Gov. Charlie Baker, who we are continually told is a Massachusetts moderate, today is standing with five other Republican governors in punishing Syrian refugees for the Paris terror attacks:
In the wake of the deadly terrorist attacks in Paris, Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker joined several American governors in announcing Monday they will not allow any Syrian refugees to move to their states.
“I would say no as of right now,” Baker told reporters at a State House event Monday. “No, I’m not interested in accepting refugees from Syria.”
“My view on this is the safety and security of the people of the Commonwealth of Mass. is my highest priority,” he added. “So I would set the bar very high on this.”
Baker said he wanted more information from federal officials. “I think at this point in time we’d have to be very cautious about accepting folks without knowing a lot more about what the federal government’s plan looks like and how it’s going to be actually implemented and executed,” he said.
Boston Mayor Martin J. Walsh agreed that he wants to find out more about the federal government’s plan for reviewing incoming refugees. “We have to see the vetting process and what’s happening with the vetting process,” he said.
It’s part of a trend as in recent years, America has begun turning our backs on refugees. It doesn’t do America’s image any favors to bomb countries like Syria, but not be willing to help the civilians displaced. Hamilton Nolan writes in Gawker today that this kind of fearful, shut-the-windows-and-bar-the-doors response is exactly what terrorists are hoping for:
Terrorism works. Against us, terrorism works very, very well. Our collective insistence on treating terrorist acts as something categorically different than crime—as something harder to understand, something scarier, something perpetrated not by humans but by monsters—feeds the ultimate goals of terrorists. It makes us dumb. It makes us primitive. It is our boogeyman, and no amount of rational talk will drive it out of our minds.
Terrorists who despise freedom of speech shoot up a satirical magazine. How do we respond? We respond with fear, by censoring ourselves and refusing to show the very images that prompted the attack in the first place. (Nothing new about that—the free press has demonstrated its cowardice on this issue for years now.) We respond with rage, by condemning all of Islam and instinctively calling for a response violent enough to dwarf the violence of the initial attack. We cower in fear and cry for war. We countenance any countermeasure as long as it will keep us safe. We let the ideal we once proclaimed so strongly sink into a pool of terror, and drown.
Sound familiar? It is always the way. We are richer, and mightier, and far more deadly than any of our terrorist foes could dream of being. And yet we happily play into their hands. We declare a “War on Terror” of our own making, an absurd construct with no possible victory. We overreact so harshly to every injury that our reputation as bullies and savages is confirmed. We allowourselves to be cowed by fear. We allow ourselves to be rendered senseless by rage. The terrorist lays the bait, and we give him the terror he seeks. The terrorist may be the criminal, but we are the hapless suckers who make his act worthwhile.
Terrorism works. But it does not have to. Terrorism reduces us to the sort of society that we claim to despise. But it does not have to. The ideals we espouse when times are calm—justice, understanding, rationality, proportionality, a love of peace—are the ones that we must cling to most tightly when things get scary. If we discard them, we have lost the game from the start.
We cannot control the terrorist. We can only control our response. Let that response be just, and wise, and proportional. Let that response embody the best of who we are, and not the worst. Terror is momentary. A loss of our ideals can last forever.
In some ways, I can understand Baker – but Walsh? When he ran for mayor, all we heard was what a progressive he was, but in office, he’s made just as many headlines for supporting school privatization and supporting back-door Olympics & Grand Prix deals as he has for making progress. And he always seems much, much too eager to prove he’s best buddies with the conservative Baker – their bromance, as the Globe has called it.
One, this is a reminder–yet again–that Charlie is a Republican and, in general, a person lacking in sound moral principles. Walsh is a Democrat, but, unfortunately, has the same lack of sound moral principles. Walsh has been a disappointment in so many ways.
Second, and a more important reminder:
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007652
To be brutally honest, Baker should have already known our federal screening process and plan if he actually gave a fuck. It’s bewildering to read Baker’s comments.
During the Olympic process, we always heard Marty Walsh talk about “welcoming the world” to our city. Now, when people need that door to be open, he says it’s firmly shut.
But not exactly a profile in courage, either.
Statement from Walsh:
n/t
I don’t live in Boston, I can’t do anything about Mr. Walsh except express my contempt for his cowardice.
How do we censure Mr. Baker? He speaks, and acts for all of us.
On a different thread, we talked about the role of faith leaders in addressing climate change. Today — right here, right now — we have more acute for genuine leadership from our faith leaders (and everyone else). I certainly hope that the faith leaders in our community will not wait for an invitation from the State House to say and do what needs to be said and done.
