of using nukes, so nuclear war isn't a real threat.
All countries have done things there was no reason to do. Don't let it get to you. Seriously, though, a conventional war with Russia would be such a horror that it is quite sensible to avoid it anyway. Also, I never said it couldn't happen.
Russia can't not get involved if we decide to actively take their puppet down.I actually don't believe that this is true. Putin is anything but stupid, and he knows that any war in foreign territory is extremely unpopular in Russia. He pulled the Ukraine stunt because no one was there to stop him. He pulled the Syria stunt because the U.S. decided that conflict wasn't worth their time and stayed out of it. But he is way too smart to risk any kind of conflict he knows he can't win. If the U.S. really went for regime change, he would try anything to sabotage that, but he would never go for outright war. And, by the way, he doesn't exactly care about Assad, so he certainly wouldn't draw any red lines in the sand (at least none he was serious about).
And by that, I'm not saying that the U.S. should risk this move, because at the moment, I actually trust a lot more in the rationality of Putin than in the rationality of Trump. Would be way to easy for Putin to provoke Trump to do something really stupid.
Added the bold, because it is the opposite of true. Not the stupid part, but rather the domestic consequences. Putin has greatly benefited from invading the Ukraine domestically, and it has generated fairly broad support for him overall. Instead of fixing problems at home, he's given Russians a sense of pride and might that had been missing since the Cold War.
Now, some of it is propaganda, Putin wants to project an image of being loved. A lot of it is real though. It's also highly consistent with what we know about polling in other countries. It is very easy for leaders to unite a country behind a foreign war and ride a wave of rising approval until the country grows weary of the conflict. As long as gains are being made and they outweigh the sacrifices, people will be happy. It's when death tolls rise, but no appreciable benefit is being acquired that people turn against the war (think 3+ years into Iraq).
Putin doesn't want a costly war. He does want a series of show wars that he can win though, to highlight to the Russian people that their country is strong and can enact its will on the world.
We've always been at war with Eastasia
Yup. If you redefine "war" to include non-military, non-violent, economic rivalry, we are at war with China. And Coca-Cola is at war with Pepsi, and Harvard is at war with Yale, and Balliol College is at war with Christ Church, and I'm at war with my boss because he says his budget won't extend to give me the raise I want.
'But "glory" doesn't mean "a nice knock-down argument",' Alice objected.
'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.'
'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.'
'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master — that's all.'
So your definition of war is exclusively with bombs and projectiles? That everything else is simply a rivalry?
Where does computer sabotage fit? If you take down someone's nuclear facility to keep them from making bombs, is that still "not war"?
I'm truly curious because this is part of a larger discussion I often have about violence/nonviolence. Is it only violence when people are hurt, or can property damage/destruction be "violence"?
So your definition of war is exclusively with bombs and projectiles? That everything else is simply a rivalry?
Pretty much, yes. The dictionary gives us "a state of armed conflict between different nations or states or different groups within a nation or state." If the conflict doesn't involve actual weapons, it's not a war.
That's been formalized at least since the Geneva Conventions; a person not taking part in armed conflict is a civilian, not a combatant.
Where does computer sabotage fit?
Espionage, the same spot the lawyers would have put it before the US-PATRIOT Act muddied the legal waters.
this would be a cold war or build up or...
no. Calling posturing a war dilutes the horrors that is war.
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Added the bold, because it is the opposite of true. Not the stupid part, but rather the domestic consequences. Putin has greatly benefited from invading the Ukraine domestically, and it has generated fairly broad support for him overall. Instead of fixing problems at home, he's given Russians a sense of pride and might that had been missing since the Cold War.
The thing is, that the Ukraine (or rather, the part that Russia annected) isn't seen as foreign country by the russions. In fact, the Krim was actually gifted to the Ukraine by Chrushchev, so for most russians (especially those living on the Krim), this is more of a coming home story. So yes, Putin greatly benefitted by this invasion. But still he only could do it because we (meaning the NATO) let him do it. As thejeff said, Putin won't invade a country with U.S. or NATO troups in it. Unluckily for the Ukrainians, they didn't have that. And just remember, officially the Russians aren't involved in any war-like actions in the Ukraine (or at least, that's what the russians get told by the russian media that are under the governments control; there's no such thing as a free press in Russia).
