West's intervention in the middle east - net positive or negative?

Thanks. It most certainly seems it was a slip of the tongue
Every other sentence Obama says is all about combating ISIS
He probably meant that they've been supporting the FSA forces (although that hasn't gone particularly well TBH).

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-34486572

...what did he likely mean to say then?

Depends on what specific intervention we're talking about. Western bombing of ISIS has been a lot more positive than, for example, the original Iraq invasion in 2003, or western countries supplying Syrian rebels with weapons.

Iraq 1991 - Operation Desert Shield/Storm: Totally justifiable as Iraq marched into Kuwait purely to gain control of its oil.

Afghanistan 2001 - Totally justified after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. ISAF forces with the Northern Alliance routed the Taliban & actually had the country under control in the early years (it certainly seems this way from material I've read/seen).

Iraq 2003 - The whole WMD issue was a massive intelligence cock up at best, downright lies at worst. The invasion itself went swimmingly & the idea behind removing Saddam is one I can actually agree with. The aftermath was a cluster though. I can still remember George W Bush standing on an aircraft carrier proclaiming "Mission Accomplished" & pretty much inviting jihadists to attack Coalition forces there. The country has been tethering on the edge of Shia vs Sunni civil war since.
Terrorist groups quickly started using IEDs & other asymmetrical tactics against Coalition forces which caused far heavier causalities than the invasion did. To make matters worse, the Taliban started copying these tactics & far too many resources were pumped into Iraq which could have been used to secure Afghanistan.

Libya 2011 - Once again the idea to remove Gaddafi I can support. Once again the military side of Operation Ellamy was a success despite cuts to the UK armed forces. Once again far too little effort was put into the plan for afterwards.
So we'll probably have to clean up the mess in the next couple of years.

Iraq/Syria 2014 onwards - Both Assad & ISIS are evil. ISIS however pose a far greater threat to the West & should be destroyed. Would they have risen in Iraq if the Coalition didn't invade in 2003? Probably not. The fact is the war against ISIS is being won & the ceasefire in Syria is holding. The jury is still out though.

(ignore the title of the video, or at least ignore the word "finally"



...do you want me to refer you to countries like chad, eritrea, turkmenistan, uzbekistan, syria, etc? there are similar non-nuclear dictatorships out there.

and how is my argument even remotely comparable to that?! I am telling you that you can't say that a country harming its citizens necessitates military interventions, because a) why should we sacrifice our soldiers in return for non-citizens? and b) why should we spend money fighting for another country's population?



as if this isn't basically stirring up a hornet's nest or inviting "blow back".

I'm rather confused how you've managed to say that the Yanks have directly given weapons to ISIS. That source seems to say that ISIS has captured US made weapons from other groups or been traded to them by other rebel groups. You can't really blame the Americans for that.

You are so brainwashed by western imperialism it's unreal

To the OP, I think we should never have got involved, we should wall off them all and especially turkey while they burn in their sharia utopia. Let them destroy each other

It's hard to tell how bad the region would have been without Western intervention, so I'm not sure it's really possible to answer this question. In some respects it has been positive, in others less so. For example, it has driven the Taliban out of Afghanistan and is effectively fighting against the IS in Syria/Iraq, but it has also fostered instability and extremism.


How have you come to that conclusion?

Saddam's invasion of Iran (which has more oil reserves than Iraq) failed in 1988. Saddam then managed to annex Kuwait, but to 'control the majority of the world's oil supply' he'd have needed to then annex Saudi and the UAE and even then they would have had a third at best.

We aren't world police, not our business. That's like saying it would have been ok to invade Russia for invading Georgia. Oh wait we didn't because we only pick on the weak.

Forget extradition treaties right? Just invade an entire country just to capture one guy then execute him without trial.

Saddam was keeping the region together, removing him was idiotic. His methods were brutal but they worked. Not like our current best friends the Saudis are any better.

Gaddaffi did absolutely nothing wrong. He improved his country massively, rarely attacked anyone (I believe his last war was against Chad in 1987) and in recent years was actually working with the West on issues such as improving Africa, stopping terrorism and controlling immigrants. The West just had a grudge for him over wanting to control his own oil, being outspoken against the West and that one airplane bombing that he allegedly did.

Assad isn't evil. he's just a run of the mill dictator, not particularly brutal but keeps things together. Most of his country actually supports him, that's why he's still in power.

What I dislike about the left wing is their belief that anti-West = evil. What have these so called monsters actually done that is evil? Mass executions? We have allies that do this all the time. Furthermore it's their country, their laws. We should butt out.

Meh rhetoric, still it is believed he has eyes on the Saudi oil fields too, so would have had a large % of the world's oil supply. An unpalatable outcome.

saddam couldnt take iran with most of the world behind him and iran in chaos after just going through a revolution and having sanctions against it

the reason most of the world backed iraq despite them being the aggressors against iran was that they were scared that iran would win and spread their islamist revolution to iraq, so they couldnt let iran win

what makes you think he could have then taken saudi, to which none of the above applies?

I can understand why you'd like to keep a laissez faire foreign policy & I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing keeping away from trouble. Sometimes dictators need to be put back in their box - Saddam invaded Kuwait for their oil and because he was about $14 billion in debt due to the Iran/Iraq war. This isn't the 19th Century anymore so I don't think anyone should just be able to invade another nation just because of greed.

The whole Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm was fully supported by the UN (even the USSR agreed) and probably saw the biggest Coalition since the Second World War. I wouldn't say that's being a global policeman. I'd say it's standing up to a bully who just attacked a kid.

You forget that the Iraqi military was actually large and well equipped in 1991 (its Army was the 5th largest in the world & was battle hardened after the conflict with Iran). Coalition military planners were geniuine worried that we'd take very heavy casualties & Saddam, perhaps unrealistically, was aiming to turn the battle into the next Vietnam. With hindsight we now know that the majority of Iraqi troops, like the rest of the Iraqi people, were poorly treated & didn't particularly want to fight for Saddam.
Meanwhile the West had been training for an all out war in Europe against the Soviets for about 40yrs. Out equipment & doctrine was all set up for a temperate climate (Germany) & was more about preventing thousands of Soviet tanks from punching through our lines rather than advancing into another nation.




It doesn't sound like the Taliban really listen to extradition treaties. If someone killed 3,000 UK citizens I'd expect the government to react. I certainly don't blame the USA for doing the same. It's no different to what happened in 1941 except that Pearl Harbour was a military target.
There was a large international concensus at the time and that NATO would back up the USA.



I wouldn't say any of those dictators are friends of the West and we shouldn't be supporting them in my opinion. However I do think you've got a point about leaving them alone. Unfortunately most of the Middle East isn't particularly interested in democracy - whether this is down to religion or just unfamiliarity with democracy (probably both) and combined with the fact that you're always going to upset some of the local population when you're invading/liberating them means that there's a good chance an insurgency will occur.
It doesn't help that the West has made bad judgment calls & mistakes in certain areas. In 2003 Coalition forces were actually welcomed with open arms by most of the population. In 2011 an American F-15E crashed in Libya and the villagers treated the pilots as liberators. It's no secret that the West has excellent firepower but we do still seem to lack the knowhow when it comes to rebuilding a nation (as Iraq, Afghanistan & Libya have shown).
Trust me, I'm not left wing .