The shame of this act by Mr. Baker — besmirching all of us — needs to be preached from EVERY place of worship, starting right now.
Governor Baker is shamefully disgracing each and every one of us. I want to know how we most effectively:
1. Communicate our outrage, and
2. STOP HIM
…the stark contrast compared to Deval Patrick’s willingness to take in Central American children, for which he cited in part his faith as motivation.
As there were not international terrorist organizations with the specific strategy of using refugees in order to get militants into western countries in order then to strike at soft targets within those countries.
If Shining Path were using seeming central American refusgees to stage attacks at Red Sox games, then the calculus would be the same.
Fox has absolutely (and insanely) hyped immigrants from Central America as a path for ISIS to enter America http://mediamatters.org/blog/2014/06/13/watch-foxs-history-of-using-immigration-issues/199723
Wait, are you saying that the potential for refugees from Syria engaging in ISIS supported acts of terror is nothing more than FoxNews hype?
Per a realist, rather than lefty source.
According to another non-partisan think tank
The potential is MUCH smaller than we can detect through any reasonable filter. It is MUCH smaller than the likelihood of a terrorist getting through our TSA screening, even after more than a decade of “improving” those processes. The likelihood of Muslim terrorists in hidden in the Syrian refugees is so small that the only way to “protect” us from them is to stop the flow of refugees altogether.
That is EXACTLY what they seek.
Fox News is doing its best to persuade Americans that immigrants are evil. While some GOP “moderates” do lip service to immigration status, the entire thrust of the party is to inflame the xenophobic and racist passions of our most sociopathic citizens. If they actually cared about the “immigration problem”, they would have acknowledged that we solved our border issues years ago. Most undocumented aliens remain that way because our entire immigration bureaucracy is so deeply dysfunctional. I think the truth is this:
1. They don’t care about terrorists hidden among Syrian refugees, they pander to anti-Muslim bigotry
2. They don’t care about immigration reform, they pander to anti-Mexican and anti-Hispanic bigotry
3. They don’t care about voter fraud, the pander to racist bigotry
Fox News is the wholly-owned communications subsidiary of the national GOP. The America that the national GOP seeks is white (except for people like Hermann Cain, Ben Carson, and Clarence Thomas), male (except for women like Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, and Carly Fiorina) and Christian. Men and women like Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Muslim refugees from terrorism do not qualify.
Martin O’Malley said it best in the last debate:
“Our symbol is the Statue of Liberty. It is not a barbed wire fence.”
Fox news and the GOP disagree.
…and I don’t hear anyone suggesting we not make sure that we are only admitting legitimate refugees.
“I think it’s appropriate for us to reassess what we’re trying to do and also the ability and the need to vet candidates for admission to this country,” Lynch said while speaking to the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce. “I think easily we could handle 10,000. That’s not an outlandish number, given the populations of the 50 states, you’ve got about 300 million people here.”
His name is President Obama.
From the Times:
The federal government was not shy about cutting off transportation funding to states who did not raise the drinking age to 21. The feds were similarly not reluctant to force states (including MA) to adopt invasive and unproductive national ID standards.
Perhaps it’s time for President Obama to show some of the sticks available to him to encourage states (including Massachusetts) to do the right thing.
.
I can understand governors in Alabama etc lacking any knowledge of the Constitution, but I had hoped that Charlie would at least have a passing acquaintance with that document.
Tomorrow his “best friends who happen to be Syrian” will tell him he was an idiot and he will repent.
I’ve been reluctant to offer this comparison in order to avoid those who will invoke Godwins’ law, but I do think it is necessary and appropriate — especially given that Mr. Rubio has already opened the door.
Perhaps we can solve several problems simultaneously by seizing more territory alongside Israel and calling it “The Islamic Homeland”. Then all the nations of the world can turn pretzels patting themselves on the back for their “compassion” as they deport these to their new “home”.
Funny how easy it was for extreme right-wing US Christians to enthusiastically “support” Israel — thus solving America’s “Jewish problem”.
The depth of our current bigotry and racism is disgusting. It surprises even me, and I thought I was already a realist about these matters.
Godwin’s Law began as a sort of Internet parlor trick, but for years has been used to shield modern fascists from the comparisons they so richly deserve. It’s past time to retire it from serious discussions. Hitler and the Nazis did not invent the sort of atrocities they are remembered for, nor did those things end with them. That their modern state was able and willing to, for instance, automate genocide does not mean that demagogues, racists, and xenophobes have no influence in our nation in the same ways that their counterparts in mid-20th-century Germany did. This needs to be called out when appropriate, and gotcha trivialists should not derail those discussions with silly citations of Godwin’s Law.
