Biden Foreign Policy

[Archy1221]

1 hour ago, Decked said:

I urge you to please consider the numerous deaths and displacements as a result of oil wars drawn by the USA. There is not a country better off for our freedom interventions. Saudi Arabia is still standing even though they helped aide in the greatest tragedy that be-folded our country since Pearl Harbor. All we are left with as a result of toppling governments and endless war is debt, veteran suffering & suicide, & a Middle East worse off than before we came. Oh and politicians investing in war. Making millions in stocks. But Raytheon thanks you. 
 

 

posted from wiki (take this at face value):

 

According to one study, the U.S. performed at least 81 overt and covert known interventions in foreign elections during the period 1946–2000.^[7] According to another study, the U.S. engaged in 64 covert and six overt attempts at regime change during the Cold War.^[1]

I don’t disagree that the US spy agencies aren’t without sin.  I just don’t know that they carried out raids on peace festivals, raped women and paraded their naked dead bodies around while killing 40young kids/babies in one beheading some of them. 

[Decked]

25 minutes ago, Archy1221 said:

I don’t disagree that the US spy agencies aren’t without sin.  I just don’t know that they carried out raids on peace festivals, raped women and paraded their naked dead bodies around while killing 40young kids/babies in one beheading some of them. 

They’ve only displaced and killed now many? Hamas is evil. Terrible. There are no words in any language fitting for them. I wish for them all to perish. But they haven’t caused the mass suffering that the United States has caused. Not even close. 
 

 

[ZRod]

1 minute ago, Decked said:

They’ve only displaced and killed now many? Hamas is evil. Terrible. There are no words in any language fitting for them. I wish for them all to perish. But they haven’t caused the mass suffering that the United States has caused. Not even close. 
 

 

Or maybe what we're realizing is that everyone is human, and as humans we're capable of some absolutely horrendous and diabolical things no matter our allegiances. Every country that has ever existed has people who have raped, tortured, and killed in it's name. It's the worst part of our humanity, but it's reality, and we should do everything we can to find a way to stop the cycle.

[BigRedBuster]

 

[Lorewarn]

3 hours ago, Archy1221 said:

Not really.  Applaud the effort however.  Interesting you equate Hamas to the CIA though.   

 

 

I did no equating, and you know perfectly well what I meant and also how reductionist and unhelpful and elementary your take that I was responding to was.

 

Are you ready to try and actually dive in to the complicated nature of this decades old conflict with terrible actors and compromised narratives on both sides like we all know you're capable of if you try hard and give up your obstinate schtick?

 

Let's start with a tough one - when is killing innocent civilians considered terrorism and when is killing innocent civilians an act of war? What's the difference between the two?

[Lorewarn]

5 minutes ago, BigRedBuster said:

 

 

 

 

Some cogent thoughts here. A few highlights:

 

I don’t believe Hamas is killing Israelis to liberate themselves, nor do I believe they are doing it to make peace. They're doing this because they represent the devil on the shoulder of every oppressed Palestinian who has lost someone in this conflict. They're doing it because they want vengeance. They are evening the score, and acting on the worst of our human impulses, to respond to blood with blood — an inclination that is easy to give in to after what their people have endured. It should not be hard to understand their logic — it is only hard to accept that humans are capable of being driven to this. Not defending Hamas is a very low bar to clear. Please clear it.

 

The Arab states had already rejected a partitioned Israel repeatedly before World War II and rejected it again after the Holocaust and the end of the war. They did not want to give up even a little bit of their land to a bunch of Jewish interlopers who were granted it all of a sudden by British interlopers who had arrived a hundred years prior. Who could blame them? It had been centuries since Jews lived there in large numbers, and now they wanted to return in waves as secularized Europeans. Many of us would probably react the same way. So, just as humans have done forever, they fought. The many existing Arab states turned against the burgeoning new Jewish state. One side won and one side lost. This is the brutal and broken and violent world we live in, but it is what created the global world order we have now.

Are Israelis and British people "colonizers" because of this 20th century history? Sure. But that view flattens thousands of years of history and conflict, and the context of World War I and World War II. I don’t view Israelis and Brits as colonizers any more than the Assyrians or the Babylonians or the Romans or the Mongols or the Egyptians or the Ottomans who all battled over the same strip of land from as early as 800 years before Jesus’s time until now. The Jews who founded Israel just happened to have won the last big battle for it.

