Chaos and the Anti-Thread

[Dreamtimer]

The 'Karens' have caused me to doubt women. The Fins are helping me to regain faith in the capabilities of women.

Finland's 36-year-old female Prime Minister, Sanna Marin, heads a governing coalition of five political parties -- all led by women and almost all aged in their 30s. It is a nation largely run by women.

The strong participation of women in decision-making has helped build a nation that ranks first among the world's 193 nations in sustainable development

Finland has achieved or nearly achieved the UN's goals for improving health, education, water, energy, and peace, alleviating poverty and reducing inequality.

And far from being a centrally-planned socialist economy, Finland is, in fact, the opposite: a thriving, free-market economy that boasts both the world's best business environment and the strongest rule of law

[Wind]

I like her a lot as she's been one of the best prime ministers we have had in years, but recently she has been under a lot of scrutiny here.

[Emil El Zapato]

she's a looker ...

Putin's rise to power:

disclaimer: unbiased source, but not much point/counterpoint, just indicting information against Putin

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIgqhU4lkgo

[Wind]

This is what true empathy is about.


Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eK93axLKQUw

[Emil El Zapato]

List of Saddam's Crimes Is Long
By ABC News

Dec. 30, 2006 — -- Saddam Hussein was hanged for ordering the deaths of 148 Shiite men and boys in the village of Dujail after an assassination attempt there in 1982. But by the standards of his brutal rule, the Dujail killings were a relatively minor crime.

The exact number of deaths attributable to Saddam Hussein may never be known, but estimates range as high as half a million. There is evidence of more than 250 mass graves dating to his rule.

Following is a list of other crimes Saddam is accused of. The most notorious is his genocidal campaign against the Kurds in the north. The trial for those murders, and for others, will now continue with the remaining defendants.

1974 -- Dawa Killings
Five leaders of the Shiite Islamic Dawa Party were sentenced to death and killed as Saddam consolidated his power. In 2004, those murders were among many charges announced against Saddam. The U.S. State Department estimates thousands of Saddam's political rivals were killed.

1980 -- Fayli Deportations and Killings
Thousands of Kurds of the Fayli sect were persecuted. Some were expelled to Iran, others killed. Saddam thought of them as Iranian, and therefore as enemies. Fayli women were often imprisoned or put into camps.

1983 -- Barzani Abductions
After the Iraqi-based Kurdistan Democratic Party allied with Iran during the Iran-Iraq War, Saddam sought to punish the clan and its leader, Massoud Barzani. More than 5,000 males, some as young as 10, disappeared. Decades later the remains of 512 Barzani men were discovered in a mass grave. They were reinterred in 2005. A letter that shows Saddam's direct involvement in the crimes was discovered in Baghdad.

1988 -- Al-Anfal Campaign
From February to September 1988, Saddam conducted what has been called a genocidal campaign against the Kurdish population. Gen. Ali Hassan al-Majid, or "Chemical Ali," Saddam's cousin, carried out the Al-Anfal operation using chemical weapons. Human Rights Watch estimates between 50,000 and 100,000 died. Kurdish officials and some international human rights groups put the number killed as high as 182,000. Saddam was on trial for the Anfal campaign at the time of his execution. Six defendants remain in the Al-Anfal case, including "Chemical Ali," who is facing charges of genocide.

1988 -- Halabja Gassing
During the Anfal campaign, "Chemical Ali" ordered an attack against civilians in the town of Halabja. Iraqi forces dropped bombs containing mustard and nerve gases. An estimated 5,000 men, women and children died in a single day. Many more died from long-term medical problems, and birth defects are still common in the area.

1990s -- Marsh Arabs Devastated
Saddam attacked the Shiite "Marsh Arabs" by destroying their land. Once a significant wetland, the marshes in southern Iraq were devastated by a government drainage plan that left behind a wasteland. In 1991, 250,000 Marsh Arabs lived in the region. Now 90 percent of the area is in ruins and only an estimated 20,000 people remain. Tens of thousands live in refugee camps in Iran. Efforts are now underway to restore the marshes. Human Rights Watch calls the campaign against the Marsh Arabs a crime against humanity and other rights activists call it genocide. There are claims chemical weapons also were used.

1990 -- Invasion of Kuwait
In August of 1990, Saddam ordered the Iraqi military, the fourth largest military in the world at the time, to invade Kuwait, leading to the 1991 Gulf War. Iraqi soldiers are accused of torturing and executing hundreds of Kuwaitis, as well as taking hostages and looting. More than 700 oil wells were set on fire and pipelines opened, spilling oil into the Gulf.