And the same goes for Syria. The NATO would have had enough time to do anything about the crisis before Putin stepped in. They decided not to, giving Putin the opportunity to fill the void. He could do it because it didn't cost him anything, he wouldn't have done otherwise.
Putin doesn't want a costly war. He does want a series of show wars that he can win though.
Yeah, but in Syria, that's only the case as long as the NATO/U.S. doesn't interfere. He can't win a war against the west, Russia is way too weak for that, economically and military. The nuclear option isn't really one because it would definitely lead to self-destruction, so in the end he would do the exact same thing Krushchev did during the Cuban Missile Crisis, as long as he can get anything out of it that doesn't make him lose his face (which would certainly be possible, if we don't let Trump lead the negotiations).
A lot of this discussion over what will or won't Russia do is heavily predicated on if anything actually comes from these missile strikes. My take home point from news shows this morning is no one, in either party, actually knows how to interpret this act by Trump. If this is just a gesture that basically amounts to "Assad can do whatever he wants, as long as he doesn't use chemical weapons", than any political conflict with Russia will be simply for show.
I am just very very skeptical this will result in any massive overhaul of US policy towards Syria, other than maybe the extra missile lobbed at safe Assad targets.
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Were I Al Assad, after confering with Godfather Putin to check if this is some convoluted Russian plan, I would carefully avoid chemical weapons for some time and use bayonets to kill my opposants. Bayonets are still okay AFAIK even for indiscriminate killings
And I would wait for another golden nugget to attract the attention of POTUS under the "ooh shiny" strategy seemingly at work there
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The evidence of this is...?
I mean, i don't think i'm being unreasonable here. This seems like a fairly simple hypothesis to test. What war was there where no one knew what was really going on except a small cadre of insider individuals? I don't think it's unreasonable that history would eventually turn the motives up.
this.. doesn't happen. The proffered examples are the government lying and half the people saying "pull the other one"
The example I gave was this:
There are some more serious examples. If westerners meddling in the middle east is our theme of choice, consider the crusades. Rest assured they weren't really about killing infidels in the name of God - but a political tool that the church could use for various purposes.
The pope and maybe some higher up cardinals and monarchs across Europe probably figured that the crusades are a political tool used by the church for various reasons (all with the ultimate goal of strengthening its grip on Christendom and/or expanding territory), most of the population assumed the crusades were something quite different.
Besides the existance of multiple example of nations going to war for such reasons, what happened in Syria wasn't a war but a move. A single attack on a strategic target. In our modern world of instant communication, this could have any number of meanings. It could be anything - off the top of my head, there could have been some secret U.S force doing something ultra secret and important on Syrian soil, which came in danger of being discovered and captured, which incentivized the U.S to create a short term military crisis elsewhere in Syria to divert attention and rescue the operation and whatever top secret mission it was carrying out. Examining what we know about top secret stuff performed in the past, this could easily be the case. Or maybe Trump was just on the phone with someone speaking Korean who was unimpressed with American foreign policy and told Trump that he will be continuing with his missile development because what's you gonna do, tough guy. Or maybe there was some high value target at that airport. Or maybe Russia positioned some anti air missiles around that airport and hey, now can be a great time to test if these can shoot down Tomahawks, right?
There are dozens of possible reasons the U.S might have wanted to make this strike anyway, and the chemical attack may have just provided a window of opportunity.
Just yesterday morning I learned about a local incident - "Night Of the Ducks", where in 1959 Israel conducted a large scale call of reserve troops for no apparent reason (which increased tension in the middle east for months). Now, decades later, we know the goal was to bait Egypt into sending spying aircraft to Israel's south, where an anti aircraft ambush was deployed (the Egyptians didn't fall for it). Had we been living at the time we may have been discussing the merits of calling reserve troops in what seems like a large scale exercise for war when there isn't a strict need to do so just then, and none of us would have been talking about Egyptian spy planes - and our entire discussion would have been completely irrelevant.