 

And yet, many Americans only view modern Israel as the "powerful" one in this dynamic. Which is true — they obviously are. It isn't a fair fight and it hasn't been for decades because Israel's government is rich and resourceful, has the backing of the United States and most of Europe, and has an incredibly powerful military. At the same time, Israeli leadership has made technological and military advancements that have further tipped those scales — all while the Israeli government has helped create a resource-thin open air prison of two million Arabs in Gaza.

Conversely, Palestinians are devoid of any real unified leadership, and the Arab world is now divided on the issue of Palestine. Israel is unwilling to give the people in Gaza and the West Bank more than an inch of freedom to live. These are largely the refugees and descendents of the refugees of the 1948 and 1967 wars that Israel won. And you can't keep two million people in the condition that those in the Gaza strip live in and not expect events like this.

I'm sorry to say that while the blood on the ground is fresh. The Israelis who were killed in this attack largely have nothing to do with those conditions other than being born at a time when Israel and Jews have the upper hand in this conflict. Some of the victims weren’t even Israeli — they were just tourists. This is why we describe them as “innocent” and why Hamas has only reaffirmed that they are a brutal terror organization with this attack — an organization that I hope is quickly toppled, for the sake of both the Palestinian people and the Israelis. But as someone with a deep love for Israel, with friends in danger and people I know still missing, it breaks my heart to say it but I'm saying it again because it remains perhaps the most salient point of context in a tangled mess full of centuries of context:

You cannot keep two million people living in the conditions people in Gaza are living in and expect peace.

You can't. And you shouldn’t. Their environment is antithetical to the human condition. Violent rebellion is guaranteed. Guaranteed. As sure as the sun rising.

And the cycle of violence seems locked in to self-perpetuate, because both sides see a score to settle:

 

Am I pro-Israel or pro-Palestine? I have no idea.

I'm pro-not-killing-civilians.

I'm pro-not-trapping-millions-of-people-in-open-air-prisons.

I'm pro-not-shooting-grandmas-in-the-back-of-the-head.

I'm pro-not-flattening-apartment-complexes.

I'm pro-not-raping-women-and-taking-hostages.

I'm pro-not-unjustly-imprisoning-people-without-due-process.

I'm pro-freedom and pro-peace and pro- all the things we never see in this conflict anymore.

[ZRod]

8 hours ago, Lorewarn said:

 

 

 

Some cogent thoughts here. A few highlights:

 

I don’t believe Hamas is killing Israelis to liberate themselves, nor do I believe they are doing it to make peace. They're doing this because they represent the devil on the shoulder of every oppressed Palestinian who has lost someone in this conflict. They're doing it because they want vengeance. They are evening the score, and acting on the worst of our human impulses, to respond to blood with blood — an inclination that is easy to give in to after what their people have endured. It should not be hard to understand their logic — it is only hard to accept that humans are capable of being driven to this. Not defending Hamas is a very low bar to clear. Please clear it.

 

The Arab states had already rejected a partitioned Israel repeatedly before World War II and rejected it again after the Holocaust and the end of the war. They did not want to give up even a little bit of their land to a bunch of Jewish interlopers who were granted it all of a sudden by British interlopers who had arrived a hundred years prior. Who could blame them? It had been centuries since Jews lived there in large numbers, and now they wanted to return in waves as secularized Europeans. Many of us would probably react the same way. So, just as humans have done forever, they fought. The many existing Arab states turned against the burgeoning new Jewish state. One side won and one side lost. This is the brutal and broken and violent world we live in, but it is what created the global world order we have now.

Are Israelis and British people "colonizers" because of this 20th century history? Sure. But that view flattens thousands of years of history and conflict, and the context of World War I and World War II. I don’t view Israelis and Brits as colonizers any more than the Assyrians or the Babylonians or the Romans or the Mongols or the Egyptians or the Ottomans who all battled over the same strip of land from as early as 800 years before Jesus’s time until now. The Jews who founded Israel just happened to have won the last big battle for it.

