Steve Sailer writes: “That’s just what a respectable country does: it drops bombs on the Middle East. So if the Russians are bombing some country in the the Middle East, then they must be, when you stop and think about it, okay after all. I mean, bombing isn’t like being against gay marriage.”
Comments to Steve Sailer:
* Is this a sign that the American foreign policy commentariat is embarrassed about being completely wrong about the Syrian revolt?
Back in 2011 the overwhelming narrative was that secular liberal Syrians were fed up with the oppressive Assad regime, and that the threat of Islamist extremism was just a red herring to distract from ordinary democracy-loving Syrians rising up against Assad’s oppression.
Today, after ISIS established a caliphate and the US government spent $500 million to locate the 5 actual moderate Syrian rebels in the country, it’s hard to pound that narrative quite as strongly.
Putin’s the guy who will do the brutal necessary work to bring Syria back from the precipice, and can conveniently later be denounced as a crazy Islamophobic homophobe. It’s very convenient.
* The weird thing is that Putin seems to be bombing mostly US-backed (also & especially Gulf Arab/Turkey backed) rebel groups, and getting away with it!
Putin screwed up a bit in Ukraine having been taken by surprise by the depth of US mendacity, and he got a bit angry. But when he has time to plan a move he seems to get it right.
* Israel is prosperous and well-armed (inc. nukes) and quite comfortable now having stable secular Arab governments on its borders, whose leaders rationally calculate that a war with Israel gets them certainly banged up a bit and with the possibility of a calamitous loss leading to instability and a coup. Israel’s borders with Syria and Egypt and especially Jordan have not been an issue.
Israel’s problem is *precisely* “various rival militia and terrorist groups” whose leaders either think that poking the infidel raises\preserves their big-man leader status or honestly feel a duty from Allah to attack and harass the infidel Jew and drive him from Jerusalem, even though Israeli retaliation always results in death and destruction for their own people.
Here’s the scorecard of the last 40 years:
– “stable secular governments” — Egypt, Jordan, Syria — no troubles
– “various rival militia and terrorist groups” — in Palestine and Lebanon — semi-continual rocket and terrorist attacks on Israel and semi-continual Israeli counter strikes all generating not just dead Israelis and even more dead Arabs but bad press and political difficulty for Israel. And during this time Israel has removed itself from occupation of Gaza … what i’d call an un-theft of land.
I have no particular love for Israel beyond a general belief that all peoples should have their own nations–not my people, and the slavish pandering to Israel is foul, un-American and highly annoying.
