Well you've aligned yourself with a dictator who recently used chemical weapons on his own population. That's quite a remarkable moral compass.
Putin and Russia in Syria
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Well you've aligned yourself with a dictator who recently used chemical weapons on his own population. That's quite a remarkable moral compass.
Yeah but he's just a git on the internet, not a collection of nations with dozens of intelligence services.
I thought we were discussing McCain, not myself?
And no, I'm not aligned with any dictator. As always, I've made clear my preferences on who wins this war and my loyalty to the Kurds, but unfortunately some can't tell the difference.
Could have been much worse. He could have tried to justify the US foreign policy. Imagine that.
We're discussing Putin/Syria et al. You have been pro-Assad since the beginning, as in you want the Assad regime to remain in place, irrespective of what it has done to its people. Not particularly realistic is it.
Wrong. I want Syria to remain secular with or without Assad, and I don't want Islamist rebels seizing control of the country. I also think that they'd be horrible neighbours for a future Kurdish state which is my primary concern.
While old man McCain indulges in some good ol archaic cold war doom-mongering, the Russians have now been coordinating with the SDF and YPG in clearing out Al Nusra and AQ-affiliated pockets in the northern canton, whereas a hawkish dinosaur like McClown would rather pour arms into those very same groups because 'Iran'.
The Russians are in the business of keeping Assad in power as a means to obfuscate from their own domestic economic doom and gloom. Supporting Assad remaining in power is not a secular solution, its a guarantee of continued insurgency as no rational non-Assad supporting Syrian is going to go back to living a normal life after what he has done to them. Thus supporting him remaining in power will only prolong not shorten the civil war. The only way out is an internationally brokered ceasefire, and the formation of a new government where all Syrian groups have an equal whack at power sharing. That's the only chance of achieving the sort of secularism that is actually sustainable.
Your internationally brokered ceasefire is meaningless when the Arab states won't sit with Kurdish opposition groups, are intent on continuing to fund jihadists, whereas the Turks are all too happy to be playing into ISIS' hands by attacking Kurdish positions. Compound in the lack of international response to Saudi atrocities in Yemen which are unlikely to make anyone take the calls for ceasefire seriously.
This isn't as simple as Assad going and everything falling into place. Thought we'd have learned that from Iraq war II.
Having a meaningful debate with Raoul on this subject is a little bit pointless. He is far and away the most blinded and biased poster here. Just poke fun at his bias' once in awhile when he gets a little too carried away with his black and white, good hat, bad hat world view.
Its a nice sentiment, just a stupidly unrealistic proposition.
Are you serious Raoul?! How is the insurgency going in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya? Don't you think you should "clean up" the mess there before starting a new one?
The continued insurgency is because Saudi Arabia (and its allies including the US) keep pumping Wahhabi terrorists, weapons and money to destabilize Syria and achieve regime change (like they did in the past). The same Wahhabi terrorists who are still a problem in many other countries who have nothing to do with Assad. Can you really not see that? I just don't believe that you actually believe what you're proposing here.
I would say "probably" if this was the first "Oops I didn't know it would go wrong like that!". But looking around, nobody is that stupid and "sentimental".
Migrant wave begun the march towards Europe way before Russia's direct involvement in Syria.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articl...falls-for-its-own-fake-satellite-imagery.html
They're not even trying. Just look at the two areas on Google Maps. One is relatively flat, parceled farmland. The other is mostly hills/mountains with no agriculture.
They're not even trying. Just look at the two areas on Google Maps. One is relatively flat, parceled farmland. The other is mostly hills/mountains with no agriculture. Kremlin Falls for Its Own Fake Satellite Imagery
Russian-Photoshopped footage of MH17 was accidentally picked up by Putin’s Defense Ministry to (falsely) argue that one of its jets never entered Turkish airspace.
The Turkish downing of the Russian SU-24 jet last November saw a predictable series of statements from each side claiming complete innocence and blaming the other entirely. Social media was a key battleground for both side—the Turkish and Russian governments—and their supporters as each tried to establish a dominant narrative explanation for what had just happened.
In the midst of the online competition, a little-observed, funhouse mirror of an online hoax was brilliantly perpetrated, one with consequences likely exceeding the expectation of the hoaxster. The Russian Ministry of Defense was duped by a fake image that Russian state media itself had circulated more than a year earlier, as a way to deny Moscow’s involvement in the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. As most of the civilized world now acknowledges, that commercial airliner was shot down in July 2014, in skies above war-racked eastern Ukraine, by Russian-backed separatists, almost certainly with the help of Russian military technicians, using a Buk anti-aircraft missile. Every passenger and every crew member onboard—in all, nearly 300 people of varying nationalities—were killed in what was no doubt an accident, yet one criminally occluded after the fact by the responsible party. Without being exhaustive, the list of scapegoats put forward by various Kremlin surrogates included a Ukrainian SU-25 or SU-27 fighter jet; an onboard bomb; a Buk missile but of a make and model that the Russians military claimed to no longer use, the implication being that it must have come from, and been operated by, the Ukrainian military.
