1) Neither did we bomb Russian soldiers or their allies from nearby airports established for the purpose.
You didn't have Russian businesses parking their money in your banks and buying your technologies, nor were your allies doing significant business with them. You also supplied the Afghan resistance with enough weapons to drive the Russians out, and while I personally believe terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda would have emerged under Russian occupation, Pakistani expansionism and Saudi oil sales just the same even without American involvement, trading the USSR's continued imperial expansion for relatively tiny hostile militias seems like a remarkably good deal to me, from a list consisting only of terrible options.
So why not increase the supply of weapons to vetted secularist militias who are actively involved both in fighting ISIS as well as Assad?
3) Good question, and as I pointed out to Schmelzer that's not something the US needs to do in its own interest - and a good excuse to not do it might be welcome in some cynical circles
Well don't label me cynical when you're the one advocating for yawning and doing nothing to save hundreds of thousands of lives and prevent millions of refugees from losing their homeland. It seems we're ultimately agreed though that the US is wasting its time fighting ISIS, if it's only going to make life easier for the Russian-backed terrorists who would eventually have to confront it anyhow.
4) Another good question, with a painful answer that many Americans still refuse to face - although misleadingly put, as it was and is not "Iran" doing the ethnic cleansing. Iran has proved adept at avoiding direct involvement, instead getting its way at the risk and expense (and evildoing) of others.
Same difference. I wasn't attempting to be misleading, as the strings are pulled from Iran either way.
5) Widespread and ongoing campaigns of assault against civilian citizens of several Western nations, including the US - among others.
Hezbollah and its allies are guilty of that too and have killed a far higher number of civilians, assassinated the former Prime Minister of Lebanon and have committed every crime against humanity in the book (including WMD chemical attacks), so why is the US not bombing them as well or punishing them at the UN? Why do you support action against ISIS as the symptom but not the continuous Shiite sectarian cleansing that gives ISIS its greatest raison d'etre, when ISIS will presumably go after Americans either way?
6) I'm sure you didn't really mean to imply that the Syrian government was responsible for the Sunni uprising against the American occupation of Iraq, including the fraction of it that formed in the refugee camps along the Syrian border.
I implied that Assad prolonged the afforementioned uprising and made it dramatically worse. Seems to me that America spent the bulk of its time in Iraq specifically cleaning up that mess and the ones left by Iran's Al Sadr militias, while Iran harboured and assisted top Al Qaeda operatives directly from its own soil, including some of Osama Bin Laden's closest family members. You can't pretend that Assad and ISIS have always been at war; they hardly even fight each other at this very moment when America's mostly long gone from the scene.
7) Tell me about it. America will be paying a heavy price for the Iraq War until this generation is dead, and possibly long after.
Don't change the subject. You'll be paying a massive price for whatever happens in Syria whether you ignore it or not, and building a time machine to stop Bush from invading Iraq won't change that.
Start there, then - those are the longer standing and indisputable claims. Please. We both know that ethnic cleansing and violence are the major refugee factors in Syria, and that "voting" has little to do with the refugee problem.
Syria's refugees are overwhelmingly opposed to Bashar Assad's continuing presidency, so of course it has to do with how they "voted" (or would have voted if they actually had basic rights).
The "two State" solution has little to do with partitioning Israel proper, and nothing to do with the proposed land claims of Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, on Israeli territory.
Let them press their frigging claims then as I already said and press it on whatever territory they think peaceful, nonviolent Palestinian farmers were evicted from, and Israel will press its counterclaims in turn. I must be missing something here, because amongst the dozen other major Russian-created crises in the area, there's a city of 250,000 currently being wiped from the face of the Earth with women and children eating mouthfuls of chlorine and flak, and unless I'm mistaken, it's located hundreds of miles outside Israeli territory. You need to check your damn priorities and stop taking these fucking fights all the way back to the beginnings of human evolution from primates.
Ok I guess if you say so, then the 600,000+ Arab Jews who were forced to migrate to Israel after 1948 did so because they liked Polish pyrogies and Mediterranean weather. Great, go to the UN and tell them "uh, no" like some skater punk, and best of luck to you with that. Personally I care mainly about stopping the existing flow of refugees rather than making them continue to bleed just so we can rejuvenate a 70 year-old fight and have yet more problems to entertain ourselves with.
No, the Israel non-sequitors are all yours this time.
- in a minute the semantics of what we are to term "refugees" will fog what is between Syria and Iraq a clear and recent, even ongoing, issue.
The United States has no interest in seeing Syria under Bashad acquire oil fields in Iraq concomitant with its absorption of refugees during the Iraq Occupation. True?
You're practically the first person I've seen mentioning Iraqi refugees in Syria since 2006. Ok, how many Iraqis and their children are living in Syria right now after being chased out by the Americans? Sure thing, let Bashar Assad claim his 50 acres on their behalf, since ultimately from an international standpoint the land would be transferred to Syria as a "nation", not specifically Assad himself. Still doesn't change the fact that Europe, Canada and the US are owed tens of thousands of square kilometres in territory, if Russia and its allies want to keep the land and don't want to let those refugees return to their homes. I'd rather just stop the refugee problem in its tracks altogether, but if we're not going to do that, then let's at least not be the ones to soak up and scrub Russia's hangover vomit stains.
