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[Sheb]

What was the last US action in the ME region that wasn't destabilizing? The region can hardly be called stable or prosperous or developed, but can you blame them when someone as big and us untouchable as the US keeps kicking them in the balls whenever they get the chance or do something that doesn't jive with the US plan for the area.

Anti-ISIS coalition? Support for the Iraqi army? Iran nuclear deal? USAID support to poor people there?

Then there is stuff which is harder to judge (Like Libya. Would Libya have turned better with Western aid to the anti-Qaddaffi rebels, or would it have been even worse, with a civil war of Syrian proportion?)

Well the current middle east crisis is pretty much directly attributable to the Iraq War.

Basically, there would have been no Arab Spring without Iraq 2003.^{[citation needed]}

[Reelya]

What's the common problem with both e.g. Libya and Syrai now? It's not the local uprising, it's the insurgents who have come there who were directly involved in the Iraq War insurgency - ISIS in Iraq / Syria and Al Qaeda + ISIS in Libya. So perhaps the Arab Spring would have happened even without the Iraq War, but in that case, ISIS would never have existed in the first place and we wouldn't be having this problem.

Meanwhile, Trump Administration officials are talking to each other using a self-destructing message app to avoid leaving a paper trail:
https://it.slashdot.org/story/17/02/09/2247240/republicans-are-reportedly-using-a-self-destructing-message-app-to-avoid-leaks
Which I believe is clearly illegal under US law, and of course makes a mockery of the whole Clinton email thing.

[Starver]

Tricky arguments, though, on either side of the discussion.

No double-blinded trial (that we know about, but then we wouldn't!) on a parallel Earth in which no initial intervention was performed, the various inter-Arabian state rivalries (uncurtailed in their self-suppressing excesses) fermented the creation of far more sophisticated cross-over guerrilla forces aided from across the other side of any or all political (and ideological) divides, developing not AQ/ISIS/etc but middle-east-flavoured FARCish movements, tailored to the regimes supporting/opposing, terrain, social and religious pressures, etc.

(Lest some of what I say seems like it isn't realistic, I'm not claiming that this is the path the region would go down, just describing a generally off-hand version of the quantum butterfly-wing flap results.  It is possible that Arabian Cold War stability could result, mollifying both the West and East and changing their policies to this and thus also other regions, because Military Budgets Need Spending, especially if you think the other guy is spending his...  Like I said, without the view upon the parallel Earth, the alternate chaotic chain of events is invisible. And we can hardly agree on the visible one in front of us...)

[Sheb]

What's the common problem with both e.g. Libya and Syrai now? It's not the local uprising, it's the insurgents who have come there who were directly involved in the Iraq War insurgency - ISIS in Iraq / Syria and Al Qaeda + ISIS in Libya. So perhaps the Arab Spring would have happened even without the Iraq War, but in that case, ISIS would never have existed in the first place and we wouldn't be having this problem.

Meanwhile, Trump Administration officials are talking to each other using a self-destructing message app to avoid leaving a paper trail:
https://it.slashdot.org/story/17/02/09/2247240/republicans-are-reportedly-using-a-self-destructing-message-app-to-avoid-leaks
Which I believe is clearly illegal under US law, and of course makes a mockery of the whole Clinton email thing.

Yeah, because ISIS is the only problem. I mean, it's not like Libya is split between two rivals government that seems to be inchying closer and closer to war, or that Syria is hanging people by the thousands. Also, AQI is litterally the only extremist group, and no other Islamist would have spawned. And ISIS fighters are only coming from Iraq and haven't been recruited from other places.

[Reelya]

Well that would be useful counter, if not for the fact that the crisis in Libya largely exists because of this:

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/libya/obamas-libya-debacle

This article is basically stating that there's not really any evidence that Ghaddafi was killing civilians, he'd gotten previous city's rebels to surrender, these surrenders were not followed by any massacres. They were down to the last rebel city, they made the same deal to them as the other cities. But then Obama decided they had to suddenly bomb the shit out of the place. It was in too much threat of having a peaceful conclusion (one that didn't topple the government). Obama might have meant well but I believe war hawks wanting regime change were feeding the administration with information. The imminent risk of the civil war ending was the trigger to pull in foreign support for the rebels. Whoever set this up knew once the final rebel city fell there would be no cassus belli possible to topple Ghaddafi. That was the entire goal here.

Regardless of what happened before (wikipedia just says both sides committed atrocities), the fighting was almost completely over at the time Obama's intervention even began. What would have been one last battle was instead stretched into years of sectarian fighting and the two-government thing you have now. Many more people were killed after the intervention began than before, it did not save lives, it took them.