Almost everyone in Europe said the same thing about the assassination of a certain Archduke in 1914, until "they" decided to make it neither a storm in a tea cup nor short-lived. (If for some reason you want more details, Barbara Tuchman has an excellent book on origins of WWI, and more recently, so does Holger H. Herwig.)
Trying to draw comparisons with WW1 is a bit ridiculous....
The technology of war has moved on by soooo many levels that your comparison is like apples and oranges.
Fighting a guerilla war vs the west is one thing.... you reduce their technological advantage significantly (but even then you still end up losing)...
Anything more than that is just a farce...
Nuclear (aka ')(^$ hitting fan) conflicts are not instigated by events such as these.....
The technology has moved on, but have the people using it?
It's not like we have a good statistical sample of what starts and doesn't start nuclear wars. My understanding has long been that one of the ways we've kept such conflicts from getting out of hand is by keeping them strictly as proxy wars. By not directly confronting other nuclear nations on the battlefield. Helps keep the escalation in check.
This kind of attitude that "it won't happen, they'd never escalate to nuclear war over something like this, so it's fine for us to keep pushing" seems to me to be the most dangerous approach to take.
Look at the Cold War when tensions between East and West were at their worst and the number of nukes were at their highest....a far worse situation than we are currently.... Result = no nuclear war
Trying to make comparisons with WW1 is just silly...
I actually do think that we are due another big war within the near future.... but its not going to be over this!!
The example I gave was this:
Right, but you followed that by saying that the speculation was useless, and it's not. In between accepting what the authorities are saying and going full on david icke you can usually tell what nations are doing and why. Its very hard to hide an entire country or obvious facts, like more militant versions of islam taking over the holy land which both have the holy land and then start knocking on europe's door.
or to put it another way... what our government is telling us is useless, less idly speculate because it's MORE useful.
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The example I gave was this:Right, but you followed that by saying that the speculation was useless, and it's not. In between accepting what the authorities are saying and going full on david icke you can usually tell what nations are doing and why. Its very hard to hide an entire country or obvious facts, like more militant versions of islam taking over the holy land which both have the holy land and then start knocking on europe's door.
or to put it another way... what our government is telling us is useless, less idly speculate because it's MORE useful.
Speculation is far from useless, but should take into account the existence of a lot of hidden information. It's smarter to say "I'm not sure what's going on here, but I don't like it" then to say "I think this attack is a bad idea because it didn't even destroy the airport and it just angered Russia" because the goal of the attack likely was not the destruction of the airport in the first place, and trying to asses the virtues of what the U.S gained vs. the problem of angering Russia is tricky without knowing what exactly the U.S gained.
In other words - I'd rather keep my arguments vague then go into too many details, because I find it highly likely that some crucial details are unknown to me, which will strongly affect the relevancy of the details I do know.
To illustrate the logic: look at ancient maps of parts of the world cartographers knew about only from secondhand and unreliable information. Those who drew blank land masses may have gotten the exact shape and dimensions wrong, but those who engaged in speculation and wrote "here there be monsters" were later proved to be wrong to a much higher degree. I'd rather be the guy saying that look, there's probably a continent over there, than the guy describing sea dragons.
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Speculation is far from useless, but should take into account the existence of a lot of hidden information.
Only if you believe there's actually a reasonable likelihood that the hidden information could be a game-changer. Look, for example, at all the Top Secret information that Wikileaks has dumped on us over the past decade. Nothing was really surprising to the spook-watchers or the political analysts. ("Goodness, the CIA have found a way to infect a car with malware, something that people have been discussing in the open literature since at least 2009!" -- that was in the most recent Vault 7 dump. As was the idea that you can use the microphone on a TV to spy on people, something that has only been discussed since 1949.)
If you think that the goal of the Syrian attack wasn't the destruction of the air field -- which I admit I find plausible, then what was the goal? And don't try to weasel out of it by saying "the goal is classified, so we can't possibly know," because that's obvious balderdash.
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Speculation is far from useless, but should take into account the existence of a lot of hidden information.
Well, if we're going to hedge our bets like that, then speculation should also take into account Trump's Razor and Trump's Mouth.