We are, in fact, comparing apples to apples. Genocidal tyrants to genocidal tyrants. It’s when public health care or gun control get casually compared to Nazism that we should be leery, or when the dittoheads point out ‘it was the national socialist party’ with the sophistry of a philistine. If the argument relies on a middle school level of historical understanding, it’s probably a lousy one.
I think it is appropriate to refer to a time when we were reluctant to accept other refugees because that is the particular point of this discussion, but for me at least it is the Holocaust that is the singular evil event, which despite there being other genocides has never been matched when you think of such things as ovens and gas chambers.
PER the BBC, they have uncovered another mass grave of women too old to be useful sex slaves or trophies. 80 in this one.
Which is why – Charley’s anxiety over ‘breaking up families’ notwithstanding – I say we should welcome women and children only.
Women have a demonstrated need for refuge.
There are plenty of men fleeing ISIS as well. In fact, I heard Chris Matthews suggest that these are the guys we should arm to create the moderate faction we are looking for in Syria.
Our previous attempts to create Good Guys With Guns in the region have been rewarded with the likes of Saddam Hussein and Al-Queda. ISIS itself seems to be a result of another aspect of our clumsy attempts to force our will on the Middle East. Chris Matthews is a blathering fool, and his advice is worthless.
Other instances of our trying to influence outcomes have not necessarily prioritized the establishment of democratic regimes. Our arming of what became al-Qaeda in Afghanistan was a symptom of our disasterous what I like to call ABC (Anybody But a Communist) foreign policy, which put us not above propping up petty tyrants all over the world. Siding with Saddam over Iran was a continuation of a policy that would get us the best oil access, popular will locally notwithstanding. Our number one priority needs to be to show that region that we know how to not be hypocrites when it comes to democracy and human rights. This will take some time as broken trust cannot be repaired overnight. We need to start by supporting factions supportive of democracy, and yes, that may mean fighting for it in the interim. I often agree with your characterization of Matthews, but he is making the point that they need to fight for themselves. If we are willing to take in refugees AND help them retake their country I think that would be a great start toward engendering good will towards us. As I have said many times I am convinced that ultimately we will be safer for it as well.
They may be more sympathetic to Al Nusra, they may be Alawites loyal to Assad, they may be part of the Kurdish, Yazidi, or Christian minorities that have never achieved self-determined statehood in that part of the world. We don’t know.
What if the Kurds we arm end up taking up arms against our NATO ally Turkey? I am fully sympathetic to them, the Turks have been fucking them over for years, but that is still highly problematic. It’s bad enough we are arming Turkey which is fighting the allies we are arming in Iraq and Syria.
I am not saying it’s a good idea or a bad idea, I am saying it’s a vastly more complex situation than the WW2 analogies of Chris Matthews. When we armed the Free French and the Poles we were dealing with a united opposition committed to overthrowing the Nazi occupation. Sure there were a lot of communist partisans in the mix there, but they were united for that particular war effort against a single, unitary state foe with a conventional military-which is so NOT the case in Syria.
In this case, there are two occupations we oppose-Assad and ISIL-and the forces aligned against those occupations have split into inumerous factions, some of which are explicitly Islamist, anti-democratic, and anti-American or against one of our regional allies like Israel or Turkey. There are now Iranian and Russian boots on the ground actively fighting against these allies, and if our arms end up killing some of them it may end up making this situation worse.
Where we agree Christopher, and we may be alone on this blog in that agreement, is that the current strategy against ISIL is also flawed, and is a moral and political failure. But I am also reluctant to follow the neocons and kneejerk interventionists like Roger Cohen or Bernard Henri Levi who have been proven wrong nearly every single time in the past, from Libya to Iraq. I am also highly skeptical of military analysts and commanders who say this will be easy, it will pay for itself, or it will require few American troops and will not require a long term American occupation. They lost any credibility from the last time.
Is Obama also risking our moral and political credibility by excluding this action? By flip flopping on red lines? By hurting our alliances? Possibly. There is obvious damage caused by his inaction, and he seems unwilling to admit his containment strategy has failed. That to me looks more like an uncharacteristic adoption of the tunnel vision and stay the course mentality of his predecessor, albeit in this case, against force rather than for force. Sec. Kerry has been a lot more clear and direct in calling out this threat and proscribing more vigorous action to address it. And when John Forbes Kerry is more direct and decisive sounding than you are, that’s a major problem.