The first serious attempt by Vladimir Putin’s government to pin the blame for this tragedy on anyone but came via Channel One, the most-watched television channel in Russia, which released what it said was imagery taken by a Western spy satellite. This purported smoking gun was meant to reveal the exact moment a Ukrainian SU-27 shot down MH17. Here it is below:
The image was instantly, widely debunked for being an obvious forgery, relying on Google Earth imagery (spy satellite, indeed) and Photoshop. The Russian government doesn’t seem terribly committed to arguing otherwise, as it now accepts the theory that a Buk took out MH17, but still blames Ukraine for firing it.
Fast forward to November 24, 2015. Two Turkish F-16s knowingly and willingly downed a Russian SU-24, which had temporarily penetrated Turkish airspace. Moscow was bound to follow a similar script to the post-MH17 coverup by releasing another piece of airbrushed “satellite footage” to argue, at the very minimum, that its warplanes never entered Turkish airspace, the provocation for which Ankara justified its (admittedly highhanded) military response.
No doubt anticipating the inevitable, the parody Twitter account “@sputnik_intl,” which spoofs headlines of the Russian state-owned news organ Sputnik, let loose its own disinfo deluge. On the day of the incident, November 24, at 22:01 GMT, the fake Sputnik published the following image claiming to show that Russia’s SU-24 had indeed flown consistently on the Syrian side of the border when it was unwarrantedly attacked by the Turkish Air Force.
The tweet is both an obvious parody as well as a clear reference to the notorious fake originally floated after MH17. Only now, it shows a crudely drawn red line with “Syria” and “Turkey” labeled on each side, superimposed over the very same Google Earth image used by Channel One.
Well, shortly after this tweet went live, two Iranian news outlets—one of them belonging to the Basij paramilitary force; the other to the Revolutionary Guards Corps-linked Fars News—and Cumhurriyet, a Turkish newspaper, ran stories taking fake Sputnik’s lampoon as a genuine piece of Russian government-submitted evidence. Subsequently, another site called “defensionem.com” ran its own version.
The story was then picked by a Ukrainian blogger known for revealing fake news items, and by the Russian Ministry of Defense’s own media organ, TV Zvezda, which seized on it as the perfect gotcha to exculpate the SU-24 and to denounce the perfidious Western press for blaming poor Russia for another mid-air disaster. Yet Zvezda evidently did not realize that it was relying on Russian-fabricated evidence from a prior international incident, or if it did, it just didn’t care. The same image was subsequently uploaded to its Facebook and vKontake pages.
The Russian government fooled itself with its own outmoded lie.
A lot of Russian observers noticed the flagrant blooper and proceeded to leave comments on Zvezda’s vKontake page. Didn’t matter. The story and all the related social media postings are still online as of this writing. No corrections or clarifications have been issued.
And herein lies the lesson. The goal of Kremlin disinformation is not to persuade people of what the truth is; it’s to fashion a compelling, counternarrative for what the truth might be for and only for use in an abbreviated period of time. Thus any empirical investigation to establish the who, what, and where of a Russian controversy is obfuscated and confused. Even in the fact of incontrovertible evidence, the Ministry of Defense still does not admit to recycling a see-through deception of its own side’s contrivance. It’s content to let its lie just sit there in perpetuity as it usher everyone along to the next self-serving falsehood.
Kremlin forgeries or inventions in the 21st-century aren’t meant to last forever because they’re only meant to serve short-term interest. Let’s not forget that the Kremlin once denied it was sending the very aircraft to Syria that it now denies entered Turkish airspace. Anyone suggesting Russia was planning a military intervention on behalf of Bashar al-Assad during the first week of September, prior to the official announcement of the fact, risked the wrath of the Kremlin troll army— and got it. That’s because Russia wasn’t ready to be seen prepping for war just yet. What if NATO or the United States, seeking to preempt this intervention, implemented its own no-fly zone over Idlib and Aleppo provinces in the summer of 2015, before Putin’s airfields in Latakia had been constructed and before the first SU-24s had taken off from them to bomb the Syrian opposition. The entire project would have been for naught. So indicating the possibility or probability of its existence was a matter of Russian national security, and those doing the indicating had to be denounced as alarmists or frauds. (Naturally, the very same trolls who denied Putin was going to war in Syria now defend that war and insist that it is targeting ISIS.)
Putinist propaganda is a series of amnesiac vaudeville acts, where each performance appears to undermine or flatly contradict the plot line of the last. Yesterday’s lie doesn’t matter because by the time everyone notices, tomorrow’s is already here.
Someone mock up a Putin Mission Accomplished pic using Dubya's Aircraft Carrier photo!
Excellent, ISIS have been routed so time to bring the troops home.
bravo!
Bonus - the photo I took his head from also had him doing a thumbs up.
It's great, although a shirtless Putin would have been even better!
Putin must be really skint back home to be pulling out so soon.
Was thinking that myself.
Like him or loathe him, Putin's decision to intervene more directly in the conflict has produced results from his point of view. And no doubt the flow of supplies will continue apace. The opposition on the other hand, is full of competing agendas locally, and blustering Western politicians elsewhere. Financial constraints notwithstanding, it is a fair enough piece of stage management.