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If you think that the goal of the Syrian attack wasn't the destruction of the air field -- which I admit I find plausible, then what was the goal? And don't try to weasel out of it by saying "the goal is classified, so we can't possibly know," because that's obvious balderdash.
I gave multiple examples. Could be a political maneuver vs Russia, Syria or some unknown third party. Could be Trump related (an impulsive move by him wouldn't really surprise anyone, would it?). Could be a diversion from some other, more important (and secret) military action in the area. Could be exploitation of window of opportunity to check weapon systems or enemy readiness. Could be a high value target that was hidden in that airport.
I am obviously unable to determine which, if any, of those reasons is the true motive behind the attack. But I think an educated guess that concedes any of these is more likely than some moralistic action taken because of use of especially cruel weapons in Syria, is a better educated guess. We don't need to know which secret goal this achieves to know that it likely had some.
Saying it's all classified secret motives and the public statements or even reasonable speculation based on public information - such as wondering about Trump using this as distraction - can't be the real motivation just leads into either blind trust or conspiracy theory. It means you can't actually do anything to judge your leaders - there always could be a good, classified reason for their apparently evil moves.
reductio ad absurdum followed by straw manning is not a useful tool in discussion. Not every single action any government takes is directed by top secret motivation. Unexpected, large scale missile launches into a broiling war zone and global political stage such as Syria is right now, that's something a bit out of the ordinary range of things. Even then public discussion using only publicly available knowledge can and should occur, but it would only benefit by daring to - and remembering to! - mention that the public has very limited access to the information relevant to this event.
! - mention that the public has very limited access to the information relevant to this event.
I don't believe that this is true. 99% of the relevant information is public. You can't hide information on the scale of nations acting. You can lie about what it means.
If you think that the goal of the Syrian attack wasn't the destruction of the air field -- which I admit I find plausible, then what was the goal? And don't try to weasel out of it by saying "the goal is classified, so we can't possibly know," because that's obvious balderdash.
I gave multiple examples. Could be a political maneuver vs Russia, Syria or some unknown third party. Could be Trump related (an impulsive move by him wouldn't really surprise anyone, would it?). Could be a diversion from some other, more important (and secret) military action in the area. Could be exploitation of window of opportunity to check weapon systems or enemy readiness. Could be a high value target that was hidden in that airport.
I am obviously unable to determine which, if any, of those reasons is the true motive behind the attack.
There's nothing "obvious" about that at all. If you're not in a position to evaluate the relative credibility of the various hypotheses, then don't criticize the people who actually are and do.
The public has very limited access to the information relevant to this event.
I believe that you are the only person on this thread who believes this. The rest of us apparently read newspapers.
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Trump also claims to be an actual billionaire, which many respected and well-informed exports seriously doubt. So, maybe Trump is just really sh!tty at math?
Or more likely, Trump expects a bigger payoff/favors down the road?
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Or more likely, Trump expects a bigger payoff/favors down the road?
Nah. The military industrial complex is a small part of the economy, and has no connections to politics or the media.
[/obvious sarcasm]EDIT:
Just a quick note about WWI and nuclear war. The most obvious comparison to the use of nuclear weapons is the use of chemical weapons. The US became THE holder of chemical weapons after WWI. To my knowledge, the US never used them significantly in any conflict. (Depleted uranium, agent orange, and white phosphorus not included.)
We do know that the Brits had plans to use chemical weapons in the event the Nazi's pulled off a successful amphibious landing on the British mainland. So in effect the standard for using banned weapons is:
The threat of annihilation by an enemy force, and that the banned weapons would have a major effect on the outcome of the battle/war. I'm not sure what the Nazis would have retaliated with in the case of the Brits using gas, but I assume they had limited supplies of chemical weapons.
I think the best argument against the US using nukes is that we are very vulnerable to an attack from a 'dirty bomb' or 'backpack nuke' domestically. I think our best defense against asymmetrical warfare in general is sympathy from the global community. Everything that erodes that sympathy puts us in greater danger.
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Watch for the same thing or perhaps more against North Korea if Trump got as much of a jolly from this as it seems. Keep your eyes peeled on the news for the latter half of April starting on the 15th.