'World's Policeman' ramps up pressure on Syria

Please watch the video, It's 5 minutes long and is pretty interesting

So the posturing over the events in the Middle East is being notched up a little more, and Russia Today have also been showing this piece on their news channel most of the day.

Seems that some pieces are being moved into position and something pretty big is on the horizon.


Do America: World police, have the authority to choose which regimes are legitimate and which aren't?

Are the motives purely altruistic and are the allies in the middle east on board?

A video which explores those questions.

Syria is stepping up security measures, closing off areas and setting up checkpoints across the country ahead of nationwide anti-government protests. Damascus has ordered troops not to fire on opposition, after dozens were reportedly killed by snipers. Activists on the ground put the deathtoll from the two-month uprising at 800. Several countries have strongly criticised the Syrian government for the brutal crackdown. Washington is seemingly debating whether the 11-year rule of president Bashar al-Assad is lawful. And as RT's Gayane Chichikyan reports, many believe the U.S. is laying the foundations for drastic action against the regime.

rt.com...

When condemning government atrocities in different countries in the Middle East and North Africa, the US claims the higher moral ground – declaring human rights as the basis for its involvement. But the critic says this is a smokescreen for the real reason for interference.

“There is no such thing [morality] in the DNA of US foreign policy. It is all power and economics. Morality? How could they speak of such a thing in the Middle East when they fully support Saudi Arabia,” says author William Blum

Originally posted by blupblup

Do America: World police, have the authority to choose which regimes are legitimate and which aren't?

No, but the central banks in the UK and the bank mafia in the US can.

Originally posted by marg6043

Originally posted by blupblup

Do America: World police, have the authority to choose which regimes are legitimate and which aren't?

No, but the central banks in the UK and the bank mafia in the US can.

Well those aren't exactly my words lol, more the words and questions posed in the video.... you should check it out, It's very interesting.


But yes you're right.... Profit and & money are king.

reply to post by blupblup


Yes I know, but taking into consideration how well has previous regime change has gone when US gets involved and the ramifications that it had for private corporate interest, I could not hold my self making sarcastic comments.

reply to post by marg6043



Oh I know, you're spot on

A few more interesting links, more goings on, pieces of the puzzle....


Missile row...

www.reuters.com...



American anti-missile shield in Romania / Dmitry Rogozin: the plan is a Trojan horse

english.hotnews.ro... he-plan-trojan-horse.htm



Bin Laden's Death Leaves Russia With Strategic Void

www.worldpoliticsreview.com...

Originally posted by marg6043

Originally posted by blupblup

Do America: World police, have the authority to choose which regimes are legitimate and which aren't?

No, but the central banks in the UK and the bank mafia in the US can.

Yeah since it's more fun to sit back with a bowl of popcorn and watch as people are murdered. so yeah lets do nothing.

Originally posted by Ancient Champion

Yeah since it's more fun to sit back with a bowl of popcorn and watch as people are murdered. so yeah lets do nothing.

edit on 13-5-2011 by Ancient Champion because: Typo

But what is the criteria for an "intervention"?

There are many governments and dictators murdering and imprisoning their own people and have been for years... what makes the US/UK/whoever get involved?

Did you watch the video?


Is it altruism or is it something else...

Originally posted by blupblup

Originally posted by Ancient Champion

Yeah since it's more fun to sit back with a bowl of popcorn and watch as people are murdered. so yeah lets do nothing.

edit on 13-5-2011 by Ancient Champion because: Typo

But what is the criteria for an "intervention"?

There are many governments and dictators murdering and imprisoning their own people and have been for years... what makes the US/UK/whoever get involved?

Did you watch the video?


Is it altruism or is it something else...

lol yep lets just watch as they are murdered..who cares right.

reply to post by blupblup


so, how about a real reply? :-)

There are many governments and dictators murdering and imprisoning their own people and have been for years... what makes the US/UK/whoever get involved?

Necessity, gain and henpecking

It seems the hens are in charge of altruism

I’m mostly kidding. I say mostly because it sounds a little sexist if I don’t (and because I know it isn’t really true). But for right now, I’m pretending it’s true.

I remember the Rwanda genocide – I spent every day of that spring into summer reading about it in the paper – listening to the radio and watching it on TV – not believing that something like that could actually happen.

The waterways were log jammed at times with floating corpses – there was so much death. Day after day after day... weeks went by, then months. A nightmare.

