Palpitus1 wrote:
gbaji wrote:
Not on my most partisan day would I claim that Obama caused violence and death around the world.
ROFL. So you don't what the country called "Libya" is, nor the one called "Nicaragua", nor the one called "Syria". ETC.
So, I mean, your claim is that President Barack Obama's actions and choices didn't cause a single death or act of violence around the world??
I think you've failed to grasp the difference between taking an action which causes something, and failing to take an action which prevents something. I'm more than critical of Obama's foreign policy. But my criticisms have been pretty consistent that his failing was that he
failed to act in many situations where I thought he should have. He failed to act early enough in Libya, allowing that conflict to go from an easy rout, to a stalemate, to a near loss by the rebels, to swinging back in their favor, and then slowly retaking territory lost, and then finally winning. That ebb and flow in between cost tens of thousands more lives than would have been lost otherwise.
Guess what though? In the absence of any action, the same war would have occurred, and the same loss of life (perhaps even larger) would have occurred. Similar inaction in Syria (admittedly, that's a trickier issue) has protracted that conflict for far far longer than it would have taken if we'd stepped in decisively on day one. To the point where now it's a nearly impossible to resolve without even more deaths. And that's before taking into account the rise of ISIS. Which, of course, brings us to another failure to act, in the form of not renewing the SOFA in Iraq, which led to a premature withdrawal of US forces before the initially stated conditions (a secure stable Iraq capable of ruling itself and defending itself). Those conditions were clearly not met, else a bunch of people wandering across the border from Syria, initially with mostly small arms and whatnot, would not have been able to take and hold nearly a quarter of the country for several years.
Again though, that was inaction, not action. It was the US *not* being actively involved which allowed those conflicts to spill over into more areas than they started in, and massively increase the total cost in lives over time.
Which kinda completely counters your core argument.
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Plus south sudan, somalia, ukraine, pakistan, afghanistan, iraq....
Yeah. Cause Sunni and Shiite factions have been so friendly for so long. And Persian and Arabs have been so friendly for so long. They all just got along splendidly until we came along. Oh wait! No. They haven't. I suppose we could just step back and let them all kill each other for a few decades. Maybe take bets on who wins. And that's if we assume that said regional conflict doesn't spill out into larger areas of the globe (or that it'll ever actually end anyway).
You just don't get that in the absence of the US (western "meddling" as a whole really) getting involved in such things and doing what we can to tamp down on such violence, things would be much much worse. The hoped for result is if we can create peace, even if it's strained and "faked" at first, over time, over generations, those who live under that peace will come to see it as normal, and maybe will get over whatever past animosities existed between them and then... maybe... learn to get along.
It's a crazy idea, but it's also pretty provably the only one that's ever worked in the history of mankind. People stop fighting each other only when they stop thinking in terms of "us" and "them", and maybe even think in terms of "we". There's a reason why, in the post Civil War era, great efforts were made to shift people's thinking from being citizens of states to being citizens of the United States. We have seen similar efforts in Europe as well (what do you think the whole EU and Eurozone stuff is about?). Same kind of thinking. Again, it doesn't always work, but it's the only thing that
can work.
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Even conservative posters with big balls are now cowed by the hagiography of the Great and Shining Obama on the Hill.
Not even remotely close. Again, my issue was with your claim that the US is to blame for these things, and that it somehow actively causes death and violence around the world. I don't agree. I think those things are very much present all over the world, all the time. The world certainly doesn't need us to cause it to fight and kill each other. Does that just fine on its own. The only question is when and how and to what degree we may choose to involve ourselves in those conflicts.
It becomes a moral issue, and frankly I'm surprised you're taking the position you are here. I'd think that someone so adamant about things like universal health care and free education would also see the inherent moral aspect of whether one who lives in a relatively "civilized", safe, and secure environment who looks outside his safe world and sees others who are less fortunate, who live in areas wracked with violence and suffering, and then maybe decides to do something. Now maybe this smacks of some form of manifest destiny, bringing civilization to the savages, or whatnot, and maybe it seems overbearing, like we assume "they" can't resolve their own issues. And frankly, I get that as well. But the reality is that we live in a world where what happens in remote places of it, does actually affect us. And while I'm not going to claim that this is always about altruism (we certainly have our own political and economic interests involved as well), that does not change the fact that we might just see as "good" the goal of trying to prevent conflicts around the world, and we might see as "good" trying to lift people who are not "us" out of conditions of slavery and/or oppression.
Because to do otherwise would be to fall back into that "us" vs "them" mentality. It's ok to let "them" suffer, because they are not "us", right? And yeah, sometimes the solutions are not clean and neat (they almost never are), but we also have to look at these things on balance and try to make some kind of moral decision. You can list off the numbers of dead in conflicts the US involved itself in, but have you spent any time looking at the number of dead in conflicts the US does *not* involve itself in? And have you spent any time considering how many would have died in conflicts even if the US was not involved? And have you considered whether the conditions of those who "lived" were improved or worsened as a result?
You're looking at just one side of the equation. That's never going to give you the right answer.