1. Initially I was on the fence, but the more I consider different scenarios, the more the original alarmist takes seem even more wrong than I first suspected. The WW3 stuff is obviously silly, but even the risk of "mere" war seems increasingly unlikely
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4. What's striking to me is that Middle East experts, including (importantly) those from the region, have tended to be *less* alarmist. There's probably a good reason for this—they're less fixated on Trump and less likely to be US-centric in their analysis
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5. It seems fair to assume that one's view of Trump will have some not insignificant impact on how they interpret the fallout from Soleimani's killing. There's nothing wrong with this per se and there's no way to correct for it, but we should at least be aware of that
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6. The left is in a bind, and there's a tension between two impulses. There's anti-imperialism and a (justified) skepticism toward US military action. Then there's a longstanding left tradition of solidarity with the victims of repression and with populations rather than regimes
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7. Too much of the analysis on the left seems to have erred on the side of anti-imperialist critique with insufficient attention to what Iran has actually already been doing—at tremendous human cost to Syrians and to civilian populations in the region more generally
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8. The 2000s, in part because of the Iraq war and the Bush administration's appropriation of democracy promotion, much of the left has become even more uncomfortable than it already was with US "leadership" in the Middle East. This is where the US centrism becomes a problem
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9. Not everything is about us. And not everything is primarily a question of whether the US is, or isn't, using military force. Not everything is about repeating Iraq. Context matters, and understanding what's actually going on in the Middle East matters
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10. The Bush administration used to talk about "moral clarity." The left should be more concerned with *moral consistency,* but our obsession with America's original sin and sometimes even its supposedly inherent badness distorts our not only analysis but our moral assessments
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11. There's no moral equivalence between the US & Iran. The US has done terrible things in the Middle East. That's clear. But to suggest that we're at the rarified level of the deliberate and systematic mass murder that Soleimani helped orchestrate isn't just wrong; it's silly
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Kraj razgovora
Novi razgovor -
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Iran has been very cooperative in Afghanistan and had not waged a full offensive on the US in Iraq or against the Saudi oil industry. The Lebanon-Israel border and the Gaza-Israel frontlines have been quiet. All of these could change very quickly with unpredictable consequences.
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The Gaza-Israel and Lebanese-Israel borders have been not been quiet. Israel has launched 100s of strikes over the border in the North and there are constanst self-defense attacks targeting Hamas/PIJ in the South. All terrorist entities Hezbollah/PIJ/Hamas receive Iranian aid.
- Još 3 druga odgovora
Novi razgovor -
Čini se da učitavanje traje već neko vrijeme.
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