Each day I waited for my president – the one I voted for – to do something. He did absolutely nothing. What kind of explanation is there for something like that – besides the fact that Rwanda wasn’t our concern, and who gives a crap about Africa?

from an interesting essay in the Atlantic by Samantha Power:

A few years later, in a series in The New Yorker, Philip Gourevitch recounted in horrific detail the story of the genocide and the world's failure to stop it. President Bill Clinton, a famously avid reader, expressed shock. He sent copies of Gourevitch's articles to his second-term national-security adviser, Sandy Berger. The articles bore confused, angry, searching queries in the margins. "Is what he's saying true?" Clinton wrote with a thick black felt-tip pen beside heavily underlined paragraphs. "How did this happen?" he asked, adding, "I want to get to the bottom of this." The President's urgency and outrage were oddly timed. As the terror in Rwanda had unfolded, Clinton had shown virtually no interest in stopping the genocide, and his Administration had stood by as the death toll rose into the hundreds of thousands.

www.theatlantic.com...

Seriously - Mr. President?

more recently, from his wife:
blogs.abcnews.com...

“Imagine we were sitting here and Benghazi,” the Libyan opposition forces’ stronghold, “had been overrun, a city of 700,000 people, and tens of thousands of people had been slaughtered, hundreds of thousands had fled and, as Bob [Gates] said, either with nowhere to go or overwhelming Egypt while it's in its own difficult transition.  And we were sitting here, the cries would be, why did the United States not do anything?” she said

from the same article:

The New York Times reported that Clinton, along with National Security aide Samantha Power and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice, helped convince President Obama to take action on Libya. Rice, who worked on the National Security Council for President Clinton during the genocide in Rwanda, in which up to a million people were slaughtered, has expressed regret for not doing more to encourage intervention to stop the killing. Powers, formerly a journalist, wrote the seminal book on U.S. non-intervention during massive humanitarian crises.

Well, it’s a good story – I like it – and like I said, I’m going to pretend it’s true. It makes me feel better.

The White House vehemently denied that Clinton, Powers and Rice were instrumental in pushing the President to approve the Libya intervention.

Of course it did :-)
another perspective:

In trying to understand why the Obama Administration has intervened in Libya, it may be helpful to re-read Samantha Power's 2001 essay in the Atlantic on Rwanda.

Susan Rice, Clarke's co-worker on peacekeeping at the NSC, also feels that she has a debt to repay. "There was such a huge disconnect between the logic of each of the decisions we took along the way during the genocide and the moral consequences of the decisions taken collectively," Rice says. "I swore to myself that if I ever faced such a crisis again, I would come down on the side of dramatic action, going down in flames if that was required."

I read Power's essay a few years ago and, while Power makes a strong case for intervention in Rwanda, I had some of the same questions reading it then that I do watching the administration's policy unfold on Libya. Some questions were strategic: What would the end state have been? Would U.S. military intervention have helped or have exacerbated drivers of conflict? (How do we know?) Other questions, meanwhile, were tactical: How would we have resupplied a parachute infantry battalion after 72 hours? How would we have conducted casualty evacuations in a land-locked African country? What about other contingency plans? What if our forces came under attack? What would have been their rules of engagement?

In the end, the sheer amount of deliberate planning and rehearsals you have to do in order to execute a proper military operation with clear and defined objectives mean policy makers cannot intervene as quickly and decisively as they would otherwise like. Confronted with a 24-hour news cycle, that must be frustrating for elected officials, but trust me, it is no where near as frustrating as being a platoon leader on the ground unsure of his commander's intent, thousands of miles from home, and responsible for 35 lives.

www.cnas.org...
I actually think that’s a fair view. But feasibility doesn’t really factor into it – because nobody was aware that a genocide was happening. Apparently.

more from the essay by Samantha Power:

One of the most thoughtful analyses of how the American system can remain predicated on the noblest of values while allowing the vilest of crimes was offered in 1971 by a brilliant and earnest young foreign-service officer who had just resigned from the National Security Council to protest the 1970 U.S. invasion of Cambodia. In an article in Foreign Policy, "The Human Reality of Realpolitik," he and a colleague analyzed the process whereby American policymakers with moral sensibilities could have waged a war of such immoral consequence as the one in Vietnam. They wrote,

The answer to that question begins with a basic intellectual approach which views foreign policy as a lifeless, bloodless set of abstractions. "Nations," "interests," "influence," "prestige"—all are disembodied and dehumanized terms which encourage easy inattention to the real people whose lives our decisions affect or even end.

