DSMatticus wrote:tussock wrote:Also, if you let North Vietnam win, they South Vietnamese will forever be caught in absolute misery and poverty and ... oh, wait, that's not, huh. Funny their war ended so they got on with being a better place to live after a while, because without a constant enemy at the door you just have to. Or it's random and who the fuck knows.
GDP's per capita, according to the CIA World Factbook:
North Korea: ~2000 USD
Vietnam: ~6000 USD
South Korea: ~36,000 USD
Here, let me make a handy diagram for you (to scale!):
If it makes you feel better, life expectancy is a little nicer to you. Vietnam's smack in the middle of the two.
There is a rather large advantage to being handed gigantic amounts of free money from the richest country in the world, yes. The US is somewhat less picky about trade these days, but it used to be a big thing where countries that got to trade with them were rich and everyone else was poor. That was the whole, first world (trade with US), second world (trade with USSR), third world (haha, fuck you guys).
Growth, of course, is now a bit sad in the US and their allied countries, and good in China. With the latter well on it's way to renewable energy security, and the former sticking it's fingers in it's ears about ever needing that. That's not going to make China the good guys in the future, just the rich ones. Ditto for the past. There are rich countries that are also terrible places to live (the US still rates poorly in a lot of ways, even after the Obama healthcare reforms), and poor countries where people are very happy, it just usually works the other way.
tussock wrote:But fanatic militias that took over countries, the history there is super bad. Pol Pot bad. That's not a good plan.
I feel the need to point out that "fanatically ideoloigical militias sponsored by foreign powers overthrow local government" is a description of the American Revolution.
I would nitpick, of course, that there was no local government. The whole deal was that US colonials had no representation there.
Independence movements are, on the whole, much less bad like that. Very reliable rule of thumb there.
When you say shit like "but that never works," I am going to have to ask you what you think the goal of the U.S. intervention was, what that goal should have been, and how that goal could have been better accomplished. To be blunt, everytime one of you fuckheads talks about the latest round of bullshit in the Middle East, my suspicion grows that you don't even really have the basic primer on "what the fuck happened," and I feel increasing compelled to just ask you to talk about it and watch you fumble that fucking ball like your fingers are made of lukewarm butter.
So talk, please. The U.S. did a thing. There are other things the U.S. could have done. What should those things have been? What would have happened had the U.S. done those things?
Let's start with the start, shall we, I mean, skipping Sykes-Picot I guess, and that thing where you overthrew the old socialist government in Iraq in favour of what turned out to be Saddam, or played both sides in the Iran-Iraq war, so just the recent horror with Bush2.
1: Don't sack everyone. They're in the Baath party because they have to be to have those jobs. Do not sack every judge and policeman and lawyer and civil servant in the country all at once. That is just a terrible idea.
Those people eventually sided with the US, to oppose the fundamentalist terrorists that sprung up in the vacuum of law and order. But it was too late, the terror groups got really big and very influential and totally became the de-facto government in outlying areas, including within parts of the refugee population.
2: Those 3 million Iraqi refugees in Syria, pay for that shit. It is crazy expensive, but just pay for it. That is on you, those refugees.
Those people broke the government of Syria, they ran out of food and the ability to buy more food on the open market. There was also a 3-year drought, and some trade sanctions for teh LOLs, but they just had too many refugees from the Bush2 war on top of that. Food aid is something the US can do at any time in any place, that would have prevented the war. Not doing so was a choice.
3: When shit kicks off in Syria as a result of the government failing the food security thing, and you notice that the major parties opposed to the government are mostly allied to the same fucking groups who oppose the new government of Iraq, oppose the Kurdish autonomous government, oppose the west in every way, and are a bunch of suicide-bomber terrorists that that hate modernism, like, the main thing you're trying to defeat ... don't try to find some good groups among that to fund, just support the government in crushing them.
Like, with ISIS on one side, whatever you want to call them, you don't fucking well spend ten years fighting those guys and then, hey, you know what, maybe we just sort of support their allies for a while and try to get terrorist militias to take over Syria. FUCK NO. THAT IS WORSE THAN BUSH2.
4: Hey, you know how people over there fucking hate the United States of America and mostly of late it's because of those drone strike things that just never fucking end?
Stop it. Stop murdering tens of thousands of people with automated guesswork. Maybe you're killing some people who talked to some people who talked to some people who talked to a terrorist once (yes, they really do use 3 steps removed as evidence, that isn't a joke) but also you are blowing up people's weddings and funerals and casual luncheons because lots of people call each other on the way to those things and it just looks exactly the same as a terrorist meeting.
People come from countries thousands of KM away to join ISIS, because unlike on the US news, their news is full of the bits of children that were torn apart at the latest wedding reception that got mistaken for a terrorist meet up by Obama's semi-automated murder patrols. There's no end to that, it makes more terrorists than it can ever kill.
5: Saudi Arabia. This thing where they fund Wahabbism. Which is the branch of the local religious crazy talk that keeps on spawning new terror groups, because it is just that fucked up. I get that's who they are, right from day one, they are the beheading and amputating branch of fundamentalist Islam in the Arabian peninsular, family Saud. I get that they are also starting to slowly back away because of it biting them in the ass at home all too often.
But you know how some governments are supported, and armed, and trained, and given intelligence on their foes, and others are opposed, and disarmed, and intelligence on them is given to their foes, just put Saudi Arabia in with the bad ones.
Or at least the neutral ones. Or at least ask them to stop funding so much crazy. I mean, Trump's going the other way in the US, supporting religious instruction in schools and shit, because LOL, but you know, things that should happen rather than things which will happen.
PC, SJW, anti-fascist, not being a dick, or working on it, he/him.