Syria

Cresselia~~

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With the current problems in Syria, and that USA, UK and France has joined forces to have war against Syria and Russia...
Are you scared?
Do you think that it will lead to World War III?
Or do you feel the media is only scare mongering?
Or do you think it will just end up being a small war like the Iraq war when Bush was president?
 
If anything really happens over this, it's probably Russia fucking with Ukraine again. Russia is pretty unlikely to openly retaliate against US, UK, or France, and Syria basically can't. I mean, really, I find it really unlikely that Russia goes to war against the US and, by extension, probably the UK and France, over Syria.
 

Tera Melos

Banned deucer.
The weirdest thing I've seen about the conflict is people blaming Trump...like France and the UK didn't lead this....like Obama never drone striked Syria...
 
I'm personally terrified. Not because war, because that's an inevitable, but because if an actual big war goes up in the air, half the people I know are at risk, not to mention the risk of escalation and further bombing. Shits just all over the place.
 

HailFall

my cancer is sun and my leo is moon
The weirdest thing I've seen about the conflict is people blaming Trump...like France and the UK didn't lead this....like Obama never drone striked Syria...
Because the US has no business getting involved in this and trump has a long long history of poor decision making.
 

Tera Melos

Banned deucer.
Because the US has no business getting involved in this and trump has a long long history of poor decision making.
Trump has the longest history of poor decision making probably ever


But Obama was pretty involved with drone strikes as well. And France and the UK have been at Syria for a while now. The point is Trump didn't call up the UN and say "I had Syria let's bomb them."
 

OLD GREGG (im back baby)

old gregg for life
I might be very wrong!

With that out of the way ...I personally think that WW3 will be fought with new weapons. The causalities and useless death of the past will stay where it belongs. This is not to imply that I believe the Syria conflict will evolve into ww3 but just in case it does....

All I know is that another "world war" with nuclear weapons will be devastating and not just the location the nukes hit...

Einstein said ww4 will be fought with sticks and stones and I am prone to agree.
 

Surgo

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Or do you feel the media is only scare mongering?
The media has been pushing this war pretty hard. I don't normally like to talk about "the media" as an aggregate entity but this is one of the few cases where it really fits. Whenever any rumbling is made about pulling out, the media starts going into detail about Syrian atrocities.

It's not lying, unlike the Bush years where they just parroted what came out of the administration without doing even the minimal amount of verification as to whether it was true or not. In this case images of children that were killed by chemical weapons are quite real. But they were equally real back in January, and it's not until a talk of deescalation that they start showing up at all on Fox News.
 

apt-get

it's not over 'til it's over
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The string of events currently happening, with the hard propaganda being spread around, reminds me a bit of 2003, except this time people seem to think they're too smart and well-informed to be the victim of state disinformation.
I guess we're supposed to believe that every single missile sent by US/UK/France hit their target, as they claim, even when we have photo evidence that Storm Shadow missiles were downed, multiple videos of AA getting successful hits, or that 70 Tomahawk missiles hit this research center when the damage looks closer to what 7-10 of them might do. A research center which was repeatedly inspected by the OPCW (with their last visit to date being last November), with no kind of chemical weapon found every time.
Funny how sites where every missile was intercepted were excluded from any pro-coalition report, resulting in only 3 bombing sites being reported, or how journalists can apparently "smell" traces of CWs off the backpacks of schoolchildren somewhere in Northern Syria, 700km away from Douma where it supposedly happened... or how the French analysis on the attack, which they hyped up for days before the strikes as "irrefutable proof that the regime did it", basically amounts to "we saw videos on social media like facebook and twitter proving the attack happened, assumed that the rebels couldn't false flag anything since they don't have enough money, and since Assad is their enemy he must be responsible".
The UK and US representatives at the UN security council couldn't even keep the same narrative yesterday, with Nikki Haley talking about sarin while Karen Pierce spoke about chlorine (somehow delivered through barrel bombs as well, since chemical weapons obviously don't need specialized pressurized canisters or anything like that).
Yet we're supposed to believe them about anything else?
You might say that there's no regime change attempt or potential boots on the ground happening here, but the only reason there isn't is because western countries already attempted it from 2011-2015 (open support to jihadist rebels accounting for billions and billions of dollars), and when that failed, they switched strategy and are currently going for a balkanization of the country and intentional crippling of Syria's sovereignty.
But I suppose I'm just part of the 2000% increase in russian trolls over the last 24 hours, as if that's somehow quantifiable... hearing the word troll coming from a pentagon spokesman will never be not funny, though.
 
