Anarchistbear said:
mikecohen said:
Anarchistbear said:
Trump is comic relief compared to Bush.
The worse thing about Bush is that we are still living with his policies and there has been no move to change them- endless wars, refugees, destabilization of Middle East and Europe, the Patriot Act, the Security State, loss of civil liberties. The political upheavals - rise of far right parties-in the US and Europe are traceable to US policies- the migration crisis in Europe and the economic crisis in the US.
Not all of that started with Bush - as opposed to being standard Republican Orthodoxy starting with the "Southern Strategy". Also, both "the rise of far right parties" and the migration crisis in Europe (which is an adjunct and help to the former) I think owe more to Putin - because, as a result of Russia's social and economic political failure since at least the rise of Stalin, the general population of Russia is socially and economically way behind the other developed countries, one result of which has been the rise to power of the Russian Mafia, who, like all crime families, seek business opportunities in the interstices of the dominant culture, the major interstice of which in Europe is the power vacuum created by a combination of (a) the open borders of the European Union, (b) the degradation of the populations East of the European Union and in Sub-Saharan Africa many of whose economies and social systems are in the toilet, largely for inability to deal with the modern world, and (c) the failure of the European Union to develop meaningful ways of dealing with the flood of suffering people cosmically needing to go from those countries into the European Union where (whatever one might say about the difficulties) life, even as a refugee and despised minority, is still preferable to life where those folks come from (unless, of course, one is a slave to said Mafia).
I think you miss that the genesis of the refugee problem was the Iraq War and the subsequent Libya fiasco which led to sectarian wars, civil war, destabilization and millions of refugees from Syria, followed by a a chaotic and stateless Libya becoming a portal for refugees not only from Syria but the continent. They all streamed by the millions into Southern Europe. The EU with incredible stupidity allowed Greece and Italy to absorb and deal with all these refugees under the theory that where they enter is whose problem it is. They then attempted to deal with it by bribing Turkey and setting quotas for Northern EU states. This of course opened up the usual fissures of racism and xenophobia that has ruled Europe for millennia but also gave rise to right wing nationalist parties that now rule Hungary, Italy and Poland. I'm not sure why you see Putin as being responsible as most of these countries hate Russia.
Although Bush doesn't deserve full credit for this- the EU was an apathetic and callous partner, Bush's decision to invade Iraq no doubt precipitated much of this crisis. We are still dealing with the wreckage of Iraq and are now bombing seven countries. Can anyone name them? Does anyone care about stopping it? No, this has been now going on for three administrations and is accepted as a fact of life, same with the Patriot Act, spying on Americans and lying about it.
As much as I agree about the extraordinary evil karma of the Iraq War, and as much as I admire Obama and Mark Zuckerberg, I do think that Libya and Syria (and the eventual change of dictators in Egypt and everything that happened there between those two dictators) was, in the main, the result of the Arab Spring, triggered by Obama's speech of hope in the region followed by the rise of Facebook there which made people there believe they would be able to achieve more (and more easily) than it turned out, with results that I think might have given both Obama and Zuckerberg considerable pause had they been able to foresee those results.
And, also despite my political leanings, I also believe that our reactions to those events (the critical periods of which were during the Obama Administration) did not do much or anything to ameliorate those disasters, whereas Putin stepped right in and made them worse - because
1) since his internal Muslim enemies have been AlQaeda-influenced Sunni Muslims, it is in his interest to support the Shia Assad and Iran; and
2) the refugee problem in Western Europe is the strongest opportunity that Russia, as he sees it, ever had to destabilize the Western Alliance.
I have to add: I certainly did not foresee the horrible results of the Arab Spring; and, as far as what we could have done, my thoughts were the same as virtually everyone else I saw here, that there were no good solutions.
In hindsight, it almost suggests the possible virtue of more forceful military action in support of the Sunni majority in Syria, whose economy was developed enough to possibly provide a meaningful bulwark against Wahabism, including Daesh.
But I do not miss the force of the argument against the ubiquitous use of the American military around the world; and I am not sanguine that American military and strategic and foreign policy thinkers could have found a way to use that military in Syria that might have been salutary instead of disastrous just in a different way - on top of which the political backlash here to that involvement BY OBAMA (which wouldn't have been there under a Republican Administration) may well have made anything along those lines impossible.
So, I don't know whether any American at that time would have had the guts (or bad judgment) to face, at the same time, both the racist American political backlash (against anything Obama did), plus risk starting a hot war with Russia in Syria.
