08-14-2016, 04:36 PM
(This post was last modified: 08-14-2016, 04:37 PM by Eric the Green.)
(08-14-2016, 03:50 PM)Mikebert Wrote: In response to Eric. "The people" do not rise up against their leaders. It is always some subset of the people that begins an insurgency.
My view is an insurgency lacks legitimacy if they have no reasonable chance of success (e.g. Syria, Libya). It is the height of irresponsibility to rise up in a hopeless cause as all it does is get a lot of your own people killed. The US acts as an enabler of this and so has been partly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. In my opinion, the US policy of trying to spread democracy in this way is evil.
I can't go with the idea that the USA enabled these risings, or tried to spread democracy in Syria. The US did nothing there for 2 years, and very little since. And the uprisings in Libya and Syria involved millions of people; in Syria they marched in the streets for several months peacefully. The civil war began when Assad started shooting them. There's no reasonable dispute with those facts. To dispute these facts is to spit in the face of those people whose only crime is that they want to be free.
However, was it wise for the millions of Syrians to rise up against their dictator? Probably not, in hindsight. I thought they were marching into troubled waters when they started; knowing the past history of the House of Assad. But, they did think NATO might help them, as they helped in Libya. And the other Arab Spring risings seemed to be working at that time. AND they were facing ruin because of the drought and the lack of action on it by the Assad regime. It's too bad that the Syrian people live under a monster. I don't blame them at all for rising up against the insect that was tyrannizing them. I was rooting for them, and still do. They deserve a chance for a decent and free life.