 

And yet, many Americans only view modern Israel as the "powerful" one in this dynamic. Which is true — they obviously are. It isn't a fair fight and it hasn't been for decades because Israel's government is rich and resourceful, has the backing of the United States and most of Europe, and has an incredibly powerful military. At the same time, Israeli leadership has made technological and military advancements that have further tipped those scales — all while the Israeli government has helped create a resource-thin open air prison of two million Arabs in Gaza.

Conversely, Palestinians are devoid of any real unified leadership, and the Arab world is now divided on the issue of Palestine. Israel is unwilling to give the people in Gaza and the West Bank more than an inch of freedom to live. These are largely the refugees and descendents of the refugees of the 1948 and 1967 wars that Israel won. And you can't keep two million people in the condition that those in the Gaza strip live in and not expect events like this.

I'm sorry to say that while the blood on the ground is fresh. The Israelis who were killed in this attack largely have nothing to do with those conditions other than being born at a time when Israel and Jews have the upper hand in this conflict. Some of the victims weren’t even Israeli — they were just tourists. This is why we describe them as “innocent” and why Hamas has only reaffirmed that they are a brutal terror organization with this attack — an organization that I hope is quickly toppled, for the sake of both the Palestinian people and the Israelis. But as someone with a deep love for Israel, with friends in danger and people I know still missing, it breaks my heart to say it but I'm saying it again because it remains perhaps the most salient point of context in a tangled mess full of centuries of context:

You cannot keep two million people living in the conditions people in Gaza are living in and expect peace.

You can't. And you shouldn’t. Their environment is antithetical to the human condition. Violent rebellion is guaranteed. Guaranteed. As sure as the sun rising.

And the cycle of violence seems locked in to self-perpetuate, because both sides see a score to settle:

 

Am I pro-Israel or pro-Palestine? I have no idea.

I'm pro-not-killing-civilians.

I'm pro-not-trapping-millions-of-people-in-open-air-prisons.

I'm pro-not-shooting-grandmas-in-the-back-of-the-head.

I'm pro-not-flattening-apartment-complexes.

I'm pro-not-raping-women-and-taking-hostages.

I'm pro-not-unjustly-imprisoning-people-without-due-process.

I'm pro-freedom and pro-peace and pro- all the things we never see in this conflict anymore.

Well said.

[Archy1221]

10 hours ago, Lorewarn said:

 

I did no equating, and you know perfectly well what I meant and also how reductionist and unhelpful and elementary your take that I was responding to was.

 

Are you ready to try and actually dive in to the complicated nature of this decades old conflict with terrible actors and compromised narratives on both sides like we all know you're capable of if you try hard and give up your obstinate schtick?

You’re holier than thou posting schtick isn’t playing very well on this one. 

more than just myself knew you were equating the two and responded accordingly.  Your post got the response it deserved by more than just one person.  
 

In terms of the “reductionist, unhelpful, elementary” take….that take had data taken from a national poll that has unfortunately for you been replicated by other polls.   Apparently those folks don’t have the same thoughts as yourself

 

[teachercd]

America has done more to help other countries/people than any country in the world.

 

 

 

[BigRedBuster]

 

[Crusader Husker]

Well, if you ever wondered what the start of WWW3 looked like, I think we are there.  Russia/Middle East/China

 

Also, probably time for it's own thread.  This is way beyond Biden Foreign Policies.  

[Archy1221]

19 hours ago, teachercd said:

So is supporting Palestine like the new "cool" thing or something?

 

[BigRedBuster]

 

[nic]

2 hours ago, teachercd said:

America has done more to help other countries/people than any country in the world.

 

 

 

Yup. Maybe folks should start remembering the good stuff so they can feel good about where they live. I looked up charitable given yesterday as just one data point. Saw a 400B number in 2021 from people's pocket books. I need to see if the number included the government humanitarian $$ as well but that number was much lower on the gov sites. It did include corporate. How many countries did we help rebuild after WW2? I think only Finland paid us back. How many immigrants have we let in? What has Hamas done for others? 

[teachercd]

24 minutes ago, BigRedBuster said:

 

Good!

 

They totally knew it was going to be used for evil s#!t.