generalspeaking

Agonizing Decisions

"My practitioner-focused response to these anxieties is straightforward: welcome to the real world. Any decision-making in any real crisis almost invariably involves hard judgement calls, weighing and balancing considerations that almost never all point conveniently the same way."
"R2P [responsibility to protect] is a framework for action for pragmatists, not purists, and this is very well understood by those who have to apply it, not just write about it."
"[Intervening countries take on ] responsibility while protecting; you break it, you own it. So fix it."
Gareth Evans, former Australian foreign minister

"It's a bit of a dodge for Evans to dismiss these critiques as academic, since the problems of R2P have been perfectly evident in practice."
"Nonetheless, I share his desire to see R2P succeed and I agree with his argument that the most realistic way forward is to negotiate a new understanding among established and emerging powers on the practicalities of preventing and responding to mass atrocities. Reaching such an understanding won't be easy, but it's definitely worth trying."
Roland Paris, University of Ottawa scholar

Miscalculations galore. Now that it is universally accepted by virtually all the U.S. political elites, both Republican and Democratic, that it was a huge mistake for Congress to give former President G.W. Bush the go-ahead to invade Iraq, and to lay the blame for everything that has erupted in the world of Islam to that misguided event, it might be a good idea to think deeply about not only Western interference in Islamic Arab affairs, but the very fundamental flaws within Islam that make it such a pathological swamp of tribal and sectarian violence.

It is part and parcel of the tribal, Bedouin culture to be on a continual war footing, to be suspicious, to be angry, to take offence, to uphold 'honour', to mount attacks, to conduct campaigns of bloody annihilation against all those whose presence is irritating to the sense of rightful entitlement of adversaries to human rights, and they are rife, in the Arab world of Islamist belligerence.

There is nothing straightforward about the state of the Middle East; it is a volatile geography of people resistant to living in harmony among themselves, much less among and within the rest of the world. The collapse of order in Iraq, Syria, and now Yemen, that is so distressing to the Sunni Arab majority, resentful of the Islamic Republic of Iran's revolutionary ardour in viewing itself as the natural successor-state to the Prophet Mohammad's caliphate is unleashing a whole other dimension.

The removal of Iraq's dictator was viewed by the West as a gift to Iraq, but Saddam Hussein's absence -- when a firm grip on power also meant that even though a minority Sunni elite was controlling a majority Shiite population whose resentment would be kept in check, not to mention that of the Kurdish population -- unleashed the hellfire of sectarian retribution and mass murder that no Western assemblage was capable of handling.

When it was decided that the Benghazi militias, a rag-tag group of tribal civilians converted into rebel material deciding they'd been exploited and manipulated, threatened and disfavoured long enough by Moammar Ghadafi were being targeted by the regime's artillery and aerial bombs, the West rode to their rescue, by clearing the air of regime warplanes, and aiding the rebels, even though it was known that among them were Islamist militias.

Now, the West is reaping the whirlwind of the distemper of the Arab Islamist season.

That, despite that the Arab Spring seemed to give promise of another era on the horizon, freeing the Arab Middle East from its assortment of tyrants and dictators, only to result in a rebound of the same in some nations, and a collapse of civilization in others. And when intervention would have represented a stellar choice of action when a Shiite Baathist Syrian regime began assaulting its Syrian Sunni rebellion, hesitation invited the presence of Islamists armed with Libya's advanced and abandoned military weapons.

Humanists, armchair pundits, UN supporters are agonizing over the failure of the West to discriminate in its choices of action/inaction, in view of the R2P concept of intervening to avert mass atrocity, as a last resort of international reaction. Wait: didn't Vladimir Putin whisper sweet escape from 'red lines' into Barack Obama's ears about diplomacy being far superior than military action to stop a regime's president from ordering chemical attacks on his own people?

Libya is a wreck, Syria has imploded, Iraq is rent asunder and Iran is in the ascendancy while cleaving to its nuclear program that sanctions stalled, but American assurances have given Iran reason to believe it will soon have ample financial resources restored so it can continue paying its proxy terrorist militias, while simultaneously perfecting and accelerating its nuclear agenda.

This is the Middle East going to hell in a handbasket; the question is the spread of the hellacious dysfunctional threats entering Europe via Libya as Muslims from Africa and the Middle East desperately flee their countries of origin which have become cement mixers using humans as the fixative to pave their way to total breakdown in a mass psychosis of hatred known as Islamist jihad.

Photo by Antonio Parrinello/Reuters A navy ship filled with migrants left Sicily's Augusta harbor on June 1, 2014. Italian navy patrol ships rescued more than 3,500 migrants in May 2014, as the crisis in the southern Mediterranean escalated last year. A total of 3,612 people from Syria and North Africa were recovered from 11 boats and taken to other ports in Sicily and Lampedusa.

Labels: Conflict, Islamism, Jihad, Middle East, Political Realities, United Nations, United States

posted by Pieface @ Tuesday, May 19, 2015