Try asking the locals what they would like now, Saddam or ISIS. They are being butchered by ISIS for very minor things
What's the alternative to bombing ISIS?
- Thread starter Edgar Allan Pillow
- Start date
Not saying those dicators were angels or anything. Everyone knows what Saddam did to the Kurds with the mustard gas or something, but the type of killings going on now are probably far, far worse. They are beheading people including children for the most minor crimes (if crimes at all)
Well you had the beginnings of a coherent post before squandering it all at the very end.
"We" as in United Nations or a similar international body. Lots of people deride America being a Global Cop, but as a concept it is not exactly a bad one, imo. The world definitely could do with a Global Cop. The way UN exists currently is weak, ineffective and political, but still the world needs it to establish legitimacy if we ever need to take a stand against genocide. "Oh, we have cases of police brutality, so let's do away with all cops" is never going to end well. US as a Global Cop maybe selfish and driven by ulterior motives, but doesn't mean that we can clean up the concept and put in a truly international force. Not easy to do, but certainly not impossible.
It's so easy to offer such horrible choices to someone in another country, ain't it? "Hey, being tortured by Saddam is nicer than the alternative, so enjoy"
They were under Saddam , and gassed too. What they didn't have was bombs going off in markets. Saddam wasn't a good man and his sons were next in line. I hear they liked killing as much one of them even more.
The Documental Centre for Human Rights in Iraq has compiled documentation on over 600,000 civilian executions in Iraq.
Human Rights Watch reports that in one operation alone, the Anfal, Saddam killed 100,000 Kurdish Iraqis. Another 500,000 are estimated to have died in Saddam's needless war with Iran. "Coldly taken as a daily average for the 24 years of Saddam's reign, these numbers give us a horrifying picture of between 70 and 125 civilian deaths per day for every one of Saddam's 8,000-odd days in power"
Human Rights Watch reports that in one operation alone, the Anfal, Saddam killed 100,000 Kurdish Iraqis. Another 500,000 are estimated to have died in Saddam's needless war with Iran. "Coldly taken as a daily average for the 24 years of Saddam's reign, these numbers give us a horrifying picture of between 70 and 125 civilian deaths per day for every one of Saddam's 8,000-odd days in power"
Western intervention breeds jihadism. Fighting ISIS' ideology has to come from the international Muslim community as well. When something happens in Palestina, people go apeshit (and rightly so knowing Israel) but they are really fecking quiet about ISIS even though ISIS kills muslims as well. Hell, you have the Turks rooting for ISIS because they don't want the Kurds to gain power. Add to that the hostility between Shiites and Sunni's and you have a clusterfeck. ISIS is being tolerated too much by muslims themselves. In The Hague you even had youths supporting them ffs.
Meh, Jihadism breeds itself. They are equal opportunity hate mongers covering everyone who is not on their side. They even bombed Saudi ffs. Mid East has always been a melting pot and it stands to reason they'd be the breeding ground for Jihadis, western intervention or not.
It's so easy to offer such horrible choices to someone in another country, ain't it? "Hey, being tortured by Saddam is nicer than the alternative, so enjoy"
No it's not easy, actually it's uninmaginable. The alternative is getting butchered by those barbarians, or get destroyed by western powers dropping bombs from 25000 feet in the air and calling it "collateral damage"
You fail to acknowledge Saddam's practices of using innocent civilians as shield, building his bunkers and command centres in housing/hospital areas and such. It's just ridiculous to imply collateral damage was equal to or greater than what Saddam/ISIS did.
I am not making any kind of excuse for what Saddam did. I read the reports about hm killing the Kurds with mustard or sarine gas, but this is far. far worse.
Don't know what the feck you're trying to argue here. He used them as shields when the western powers started bombing him, same as what ISIS is doing right now. According to estimates, over 600,000 people have dies since Saddam was removed from power, killed by either western countries bombs or by these terrorists. This is a conservative estimate, the actual people killed will be much higher.
What would your solution be?
I was just disputing your original post that countries needed dictators like Saddam.
Personally, I think we should continue actively fighting against ISIS and bomb them if needed. If the international community is silent, then ISIS will just get bigger, refugee count will get just larger and we'll end up with a more massive problem down the line.
