Well it's already been going on for 7 years with 500k+ dead. US has already been there quite some time. The Kurds we support have many enemies as well. They will not exist without our support.
War is great for business, why stop now when there are contracts to renew and weapons to be built and sold? Just dress it up in enough appeals to emotion and political drama and people will do their patriotic duty to believe in the effort.
Lunacy. Under what rule, law or authority are we just allowed to bomb/attack other nations? Imagine if china, russia or any other nation acted like this. The media would be screaming bloody murder and calling other nations evil, depraved, etc. When we do it, it's "strikes on chemical weapons sites", it's for democracy, it's for freedom. One day, I hope leaders of all nations are held to account for their crimes and not just the leaders of poor and weak countries. And most importantly, I hope one day the media are held accountable for their part in war mongering as well. Rule of law should be applied to all, not just the poor and weak.
Look, we can only go by what we're told. We, the people, have no ability at all to ascertain the veracity of assertions of this nature made by our government. It's not that we're naive, it's that we are in no position to go to Syria and watch every second of the hostilities so that attribution can be made independently of government agencies and the media.
If Assad did do it, then we are simply responding to what he did. If Assad didn't do it, well, it's not the first time our government has lied to us. Either way, this military action will not have much effect on the outcome of the conflict so it's not as if we're messing anything up too bad.
That's a horrible way to go about modeling reality.
What the government says is only tiny portion of the information we have on any situation.
We also have what 200 other governments say, what academics say, what thousands of different journalists say, what historical precedent says, and what your own logic and intuition says.
Your obedience to the government narrative makes you the perfect tool of those in power.
The president is supposed to get approval from congress before entering into war. As citizens who are subject to a draft, we should care greatly about this...
> but when Pol Pot copy cats come along, root them out
Probably not the best example. The "free countries" did nothing about the Khmer Rouge and it was left to post-unification Vietnam to invade Cambodia and clean up the mess.
Vietnam was then sanctioned for its aggressive invasion of a sovereign nation..
what are you talking about? Russia has troops on the ground there. They invaded the Ukraine as well. They shot down a plane full of Dutch people flying to Malaysia.
We have a rule of law. It's called the Geneva Protocol and Assad violated it!
Hi dang. I unreservedly apologize. Can you please tell me which rule I broke. Maybe it was interpreted as being sarcasm but I meant it in ernest, but I accept brining it to your attention your have been a better course of action.
Oh, I mean the rule against insinuating that other users are astroturfers or shills: "Please don't impute astroturfing or shillage. That degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about it, email us and we'll look at the data."
It's not that such things don't exist, but they're much less common than people jumping to the conclusion that someone they disagree with isn't posting in good faith. I've written tons about this if you or anyone wants to read more:
Yeah, didn't have Russia on the other side last time, I make light of it but it is honestly terrifying. Unbelievable how few people see history repeating almost identically though.
There was never evidence shown that the attack was executed by Assad. There has not been any evidence shown that Assad still has WMD. This all started winding up right after the Bolton appointment. As is well known, Bolton was a Neoconservative architect of the Iraq war, and has been pushing hard for an attack on Syria. Also well known is that Assad was almost in full control of Eastern Ghouta, and Trump announced that he was planning to pull out, so why on Earth would Assad do something so dumb as to pull the west back in?
Think about who is most invested in keeping the west involved. That would be the rebels/al queda/Isis who have been armed and supported by the Saudis and the US to fight Russia and Assad.
It was even tweeted that insurgents were going to stage a chemical attack false flag before it happened:
I gotta say, I was skeptical of a Trump presidency at first, but when I look at in retrospect so far, things aren’t really all that bad, if you ignore all the media circus around Trump’s character flaws and the stupid election conspiracies, which in the grand scheme don’t matter.
Trump is a random chaotic president, and when his presidency is done the effects of his presidency will linger and new precedents will have been set, some good and some bad, but I think the good will outweigh the bad in more important ways. He is the mutation in the status quo’s DNA.
I’m not dooming and glooming but I don’t think good precedents will come out of this presidency. If anything it has become a litmus test of our democratic institutions in the era of “Fake News” and “alternative facts”, and mob boss leadership. I hope we come out better on the other side.
