anaiphoalas:rossjm:soundgoodizer:(He’s not)I love how the media is frantically and completely desper

anaiphoalas:rossjm:soundgoodizer:(He’s not)I love how the media is frantically and completely desperately dedicating their efforts to announcing that Barack Obama is not, in fact, the founder of ISIS and that Donald Trump is utterly Crazy™ and Insane™ and Racist™for having the audacity to imply such a thing. Meanwhile, discerning viewers know that Trump is simply referring to Obama and Hillary’s foreign policy, which directly funded ISIS and gave them weapons, all after creating the perfect conditions for them to exist in the first place.Didn’t the media try to clarify with Trump that that was what he meant only for him to deny it and say that Obama had literally founded the Daesh?Yeah, Check Out This Video, he literally meant they founded it, as he clarified to Hugh Hewitt in an interview later where he explicitly rejects that he was arguing they created the conditions for it, or funded it. Reporters reporting what someone said, then following that up by reporting on that person later saying “Yes, that is literally what I meant” is not “frantically and completely desperately” anything, most certainly not covering for another politician(who, by the way, is Kicking Daesh’s Ass In). Reporting what someone has said as meaning what they have repeatedly said they meant it to mean isn’t deceptive propaganda; it’s the definition of Literalism.The rest of this got long, so I’m putting it under a cut to spare the dashes.As a basic matter of physics, Obama and Clinton cannot be responsible for Daesh, because Daesh predates their time in office. Now, I realize conservatives are absolutely sure that Obama has a time machine which he uses to cause every bad thing that has ever happened, forever, but that’s not actually the case; HG Wells wrote fiction, time machines don’t exist, and it’s kind of impossible for Obama to be responsible for things done by the presidency before he was president. Causation is A Thing, Causes proceed Effects. Daesh is a rebranding of “al-Qaeda in Iraq”, an organization that came into existence after Bush’s unnecessary, ill-planned, ill-advised, under-resourced, and criminally mismanaged invasion and occupation of Iraq. The judicialwatch docs you link show this link and transformation, as well as explaining why Western Iraq/Eastern Syria was such a favorable location for them, if you ever bothered to actually read them rather than just take some headlines word for it, ross. So if anyone can be said to be responsible for “creating the perfect conditions for them to exist in the first place” it would probably be the person who actually created those conditions, and presided over them, who was George W. Bush. When the US mil pulled out of Iraq -correctly so, as the democratically elected Iraqi government no longer wanted us there and refused to renew our major basing agreements which Obama Wanted to Extend- AQI was pretty much defunct. It’s resurgence had little to do with US policy and quite a bit to do with the sectarianism of Nouri al-Maliki(Bush’s favored client in Iraq)’s regime, and to talk about why that was important, we have to back up a bit. When people talk about “The Surge”, they talk about it like it was the additional troops that changed things in Iraq. It wasn’t. The troops helped, certainly, but what really turned things around was the shift in strategy, spear-headed by General Petraeus, to co-op the various Sunni militias to fight for us instead of against us by buying them. That extremists like AQI were blowing everything up, killing lots of civilians, and generally causing havoc certainly helped in convincing them to switch sides, but they did it primarily because we offered them lots and lots of money to do it. Huge suitcases full of hundred dollar bills. So by buying our less fanatical enemies, we brought them into the Iraqi government, and reconciled them to attempting to work democratically with the long oppressed Marsh Arab population that al-Maliki represented. That was the situation when we left; the Sunni of the vast western regions in an uneasy political truce with the Shi’a Marsh Arabs of the, smaller but far more populous, delta and river valley. But al-Maliki wasn’t interested in national unity. He was weak in his own coalition, deeply reliant on al-Sadr for loyal troops and legislative support, and not a particularly gifted politician in the first place. So instead of continuing to try and integrate the Sunnis into the Iraqi government, he sought to directly exclude them and empower his friends to strengthen his position among the Marsh Arabs. One of the many results of this was that groups like AQI were suddenly welcome in the far Western provinces of Iraq again, both as a counter-balance to al-Maliki’s repressions, and because those westerners were no longer getting paid to support the central government. And -because Sunni extremists like AQI hate the Druze as much as they hate the Shia, and the Gulf States who fund those extremists have it in for Syria(both because it successfully resisted attempts by Saudi Arabia to annex it during the immediate post-colonial period, and because it is an ally of the country they view as their most significant geo-poltiical competitor, Iran)- when the Rebellion started in Syria, AQI enthusiastically supported those efforts to overthrow Assad. With a new base to operate from, a new fight to recruit for, the government in Baghdad distracted by its own infighting, and the Gulf money-taps turned back on for this new front in their Cold War against Iran, the organization recovered and, once it has taken enough territory in Syria to feel it justified, declared a new Caliphate and just started fighting everybody, including more moderate Sunnis. And so AQI was Rebranded, and Daesh was “born”.So how was any of this Obama and Clinton’s fault? Well, one could argue that their rhetorical support for the “Arab Spring” movements inspired the Syrian rebellion in someway, which created a situation favorable to AQI expanding. Of course that argument’s ridiculous, as it stands entirely on the assumption that the people of North Africa, the Near East, and the Middle East(Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, ect) lack the agency to choose their own political behavior. Syrians rebelled because Syrians wanted to rebel; Obama saying a few nice words about pro-democracy movements in Egypt and Tunisia didn’t cause that; Syrians