Those countries absolutely need someone like Saddam to control them. Look at Iraq, look at Libya, look at Egypt, look at Syria. Yes they were horrible leaders, but look at those countries now, is anyone safe there?
Right now we have no other options than to fight them, but for every "collateral damage", there will likely be 10 terrorists being coverted to their cause because a loved one was killed.
So basically "those countries over there" require dictatorships, whilst we get to have free market democracies.
Exactly what i am saying. They are not ready for "democracy" right now, especially those manufactured by the U.S. I know this will bother a lot of people, but you cannot hide facts. Western countries can send ground troups if they want, those terrorist only have to hide their guns and change uniform to become normal citizens and wait a few years till the troops leave to carry on with what they are doing now. This is happening in Afganistan right now, the Taliban and Al Qaeda waited till the troops had left and now they are back with a vengence.
It's a fair point. You're talking about a region that has never known peace. Retro-fitting liberal democracies into countries riven by ancient religious rivalries is doomed to failure. Depressing but true.
Long term it would be nice to see their populations become more secular states and/or their chosen religions become more tolerant and less divisive/violent. I don't think that can be achieved in the near future and certainly not from the outside.
Meanwhile, the installation of malleable dictators might put the cork back in the bottle. For now.
Long term it would be nice to see their populations become more secular states and/or their chosen religions become more tolerant and less divisive/violent. I don't think that can be achieved in the near future and certainly not from the outside.
Meanwhile, the installation of malleable dictators might put the cork back in the bottle. For now.
One of the reasons for the appeal of Islamist groups in the region in the first place is the complete and utter failure of these so-called 'secular' dictatorships to provide any sort of dignified life for their peoples. These regimes lived on divide-and-rule and brutal coercion, in effect creating many of the conditions required to facilitate the rise of groups like ISIS. The idea that they're 'needed' to hold the Islamists back misses the point that their policies have over a period of several decades made Islamism seem like a good, nay the only alternative. Throw in Western and Soviet support for the dictatorships, the influence of the Mordor of the Middle East in Saudi Arabia, the revolutionary Shi'ism of Khomeinist Iran, and a host of economic, geographic and demographic problems, and you've got the perfect toxic mix.
Really good point. What's the alternative solution, though?
For almost 400 years following the Ottoman conquest, the Middle East was a far more peaceful and stable region than Europe. The idea that ancient hatreds are fueling the current conflicts obscures the very modern phenomena driving the current political breakdown.
At this stage I'm not specifically sure at all, but in the long-term the Islamist current is going to have to play itself out. That will only happen if Islamist movements (not ISIS but the more populist ones like the Brotherhood) are allowed to rule - and fail. But I have no short-term solutions in mind.
Takes a bit of both though, right? It's the combination of modern phenomena with (relatively) ancient sectarianism that creates the powder keg.
Ahh, so it might solve "something"?
Yeah I'd agree with that. The bigoted sectarian discourse of the 'ancient hatreds' is always there lurking in the background, ready to be drawn upon as events dictate. It really doesn't help that a movement whose entire discourse seems to revolve around bigoted sectarianism (Wahhabism) has, by pure chance, found itself sitting on the world's largest oil reserves.
Yeah, if there is a "solution" you'd have to think getting Saudi Arabia to somehow sort itself out would be one of the first steps. Feck knows how, though.
The partitioning of the Ottoman Empire after WWI put conflicting groups in the same country together, but they were in the same empire together before that.
My question is, what did the Ottoman Empire do to keep the various groups in relative harmony, or were there struggles happening throughout the period that weren't well documented?
No.
Bomb them with porns, kpop, propaganda of how good it is in the west.
Smear campaign. Send a hacker black ops to oust their rich leader sipping wine in a yatch, expose what isis leader is really are.
Use the good Islam against them, reverse the brainwashing, preach goodness of Islam.
The moderate Muslim society needs to band together to help their misguided brethren instead of being silent.
Admitting the feck up from the west is a good start.
A world scale isis task force hunting their operatives with virtually a license to kill ask later kind of authority.
Massive tv campaign propaganda all across the world on daily basis, massive braincleaning propaganda.
Bomb their stronghold at the same time, i know it's contradiction but we need to get an all out attack, call it ruse or ploy but let's get the job done
Smear campaign. Send a hacker black ops to oust their rich leader sipping wine in a yatch, expose what isis leader is really are.