Our governor, who is now siding with the likes of Alabama Gov. Bentley in post-Paris fear mongering, is an embarrassment. FDR told the nation we have nothing to fear but fear itself, but we have a Republican governor who folds up like a $2 suitcase in the face of a desperate and weak criminal enterprise (ISIS/ISIL). Imagine what he would have done if instead of ISIS/ISIL he was facing the Wehrmacht? Charlie, you have failed the leadership test. You are unqualified to lead this state, let alone the nation.
In addition to Baker, Walsh, Hassan, and all the national scum bag Republicans, the press has reached a new low on this. MSNBC was a complete joke this morning. All of the commentators were criticizing (except Gene Robinson) the tone and approach of the president yesterday. Tone and approach… Basically, the Republicans, cowardly Democrats, and media are upset because the president isn’t using more bellicose rhetoric, and verbally committing to the use of ground troops. No one—not one—of the politicians I have heard including Marco Rubio (who’s so full of crap), has a plan for what tough talk and ground troops would accomplish. Basically, all they can stammer is that they want more forward operators and air power. Well guess what—we’re already doing that. Tough talk has it’s place, sure; but in this instance to what end? ISIL already knows that we’re committed to killing them. Are we going to scare them off through tough talk? Yeah, right. The fact of the matter is the Republican neo-cons created this mess, never paid for it domestically, have no plan going forward other than to fuck it up more and criticize the president. The press wants a full on ground war. Nothing sells ads like wall-to-wall war coverage. Thanks for my morning rant.
We seem to be falling all over ourselves in a national rush to confirm the validity of the WORST accusations against us.
This is a sad, sad week for America.
This quietly moving scene had far more historical resonance than anything either Obama or Bush said in the aftermath of their fight, and there is just no way we can replicate it. We do not have the baggage of three successive generations of German invasions, two world wars, losing an empire , and losing over a quarter of our male population to warfare that they do.
The French people are not cowering in their homes looking for hidden Muslims in their midst, they are rushing back to the restaurants, bistros, and discos to show these barbarian cowards they are not afraid and their way of life centered around liberty, freedom, humanism, and secular values will continue without fear.
Every American should follow the example of this French woman:
I agree with all you’ve said here.
I do not, however, wish to emulate their decision to declare war.
As I’ve perhaps belabored, I remain convinced that this kneejerk declaration of war is precisely what ISIS expects and seeks.
When they killed 129 French citizens in cold blood. France didn’t ask for the fight, neither did the US on 9/11. I get it’s a bit more nuanced than that, both groups are largely the result of blowback from our failed past policies, but they lost as many people proportionately as we did on 9/11, and they have a right to respond.
The question now is not whether to respond, but the best way to respond, and I think Hollande is wise to be a bridge between Russia and the West, and create a truly international coalition with full Security Council backing to treat this cancer before it spreads even further. And Sec. Kerry is doing God’s work trying to get the non ISIL factions in Syria to come together.
I agree that a response is required from both France and the rest of the western world, including Russia.
If the Italian mafia blew up several Chicago establishments because local police were interfering with profits, would we declare war on Italy, the Italian mafia, or the Vatican? I think not. I think our response would be a suitably measured police action directed at Italian mafia (I choose the Italian mafia for this absurd example because their members are generally Roman Catholic).
Let me ask a related question. Declaring war is an implicit recognition of the legitimacy of the declared enemy. Suppose this war that France has declared is “won” — does ISIS also negotiate the surrender?
It seems to me that the path chosen by France (and anyone else who joins in the war against ISIS) leads to either perpetual warfare or the recognition of at least some of the territory claimed by ISIS.
I suggest that war — both as a formal declaration by France and as a metaphor — leads us into a quagmire from which the world has everything to lose and little to gain.
The mafia did blow up several Chicago establishments in the 1920’s and we recognized municipal and state police forces were inadequete to the task and dispatched the FBI to declare, and ultimately win, a long war against the mob. Several contemporaneous pieces refer to it as a ‘war’.
A major difference is that the mafia was an internal issue, and a criminal organization. ISIL is a criminal organization that is also a de jure state controlling significant amounts of territory, funding it’s wide spread social services via dirty oil money, and ruling with the harshest form of religious law imposed in the modern world. Harsher than even Iran or Saudi Arabia. And it is drawing foreign fighters ideologically committed to the cause.
