Rolling MENA 2014 (Middle East)

it's certainly a little discombobulating to be bombing both houthis + al-q at the same time

Yemen had one dictator for awhile I think, then Hadi (who had been part of the prior dictatorial government but was perceived as more moderate). The US just wanted to keep droning Al-q and did not seem to perceive the Houthis as that big of a threat. CIA failure to see this maybe. Or is the US defense establishment gonna claim they were giving Hadi advice to be nice to all including the Houthis but Hadi didn't listen; just as they they similarly did so the government in Iraq and various governments in Egypt....

Standard operating procedure where US supports these types of authoritarian governments and then gets surprised about the amount of different groups that have issues with them

just as they they similarly CLAIM THEY HAVE DONE with the government in Iraq and various governments in Egypt....

i guess i just find the critique that obama's lacks a coherent, unifying strategy for the middle east to be resonant - as they continually seem caught off-guard by new developments. maybe US FP has always been thus, and as i've said before obama admin has never done anything as stupid as gwb's occupation of iraq so he's not the worst FP president ever. like hillary said tho, "Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle."

"great nations need organizing principles" is exactly the kind of meaningless, unhelpful, abstract blather that foreign policy wanks adore and that actual ppl conducting real-world foreign policy tend to laugh at. when has u.s. foreign policy ever had an "organizing principle"?

does "money" count as an organizing principle

the Monroe Doctrine? (j/k, kind of)

a coherent, unifying strategy for the middle east

the middle east is an incoherent morass of conflicting agendas and ideologies that often are unpredictable and unstable, a "coherent, unifying strategy" is not possible

applying any kind of consistent principle will immediately lead to direct conflict with one faction or another

an organizing principle could be as simple as "constrain russia's ability to annex parts of predominately ethnic-russian europe" - just some idea that they have an objective w/ some coherence. i have no idea what their objective is. sometimes it seems isolationist, but then they conduct huge drone wars + air bombings in MENA. is it pro-stability? american actions in ukraine before the revolution, support for anti-mubarak protesters, said drone bombings, etc suggest not. stopping atrocities? in libya yes, in syria no. rapprochement w/ iran, or reaffirming traditional sunni + israel alliances in middle east? god, who really knows.

maybe obama is playing nth-dimensional chess and he knows exactly what he's doing, or maybe he was being honest that his theory of FP is "don't do stupid shit" and he really has no vision of how america should operate in the world.

kiss my ass "great nation"

morbz, think of "great" as "big" and "powerful" and not as "does stuff i like"

then doing nothing is a great idea vs the last 60 years

i have no idea what their objective is

no. 1: prevent Americans from being killed

except obama FP is not doing nothing. it's doing a ton.

no. 2: kill people who are planning to or may have been thinking about or were maybe somehow connected to killing Americans while expending the smallest amount of resources possible

xp

no. 3: democracy is cool, as long as it results in regimes that are friendly to the US. when it doesn't, uhhh we're outta here, I guess the new dictator is cool

curmudgeon asked: "Mordy, why is Shia supporter Obama providing intell to Sunni Saudi Arabia about Yemen?"

houthis are not a threat to america or american lives, so what is the motivating factor here?

the Monroe Doctrine? (j/k, kind of)

― sleeve, Friday, March 27, 2015 6:11 PM (7 minutes ago)

that's actually a perfect example of how "organizing principles" tend to work in u.s. foreign policy (as opposed to the abstract world of "strategy"), because the u.s. talked up the monroe doctrine nonstop for decades but almost never actually enforced it until the 1890s (when, tbh, other concerns were far more paramount). you could say the same for the cold war, when we interfered in some communist scenarios and not others. "organizing principles" are basically a cover for whatever we feel like doing at the moment.

houthis are not a threat to america or american lives, so what is the motivating factor here?

iirc "Death to America" is in the Houthi logo

also the iran logo and we're in the middle of negotiating a nuclear deal w/ them

[March 21, 2015] Khamenei told a crowd in Tehran that Iran would not capitulate to Western demands. When the crowd started shouting, “Death to America,” the ayatollah responded: “Of course yes, death to America, because America is the original source of this pressure.

“They insist on putting pressure on our dear people’s economy,” he said, referring to economic sanctions aimed at halting Iran’s nuclear program. “What is their goal? Their goal is to put the people against the system,” he said. “The politics of America is to create insecurity,” he added, referring both to US pressure on Iran and elsewhere in the region.

i lol'd at "of course yes." so nonchalant

as simple as "constrain russia's ability to annex parts of predominately ethnic-russian europe"

Conservatives see this as simple, but others say should we constrain, and who do we support to constrain Russia and how and will it work? If we do x, y, and z, what could be the result? Will other countries join us? As noted by the others here, every location is unique and different factors have to be considered.

ok but it's not like it's too complicated so obama isn't doing anything. he still sent ppl to foment revolution in ukraine.

also the iran logo and we're in the middle of negotiating a nuclear deal w/ them

hmm gee what is the difference there I wonder

you seem to be requiring a clarity and consistency of vision that does not address actual political realities. the last time we had people like that in the white house things didn't turn out so well

lol ok so we believe that when it's an iranian sponsored militia group whose activity has been entirely confined to yemen saying "death to america" that's a national security threat worth a military intervention. when it's a government pursuing nuclear weapons with a track record of sponsoring terrorism abroad saying "death to america", then we should sit down to talk.

did you miss the part where Yemeni/al Qaeda groups directly targeted Americans - obviously O's concern with Yemen is keeping a regime friendly to the US that continues to allow us to dronestrike whatever Al Qaeda jokers are still running around out there.

