I honestly can not say I have a deep knowledge of the Syrian civil war except for a few things.
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Multiple groups including Isis and the Syrian army are involved, some of which are US backed
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Rojava and the Kurds seem genuinely unproblematic and cool, and are currently being attacked by Syria and Turkey, and their support was withdrawn by trump.
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The resulting refugee crisis is a big deal, etc etc. I’ve actually been fortunate enough to talk with several refugees as my mother works in local government helping sponsor them, and one family threw a party and invited us. The food was delicious, but I felt like asking a family who had just been reunited with a family member after years about the civil war would not be a good idea. So I can’t say I learned much from the conversations I’ve had.
I see lots of Assad memes. Is it ironic? Is it unironic? Is it a big critical support deal like Kim Jong un? What’s the consensus? Can someone educate me or?
Thanks.
Very high-level description of middle eastern politics (and also parts of Africa) is that basically the country borders are shite, so you get ethnic groups who hate each other going back hundreds/thousands of years in the same country. (Normally these reasons make a lot of sense; Northern Ireland is a Western example.) The only stable countries are those with strongman leaders. Trying to remove said strongman leaders just means the country collapses into civil war. Saddam Hussein was a terrible person but it's hard to argue with a straight face that US intervention helped Iraq. Likewise for Afghanistan, etc.
You'll see a lot of warhawks talking about how this one regime change war is a good idea. But unless they come up with some really solid reasons that taking out the handful of people holding a country together won't explode into ethnic strife, war, famine, etc. and just go "mumble mumble we bring democracy, they'll welcome us as liberators" then you can guarantee it will be a shitshow.
That's why (imo) removing Assad is a bad idea. There's no followup plan that has any chance of making things better.
The borders argument is a western favourite, because it absolves them of the fact that most of the strife is caused by imperialist meddling in the region.
There are ethnically diverse countries that are stable, look at Belgium or Spain for example. Yeah the borders arent ideal, but we want to abolish borders anyway.
The borders were drawn by Western imperialists specifically in order to destabilise the region. Hence four different countries getting a chunk of the ethnically Kurdish region, which has led to multiple attempts at ethnic cleansing, to take one very straightforward example. The ethnic diversity isn't the sole cause of the various issues in the Middle East, of course -- but it's a key factor that no Western intervention is going to fix. And, historically, it's been exploited by imperialist meddling via arming different religious & ethnic factions.
I'm not saying that different Middle Eastern ethnicities are forced to fight each other due to their backgrounds. I'm saying that, much like Northern Ireland/Catalonia/other Western conflicts along similar lines, there are a multitude of societal fault lines that coincide with the various ethnicities present in each country to a large degree.
(Somewhere to start reading for anyone with a cursory interest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sykes%E2%80%93Picot_Agreement)
Not to mention that the various Gulf micro-states like Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar were specifically fostered by the British, in combination with Saudi Arabia and Hashemite monarchist states such as Jordan and Iraq, to prevent a secular, nationalist pan-Arab state from gaining monopolistic control of the region's oil.
well Spain almost got an insurrection and Belgium works more like two counties(different parties for different ethnic)
idk much about movements in spain but isn't catalan and basque independence pretty big?
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Didn’t internal shit in Iraq start by active US interventions (after occupation) and fanning the flames? I think Scahill wrote something how it wasn’t organic explosion of previously suppressed violence, but active effort.