TheReal_ND wrote:The dude practiced in London. He didn't even want to go back to Syria. He's acting westernized and polished because he is.
He's about as Westernized as Stalin was. There's a link from Marxism to Baathism, and Marx was certainly a Westerner and Marxism was a Western invention, so...from that perspective, sure, you could say he's Westernized. Just not Westernized in the sense of having modern, democratic values and holding notions of individual civil rights that most modern and current Westerners sympathize with.
Ph64 wrote:He was trained as an opthalmologist, so eye Dr, not dentist.
Oh...I see...Well, you English speakers really should just call them "eye doctor" and "tooth doctors", instead.
StA wrote:Compared to our so-called allies like Saudi Arabia, Assad is a saint. It's risible that people will turn a blind eye to Saudi Arabia or Pakistan and then use some made-up stoties to justify war with one of the few Muslims actually fighting ISIS.
Agree, to an extent. Ideologically, Syria and the Assad regime is -
relatively speaking - closer to us in terms of ideologies and values. It's not even a year ago that a Shiite cleric in SA got put to death for writing anti-government propaganda, people still get executed for witchcraft in SA and SA's the main distributor of the same school of Islam as ISIS and Al Queda to both the rest of the Muslim world, but also funding Wahhabist Islamic schools and mosques in Europe and the US. Syria is Baathist, an ideology that combines Arab Nationalism with Marxism and Islam. That's not excatly a recipe for respect of civil rights, either. But at least Nationalism and Marxism is more familiar to most of us.
But, if you have to ally with seriously nasty people to advance US interests, the Assad dynasty torturing and executing anti-government dissidents without a trial isn't too big of a leap and might in the macro-sense be more beneficial to US interests, for all I know. I know I prefer the Syrian Democratic Council over the Assad regime, but it looks like they appear to be as interested in good relations with Russia as in good relations with the US, so I can't tell how beneficial they'd be to advance US interests.
What
I keep objecting, though, is this notion or idea that
because you ally with a nasty regime, that you somehow
need to portray them as "the good guys" and their opponents as either "the bad guys", or that you simply stay categorically silent on anything that makes them look bad.
What I'd want you to instead reject, as a person, is the notion that you - as a private citizen - have to "stand up" to your allies if they become your allies, ignoring all their human rights abuses, tyranny, etc. The US
government currently does this with Saudi Arabia and the next administration will - in all likelihood continue this alliance, despite all the human rights NGO's trying to get the government, media and public's attention to that fact that some of your allies are deeply, deeply shitty people. But you are not your government. Just like you don't buy the Bush/Obama/Trump bullshit about Saudi Arabia as your best, highly respected allies, you should not assume that the
opposite of allying with Saudi Arabia must be true. It's the Middle East, they're all shit. It's just a question of which shits you should tolerate and what benefits there are to allying with them.
From a purely foreign policy standpoint, though: It doesn't
matter that your allies are shitty people, with pure, Satan-spawned evil in their hearts, as long as they advance US interests, as long as they make the US stronger or at least help
keep the US strong. Propping up nasty regimes abroad may backfire, ok sure, but with some skill you can prop up friendly regimes in a more effective, long-term manner than what you historically have done in the past in Latin America and the ME.
If the public is unhappy with those deals made with evil, foreign US-friendly regimes.... vote for some other guy next time. Your problem is that both Bush jr., Obama and Trump promised less foreign interventionism, yet all of them reneged on that. They say that because they know you want to hear it, and that's it. If you want a
moral foreign interventionism, all you can do is hope the next one of two candidates in the next election isn't full of shit. Or you could accept that the US, like every other government in every other country in all of history, has to make deals with nasty people in order to project their power and influence as far as possible.
Fame is not flattery. Respect is not agreement.