Yes, for all of us sitting at our computers talking about war and international law, Syrians are dying and have been dying. It's a humanitarian disaster. No one deserves to go through something like this.
One only needs to apply basic game theory and skepticism to come to the conclusion that Assad has no incentives to gas citizens. He's winning the war!
On the other hand who would benefit from a gas attack? Obviously, the "rebels" (read islamists). They have been losing ground for the past two years and if the US pulled out (which was planned) and a peace settlement is reached then they would lose.
Now consider that the exact same sequence of events happened almost exactly the same time last year -- the US announced that "regime change is no longer a priority" and a few days later we saw reports of a gas attack. See http://www.moonofalabama.org/2018/04/timelines-of-gas-attack...
You have no clue. How did rebels benefit? JAI in Douma capitulated the next morning, lost everything except some small arms and were displaced north. Assad obviously benefits, he has his territorial control now. He uses chemical weapons periodically, mostly chlorine, to get what he wants, which is teritorrial control and sending message to other groups elsewhere to obey or face the same terror.
And I don't care who's good for the sake of this argument. Just get a clue about the actual conditions and effects on the ground if you want to play Game theory.
Assad just got unlucky, because this time the stupid chlorine container fell next room to where plenty of people were, and they had no chance, and the Trump noticed this time, and felt whatever Trump feels, and decided to act.
You can't use skepticism and speculation (meaningfully) without being significantly informed about context, and history of those urban sieges Assad's regime uses. Otherwise your speculation is baseless, nevermind the theory it's based uppon.
Game theory assumes rational decision-makers; Bashar al-Assad is a premium-grade psychopath.
A rational actor might not have enough incentive to gas civilians. But a despot who listens to LMFAO and Right Said Fred [1] while his own citizens are shot at his behest? What does he care?
Hmm, I never thought my informative post would get flagged, while baseless speculation is upvoted.
The parent is pretty much 9/11 inside job conspiracy level stuff. I just stated a few facts about what happened, and how that contradicts the parent's speculation.
Anyway, whatever. Evidently HN is not a forum for reasonable discussion around this topic, because people don't follow what's happening wrt Syria closely.
EDIT: Let's just say, that this reaction is pretty typical. Almost universally, whenever a chemical attack happens and is reported, we're told that rebels are doing it to themselves as a false flag, to inspire western intervention.
After 40th case of rebels successfully throwing canisters with chlorine upon themselves from helicopters they don't have, to inspire intervention that never happened in the last 7 years or didn't bring anything good,... it gets ridiculous...
The problem is that anyone who doesn't watch closely, only sees this one medialized case in MSM, and thinks that false flag somehow may make sense. And "why would Assad use chlorine?" pops up, when it's docummented he uses it regularly.
I'm just guessing but maybe you were flagged because of the way you argue. You're both strawmaning my argument and associating it with a conspiracy theory. Nobody would be against a good faith debate.
My opinion is not as fringe as you make it to be. It's true that there are consensus from politicians and the media about what happened but that doesn't necessarily mean it's the truth. In fact, respectable academics are looking at this from scientific point-of-view and coming to the same conclusion.
I’ve read that blog post a while ago and sorry but it just doesn’t cut it the problem with applying game theory in these cases is that you don’t actually have access to correct intelligence and information both in terms of the actual events as well as the motives and parameters under which all the parties operate.
In this case he's applying probablity theory which is basically "reasoning under uncertainty". If you're interested in this check out a book called Superforcasters which is an elite team of forcasters that use similar methods to predict and answer questions about geopolitics and other stuff. They beat government and intelligence community forcasting using Bayesian reasoning and similar methods.
I have read supercasters and also unmaking the west i think you are either projecting and extrapolating way too much from them.
You are also ignoring the IO that russia is been running which is essentially a carbon copy what they used to run during the cold war, only considerably more amplified and effective these days.
I'm actually frightened by the fact that there are now links here to what is an unquestionably a new breed of academic UIC's now I thought the last of these died shortly after the wall fell.
Perhaps your comments would be received better if you'd cite some sources for your claims, otherwise they look pretty much like a speculation as well, and not informative or stating facts.
Or Russia is trying to drag the US into a war in Syria, using gas was a surefire way of bringing them into it, regardless of Trump's anti interventionist stance.
