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Why does any discussion around the Middle East produce incredibly shallow, edgy comments? It's incredibly, incredibly, incredibly complicated stuff, and the di
by JBReefer 11y ago
Why does any discussion around the Middle East produce incredibly shallow, edgy comments?
It's incredibly, incredibly, incredibly complicated stuff, and the discourse is all soundbites.
- Happydayz 11y agoThere is a really strong bias among people in the west to overemphasize their role in complex international events. The US absolutely played both sides in the Iran-Iraq War. However, let's not strip the very real agency that Iraq and Iran exercised in the conduct of it. What the US did was tilt the scales in Iraq's favor when things were looking exceptionally grim for them. This probably prolonged the war or at least prevented it from reaching an early decisive end. However, this shouldn't be surprising given the events of '79 and what that did to the US's prior Middle Eastern strategy.
- Synaesthesia 11y agoRead Noam Chomsky, a lot of the facts aren't made public, particularly the huge US neocolonial interest in the region, spanning back a century.
- JBReefer 11y agoNoam Chomsky doesn't have the answer. You'd need a PhD on the subject of a single conflict in order to talk about it with authority. He does not have that, though he is a gifted linguist. You're talking about conflicts that legitimately have roots to the beginning of human history.