Until Monday, the United States refrained from striking the fleet used to transport oil, believed to include more than 1,000 tanker trucks, because of concerns about causing civilian casualties. As a result, the Islamic State’s distribution system for exporting oil had remained largely intact.

...

To reduce the risk of harming civilians, two F-15 warplanes dropped leaflets about an hour before the attack warning drivers to abandon their vehicles, and strafing runs were conducted to reinforce the message.

The United States Air Force bashfully allowed ISIS to tool around in the desert with a fleet of 1000 tanker trucks because they were afraid of civilian casualties

A drone strike in the middle of a Pakistani city though? Light 'em up.

Superabound posted:

they were afraid of the American civilians who would die without cheap CIA Oil to drive them to get their cheap CIA Heroin

interesting no change at all, i guess it checks out

What would such an effort look like? First, it would require establishing a safe zone in Syria, providing the millions of would-be refugees still in the country a place to stay and the hundreds of thousands who have fled to Europe a place to which to return. To establish such a zone, American military officials estimate, would require not only U.S. air power but ground forces numbering up to 30,000. Once the safe zone was established, many of those troops could be replaced by forces from Europe, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and other Arab states, but the initial force would have to be largely American.

In addition, a further 10,000 to 20,000 U.S. troops would be required to uproot Islamic State from the haven it has created in Syria and to help local forces uproot it in Iraq. Many of those troops could then be replaced by NATO and other international forces to hold the territory and provide a safe zone for rebuilding the areas shattered by Islamic State rule.

At the same time, an internationally negotiated and blessed process of transition in Syria should take place, ushering the bloodstained Mr. Assad from power and establishing a new provisional government to hold nationwide elections. The heretofore immovable Mr. Assad would face an entirely new set of military facts on the ground, with the Syrian opposition now backed by U.S. forces and air power, the Syrian air force grounded and Russian bombing halted. Throughout the transition period, and probably beyond even the first rounds of elections, an international peacekeeping force—made up of French, Turkish, American and other NATO forces as well as Arab troops—would have to remain in Syria until a reasonable level of stability, security and inter-sectarian trust was achieved.

HenryKrinkle posted:

i sometimes have trouble understanding how people who saw thru all the lies and exaggerations during Kosovo et al now see the Syrian rebels as a legitimate resistance force. like how richard seymour wrote an entire book denouncing humanitarian intervention and the "liberal defense of murder" but then went on to legitimize the Libyan "revolution" while condemning the US-led air strikes in passing. don't even get me started on his current stance on Ukraine.

i guess it could be careerism. maybe it has something to do w/ the inevitably of trots and anarchists becoming pro-empire if they aren't already. idk.

I think it has to do with arrogance. It's super easy to look back on Grenada or Yugoslavia or Vietnam and do the research necessary to show what really happened. But when something is happening right now you have to take a principled stand based on vague facts and a general understand of how imperialism works. Seymore would never say something like "I don't know enough about the history of Syria and the current flow of money/weapons/CIA in the region to state unequivocally what is happening but I know what the general interests of imperialism and the regional players are" instead he has to know everything so his audience keeps paying attention and keeps giving him those sweet blog clicks. I think first world white liberalism is behind the fear of being caught without an opinion on everything and everyone. Of course the desire to know is filled by fake knowledge like Elliot Piggins which is part of new psyops that are far more effective by flooding our brains with information than censuring it. This is my opinion based on talking to otherwise reasonable people on the internet about subjects they know nothing about.

babyhueypnewton posted:

Seymore would never say something like "I don't know enough about the history of Syria and the current flow of money/weapons/CIA in the region to state unequivocally what is happening but I know what the general interests of imperialism and the regional players are" instead he has to know everything so his audience keeps paying attention and keeps giving him those sweet blog clicks. I think first world white liberalism is behind the fear of being caught without an opinion on everything and everyone.

a related problem is that true political decisions are always situated in a real person and movement, and those people almost always just have to choose from what's around them. if you think abstractly you can come up with pleasant-sounding formulae but they don't really tell much to people stuck on the ground there. most western liberals just say something they think sounds nice in abstract, like defending the need for liberal-democratic elections or something, rather than talking about specific choices.

i think a fair number of radicals sense that and just go the other way and endorse a countervailing trend, which is really similar thinking because a lot of people on the ground are probably more nuanced. those sort of simple positions easily contradict themselves and conflict, too. but in a true political decision the stakes are often catastrophic but also the options are not all pleasant. like reading early communist stuff doesn't really give the sense that these people had science so they agreed on everything. they had real debates and each side had enormous risks. lukacs called lenin's perspective "revolutionary realpolitik" because he would find some appropriate position which he could strongly defend while recognizing it could be changed at a moment's notice if the situation demanded it. and if you think about it you can imagine almost any permutation of policy being defended and the question is more what would actually work best rather than just consistency with moral norms or whatever. as a friend said to me, the problems often arise when people refuse to choose the hard road based on supposed principles, like when trotskyists conjure up a vague "democratic opposition" in syria so that they can simply pick that side.

Britain’s foreign secretary, Philip Hammond, has accused a Labour MP of being an “apologist for Russian actions” after questions were raised in Parliament about Turkey’s reliability as a British ally.

Skinner had asked Hammond: “Do you regard Turkey as a reliable ally in the battle against Isil ?

“When you consider that not only today that they’ve shot down a Russian jet - who are also trying to fight Isil - they’re buying oil from Isil in order to prop them up, they’re bombing the Kurds who are also fighting Isil."

lmfao

aerdil posted:

lookin' forward to the unbiased and comprehensive teardown of what really happened to that russian jet from intelligence analyst eliot higgins

HenryKrinkle posted:

the major Syrian communist parties sided with Assad from the beginning of the armed insurgency

most leftists (who aren't members of some allied CPs) don't care about that though. the reason is that when the ba'athists rose to power they were hostile to rival leftist forces. so they gutted the CPs and made them into bloc parties in the national front. it is not really an independent leftist force, it is integrated into assad's coalition. also in iraq i think the communist party essentially became an exile force for similar reasons and after the invasion of iraq they supported the new government.

the argument the trots use about syria is more that the large protests got shut down and then activists started meeting in assemblies or circles to decide how to move forward. and many of theses assemblies did take on a sort of vaguely leftist hue. like they would talk about the need for direct democracy and social justice or whatever. but that one moment gets sort of painted across everything that followed, which is silly, because those people didn't end up having an army, and without a people's army the people have nothing.

i looked it up today and the actual city of kobani has 40,000 people. i know syrian kurdistan has a lot but that's not my point there. it's basically a smaller town and it's being blown up into the 2015 zapatistas.