1991 -- Kurdish and Shiite Rebellions
After heeding President George H.W. Bush's call to rebel against Saddam, Shiites and Kurds were crushed by immense Iraqi military force. Saddam turned his military against the people as part of his widespread crackdown after the war. The rebels thought they would have the backing of the U.S. military. Thousands have been discovered in mass graves.

1999 -- Al-Sadr Assassination
Ayatollah Muhammed al-Sadr, father of prominent Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, and two of his sons were assassinated in 1999. Al-Sadr was a well-liked Shiite leader, and his death spawned Shiite uprisings in Baghdad. As he had previously, Saddam cracked down on the rebellion and hundreds were killed.

In a statement responding to the execution, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki said, "Let the families of Iraqi martyrs killed in mass graves, Anfal, Halabja or those executed in the cells of the dead regime be happy. The mothers, orphans and widows should celebrate the death of the buried dictator."

[Emil El Zapato]

Please note that this information was purposefully declassified by the United States Government. Please read it carefully and do a little more research if necessary:

Newly declassified CIA documents "combined with exclusive interviews with former intelligence officials reveal new details about the depth of the United States' knowledge of how and when Iraq" used chemical weapons against Iran in the 1980s, Foreign Policy reports.

According to the magazine:

"In 1988, during the waning days of Iraq's war with Iran, the United States learned through satellite imagery that Iran was about to gain a major strategic advantage by exploiting a hole in Iraqi defenses. U.S. intelligence officials conveyed the location of the Iranian troops to Iraq."

For several years before that, CIA documents show, U.S. officials were aware that Iraq had been using chemical weapons in its long war against neighboring Iran and likely would again.

That's just what happened, according to Foreign Policy:

"The Iraqis used mustard gas and sarin prior to four major offensives in early 1988 that relied on U.S. satellite imagery, maps, and other intelligence. These attacks helped to tilt the war in Iraq's favor and bring Iran to the negotiating table, and they ensured that the Reagan administration's long-standing policy of securing an Iraqi victory would succeed."

The new report comes, of course, as the U.S. and other nations weigh whether to use military force to send a message to Syrian President Bashar Assad following last week's alleged chemical weapons attack on civilians near Damascus.

The Washington Post's The Switch blog writes that the Foreign Policy story shows how "satellite imagery can be used to violate human rights, or to protect them."

[Emil El Zapato]

This article is written by a Middle-Eastern scholar born in the U.S. and educated in England. His views are by default going to be from the perspective of Middle-Eastern political philosophy which in an honorable world is significant because it is honest and honed from personal experience, as well as earned and learned through scholarship. i.e. Egyptian Muslim [me]

There are many things worse than American power

Shadi Hamid Tuesday, March 8, 2022

Shadi Hamid is an American author and a senior fellow in Brookings Institution. He is also a contributing writer at The Atlantic. He has been called a "prominent thinker on religion and politics" in the New York Times and was named as one of "The world's top 50 thinkers" in 2019 by Prospect Magazine.

Editor's Note: While U.S. foreign policy has been hypocritical and disappointing in its conduct, relying too often on repressive partners, Shadi Hamid writes, Russia's invasion of Ukraine has reinforced that no moral equivalence exists between the policies of Moscow and Washington, and a world without American power would not be a better world.

If there was any doubt before, the answer is now clear. Vladimir Putin is showing that a world without American power — or, for that matter, Western power — is not a better world.

Shadi Hamid
Senior Fellow - Foreign Policy, Center for Middle East Policy

For the generation of Americans who came of age in the shadow of the September 11 attacks, the world America had made came with a question mark. Their formative experiences were the ones in which American power had been used for ill, in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the Middle East more broadly, and for much longer, the United States had built a security architecture around some of the world’s most repressive regimes. For those on the left, this was nothing new, and it was all too obvious. I spent my college years reading Noam Chomsky and other leftist critics of U.S. foreign policy, and they weren’t entirely wrong. On balance, the U.S. may have been a force for good, but in particular regions and at particular times, it had been anything but.

Blaming America first became all too easy. After September 11, U.S. power was as overwhelming as it was uncontested. That it was squandered on two endless wars made it convenient to focus on America’s sins, while underplaying Russia’s and China’s growing ambitions.

For his part, Putin understood well that the balance of power was shifting. Knowing what he knew, the Russian president wasn’t necessarily “irrational” in deciding to invade Ukraine. He had good reason to think that he could get away with it. After all, he had gotten away with quite a lot for nearly 15 years, ever since the Russian war against Georgia in 2008, when George W. Bush was still president. Then he annexed Crimea in 2014 and intervened brutally in Syria in 2015. Each time, in an understandable desire to avoid an escalatory spiral with Russia, the United States held back and tried not to do anything that might provoke Putin. Meanwhile, Europe became more and more dependent on Russian energy; Germany, for example, was importing 55% of its natural gas from Russia. Just three weeks ago, it was possible for Der Spiegel to declare that most Germans thought “peace with Russia is the only thing that matters.”

