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Originally posted by kentonio
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Except that it's incredibly rare for us to actually solve long running problems resulting from hastily and ill thought out border creation post colonialism, instead we generally just dampen the fires to stop them exploding and hope the problem will just go away over time.
Criminal behaviour my arse. What exactly resulted from the block on military action in Syria? How did that work out for us at this current time, where you may recall we're now engaging in military action in a much worse situation in Syria. Incidentally don't tell me I can't support any form of intervention without magically giving blanket support to my governments actions, it's lazy posting at best and ****ing patronizing at worst.
The only solution in Syria, as it was from the beginning - was to support Assad. Even at this stage, it is still the best solution, so the fact that we haven't bombed him out, gives us and Syrians this "privileged" situation that we do not have ISIS ruling the country just yet, and to have done what they do on the whole population, but just the pockets of the country that they control.
Our main issue with him being a Russian sponsored dictator (secular no less), should take a back seat to the reality on the ground no matter how harsh. So that remains, but in any case this is for Syria thread, which is buried somewhere.
It's a good thing Arab Spring didn't happen post 2003 then, otherwise your entire argument wouldn't make any damn sense. Oh wait..
I also have no damn idea why you're pointing at Iraq as if it works against my position, when I'm a strident opponent of occupation and how that entire **** show went down. Perhaps if you considered there might be a whole variety of positions between warmonger and peacenik then you might avoid these irrelevancies.
You posted your position as:
*we need to intervene as we cannot ignore the suffering
*removing dictators is good for the local population
*intervention in Libya was good as we removed the dictator
*intervention in Syria should have been done
Out of which, I got the impression you were pro-Iraq, as we went in to remove a dictator there, we went into Afghanistan to "reduce the suffering", at least partially (btw, I was pro-Afghanistan as well initially; except we botched it colossally).
All in all, we are likely closer in the position than this thread shows, just as well as with Cockney (I think that I am pretty much aligned with him) - the main difference with you being is that we should in my view intervene only to - stop - (and that is important) an existing conflict, with adequate force to ensure it is stopped, so peace can be built without space for violence, and not go in and create a conflict (or a vacuum zone which invites it) as we did with half dozen countries during last 10 years or so.
Stopping a conflict does not involve removing Gaddaffi, or Assad, or Saddam interestingly enough, but working with them to some sort of transition, even waiting them out as Indonesia waited out Suharto, or Chile waited out Pinochet, as in a volatile zone this is pretty much always preferable to the crap that happens when you have a violent overthrow of a system.
In Libya in particular this would not have meant making our airforce the "rebel" airforce, and hoping for the best in the aftermath - it would have meant troops on the ground, cessation of hostilities and negotiations (more or less as in ex Yu), but noone wanted to commit to that, bombing Gaddaffi was the easy way out to the desired short term outcome, turning the country back into the middle ages from a developed state.
This much is obvious, to our diplomats as well, and less the general population supports it in the west, the better. Even with Syria the outcome as bad as it is, is still better than what would have been the case had the airstrikes, to take Assad out, not been stopped by the British parliament.
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