I can't rememeber the last time an Iranian-back group successfully attacked Americans, unless we wanna get into random shit that happened during the Iraq War. And besides, threat of nuclear power is obviously totally game-changing in terms of what strategies are on the table and what will be effective.

we're sitting down to talk with Iran because we don't have any proxy nations that are going to keep them in line militarily, and we can't invade, or fly drones over there to assassinate people. completely different scenario.

houthi != al-qaeada

if our concern is just suppressing al-qaeada in yemen, stopping the houthi seems like the wrong move there

I never said they were...? but it's pretty clear a Houthi regime will not give us free reign/coordinate activities, etc. like the previous regime did. so if we (or our proxies) can knock them off, hey win/win

xp

the middle east is an incoherent morass of conflicting agendas and ideologies that often are unpredictable and unstable, a "coherent, unifying strategy" is not possible

this is largely true, but obama’s FP still appears to me extraordinarily incoherent, imprudent, short-sighted, naive. e.g. it’s fucked up or worsened relations with allies; US is now not trusted by “friends” not respected by “enemies.”

my impression of Obama’s FP (cf. “don’t do stupid shit”) is that its coherence for Obama consists in the fact that it’s his, Obama’s, policy; he cares little about continuity or coherence with past US FP, or consequences for future US administrations. On the contrary: many of Obama’s decisions seem to have been driven by an impulse e.g. to contrast himself with Bush, i.e. not just to avoid Bush’s mistakes or prudently correct course (which by itself is laudable) but to mark the discontinuity between their administrations— more symbolically than in reality, yet sometimes to great cost (e.g. Obama’s great accomplishment of “ending the war in Iraq”).

So too, in terms of relations with or obligations to allies or other countries; seems like Obama doesn’t feel bound to abide by or cohere with such things insofar as they preexist his administration. Cf. the infamous “reset button” with Russia. Like: *he* didn’t make those promises; *he* didn’t choose the close alliance with Israel, etc. Things are different now because Obama is POTUS, and Obama is Obama (not Bush), and that by itself will fix American FP and the world.

imo it goes beyond a thoughtful re-evaluation and correction of American FP into a kind of egocentric recklessness. Sometimes it seems Obama is less concerned with long-term US geopolitical interests than his symbolic vision of himself & his legacy.

it’s fucked up or worsened relations with allies; US is now not trusted by “friends” not respected by “enemies.”

lol unlike during the Dubya admin

I don't think anyone on this thread or on ilx as a whole is defending dubya

http://www.lefigaro.fr/international/2015/03/25/01003-20150325ARTFIG00431-tensions-franco-americaines-sur-le-nucleaire-iranien.php

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/03/britain-foreign-secretary-iran-deal-reaction-116456.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqAuY3yOlXs

I'm not sure which significant allies' relationships you think have worsened because of Obama, (besides Israel - and I think Bibi deserves a large share of the blame there, given his taking US support for granted, doing whatever he wanted, basically telling Obama to get fucked from day one etc.)

xp

- I don't read French (do they still eat freedom fries over there)
- there's nothing in that article about Britain not trusting us
- lol military officials

lol unlike during the Dubya admin

no argument there! a lot of damage under bush. but when obama became potus he made much of the promise that he would repair relations with allies etc.; it appears to me that, if anything, he's not repaired but only worsened them.

and fwiw I feel weird to be the de facto defender of Obama here given that I don't support a bunch of what he's done (dronewars mostly) but the handwringing and apparently willful mischaracterizations in this thread are really out of touch with reality

xp

it appears to me that, if anything, he's not repaired but only worsened them.

really? is Merkel complaining about O's backrubs? are the French refusing to cooperate with us? Is South Korea unhappy with us?

those links not necessarily meant to corroborate my post; just some mid-east related links i found interesting today

But he said that whatever the negotiators produce should satisfy “99 percent” of people’s questions, while acknowledging that the expected looseness of the agreement opens the possibility that Secretary of State John Kerry will have a different version to talk about in Washington than Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif will bring back to Tehran.

This seems fucked up to me. Has there ever been a negotiating strategy that anticipates the two parties having different ideas about what was negotiated?

Merkel pretty unhappy w wiretapping iirc

they tried to do something similar imo during the recent I/P negotiations - they had this theory of negotiations that they'd produce an agreement alongside a set of dissents from both parties. essentially signing the negotiation before actually doing the compromising. seems like terrible statecraft theory to me.

haha ok I forgot about the wiretapping!

xp

(although even there I would say that's more sloppy operations than policy)

(btw inspired by love-in for 龜 today, just want to mention that i enjoy & appreciate reading the discussion & different perspectives on this thread)

agree that the negotiations w Iran sound ridiculous at this point - they're really grasping at straws, desperate to salvage anything. I'm sure Kerry/Obama don't want to admit failure in the face of the GOP's Senate letter stunt, among other things.

think this 'agreement before negotiation' is pretty emblematic. more negative interpretation is that the admin cares more about the symbol than actually negotiating. Maybe they think there's value in just chatting bc at least then you're building relationship but I think that's kinda naive about the relationships between states which are motivated by state interest and not on feeling good bc you have signed a meaningless piece of paper