[Sheb]

You're again changing your position from "Everything is due to Iraq" to "Arab Spring wasn't caused by Iraq, but it wouldn't have been bad if it wasn't for Iraqi jihadi" to "Libya was actually a separate mistake from Iraq". I don't even really disagree strongly with the last point TBH, but I'm just getting tired of chasing you. Plus, this is Ameripol thread.

[Starver]

(Started after Reelya's post, with maybe a focus on the points on that, but intended as a general comment, like the previous one, and might be as equally a response to Sheb if read from another perspective. I agree that this is Ameripol, and neither I nor the territories being discussed are American, but there was American politics (certainly policies) involved in it all. Like they are with most of the world, so I canmot say where the actual edge of the subject is, either.)

It's too complicated to relate Libya to Syria.  Would Ghaddafi have definitely not gone full-Assad once he had suppressed everyone?  Would Assad have fermented his own reaction (with limited Western opposotion and garnering far less limited Russian support) to the same extent, had the Ghaddifi not met the end he did?  Did Libya's rebellion's 'borderline success' sour the West's appetite for reacting to the provably-crossed Red Lines, and the multi-faction 'opposition' forces having to deal with the ultra-opposition of ISIS before the rebellion was won, plus being a handy handle for the Assad side to paint the whole spectrum of judicious to injudicious oppositions as all one enemy in an advantageous way...  (Assuming that Russia needed the sugaring of the pill that was the attacking of the vulnerable under the guise of rooting out those painted as bad as the more dangerous factions, but it doubtless helps.)

Too complicated. Too susceptible to individual impressions (I include my own).  Too chaotically unpredictable in the way it unfolded in front of us and too tirbulent, yet, to get a good overview via hindsight of what exactly actually occured.  This is an argument for the next century, assuming no bigger argument makes it (or the very concept of arguments!) entirely moot...

[palsch]

Regarding the travel ban, it is possible that they could try to delay a SCOTUS decision, but not long enough to appoint a new justice. They may still want to for a Solicitor General.

They could ask the 9th circuit to hold an en blanc hearing of 11 judges (or even, theoretically, all 29 who sit in the court) rather than the 3 that heard the case originally. I can imagine they would hold an 11 judge hearing (likely the same result as the original opinion) then call for a 29 judge hearing which would be rejected, causing a week and half to two weeks delay.

As noted in SCOTUS blog, the SCOTUS appeal would go to Kennedy specifically, who can then act alone or refer it to the entire court. My SCOTUS protocol is a little rusty, but I believe it is traditional that they may reject petitions unilaterally (without referring to the full court) but not reverse or decide points without such a referral. So if Kennedy believes there is any case to be answered it would be referred to the full court.

This leaves the administration a bit screwed as, as noted at the end of the SCOTUSblog piece, they don't yet have a Solicitor General (the position that argues for the government in front of the Supreme Court) and have been relying on lower level Obama era workers for the filings to date. This is made worse by their nominee withdrawing yesterday (which may or may not be related) and no replacement named as of yet. It is extremely likely that the replacement would be George Conway, Kellyanne Conway’s husband. He has relevant experience and is strong conservative credentials with relevant appellate experience; a Federalist society member, Republican donor, representative for Paula Jones against Bill Clinton and representative for Philip Morris in a high profile defamation case against ABC News. Those are huge points in his favour as far as Trump would be concerned. He has argued one (won) case in front of the Supreme Court, which found that Dodd-Frank section 10(b) doesn't apply to non-US security trades.

I would expect that he would be approved by the Senate - not doing so would be extraordinary - but the Democrats would be motivated to drag out the process and make a lot of noise about his history as well as his wife's position in the administration. If the ethics complaints against Kellyanne filed yesterday in the office of government ethics by both Chaffetz and Cummings (Republican and Democratic senior members of the House oversight committee) it could get even uglier and any confirmed ethics violations by her could taint him, especially if the HOC decides to hold their own hearings about the Nordstrom issue.

Right now my bet is that they don't have a confirmed SG at the time the case goes to the Supreme Court, but they would still want delays to try to put together an appellate team from the remains of Obama's Solicitor General office. They do have a Principle Deputy appointed (does not require Senate confirmation) who is serving as Acting SG, but he did not sign the appeal that went to the 9th circuit. The reason being the traditionally conservative but gradually evolving Jones Day firm where he worked filed a brief opposing the executive order. This caused both Noel Francisco and Chad Readler (the acting Attorney General and previous other point man on the issue) to step back from the case.

[Reelya]

What I said was the the arab spring stuff was largely inspired by the regime change that happened a few years before it. Really, the only comparable event was Iran 1979. Other than that there hasn't really been a successful revolution in an Arab nation since probably before WWII. There are reasons this happened when it did, and spread all over the place, where previous decades never did. The fundamental change was not in the regimes that were toppled, they were the same as ever. It was the toppling of Saddam that set the example, and then the fact that the USA was unable to suppress the rebels that gave them the courage.