But as you've alluded to with that manipulation of Bush's victory speech aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln (well done btw
), such confidence can be misplaced.
But as you've alluded to with that manipulation of Bush's victory speech aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln (well done btw
), such confidence can be misplaced.Timeline so far:
And you say... "Putin must be really skint back home to be pulling out so soon". Why? Is it because we're used to seeing foreign powers illegally invade, and occupy sovereign nations for years, and only pull out after they've made trillions for their corporations?
The choreographed demonisation of Putin by the MSM over the years needs to be questioned by some, especially given the West's track-record. You are being dictated to by the mouth pieces of the very people that promote and benefit from the illegal and immoral conflicts in the middle East, yet your cognitive dissonance, nationalism, self-righteousness, is so strong that it overpowers your intelligence and common sense to see the shit for what it is.
- Assad is the only obstacle standing in the way of a Qatari-Saudi-Turkey-Europe pipeline, conveniently made viable by cutting off Russian gas (see Ukrainian conflict).
- The West (UK, US, NATO, whatever you want to call it) gets involved in trying to overthrow Assad in order to serve their own geopolitical agenda (see Qatar-Turkey gas).
- 500 gleaming white Toyota Land Cruisers suddenly appear out of nowhere. Conveniently, no one knows who is funding them or who buys their stolen oil.
- Syria and the whole region is turned into Hell on Earth, resulting in an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe.
- The Syrian government (or the Assad Regime as it is called by the MSM) asks for support from Russia, making theirs the only legitimate foreign presence in Syria.
- Russia provides fire power, destroying ISIS and other targets opposed to the Syrian Government, in Syrian territory.
- Once dialogue commences between the warring factions and a cease fire has been agreed, Russia decide to reduce their military presence in Syria.
And you say... "Putin must be really skint back home to be pulling out so soon". Why? Is it because we're used to seeing foreign powers illegally invade, and occupy sovereign nations for years, and only pull out after they've made trillions for their corporations?
The choreographed demonisation of Putin by the MSM over the years needs to be questioned by some, especially given the West's track-record. You are being dictated to by the mouth pieces of the very people that promote and benefit from the illegal and immoral conflicts in the middle East, yet your cognitive dissonance, nationalism, self-righteousness, is so strong that it overpowers your intelligence and common sense to see the shit for what it is.
To be fair, you have to say he has achieved what he wants. The Assad regime isn't going anywhere anytime soon.
To be fair, we know he's skint because Russia has a resource based economy, heavily reliant of fossil fuels, whose market price has bottomed out. They've gone from being a very powerful economic force to one that absolutely has to be rocking in the space of a year and a half. Add in their massive geographical area, which presents its own problems for government; huge population and large military force and one has to believe that, under current conditions, money's too tight to mention.
I won't even bother getting into the notion of proxy war re Russia's involvement in Syria because it's blatantly obvious that Putin is no humanitarian. Cough, Grozny, cough. Ahem.
Whatever his motivation, this man gave Turkey's dictator the middle finger, and for that I'll always be grateful to him.
I'd say his greatest motivation was to distract the Russian people from something at home. Maybe domestic trouble or some unpleasant legislation or other political manoeuvres. Sure he was invited by Assad but there was a definite benefit for him.You could also argue that Erdogan gave Russia's Dictator the middle finger by shooting down one of his jets he claimed entered Turkish airspace.
You could argue that. Seeing as Russians have stopped flooding into the country and contributing to its tourism industry, blanked desperate pleas from Turkish diplomats and the man himself, and ultimately shit all over his grand desire to see Assad dethroned, I'd say it's a pretty weak argument.
Perhaps its a good opportunity to diversify away from Russian tourism.
Why not have all of them? Turkey does quite well in terms of tourism, meaning it was a bizarre decision to shoot down those jets. Not only would it allow Russia to dissuade its citizens, Turkey's position of uncertainty hardly inspires others.
I truly think he personally ordered those jets to be shot down because he overestimated his position, and the little dictator confronting the big dictator proved to be an ego check for him.
History has some examples of dictators giving each other the middle the finger, it generally does not end well for anyone.
Nothing will come of it, as Erdoğan is scared of Putin. He might be on an insane power trip in his pursuit of outright power by bringing Turkey to its knees, but he'll never be significant beyond the borders of Turkey and that eats him up inside.
Erdogan has been made to look very small by Putin.
The Sultan also seems to be cracking up these days as evident by his attacks on the media.
The Sultan also seems to be cracking up these days as evident by his attacks on the media.
The guy said there's no difference "a terrorist holding a gun or a bomb and those who use their position and pen to serve the aims," adding that this could be a journalist, a lawmaker or an activist.
He's a nut job who just wants to clamp down on the journalists, lawmakers and activists who are roadblocks to his dictatorship.
Who said there was? In fact, I'm not a Russian citizen, nor have I ever lived there, so I'll leave that up to somebody more qualified to comment on.