Use the good Islam against them, reverse the brainwashing, preach goodness of Islam.
The moderate Muslim society needs to band together to help their misguided brethren instead of being silent.
Admitting the feck up from the west is a good start.
A world scale isis task force hunting their operatives with virtually a license to kill ask later kind of authority.
Massive tv campaign propaganda all across the world on daily basis, massive braincleaning propaganda.
Bomb their stronghold at the same time, i know it's contradiction but we need to get an all out attack, call it ruse or ploy but let's get the job done
Kpop? I know it is ISIS, but show some humanity.
The order of social relations was known as the millet system, whereby each religiously-defined community (millet) was granted the autonomy to regulate its own civil and religious affairs within the broader Turco-Islamic framework. In exchange for this autonomy, the protection of the state, and exemption from military service, non-Muslim communities were required to pay a special tax and acknowledge (Sunni) Muslim supremacy in the higher politics of the empire. This arrangement seems to have satisfied them until the early 19th century.
The Sunni communities of the empire accepted the legitimacy of the system as deriving from the sultan's authority as caliph and ruler of the holy places in the Hijaz and Palestine and the great cities of the early Islamic empires (Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo), and as Sunnis they could aspire to reach the highest echelons of power. The Shi'a were probably the most problematic religious community, as Safavid Iran was an explicitly Shi'i rival to the Ottomans, and the Shi'i shrine cities in Iraq were located on the Ottoman-Safavid frontier and indeed changed hands a couple of times over the years. There were times during the Ottoman-Safavid wars when the Shi'i communities on the frontline in eastern Anatolia (which were mostly the heterodox forerunners of today's Alevi community in Turkey) were uprooted and/or massacred by the Ottoman authorities. But the Shi'i communities away from the conflict zone, in southern Lebanon for example, were left to their own devices as the system demanded.
As a means to prevent any one Sunni ethnic or interest group from gaining too much power and challenging the base of the ruling elite, the Ottoman civil administration was largely drawn from the collection of young Christian boys taken from their families in the Caucasus and Balkans, converted to Islam, and specially trained for service (these also made up the infamous Janissary units in the army). The idea was that these young men would have no local base or loyalties with which to challenge the ruling elite, but during times of decentralization, when Istanbul was weak, they were often the king-makers, deciding who should be sultan.
Overall, as a system of pre-modern social order it worked remarkably well in maintaining stability and peace. Everyone knew the rules and red lines, and most found they could live quite easily with these restrictions. And while power fluctuated over the years between the center and periphery, the system only really began to come undone with the impact of Western military, economic and cultural penetration from the late 18th c. onwards, and especially with the spread of nationalism among first the Christians (throughout the 19th c.), and then the Muslims (the years around WW1).
Last edited:
@2cents thanks for the explanation!
While many of the methods used by the Ottomans don't seem to be applicable to the modern world, do you think that erasing the boundaries created post WWI and allowing the formation of nation-states like the millets in the Ottoman Era (after the defeat of ISIS) would help the region gain stability?
While many of the methods used by the Ottomans don't seem to be applicable to the modern world, do you think that erasing the boundaries created post WWI and allowing the formation of nation-states like the millets in the Ottoman Era (after the defeat of ISIS) would help the region gain stability?
Let climate change bake the feck out of them
We basically need Bane.
Sorry 2cents but I call bullshit.
Dates please on when you claim the Ottoman conquest finished and when this period of peace started and finished?
Also given that the Ottomans were expanding through conquest into Europe and causing wars and instability there isn't the second part a bit of a self fulfilling statement?
Please show me a map of the accepted rather than imposed borders between the areas of the different religions, cultures and tribes under Ottoman control during this peaceful period.
The Ottomans completed the conquest of the Middle East, including Egypt and the Hijaz, in 1517. Ottoman rule began to come undone there with Napoleon's occupation of Egypt which, though only lasting three years, left Egypt virtually independent (though still formally acknowledging Ottoman suzerainty). The ruler of Egypt in the early 19th c., Muhammad Ali, made an attempt to conquer the empire for himself, and took Syria, only to be stopped from marching on Istanbul by the British and French.
But I would date the beginning of the end of the Ottoman system in the Middle East to 1860, when there were anti-Christian riots in Syria and Lebanon.