In some ways it is more analogous to the Bolsheviks in the 1910s and 1920s. The Allies 1917-1919 expedition to crush them is instructive, even if it sadly little remembered as a footnote in American history, as a policy failure that cost hundreds of American lives and failed to achieve it’s objectives.
Even then, it had significant mass popular support which ISIL is lacking, and it wasn’t as multi sided and complicated as this one. One of the few memorable things Jim Webb said on the campaign trail was ‘never get into a 5 sided fight’ when it came to Syria. That was my opinion on Thursday.
Friday’s attacks proved me and President Obama wrong, and it showed that our current policy is insufficient to contain ISIL to it’s region of the world. It is now exporting it’s terror overseas, something our intelligence analysts failed to predict, and arguably a key area where there are no easy historical precedents to fall back on or lessons to be learned. I think we have to concede and recognize that we are dealing with a different kind of enemy than we thought we were.
So a key phase now is entirely diplomatic. Getting 4 of those 5 sides to stop fighting each other and start fightign ISIL. This is what Kerry, Hollande, our President, President Putin, and others are trying to do. I strongly hope it succeeds against the odds. Getting our allies in this fight-particularly Turkey and the Gulf States-to stop attacking other allies (the Kurds, the FSA and Al Nusra) and funding ISIL through proxies or dirty oil sales, is the second essential step.
Convincing Russia to stop attacking Assad’s enemies and convincing Assad to step down and transition out would start at step 1 but are honestly step 3 in their own right. And then step 4 is seeing if having done this, the diplomatic and law enforcement phase, only then should we start to plan and consider a larger military phase that may need to include ground troops. But they should be used only after those other steps have taken place, only with the cooperation of the entire international community, and given full free reign to wage a limited objective campaign to kill ISIL. I have no interest in importing Jeffersonian democracy to this place, I just want the terrorist threat eliminated, and in such a way that the mole won’t pop it’s head up somewhere else.
Getting to the point where all agree to use ballots rather than bullets to resolve their disputes is the only way to maintain longterm stability internally and security for the rest of us.
I’m pretty sure that entering into this negotiation with the premise that “Jeffersonian Democracy” is the only stable outcome dooms it before it begins.
I think we can all agree in broad terms that tyranny is wrong and democracy, even in it’s most flawed forms, is better. Ours is a democracy in progress, from voting rights, to racial justice, to gender and economic equality. India and the Philippines even more so. I’ve met through my future in laws an activist who lost his spouse when she was killed by a sniper during a voter registration drive, a hit probably paid for by the local incumbent governor and his family. I’ve met through the church my fiancee works at Indian Christians fleeing the Modi government which has started cracking down on Christians.
Obama is visiting the first government today, and has hosted the second at a lavish state dinner. Mentioning in neither situation incidents such as these. We have many other allies that are entirely autocratic in nature, including some that look awfully close to ISIL in their depravity. We still don’t know what will happen in Burma.
My point is, it’s ultimately up to those citizen activists, human rights groups and other NGO’s, the UN, and journalists to spread, sustain, and defend these values worldwide. The ballot is preferable to the bullet, but you cannot democratize a foreign culture by force. I believe recent history has taught us that lesson loud and clear.
What is needed now in Syria is a path to a new government. One that by nature, will have to include elements from the existing regime, it’s infighting opposition, and exclude ISIL. I am confident it will be vastly superior to the status quo, which has killed hundreds of thousands, displaced millions, and has allowed a terror group far worse than Al Qaeda to have a safe haven which it is apparently using to launch global attacks. But it will likely be far from even an embryonic democracy.
…and you do have to start somewhere, and my understanding is that diplomats are in fact arranging a timetable for elections, which is exactly what I want to see. I’m not asking for anyone to be more perfect than we are at the flick of a switch, but it should be our policy to encourage democracy and discourage tyranny even if the illusion (and make no mistake, it will always be an illusion) of stability of the latter is tempting. There is a direct correlation. The more people who can choose their own destiny and the more territory subject to freely elected regimes, the better it is for everyone. The Declaration of Independence did not just refer to us and I have to say I’m very disappointed that I seem to be the only idealist around here (though ultimately I think there is a lot of potential for reality in it too).
We all had to learn democracy at some point and I think most people prefer not to constantly live in fear. It’s not going to look exactly like ours. They may want to use different models of representation, or have a more socialistic economy, or even have a close connection between mosque and state – all of which are fine as long as they get to choose. It rarely, if ever, happens that any two nations go to war with each other if both are democracies. Making the world safe for democracy has the great by-product of making the world simply safe.