did. Moreover, promoting more democractic institutions in the Near East has long been a US policy aim; in fact, it was one of the(many, and frequently rotated to fit the moment and audience) justifications Bush used for going into Iraq in the first place. So not only is it silly because it inflates US influence and erases Non-USian agency, in doing that it also ends up putting far more blame on Republicans and Bush, who actually invaded a country to “promote democracy”, than it does on Obama and Clinton.One could argue that their material and political support for the rebels early on kept them from getting immediately crushed by Assad, which led to the rebellion expanding, which led to havoc in Syria, which gave AQI an opening into Syria, or that -through this material and political support- AQI/Daesh was implicitly aided also, because some of it reached them. But this is hardly an argument Republicans want to be making for rather familiar reasons. Since the Rebellion started, Republicans have been advocating for MORE material and political support for the rebels, with LESS oversight and restrictions to keep that aid out of the hands of extremists, than Obama(and Clinton as his Secretary of State required to carry out his policies) was willing to provide. Since this whole thing started, Obama has been extremely hesitant to back the rebels because he knew, because our military intelligence was telling him, that a lot of these “rebel” groups were religious extremists little if any different from the folks we had been fighting in Iraq(and often, as in the case of AQI, EXACTLY who we had been fighting in Iraq), and which we funded in Afghanistan back in the 80s. Obama didn’t want to repeat the mistakes of Carter and Reagan, and he was very careful about trying to avoid them. It’s people like Trump who were calling for him to throw caution to the wind and fund these people more robustly(because Republicans have it out for Iran as much as any Saudi prince does since they see the Rebellion as really a geopolitical struggle between us and Iran), and blowback be Damned. So if you’re going to blame Obama for “supporting Daesh” and “creating the conditions” of their rise because of the material support we gave to the rebels, aren’t you also implicitly blaming the Republicans even more for that, since they were the loudest proponents of that support, and their major complaint about his policy was(and still is) that he wasn’t doing enough of it? Yes; Yes you are dong that implicitly, because implicit to your argument is that the Syria Rebellion, in being a set of conditions favorable to AQI/Daesh’s resurgence, is A Bad Thing, so anyone who supports it is supporting A Bad Thing.One could argue that, by pulling out of Iraq in the first place, Obama gave AQI “the breathing space” to recover and reform. But again, this is a terrible argument. It ignores that, when we left, we left AQI on its last gasp; a practical non-entity that all our military analysts and advisers no longer saw as a threat and openly described as a “junior varsity” organization(because USian pols are both really callous/dismissive about the politics and violence of the rest of the world, and because they love sports metaphors). It ignores that we left al-Maliki’s government with all the means and opportunity we, as interlopers, had it in our capacity to give him to finish off these sorts of organizations and build a reunited Iraq, and that he, instead, decided to settle scores. It ignores the sovereignty of Iraq, and that its people, through their elected officials, had made it clear that they wanted us out of their country and out of their internal affairs as much as possible. It ignores that, without the rebellion in Syria which arose out of political situations native to the region and entirely independent of actions taken by the US and Obama, AQI would have never had a new conflict to exploit to revitalize its recruiting and funding in the first place. It ignores that Obama wanted to maintain troops levels in Iraq, and continue our relationship with the Iraqi military on a more robust basis, but was rebuffed. It ignores that the people of the western provinces of Iraq and eastern provinces of Syria initially welcomed AQI into their communities, to serve their own interests as they defined them. It ignores basically every established fact about the situation there is to know. It is an argument completely divorced from reality, history, and sense, and entirely motivated by a willfully ignorant and petulant factionalism; one that reduces the choices, struggles, and sufferings of other peoples in other lands to a US domestic dispute. Oh, and it ignores that, without Bush’s pointless and incompetent 2003 invasion of Iraq, AQI would have never existed in the first place, Iraq would not have had a civil war, and the infrastructure and know-how to fight the sort of campaign Daesh has fought would never have been in the region in the first place.So basically, all the arguments ross here could be making are exceedingly stupid ones, that can actually be dismissed out of hand on their merits, without one really even having to delve that deep into them. The charge that Obama is responsible for Daesh comes down to 1)him having a time machine, 2)him refusing to illegally keep our military where it wasn’t wanted, and 3)him refusing to omnisciently know what the people of Syria and Iraq are going to do before they do it, to omnipotently control those actions, or even bother to try. So, ok, Obama isn’t a god; that’s certainly a valid critique :| Why Oh Why won’t ~The Media~ focus on this incredibly important development, rather than Donald Trump saying Obama founded a terrorist organization, and that someone should shoot Hillary Clinton :? :? I am utterly mystified :| :| :|Lastly, there’s the question of sources. US Herald is a Right-Wing Propaganda Click-Bait Site. Oh, and it frequently prints not just biased stories, but blatantly manipulative and false ones. Linking to it isn’t going to impress or convince anybody, because the people over there are temperamentally unable to present a story -any story- with anything coming even close to objectivity, or even a tone that isn’t entirely frantic. It also takes forever to load, which makes me wonder what sort of scripts are running in the background over there; might want to invest in a good anti-viral if that’s the sort of site you get your news from. -- source link

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