oh hi snowy, up for a game?

Bush didn’t lie. There were, factually, WMD’s that Saddam refused to disarm. He also tried to hide that info from the UN. We shouldn’t have gone into Iraq, but trying to villainize Bush as a purely self-interested liar is a mischaracterization. Cheney, fucking monster. Bush, not so much.

Iran is not an Arab country. Tunesia benefited from the Arab spring.
Egypt became a kind of democracy, but they voted "the wrong way". Hence, the US supported a military coup (just like in Algeria a decade ago).

I was in Egypt in 2012, after the first revolution of 2010, and during the second one which overthrew Morsi and the Islamic Brotherhood. In the week prior to that revolution/coup, everywhere I went there were signs of how much the tourism industry had collapsed. When I first arrived, our coach was given a guard of honour down the road by residents in every town we passed through, as we represented pretty much all of their income. The fall of Mubarrak destroyed their economy, and Morsi had failed to fix it, whilst trying to introduce measures to increase his own power. I then watched the tanks roll down the runway and the soldiers seize the airport on my final day there (I was in Luxor, thankfully, not Cairo, so didn't have too much concern). The Arab Spring destroyed Egypt twice, and poverty has shot up there.

And then you look to the neighbours. Sure, Morocco and Jordan passed a few liberalising laws, because the protesters were realistic there. Everywhere they tried to force regime change has taken some massive hits. Libya is now a failed state akin to Somalia, with zero signs of that changing. ISIS and Al-Qaeda control various towns and cities, alongside hundreds of different militias. Yemen is in the midst of a civil war that's been raging on for 6 years with zero international attention, as the Saudi's bomb the hell out of the Shia Houthi's that initially "won" that war, causing the Houthi's to ally with the very dictator who was initially driven out of power, against the Saudi-backed regime in Aden. Al Qaeda control half the country, which is the only thing that's topped ISIS joining the fun there too.

Syria, of course, has been utterly obliterated on every front with only the Kurds coming out of it having gained anything. All those initial protesters are dead. All the so-called "Moderate Opposition" that the West tried and failed to arm and support are dead. Assad is the Moderate at this point, given the opposition is now entirely consisting of Al Qaeda/Al Nusra, ISIS, or the Ottoman Revanchist Turk Nationalists backed by Erdogan in the North to contain the Kurds. The sooner we make our peace with the fact that Assad has won, the better. It's the only way the Syrian people will ever know peace again.

Iraq has been, once again, racked by war, undoing what little positive work NATO had managed to do toward the end of the Iraq War in building for the future, and throwing the Baghdad government completely into the sphere of Iran. ISIS may now have been defeated in Iraq, but the Saudi's will continue to meddle there now that Iraq is so firmly in Tehran's pocket. At the continued expense of the Iraqi people.

So, who does that leave? Lebanon, where Saudi Arabia has just attempted to restart their old civil war of the 80s and 90s by trying to force the Lebanon PM to step down (whilst in Saudi Arabia) and decry Hezbollah, possibly leading to another Israel-Hezbollah war. Unusually, that seems to have failed due to the restraint of Hezbollah themselves - rather ironic, and the Lebanese PM has now suspended his resignation and returned to the country.

Algeria and Bahrain, where the Arab Spring's protests were brutally suppressed and liberties curbed to below the level they were at prior to the whole thing. The UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, and Oman, where the entire thing was pretty much ignored. And Tunisia, the so-called jewel of success.

Sure, Tunisia now has a democratic government. It's only one of them refuse to cede power so far, with the standoff lasting a few months between the hardline Islamist faction and the secular moderates, but that deadlock was eventually broken and a new constitution agreed. Economically, though? Ever since ISIS slaughtered all those tourists at a beach resort a few years ago, Tunisia has joined Egypt (and since, Turkey) in the list of countries to have had their tourism industry implode in recent years, with Tunisia similarly reliant to Egypt on it. And as a result, poverty continues to rise and people continue to suffer. Because, as the Tunisian people have found out, democracy doesn't actually solve anything by itself. Whether it was a price worth paying remains to be seen in Tunisia (Egypt already decided it wasn't), but given the instability next door in Libya, it's going to be very hard for Tunisia to really do well going forwards.

So, yes, The Arab Spring was a failure. A failure caused by Western meddling for the past few decades, and leading to a dramatic rise of Islamism - something which had been somewhat receding after Al-Qaeda in Iraq (The predecessor to ISIS) was defeated in 2008. Something we'll all suffer for in the years to come. But really, you can trace the rise of Islamism as an ideology back to the failure of Pan-Arabism in the 1970s, after the Arabs picked the wrong side in the Cold War. The butchering of the Arab Spring has already killed off most liberal forces in the Arab World, and for the next few decades all we're going to see are strongmen vs Islamists, because people have seen what happens when you protest, and the results ain't pretty.

Tl:dr - HR broke Egypt

Pretty much. Everywhere I go experiences riots and political turmoil soon afterwards. Canada's time is coming :P

Post of the year, HR. Too true

Yes it is true Ogion, so why did you make a post saying the west should interfere in Syria and in taking out other dictators?