It's sad that the top comment here is a conspiratorial hypothesis with game theory as a supporting argument. It seems wrong to cite game theory as evidence that a gas attack was unnecessary when that gas attack achieved victory by forcing the Douma rebels to, just hours later, agree to surrender. It's sickening to contemplate, but one could argue that in this case, the despicable use of chemical weapons brought a remarkably swift end to the fighting in Douma and in the longer term actually saved lives in that region of Syria.
So it's more likely that the attack is false flag last ditch effort one. We all know that the civilians that the "rebels" hold are hostages. Even the article you cite says this much.
Saddam gased the Kurds with even less “strategic” or “tactical” reasons to do so if you simply apply game theory.
Considering Russia went on a conspiracy theory blitz from the get go which started about 3 weeks prior to the recent attack it follows the same pattern as 2 previous attack with high confidence of attribution to Syrian government or what is left of it since Russia and Iran are running the show now.
It’s quire scary just how efficient their information warfare has become.
At the time Saddam was emboldened by the US and when he gassed the Kurds the CIA blamed Iran for it to cover it up for him. If anything that proves that we can't trust Western intelligence reports. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halabja_chemical_attack#Afte...
Shouting "consipracy" as loud as you can doesn't make you sound smart and it's not an argument. Try reasoning about this and bring something substantial to the discussion instead of this shoddy attempt at mccarthysim.
And trusting Russian intelligence sources and the new breed of academic 'useful idiot' cooperatives is any better?
Russian run IO social media accounts have started spreading news about an "eminent false flag" attack in Syria 3 weeks ago this is exactly the same pattern that we've seen on several of the attacks before specifically to all attacks that were eventually attributed to the Syrian government.
And while you may say that "shouting conspiracy" isn't fruitful neither does spreading it without anything that could be considered even remotely as a shred of any proof.
I don't think people realize how serious this is. For those of us who vividly remember the events leading up to the Iraq invasion, this is extremely unsettling. I can see younger members viewing this as just more tripe from international news or whatever though.
74 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 144 ms ] threadGood grief, how much of a goldfish can you be?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If Assad did do it, then we are simply responding to what he did. If Assad didn't do it, well, it's not the first time our government has lied to us. Either way, this military action will not have much effect on the outcome of the conflict so it's not as if we're messing anything up too bad.
What the government says is only tiny portion of the information we have on any situation.
We also have what 200 other governments say, what academics say, what thousands of different journalists say, what historical precedent says, and what your own logic and intuition says.
Your obedience to the government narrative makes you the perfect tool of those in power.
Chemical weapons inspectors are supposed to be starting their work on the 14th.
And we start bombing with confidence the day of?
Nothing is adding up. LET ALONE THE LEGALITY OF IT.
Sorry, I'm mad.
That's my point. Russia was wrong. And so are we.
Should we have waited for the rule of law there too?
I agree we should disengage from the nation building nonsense Bush and Obama got into, but when Pol Pot copy cats come along, root them out.
Probably not the best example. The "free countries" did nothing about the Khmer Rouge and it was left to post-unification Vietnam to invade Cambodia and clean up the mess.
Vietnam was then sanctioned for its aggressive invasion of a sovereign nation..
We have a rule of law. It's called the Geneva Protocol and Assad violated it!
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency
Now, can you tell me what organization you work for?
It's not that such things don't exist, but they're much less common than people jumping to the conclusion that someone they disagree with isn't posting in good faith. I've written tons about this if you or anyone wants to read more:
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
It happened, and Assad did it, whether or not you believe it.
Russia invaded and bombed Ukraine. Still meddling there, btw.
Think about who is most invested in keeping the west involved. That would be the rebels/al queda/Isis who have been armed and supported by the Saudis and the US to fight Russia and Assad.
It was even tweeted that insurgents were going to stage a chemical attack false flag before it happened:
https://twitter.com/mod_russia/status/973535840646434816?s=1...
Edit: removed personal attack.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I gotta say, I was skeptical of a Trump presidency at first, but when I look at in retrospect so far, things aren’t really all that bad, if you ignore all the media circus around Trump’s character flaws and the stupid election conspiracies, which in the grand scheme don’t matter.
