Iran blowing up Nevatim airbase (where US shipments of bombs mostly came in) is a moral victory regardless of their reasons. Better use of their power than helping Assad treat his own citizens in a slightly-less monstrous way than what’s been done to Gaza. Reminds me a bit of when Trump struck Syrian airbases actually.

Also a show-y, escalatory move from a morally dubious power but nevertheless was appreciated by us who actually live in this region and know people slaughtered in merciless airstrikes.

I don’t get why you guys view it this way. They, as Russians, are being utilized by the state and expended in a war of conquest that was initiated by an autocratic leader. The nation has paid a steep economic cost for it. That’s hard fact.

But it’s also hard fact that their Russian nation is gaining territory. It is true that their country doesn’t control its strategic environment, their historic rivals in America and Western Europe. It is true that the last time they let these rivals lead them somewhere, it was to national decline and humilation.

So yes, it is a tragedy, but the same one that characterizes the history of nations, and there is a rational element to the ideology that so many Russians now follow. The danger is the irrational element which turns this nationalist war into a racial or religious crusade, which are present but in my view not dominant.

How many? Because at this point Israel has proven that less than ten were “Hamas terrorists”, and only one of those was proven to be an actual combatant and not just a desk jockey.

Isn’t that Greece? Spain just pays non-black North Africans to beat and herd them away.

Having friends that donated money to the Christchurch mass killer and that really wanted to “meet him and drink a coffee if he visits Vienna one day”.

Can you link me to an article about tbis? My contention is that Anders Breivik was just ahead of his time. Europe’s turning ugly.

“Limited operation.”

“Well they have to stay to prevent threats from reconstituting.”

“The settlers are just unfortunate extremists.”

“Today, I recognize the Litani as sovereign Israeli territory…”

“Learn your lesson: if you attack Israel it will get bigger. FAFO.”

“Lebanon is attacking innocent defenseless Jews in Israel’s Litani region! What revanchism! They’re stuck in the past! We must prevent the Holocaust!”

“Limited operation.”

Hezbollah is hostile because Israel keeps massacring, jailing, blockading and depriving of rights their ally. Actually now they’re committing a genocide against it.

Actually (and inconveniently), both the violence and the settlements most resemble the French in Algeria. One of the least discussed

“Terrorist” is the worst defined, most expansive and arbitrary applied legal term. It essentially means “non-state actor hostile to us or our friends.”

Notice that the US didn’t enter WW2 until it was attacked at Pearl Harbor.

That should he a point of shame, not pride. And it rings rather hollow to refer to a “Chechen genocide” when you’re someone who thinks Gaza isn’t one.

We can’t call out people for an accusation you can’t really prove. Unless you’re arguing that all militaries and militias should have all of their combatant and non-combatant agencies away from the population centers they have to defend.

Not a single rocket fired into Israel has been from Beirut.

“What does it have to do with America?” - you in 1939

Liberal delusions from boom times are giving way to the cultural, political and economic contradictions of globalization in a world of nation-states.

I’ve come to believe with strong conviction (rare for me as a skeptical person) that there is no redemption to be found in Washington, and that the American Congress would gladly see Beirut, Damascus, Amman, Tehran, Baghdad and countless other cities wiped off the map if it means continued Judeo-Christian self-glorification and strategic stranglehold over the region. The solution now and forever is for the region to make that too costly, and that can only happen if there is a viable alternative to American power in the region or self-reliance by the Arab states. Neither of which appear to be forthcoming in the next decade. Maybe after.

Hyperconservative religious zealots of the kind who refuse to learn a new language aren’t even a majority in the nations these people come from. The “religious fucks who don’t learn the language” are small population which detracts from the millions who already have. Go look up the statistics on Syrians in Germany. The only people not learning the language are those who were already old when they got there.

No… the alternative already exists, which is to put up with people who “stick out.”

I am - it doesn’t seem all that apocalyptic. If you take the Syrian population, it’s a huge improvement. Besides the typical issues associated with taking a big refugee population like that, I’d say the biggest issue was that ISIS was still highly active.

Trust me, we in this region know exactly what Trump means by “run the government like a business” - it means superficial transactionalism. I was living in the Gulf during his presidency, and everyone knew the Saudis were trying to buy him on the cheap LOL! In fact, that’s why some people in the region want him back, hoping that his unpredictablility, stubbornness, contempt and seeming aversion to getting the US into a war may actually lead him to snub Israel or at the least make it reconsider whether the US would follow it into a regional war. As it stands, I can’t blame them for thinking that. You cannot imagine the rage and anxiety that this latest massacre of Lebanese by Israel has created.

What do you do if - let’s assume- integration is proven to require a generation? If you have large migrations, they will lead to ethnic enclaves, which means the strongest point of integration will be when the children of the migrants enter the education system.

Uh, no it’s not a technical term.

I don’t know what you mean by “technical” here. There are several contexts where it is used academically. For example, here in Turkey the term is pretty ubiquitous when discussing the 80s ultranationalist, anti-communist state bureaucracy. It’s certainly in several of the English language political and international relations glossaries I’ve read.

I don’t dispute that US politics is complicated and has many democratically elected players who shape policy. That’s why I put “deep state” in quotations, because the concept fits much more loosely when discussing US foreign policy bureaucracy.

After all, when Trump got in, he fired a whole lot of State Department workers, raising fears that he was crippling it by removing indispensable experts. But what’s interesting is that his move was considered unprecedented, which sort of goes to prove the point that these individuals are embedded into US foreign policy and kept on as a matter of necessity or simplicity even if their overall strategic and moral outlook is detrimental to US interests and the world.

Not that Trump made any improvements, he just replaced them with incompetents, extremists and yes-men.

And you’re right, it was Ben Rhodes who coined “the blob”. No need to be rude, my point still stands. I am not a Trump supporter at all. His administration was a collosal failure for the Mid East’s future, but unfortunately the current crop of Democrats have taken after him on nearly all issues - from JCPOA to normalizing MBS to letting Israel run amok.