Is that proof Ogion is fake and just saying whatever? He did say he was mainly trolling awhile ago.

The best way to reduce the military industrial complex is to stage regime changes in as many countries as possible, fighting to prevent genocides by picking sides REGARDLESS of if either side is evil or not.

We should attack the japanese because they do whaling
We should invade Alberta because of evil tar sands oil
We should invade south america and replace any governments that have poverty

The US should invade the US because of evil oil pipes
The US should invade the US and replace any governments that have property

Do mass shootings count as genocides?

Maybe we qualify as a nation in need of a big dose of American freedom too!

We can start by carpet bombing oklahoma.

The US should invade the US and overturn police states that brutalize their citizens.

Wait no not Oklahoma we're just about to get Criminal Justice reform right before most other states.

Yea but you dont sell alcohol in grocery stores. Sorry but I already called in the airstrikes.

WE DO NOW

That was a ballot question a year ago and it passed.

I agree with Ogion and HR. The Obama administration has failed abysmally in the Middle East and North Africa, continuing a grand traditional of failure. There has been plenty of failure to go around, however, be it European ineptitude or Russia blatantly pouring oil on the flames in the name of national interest.

It would have been difficult enough for a modern thinking moderate people to deal with, but when you have populations such as in Egypt where the majority are Islamic extremists there wasn't a hope in hell of it ending well.

The failure in North Africa goes back just as far as the failure in the rest of Africa.

Because it is a useful run down of actual facts. The key point is that the meddling has been to coddle various dictators endlessly and then cut democratic movements off at the knees. We sent billions in military aid to the generals in Egypt. Imagine if we spent that money and leverage supporting civil society instead.

Obama failed to be active enough in bringing about change, in part because he was hamstrung by Congress (remember the lack of response to theuse of chemical weapons that happened when Congress refused to support the attack? That didn't help.), and in part because he was far too timid in working to support democracy and human rights.

And he failed in part because the actual abysmal failure, particularly of the Bush administration, in Iraq. Let's not forget that Obama has a lot of disaster to clean up when he came in following the most disastrous presidency in US history up to that time.

Probably too nuanced for you, but there it is.

And BB talks like someone who never had his family rounded up and gassed or sent to a labor camp.

The big question is as follows:

Why do you trust future intervention to do great for the country that needs help when any other attempt, even with good intentions, ends horribly.

or we can sit back and let genocides just happen whenever and do nothing.

These are still legitimate questions International relations theorists still don’t have answers for, so it’s a bit presumptuous to say this is an easy concept and that it’s obvious that we should go in.

I think this is a good time to remember that Saddam Hussein killed anywhere from 50,000 to 100,000 Kurds in a mass genocide. Not invading in '91 and allowing a dictator to stay in power for over another decade was probably a bad move

Careful, TrPrado. That's probably too nuanced for Ogion

@ Ogion
or we can sit back and let genocides just happen whenever and do nothing.

what and send the fetish military in do do something? ogion again trying to have cake and eat it too. and it isn't even his cake. like the liberals, its someone else's cake appropriated in a cake transfer. rob from the baker and give to the poor liberals

Did TrPrado say something? I've had him muted for ages.

But frankly, having, you know, lived in the Middle East and studied ratehr a lot of the history, I suspect it's far more likely that Tr Prado is simply incorrect in whatever it is he is saying.

I do declare, Oggy, that there seems to be literally nothing you haven't done.

Ah, that's actually a good question:

I don't think it is remotely true that every other intervention ends horribly.

I'd say the interventions in Germany and Japan did not end horribly. I'd say the interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo, while too late, ended very well. Similarly, the French action in Rwanda saved many lives by establishing a safe zone, although it was also too late.

Intervention does not have to mean "bombing the shit out of everything and everybody" Often supporting civil society can be very effective. See the various color revolutions that have ousted the corrupt or authoritarian. I'd say that for all its flaws, even the intervention in Haiti had some benefits (compared to letting the Touton Macoutes run rampant.) Time will tell if the military intervention to oust ISIS from its strong holds was a failure. Frankly, I'm not sure that isn't an improvement to letting ISIS control territory and oil money.

On the flip side, where has the failure to intervene gone well? Rwanda? Cambodia? Syria? The whole "taht's someone else's problem, why should we help" approach almost invariably only lets genocides and ethnic cleansing run rampant. Perhaps we should have let Ghadaffi slaughter everyone in Benghazi. I'm not sure that largely stepping aside and letting Assad gas people worked out well.

Your question takes a somewhat ignorant premise, because you haven't really thought about what intervention or success looks like. So, before you can make blanket statements, I'd recommend you actually study the history of tehse efforts and then consider the moral plusses and minuses rather than spouting off ignorance. Same to you too, Octavious.

Actually, international relations scholars know rather a lot about what makes for a successful intervention and what makes for a failure. However, even in the best of circumstances, there are no guarantees except that the failure to act leads to bad consequences usually. Beyond that you can do everything right and still come up short. however, the odds of a successful outcome are greater where an effort is made, usually.