The narrative of a feckless and divided West solidified for years. We, as Americans, were feeling unsure of ourselves, so it was only reasonable that Putin would feel it too. In such a context, and after four years of Donald Trump and the domestic turmoil that he wrought, it was tempting to valorize “restraint” and limited engagements abroad. Worried about imperial overreach, most of the American left opposed direct U.S. military action against Bashar Assad’s regime in the early 2010s, even though it was Russian and Iranian intervention on behalf of Syria’s dictator that bore the marks of a real imperial enterprise, not just an imagined one.

Russia’s unprovoked attack on a sovereign nation, in Europe no less, has put matters back in their proper framing. The question of whether the United States is a uniquely malevolent force in global politics has been resolved. In the span of a few days, skeptics of American power have gotten a taste of what a world where America grows weak and Russia grows strong looks like. Of course, there are still holdouts who insist on seeing the United States as the provocateur. In its only public statement on Ukraine, the Democratic Socialists of America condemned Russia’s invasion but also called for “the U.S. to withdraw from NATO and to end the imperialist expansionism that set the stage for this conflict.” This is an odd statement considering that Russia, rather than the United States, has been the world’s most unabashedly imperialist force for the past three decades. But many on the anti-imperialist left aren’t really anti-imperialist; they just have an instinctive aversion to American power.

America’s low opinion of its own capacity for good — and the resulting desire to retreat or disengage — hasn’t just been a preoccupation of the far left. The crisis of confidence has been pervasive, spreading to the halls of power and even President Barack Obama, whose memorable mantra was “Don’t do stupid sh*t.” Instead of thinking about what we could do, or what we could do better, Obama was more interested in a self-limiting principle. For their part, European powers — content to bask under their U.S. security umbrella — could afford to believe in fantasies of perpetual peace. Europe’s gentleness and lethargy — coaxing Germany to commit even 2% of its GDP to defense seemed impossible — became something of a joke. One popular Twitter account, @ISEUConcerned, devoted itself to mocking the European Union’s propensity to express “concern,” but do little else, whenever something bad happened.

Suddenly, the EU has been aroused from its slumber, and the parody account was rendered temporarily speechless. This is no longer tepid concern, but righteous fury. Member states announced that they would send anti-tank weapons to Ukraine. Germany, for the first time, said that it would ramp up its military budget to 100 billion euros. On the economic front, the EU announced some of the toughest sanctions in history. My podcast co-host, Damir Marusic, an Atlantic Council senior fellow, likened it to a “holy war,” European-style.

Sometimes, unusual and extreme events mark the separation between old and new ways of thinking and being. This week, the Berlin-based journalist Elizabeth Zerofsky remarked that the current moment reminded her of the memoir “The World of Yesterday,” written by the Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig as World War II loomed. In it, he recalls the twilight of the Austro-Hungarian Empire with an almost naive fondness. On the first day of the Ukraine invasion, I happened to be speaking to a group of college students who had no memory of September 11. I told them that they may be living in history. Those students, like all of us, are bearing witness to one of those rare events that recast how individuals and nations alike view the world they inhabit.

The coming weeks, months, and years are likely to be as fascinating as they are terrifying. In a sense, we knew that a great confrontation was coming, even if we hadn’t quite envisioned its precise contours. At the start of his presidency, Joe Biden declared that the battle between democracies and autocracies would be the defining struggle of our time. This was grandiose rhetoric, but was it more than that? What does it actually mean to fight such a battle?

In any number of ways, Russia’s aggression has underscored why Biden was right and why authoritarians — and the authoritarian idea itself — are such a threat to peace and stability. Russia invaded Ukraine, a democracy, because of the recklessness and domination of one man, Vladimir Putin. The countries that have rallied most enthusiastically behind Ukraine have almost uniformly been democracies, chief among them the United States. America is lousy, disappointing, and maddeningly hypocritical in its conduct abroad, but the notion of any moral equivalence between the United States and Putin’s Russia has been rendered laughable. And if there is such a thing as a better world, then anti-imperialists may find themselves in the odd position of hoping and praying for the health and longevity of not just the West but of Western power.

[Fred Steeves]

America is lousy, disappointing, and maddeningly hypocritical in its conduct abroad, but the notion of any moral equivalence between the United States and Putin’s Russia has been rendered laughable. And if there is such a thing as a better world, then anti-imperialists may find themselves in the odd position of hoping and praying for the health and longevity of not just the West but of Western power.

That's quite the summation as a rallying call for American imperialism!