Policy analysis excluded discussion of human consequences. "It simply is not done," the authors wrote. "Policy—good, steady policy—is made by the 'tough-minded.' To talk of suffering is to lose 'effectiveness,' almost to lose one's grip. It is seen as a sign that one's 'rational' arguments are weak."

Did you watch the video?

I did. I thought it was a little judgey :-)

so, the Russians have doubts about our true motives, our sincerity and sense of altruism? That’s rich...

BISHKEK, April 8 (Reuters) - Kyrgyzstan's self-proclaimed new leadership said on Thursday that Russia had helped to oust President Kurmanbek Bakiyev, and that they aimed to close a U.S. airbase that has irritated Moscow.

"We agreed that my first deputy and the republic's former prime minister, Almaz Atambayev, would fly to Moscow and formulate our needs," she told Russian Ekho Moskvy radio.

Putin did not promise a specific sum, she said. "But the fact that he called, spoke nicely, went into detail, asked about details -- generally, I was moved by that. It is a signal."

www.reuters.com...

It IS a signal

...That is why the presence of Russian law enforcement forces should be limited to the bare minimum and assistance should be reduced to consultations and training. Force should only be used if there is a real threat to the overthrow of the interim government and the country’s collapse. But should such a situation emerge, Russia should necessarily resort to force. Otherwise it will lose influence in Kyrgyzstan and the interim government will have to address other countries for help. At the same time, Russia should make it clear that its military force or – which is preferable – CSTO force will be used exclusively for peacekeeping and will be withdrawn from the country immediately after stabilization is achieved there. It is essential that Roza Otunbayeva’s administration avoid the charges that it is being kept alive at the point of Russian bayonets...

eng.globalaffairs.ru...

anyway, how many times can the words ‘self proclaimed’ be used in one news segment before they start to sound silly? :-)

Is it altruism or is it something else...

It’s something else. Probably. Usually. But, if that something else is enough to prevent a genocide...

a deal with the devil, I know

I’d prefer to think we’d go in because we’re just that decent – but I know better

however, that’s just my opinion man... :-)

Originally posted by Ancient Champion
lol yep lets just watch as they are murdered..who cares right.

I absolutely think that we should have involved ourselves in Libya... there would have been a slaughter.

But what about Sri Lanka.... when the Tamil Tigers and Government forces killed tens of thousands of civilians?

The Sri Lankan civil war was very costly, killing an estimated 80,000–100,000 people. The deaths include 27,639 Tamil fighters, more than 23,327 Sri Lankan soldiers and policemen, 1,155 Indian soldiers, and tens of thousands of civilians.

Libya is a civil war right?


We stood by and watched... As the other poster says, what about Rwanda?


What about some of the recent LRA massacres?

Efforts by the Ugandan army in early 2009 ('Operation Lightning Thunder') to inflict a final military defeat on the LRA were not fully successful. Rather, the US-supported operation resulted in brutal revenge attacks by the LRA, with over 1,000 people killed in Congo and Sudan. The military action in the DRC did not result in the capture or killing of Kony, who remained elusive

Interesting there about the "US supported" operation... so we know it's going on, we just choose not get involved to the extent we do in the middle east.

And I know... It would much more difficult to do anything in Africa, so I suppose we should just stand by.



I mean there's always an excuse as to why we WONT involve ourselves, but when we actually DO involve ourselves... It's always because we can't stand by while people are slaughtered... and yet we always do.

reply to post by Spiramirabilis




Well yes exactly, Rwanda was an absolute travesty.
And we did stand by... but there we reasons we stood by, so they say... so I guess that's ok. :shk:

That's a pretty interesting article too.


But yeah I know... as I said in the post up there, I know it's difficult and I know logistics do play a pretty big part, but I think if people/government were truly doing all of this for the very reasons they say they are, then logistics would have nothing to do with it, or at least a hell of a lot less to do with it.

Strategically and practically... we are closer and have people in the area with the Libya situation... so that makes it easier.
And I do get that we literally can't help every country and every oppressed people... but I do find it, just as your article says, annoying when people are hypocrites and say that they cannot stand by and watch a slaughter, while already having stood by and watched a dozen of them.

It's crazy logic.

But as we know... Africa is apparently just a lost cause

Well I know that BP and a Russian Oil Company Rosneft made the deal to explore (Exploit) the Arctic Circle for oil...

So A new "conflict" could be on the horizon.... Russia & NATO


www.guardian.co.uk...