1614

What’s your definition of intervening?

1615

Supplying the Saudis with bombs to kill Yemenis of all stripes?

1616

France, and the UK are also major arms suppliers to the Saudi, who were the major purchasers of arms over the last few years in the Middle East. On the Houthi, side you have in addition to the Iranian, Russia, and China being suppliers to Iran. Does that make all six countries interveners?

There probably a Swedish anti-aircraft gun, Italian and German bombs. I’m imagine with a bit of digging I could probably find twenty countries who’ve supplied arms to the conflict. If supplying arms to a country counts as an interventation.

Then what term do we use for Russia’s intervention in Ukraine?

1617

Yes?

Also, we have been carrying out our own attacks in Yemen for years.

Invasion?

1618

Yeah, all of 'em. And I was being a bit flippant, to be sure, as the Yemen situation is fairly complex. But the essence of it seems to be that none of the external intervention is helping Yemenis, on either side.

1619

The key is stability. When we leave these places to burn, bad things happen. Sudan was home to Osama Bin Laden at one point. Yemen and Somalia have been run by bandits and terrorists for decades.

Shielding Israel from international law has provided anti-western terrorists with their single most effective issue for recruitment, and it is what made the US a target to begin with.

In the time it took us to intervene in Bosnia, Saudi Arabia and Al Qaeda conspired to dispatch an Al Qaeda unit to fight with the Bosnian army, and opened an office that appears to have been used to fund Al Qaeda operations up until 9/11.

So launching a military occupation in order to hunt a death cult of maybe 2000 people is a farce, but doing nothing will always come with its own consequences.

Fiddling while the world burns isn’t as much of an option as some people would like it to be, and that’s not even taking into account how these conflicts can end up destabilizing entire regions. Even minor influxes of refugees are capable of destabilizing the EU somewhat.

I think for some people there’s a myth of a natural order. That things will eventually sort themselves out, so it’s better if we just stay home. I’m not sure where they get that from. It completely ignores the thought and the work that goes into creating order and civilization, none of which is possible under warlords and bandits.

1620

The challenge is defining so-called civilization, and what type of order you want. Civilization as a term or a goal has a long and problematic history. Too often people use it to refer solely to a specific kind of technocratic, modernist, Western idea of society, and denigrate pretty much every other society on the planet. But even if you back off that and try to define it with terms like “rule of law,” “human rights,” and “freedom of conscience,” you haven’t done much. Laws can be brutal, human rights are not understood the same way in all places, and freedoms of any sorts have very different social and cultural contexts and meanings.

Same with order. Hussein in Iraq and Assad in Syria arguably maintained “order,” just like Tito or any number of other strongarm dictator types. Order, when used by Westerners, usually means “laws like ours enforcing values like ours,” with little in the way of understanding that not everyone on the planet thinks the same way.

When we talk about bringing civilization and order to a place, it really starts to sound like something the British would say in the reign of Victoria. I get that many places are in dire need of improvement, no doubt, but I’m skeptical that we have the recipe for doing so.

1621

To some extent, it remains an open question whether the outcome in Iraq represents very much more than just swapping the in- and out-groups. Certainly things are better now than they were during the worst days of the US occupation, but whether they are better than they were for the most part under Saddam might come down to who you ask.

1622

The Atlantic report above makes it feel like whatever it was the US and Allies were doing in Afghanistan, order and civilization wasn’t it, and no matter how long it would’ve gone for, order and civilization as the US understands it would never come from it, at least once you moved a few kilometers outside the big cities.

1623

Other than via psychic hotline there are about a million Iranian and around 750,000 Iraqi who you’d be unable to poll, under Saddam’s regime cause they are dead. It is true a couple hundred thousand, Iraqi died turning the civil war, mostly not killed by Americans, but it is a far smaller number than Saddam butcher bill.

1624

Oh, there’s no doubt Saddam was a Class A bastard, full stop. And his demise was, in many ways, not only karmically warranted but objectively better for Iraq and the region. But the problem is the choice usually is not between terrible dictator and democratic paradise. It’s between utter chaos and the order imposed by a dictator, who may or may not be really terrible.

1625

I really object to exaggeration of bad deeds. America is the largest arm supplier in the world, and certainly to Saudi Arabia. Generally speaking I don’t think this is a good thing, better than being an illegal drug dealer, roughly on par with being a supplier of tobacco and booze. I think it is important differentiate our role as enabler, (along with all the other arms suppliers) from what the Saudi and Iranians are doing in Yemen.

What Hitler did to Poland, and what the Russian did to Crimea is an invasion. Its worse than what Russian is doing in Donbas region of Ukraine,supplying arms and men to fight as freedom fighters/terrorist. I don’t think anything is gained, and much is lost by muddying the waters, and calling supplying arms an intervention.

1626

Agreed, I’d argue in the case of Saddam it was better. In the case of Ghadaffy, maybe not. The jury is out in the case of Taliban vs the completely corrupt government of Afghanistan.

1627

Tomato, tomatoh I guess. In today’s world, given the lethality and ease of use of modern weaponry, supplying the guns is intervening in my book. But YMMV.

1628

It’s weird that you count the Iranians, since Saddam was killing them with our explicit blessing and willing assistance. So maybe some of the dead should go on our tally instead?

Oh, okay.

1630

In some cases it is much better to sell a nation F-16 than cigarettes. For instance, I think providing Ukraine, Taiwan, Estonia, Lativa, Lithuania, South Korea and yes even Saudi Arabia F16 and other armaments allows those countries to protect themselves from their dangerous neighbors, Russia, Iran, China, North Korea. This saves lives, including potentially American ones, rather than kiling people like tobacco products do…

1631

I noticed you’re pointedly ignoring the drone strikes in Yemen. Any reason for that?

1632

We conduct drone strikes all over the world. What makes the ones in Yemen unique?

1633

Doesn’t it at least mean we are “intervening” there, which is what’s being discussed?

1634

Are the people we are killing with drone strikes exclusively Houthi , or even Shiite? Al-Qaeda in the Peninsula is primarily a Sunni organization meaning that many if not most of the people we kill in Yemen with drone strikes are nominally aligned with the Saudis. In reality, like most things in the Middle East there are more than two side to the Yemenese civil war. Some times we are on the same side as the Saudis often we are not.