"America is lousy, disappointing, and maddeningly hypocritical in its conduct abroad, but they're not as bad as the other guy"...

And that's a white wash to begin with! Not to excuse Putin's actions by any means, but a 25 year side by side comparison of U.S. foreign interventions and Russian interventions would prove quite embarrassing for the U.S., and even more hypocritical than the piece is forced to admit.

This is American neoliberalism at its very finest, at times nearly indiscernible from their neoconservative counterparts.

But anyway let's all be good little boys and girls and chant it together: USA! USA! USA!

[Emil El Zapato]

That's quite the summation as a rallying call for American imperialism!

"America is lousy, disappointing, and maddeningly hypocritical in its conduct abroad, but they're not as bad as the other guy"...

And that's a white wash to begin with! Not to excuse Putin's actions by any means, but a 25 year side by side comparison of U.S. foreign interventions and Russian interventions would prove quite embarrassing for the U.S., and even more hypocritical than the piece is forced to admit.

This is American neoliberalism at its very finest, at times nearly indiscernible from their neoconservative counterparts.

But anyway let's all be good little boys and girls and chant it together: USA! USA! USA!

you do realize that neoliberalism is the same thing as neoconservatism ... you really must pay attention. They are both rooted in right wing corporatism

[Emil El Zapato]

That's quite the summation as a rallying call for American imperialism!

"America is lousy, disappointing, and maddeningly hypocritical in its conduct abroad, but they're not as bad as the other guy"...

And that's a white wash to begin with! Not to excuse Putin's actions by any means, but a 25 year side by side comparison of U.S. foreign interventions and Russian interventions would prove quite embarrassing for the U.S., and even more hypocritical than the piece is forced to admit.

This is American neoliberalism at its very finest, at times nearly indiscernible from their neoconservative counterparts.

But anyway let's all be good little boys and girls and chant it together: USA! USA! USA!

For the ONE-THOUSANDATH TIME:

I have never chanted USA! USA! USA! and never will. If you can get that straight we would have made some huge strides. Save that b.s. for the disappearing 'greatest generation' and baby boomers.

I grew up in the same U.S. as you did Fred ... never really respected it but I don't believe in shit for brains chants of America is the Evil Empire either. I feel strongly about either fantasy being put forth as reality.

If you can integrate that into your programmed brain then we will have made great progress in understanding one another. Just get me straight and you can work on the rest of your life on your own time.

I don't know how many times you need to hear/see it from me but I've plainly stated that the U.S. as a power broker has made mistakes and indulged in Machiavellian plots for what it considered its own best interests, as the rest of the world has and does. In terms of imperialism, the only entity in the 'civilized' global community as we speak indulging in imperialism is Putinia.

Obama let slide Crimea with the leftist philosophy of Kantianism in mental play and Ukraine is now suffering the consequences of it. There is no justification for a paranoid lunatic to live out his fantasies at the expense of innocent people.

And that is my definition of 'INDECENCY', to argue otherwise is beneath human dignity.

[Dreamtimer]

The phenomenon of people putting words in your mouth and feelings in your heart just won't stop, Chuckie. Don't expect it too. For many it's much more gratifying to make it about you and distract you with that conversation. Then the uncomfortable subject can be 'ignored'.

So stay on topic and ignore the personal stuff. Perhaps channel your inner Malcom Nance like, "I'm only going to say it once. That's not what I said." Don't waste your time beyond that.

I've had to learn the hard way to not be led down that garden path.

[Emil El Zapato]

yeah, I made it plain why I was getting out of that thread. It's amazing how people can twist plainly spoken/written words. I'm not sweating it and thanks for your support.

[Dreamtimer]

Have you heard of Politics Girl? I just came across her last month. She calls 'em like she sees 'em. I won't start a thread about her because....American politics. But she's a breath of fresh air in that arena. I haven't seen any who compare.

She points out the gross hypocrisy in current right-wing claims surrounding freedom. "Do you think we're just going to roll over?"

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nd4xJJ5pQqo

[Emil El Zapato]

Amen ... as the old-timer baseball umpire and Howard Cosell said: I calls 'em like I sees 'em!

[Fred Steeves]

Have you heard of Politics Girl? I just came across her last month. She calls 'em like she sees 'em. I won't start a thread about her because....American politics. But she's a breath of fresh air in that arena. I haven't seen any who compare.

She points out the gross hypocrisy in current right-wing claims surrounding freedom. "Do you think we're just going to roll over?"

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nd4xJJ5pQqo

Well, if you go through her videos from the beginning, she unsurprisingly argues for the democratic party straight down the line.

Breath of fresh air? Sure, I guess... in that she totes the party line in her own unique and fiery manner.

Here's just one brief example, telling everyone to vote democrat:

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cU5j-eQsbo