But in 2011 the US poured more fuel on the fire, so the point there was that your basic argument is that America isn't responsible for Libya because you're saying it's not directly linked to Iraq. I'm still saying it is, but pointing out that even if it wasn't ya still dun fukked up multiple different ways on the Libya front. Because the bombing is what really collapsed the nation at the point that the civil war was basically wrapping up, and then if that was not enough, ISIS, which came into existence as part of the Iraqi insurgency, they ended up there too. So there are multiple lines of causation, at least a majority of which are traceable back to the spillover from American efforts.

[martinuzz]

You're starting to sound like some kind of blend between RT and ISIS propaganda

[Reelya]

How's that ISIS propaganda? I'm saying ISIS is a bad thing, and they originated because of the Iraq War insurgency. Those aren't really disputable facts. The Iraq War Insurgency couldn't have existed without the Iraq War, goes without saying, and neither would ISIS. The whole clusterfuck is in fact Bush's fault. Pretty much everyone should be aware of the history here or you really haven't been paying attention for the last 15 years.

And my source for the Obama / Libya stuff is an American journal article (in a magazine published by the Council on Foreign Relations, which is about as opposite as an RT/ISIS mouthpiece as you can get) written by a US college professor who's a respected expert in that field. So it's from really mainstream US sources.

EDIT, BTW in an Australian news article written by a regional foreign policy expert, I was reading how China is going around to all the countries pissed of by Trump and making deals and promises with them, basically going "we keep our promises and we're not loonies". So the fixation on the South China Sea dispute and how all their neighbors fear them might be a sort of distraction from the fact that China is in fact going around doing Max Diplomacy right now, but none of you guys hear that side of it, only the "everyone's scared of China" story.

[Jopax]

@Sheb, and every single one of those has been an attempt to fix what they broke earlier.

The situation is a giant clusterfuck and as Starver says we can't know for sure if or how different it would be if the US hadn't interfered, what we do know is that the entire clusterfuck can be traced, in one way or another to US actions in the region over the past several decades. But instead of realising that they're only causing further chaos and harm (or even worse, in spite of realising it) they keep doing it, even if it keeps blowing up in their face in one way or another.

Honestly the best thing that can happen with the Trump presidency is the US stepping back from it's position of power, even if temporarily. Russia may not be peachy but atleast they don't hide behind spreading democracy and freedom while they look out purely for their own asses.

[Sheb]

@Sheb, and every single one of those has been an attempt to fix what they broke earlier.

The situation is a giant clusterfuck and as Starver says we can't know for sure if or how different it would be if the US hadn't interfered, what we do know is that the entire clusterfuck can be traced, in one way or another to US actions in the region over the past several decades. But instead of realising that they're only causing further chaos and harm (or even worse, in spite of realising it) they keep doing it, even if it keeps blowing up in their face in one way or another.

Honestly the best thing that can happen with the Trump presidency is the US stepping back from it's position of power, even if temporarily. Russia may not be peachy but atleast they don't hide behind spreading democracy and freedom while they look out purely for their own asses.

The Iran deal is an attempt at fixing stuff broken earlier? Even if it is, shouldn't the US try to fix the mess rather than step back? We all so how 2011 turned out.

And sure, you can trace it all to US action on way or another. The US is a superpower so it has SOME involvment in litterally anything. That doesn't automatically means that the mess is BECAUSE of the US, that's my whole point.

[Sergarr]

I wonder if someone is trolling Congress, because surely, no one would try to terminate the Department of Education for real, right?

[Reelya]

The situation is a giant clusterfuck and as Starver says we can't know for sure if or how different it would be if the US hadn't interfered, what we do know is that the entire clusterfuck can be traced, in one way or another to US actions in the region over the past several decades. But instead of realising that they're only causing further chaos and harm (or even worse, in spite of realising it) they keep doing it, even if it keeps blowing up in their face in one way or another.

Part of it is, I think about how they frame these incidents. e.g. Chomsky & similar writers talk about how the US media often frames Iran or something as a two-side debate: side 1 "do we bomb them now" side 2 "bombing them now might not get what we want". How about not threatening to bomb them at all and trying to talk to them? Often that point of view isn't one of the debate "options", and you're a radical if you think that. In this real example, about 90% of Americans polled wanted peace with Iran, but that view wasn't on offer in TV debates at all, implying that it's a freakish and rare belief.

So you have a political / corporate class in the USA in which debates are framed in very narrow terms, and often these terms are wildly different from what opinion polls suggest about the population as a whole. But to the political class who make decisions, they're immersed in the mass media culture so they believe the rhetoric, allowing them to keep doing the same thing. Mass media allowed them to get away with this for decades. But now, you have the 'net and social media, and lots more opinion polling data quickly available. So instead of just ignoring the populace's real opinions as they've done for a long time, you get a populist right wing leader.