Trump is a random chaotic president, and when his presidency is done the effects of his presidency will linger and new precedents will have been set, some good and some bad, but I think the good will outweigh the bad in more important ways. He is the mutation in the status quo’s DNA.
On the other hand who would benefit from a gas attack? Obviously, the "rebels" (read islamists). They have been losing ground for the past two years and if the US pulled out (which was planned) and a peace settlement is reached then they would lose.
Now consider that the exact same sequence of events happened almost exactly the same time last year -- the US announced that "regime change is no longer a priority" and a few days later we saw reports of a gas attack. See http://www.moonofalabama.org/2018/04/timelines-of-gas-attack...
For the game theory see: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2018/04/from_game_theor....
And I don't care who's good for the sake of this argument. Just get a clue about the actual conditions and effects on the ground if you want to play Game theory.
Assad just got unlucky, because this time the stupid chlorine container fell next room to where plenty of people were, and they had no chance, and the Trump noticed this time, and felt whatever Trump feels, and decided to act.
You can't use skepticism and speculation (meaningfully) without being significantly informed about context, and history of those urban sieges Assad's regime uses. Otherwise your speculation is baseless, nevermind the theory it's based uppon.
A rational actor might not have enough incentive to gas civilians. But a despot who listens to LMFAO and Right Said Fred [1] while his own citizens are shot at his behest? What does he care?
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/mar/14/assad-itunes-e...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/natalierobehmed/2012/03/20/assa...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/16/world/middleeast/syria-do...
The parent is pretty much 9/11 inside job conspiracy level stuff. I just stated a few facts about what happened, and how that contradicts the parent's speculation.
Anyway, whatever. Evidently HN is not a forum for reasonable discussion around this topic, because people don't follow what's happening wrt Syria closely.
EDIT: Let's just say, that this reaction is pretty typical. Almost universally, whenever a chemical attack happens and is reported, we're told that rebels are doing it to themselves as a false flag, to inspire western intervention.
After 40th case of rebels successfully throwing canisters with chlorine upon themselves from helicopters they don't have, to inspire intervention that never happened in the last 7 years or didn't bring anything good,... it gets ridiculous...
The problem is that anyone who doesn't watch closely, only sees this one medialized case in MSM, and thinks that false flag somehow may make sense. And "why would Assad use chlorine?" pops up, when it's docummented he uses it regularly.
My opinion is not as fringe as you make it to be. It's true that there are consensus from politicians and the media about what happened but that doesn't necessarily mean it's the truth. In fact, respectable academics are looking at this from scientific point-of-view and coming to the same conclusion.
Here is a UK professor applying probablity theory to understand the weight of the evidence for the alternative explanation in the alleged gas attacks in 2017 and 2013: https://timhayward.wordpress.com/2017/08/31/who-is-responsib...
You are also ignoring the IO that russia is been running which is essentially a carbon copy what they used to run during the cold war, only considerably more amplified and effective these days.
I'm actually frightened by the fact that there are now links here to what is an unquestionably a new breed of academic UIC's now I thought the last of these died shortly after the wall fell.
The other half of this thread is a conspiracy.
http://www.dw.com/en/syria-rebels-evacuate-douma-under-new-a...
On your point in Douma, the deal to evacuate was reached two weeks ago (about 10 days befoe the alleged attacks) https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/...
So it's more likely that the attack is false flag last ditch effort one. We all know that the civilians that the "rebels" hold are hostages. Even the article you cite says this much.
Considering Russia went on a conspiracy theory blitz from the get go which started about 3 weeks prior to the recent attack it follows the same pattern as 2 previous attack with high confidence of attribution to Syrian government or what is left of it since Russia and Iran are running the show now.
It’s quire scary just how efficient their information warfare has become.
Shouting "consipracy" as loud as you can doesn't make you sound smart and it's not an argument. Try reasoning about this and bring something substantial to the discussion instead of this shoddy attempt at mccarthysim.
Russian run IO social media accounts have started spreading news about an "eminent false flag" attack in Syria 3 weeks ago this is exactly the same pattern that we've seen on several of the attacks before specifically to all attacks that were eventually attributed to the Syrian government.
And while you may say that "shouting conspiracy" isn't fruitful neither does spreading it without anything that could be considered even remotely as a shred of any proof.