So from 1517 to the mid-19th c. things were relatively tranquil in the Middle East. Over the same period Europe suffered the 30 years war and all the other minor conflicts surrounding the Reformation, as well as the Napoleonic wars, none of which had anything to do really with the Ottoman campaigns in Europe.
I'm not trying to paint a rosy picture here of Ottoman life. As suggested by the Devshirme (the taking of Christian boys from their families) or the reality of the Ottoman slave market, life could be harsh, and while it was at its peak the Ottoman state was geared towards military expansion. But within the empire's frontiers, social relations between the religious communities never collapsed the way they did in Europe during the 16-17th centuries.
I'm not too sure what you mean by 'accepted' rather than 'imposed' frontiers, this was all before the idea of national self-determination and national/natural borders existed.
Last edited:
In a way, this is what appears to be happening now, in a rather brutal and violent fashion. But I don't think it holds the promise of peace and stability ahead. With the exception maybe of the Maronites, the religious communities were and are too geographically dispersed to form nation-states on the model of Europe. And the Maronites, when they had their opportunity, grabbed too much non-Maronite territory to form Lebanon, with disastrous consequences.
When people are asked to provide an alternative arrangement to the partitions that actually occurred, there are no answers that can be given which you can say would definitely have provided order of the kind that the Ottoman system successfully provided for centuries, because the realities of nationalism had changed the rules of the game to the extent that violence, ethnic cleansing and partition were inevitable. We can be thankful that none of them were carried through with the same ruthlessness and on the same scale as what Europe experienced 1914 - 1945, although in some ways what's happening today can be seen as the same logic working itself out.
People generally offer three alternative arrangements to what actually occurred:
1. "The new states should have reflected the ethnic and sectarian realities of the region." The problem with this is that (a) the region had never been governed along such lines, and (b) introducing this principle in 1918 would have resulted in the creation of literally dozens of micro-states, all even greater prey to the logic of divide and rule, but only after many forced population transfers (ethnic cleansing) had taken place. This argument also implicitly suggests that the creation of states in which a common citizenship rather than ethnic or religious affiliation would be the defining factor of an individual's identity was impossible, and therefore it retrospectively justifies the continuation of pre-modern forms of communal identity as the 'natural' way of things in the Middle East. In other words, it embraces the same kind of Orientalist way of thinking, of an unchanging region defined by religion, which the very people making this argument often decry.
2. "The British should have handed the entire region over to the 'the Arabs'." The problem with this argument is that 'the Arabs' didn't exist as a unified political actor. The British had alliances with a number of different Arab tribal leaders in the Arabian Peninsula, most of whom were at each others' throats. The Arab populations of Syria and Iraq largely remained loyal to the Ottoman Empire throughout the war, and in its aftermath went at each others' throats over how to divide the limited spoils granted them by the British. The result would likely have been a bloody, immediate civil war in which all kinds of ethnic cleansing and massacres would have shaped whatever kind of state of states eventually emerged.
3. "The British and French had no right to be there in the first place, and therefore the region should have remained under the Ottoman Empire." This argument is based on the idea that everybody should just leave everybody else alone all the time. Putting aside the fact that humans could never progress that way, it's just a completely unrealistic way to view these things. The Ottomans themselves were foreigners who had conquered the region by force and imposed their rule on its population. The British and French therefore broke no moral code by doing the same. The Ottomans had been happy the use the interference of Britain and France throughout the 19th c. in order to keep the Russians from conquering them once and for all, and then made the decision to enter WW1 with the partial aim of reconquering territories lost to them over the previous half century or so. Unlucky for them, they chose the losing side, and so paid the price. In any case, Ataturk had no interest whatsoever in retaining the Arab lands for Turkey, and wisely let the Europeans have them as he went about constructing his modern state.
Basically, my argument is that nationalism is to 'blame' (if we have to assign blame - personally I see little point in moralizing back across the decades and centuries), but that it's hard to envision how it could have been significantly different given that nationalism was destined to shape the postwar world order.
Last edited:
=> rethinking nationalism, identity and modern statehood.
A fantastic post. This info should head up all Middle East threads as context is always sorely missing - especially when it comes to the Israeli/Arab/Kurd etc. conflicts which likewise can be traced back to the Ottoman empire break-up.