Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Do They Ever Listen To What They Are Saying?

I have backed off commenting on political stupidities (I hate election years), but some things are just too rich...

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu had a clear and unified message coming out of their meeting in Washington, D.C. Monday: They are looking for a political solution in Syria and won't consider putting international troops there unless the Syrian regime agrees.

She wants to avoid a civil war, she says, ignoring the civil war that is currently underway, with Assad's troops shooting and shelling civilians daily. She explains that her concept of Smart Diplomacy is to buy Assad a burger and talk it over.

Let's see. If a peace-keeping military force were allowed in, who would they shoot at? Certainly not at Assad's troops: that would be impolite to the gracious host. So they would be restricted to shooting at civilians, acting as extensions of Assad's forces.

And in the meantime they are requesting politely, and maybe offering fries with that burger, that Assad just quit. Yes, that should work. It always works with dictators.

That is their clear and unified message, a marvel of Smart Diplomacy.

2 comments:

FrankNorman said...

The idiocy of using "diplomatic pressure" to try to make a dictator give up power, is that there is little they could threaten him with, that would actually be worse than losing power.
This is especially the case if they have already declared him a war criminal and want to put him on trial for whatever. (Not the case with Assad, but was with some of the others)
Of course the dictator will dig in his heels and go down fighting. What has he to lose?

Stan said...

Anonymous,
Man up and choose a moniker; further comments from no-one in particular will be deleted.

This particular comment both is a rant and is false; it is an emotional outburst. The home article for the massacre is here ... and admits that the sources for the information were Assad-friendlies, and even if the report is true, that the attack might have been Al Qaeda, who would kill any non-Muslim, just because: Islam.

The USA is not "the most ignorant and racist" by any sane measurement. The USA makes diplomatic errors due to liberal tendencies, and fails to understand the violence embedded in Islam, so yes, there is ignorance, but it is in the vein of granting the benefit of the doubt to those who do not deserve it.

The violence in Syria is, in large part, sectarian: Sunni vs Shia, with offshoot sects and political inputs involved as well.