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Surgo

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To add on to that 2000% increase figure mentioned by apt-get: after getting that hilarious misattribution of the Sony hack to North Korea, I don't really believe anything internet-related that comes from government mouthpieces anymore. When they're not lying, they're just straight up inept.
 

TheValkyries

proudly reppin' 2 superbowl wins since DEFLATEGATE
The World Continues to enjoy the order brought to us by "Pax Americana".
 
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TheValkyries

proudly reppin' 2 superbowl wins since DEFLATEGATE
Sykes-Picot Agreement don't real, literally any kind of suffering in the world can be directly attributed to America because my sociology professor told me so, suck it blurmphft
This is a very good post because I literally said not a single thing even remotely talking about any of what you just responded to. Like this isn’t your average strawman attack. This is high tier grade A triple plus fabrication. Then to attribute my made up bad opinions to my non-existent sociology professor because I’m incapable of independent thought is a simply inspired play. And, cherry on top, you've even gave me a stupid voice with bad grammar and all!!!

Grats to you on such a blistering success. I got got, folks.
 

Shrug

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Wars shape America domestically in ways pleasing to those who run the country. What's surprising is the speed with which Bolton and friends managed to shift from the ISA's carefully built panic about North Korea and make that war Middle Eastern. The pretenses are thinner than the last time. Unfortunately we won't see hangings on the national mall even knowing how horrid this will be.
 

termi

bike is short for bichael
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Nice meme but honestly not a whole lot of destruction took place, a few symbolic bombs aren't doing any real damage to Assad. Using chemical weapons isn't necessarily a bad move on Assad's end (strategically speaking, not morally). One of the best ways to win a war is to break your opponent's will to resist. Showing that you have access to and the will to use chemical weaponry is a good way of making your opponent think twice about resisting when a horrific death for them and their family lies in the wait. Assad has no goodwill to gain at this point, his domestic supporters won't abandon him over a few more attacks on his own people (especially when they can simply choose to believe that these attacks never took place), his international allies care more about Assad's value as an ally on a geopolitical scale than about what Assad does domestically, and everyone's sided against Assad isn't going to be convinced anyway. In other words, gas attacks were a perfectly reasonable option for Assad.

Now of course, you could argue that he risked retribution by performing gas attacks and that those retributions did, in fact, happen, but I don't think the risk was that great. Considering Assad's found himself a powerful ally in Russia, the "West" would be off its rocker to risk a world war over some silly gas attacks. The West has consciously let many atrocities slide by or even actively contributed to them in the past, so there was no reason to "punish" Assad for this unless there was something in it for them. In this case, my guess is that the USA/France/UK used this opportunity to bolster the popularity of the status quo - cynical as it may be, warmongering can do pretty well in the polls, especially when you give it a veneer of justice. In other words, if Assad knows his geopolitics, he knows that the West can't go far beyond symbolic attacks because if they take things too far they act against their own self-interest. As a result, we have seen a relatively harmless couple of attacks that were announced in advance, to which Russia responded with a wag of the finger and not much else. At this point Assad will probably exercise more caution with chemical weaponry just to play it safe, but otherwise he's basically free to terrorize his people in any way he wants.
 

apt-get

it's not over 'til it's over
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Nice meme but honestly not a whole lot of destruction took place, a few symbolic bombs aren't doing any real damage to Assad. Using chemical weapons isn't necessarily a bad move on Assad's end (strategically speaking, not morally). One of the best ways to win a war is to break your opponent's will to resist. Showing that you have access to and the will to use chemical weaponry is a good way of making your opponent think twice about resisting when a horrific death for them and their family lies in the wait.[/spoiler]
You don't use chemical weapons when conventional weaponry has already netted you a capitulation in eastern ghouta. The rebels' will is already broken, the population doesn't really enjoy living under Jaysh Al Islam's salafist rule, and the fighters get green bus'd to Idlib anyway, so there's no one to punish (and it's not really in the gov's habit to do that, considering how many reconciliation treaties they've already signed with various pockets).

There's no reason to endanger yourself on the international scale to "break the will" of some rebels you're already rampaging through at this point of the war.
 

Surgo

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Assad's been using chemical weapons continuously since at least last year. He probably assumes that if it didn't cause any problems then, it won't suddenly start causing problems now.
 

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