America’s Declaration of Independence was written after centuries of trial and error, starting at least as early as the Magna Carta in 1215. That transition most certainly did include the use, or threat of use, of whatever weapons were available at the time. Of the previously mentioned five sides in this fight, representative democracy in anything comparable to the form you use the phrase has no foundation comparable to the tradition from which our Declaration of Independence emerged.
Meanwhile, our own form of democracy is showing symptoms of serious — even catastrophic — dysfunction. In my view, we are not currently a model of modern government suitable for export. I suggest that if some form of representative democracy somehow emerges from all this, it is far more likely to resemble the forms practiced in Europe.
As has been noted before, the first few actions taken by any representative democracy in the Middle East will be:
1. Call for the immediate destruction of Israel
2. Call for the immediate ouster and destruction of the US
I suggest that all five sides of the current crisis describe themselves as idealists already. It seems to me that the situation calls for rather less “idealism” and rather more pragmatism.
A stable and peaceful government that follows ISIS is, I suspect, far more likely to resemble 21st century Iran than 18th century America.
…and European models are perfectly acceptable. I do not know for sure that democratic regimes will call for either ours or Israel’s destruction, though I don’t doubt that such factions will compete for votes. Maybe they will ask us to leave, which would be their sovereign right. Anti-US and anti-Israel sentiment is often ginned up by elites who want to point the finger at anyone but themselves for the plight of the Arab Street. They may not become buddy-buddy with us like UK, Canada, and other NATO partners, but I strongly suspect that when they see that we can respect their decisions they will respond favorably.
Are the consultants up there trapped in 2004? I remember Shaheen in 2014 running away from the President and being more hawkish on Iran and Syria, more skeptical of immigration, and hawkish on the ebola scare. She was the only purple state Senator re-elected following that shitty strategy, and it’s because she ran against one of the most inauthentic politicians in local memory.
Hassan, who is a fantastic Governor, assertive feminist, and strong leader seems to be following a similar playbook. You can’t out hawk Ayotte, who is a proud member of the ‘uncritical advocates of war’ caucus alongside little Lindsey and John boy. Better to run for Democratic principles than run away from them, it’s been turning NH blue for sometime. She is even the first Governor to refuse to sign that idiotic pledge, so she should stick with what works.
I just am highly skeptical that the military is the means to do it, or that it gives us a tactical or strategic advantage when it comes to facing our strategic foes. It seems very selective in it’s application. Saddam was a threat that only ‘democracy’ could prevent from occurring again.
Both of those postulates were falsifiable, and have indeed been falsified. Yet containment is working for the nuclear armed Kim regime in North Korea, or for our largest trading partner and creditor, which happens to be the world’s largest autocracy-across the Yalu river in China. No one has ever seriously discussed regime change in either of those oppressive states, Korea probably the most oppressive on Earth, and certainly a greater threat to our interests than Saddam ever was.
Similarly, Iran and Cuba can be integrated into the global community and naturally opened up, neither was a military democratization and both required extensive diplomacy to succeed. In either case its a nice byproduct to achieving a more direct geopolitical goal. And of course, we have taken out a democracy and replaced it with a strongman many times over from Chile under Nixon to Egypt under Obama.
Unlike some here, I might even defend some of those actions under realist grounds. Sissi is preferable to Morsi when it comes to the geopolitical interests in the region, though neither is preferable to Muburak who was a far more stable ally shown the shaft as soon as the street turned against him, undermining our credibility with other Gulf states in the region, and making us look like hypocrites to the Arab people when we went against the street in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan.
It’s super duper complicated, and as you’ve pointed out in other arguments, we certainly made democracy promotion harder by actions like the coup in Iran and Lebanon, which took out socialist elected governments and enabled the rise of Shia fundamentalism in both states. We certainly didn’t help the secular leftists in the Palestinian movement, they’ve now been supplanted by Islamist radicals who are significantly worse. We may make the same mistake with the Kurds, who we are simultaneously arming in Iraq and Syria and looking the other way while their people’s aspirations are quashed by our NATO ally in Turkey.
I think the three of us have discussed this topic without getting anywhere new, so I will try and spare the BMG community a repetitive argument. I think we do agree on more than we disagree, and I also think the three of us have a decent idea of what ISIL is, what the threat is, and how to fight it. And at least we all recognize the humanity of refugees, which is sadly something even our ‘moderate’ Republican governor can’t seem to do, not to mention any of his party’s candidate for President.