> The specific mechanism of withdrawing US forces from the area?
The timing, manner, and surrounding supporting activity (or lack thereof) of that withdrawal, yes.
> You can't say oh, I'd like to extricate myself from this conflict, but also force a specific outcome.
Perhaps, but you absolutely can choose the manner in which you attempt to extricate yourself from a conflict with an eye toward the likely impacts of that extrication.
We could quite literally reparent your comment under a discussion about Iraq circa 2007 and it would not look out of place coming from a neoconservative. And no wonder -- those are the same people who now form the "remotely sane parts of the right," according to the so-called left.
> The timing, manner, and surrounding supporting activity
Presumably the timing is too soon, the supporting activity not vigorous enough, etc, etc. Let's kick the can down the road another year, surely our underspecified war aims will be closer to fruition.
> We could quite literally reparent your comment under a discussion about Iraq circa 2007 and it would not look out of place coming from a neoconservative.
No one had a plan to criticize in 2007. If you mean 2009-11, sure. Or, earlier in the same conflict, in 2004 from much of the Left and non-neocon Right against the Bush Admin in discussing how the neoconservatives desire to disentangle rapidly after the defeat of Iraq was leading them to ignore the lessons of defeats of past regimes stretching back at least to WWII.
And there's plenty of historical evidence (including the conflict that drew us back into Iraq and Syria) that there was merit to both of those objections, despite them coming from very different, largely opposed, ideological factions.
I'll admit I just plucked a year at random there and it was a poor example. You've aptly demonstrated your grasp of history but think it's a case of refusing to see the forest for the trees. The question in my mind is whether you've soured on the entire imperial project or not. Were the American objectives there ever realistic? Did the war ever make sense?
The Syrian conflict itself is far too big a can of worms to open here. We probably disagree on the ground truth of what precipitated the conflict there and who's fighting whom and for what reasons. Regardless, it's very hard to convince the average American that whatever geopolitical maneuvering is happening there is worth caring about - despite very hard propaganda push campaigns in support of it.
Back to the start of the thread, it was my observation that media outlets such as CNN, Fox etc are broadly pro-war... you're basically getting the range of perspectives between State and DoD and that's about it. The broad heuristic you can use to predict their editorial slant on any issue is use-of-force maximization. And that's definitely a discernible agenda.
> The question in my mind is whether you've soured on the entire imperial project or not.
That presupposes that at one time I supported the “imperial project”; as someone who repeatedly argued that it was an example of the crime of aggression for which we rightly hung a bunch of people after WWII, I don't think that is a valid premise.
OTOH, I don't think the illegality of how you got into a position does anything to.absolve you of responsibility for the consequences of the manner of your exttication; quite the opposite.
> Were the American objectives there ever realistic? Did the war ever make sense?
No, and no. But, unless we are in a sci-fi scenario where we get to rewind time and attempt to alter the past, those are entirely irrelevant questions—as they address only should we have intervened (and actually address some of the less important factors of that question, as prospexts for success are only relevant when provocation is established) but are largely irrelevant to the question of “given that we are there now, what is the most appropriate manner for extricating ourselves from that situation.”
What I intended there was not to accuse you of anything. I still think the question is relevant, because it may be that the political objectives were never realistic, and thus the effort is Doomed with a capital D, and dogged persistence can only result in perpetual war.
It's also possible that, given the political, religious/sectarian, and economic factors at play, the region is likely to "relax into a minimum energy state," so to speak, which is unlikely to be much perturbed by the specifics of withdrawal.
There are always better and worse ways to do something. The hazard of holding out for the optimal withdrawal strategy is that it aligns you with disingenuous people who don't really want an end to the thing at all. They will poke holes incessantly in any proposal because either they still think the thing is winnable, or prolonging it advances their personal or institutional interests.
I'm still curious to know what precisely is so complicated about US withdrawal in Syria, what the counter-proposal is, and what objective it's supposed to achieve. This thread is going to get depth-limited at some point though, so I may not find out.
Oh, that we might ever take such care when starting wars rather than when ending them...
After we abandon our misguided efforts in e.g. Libya and chaos reigns, it might be tempting to ask ourselves how the abandonment might have been more methodical or whatever. Well, it would be tempting for BHL or HRC. Wiser, less bloodthirsty observers wonder more about whether the entire conflict could have been avoided.
Actually, now that I'm reminded of Libya (easy to forget if you're just watching MSNBCNNFox...), I'm also reminded of the decidedly non-methodical way that abandonment went down. Essentially, every military vehicle was confirmed to have a full tank of gas, and all our soldiers booked the fuck out. They didn't stop for souvenirs, they didn't worry about what would happen the next day, they just left. Sure, Libya is a smoking hole, but it already was by the time Qaddafi had his intimate encounter with HRC's bayonet. Nothing additionally terrible happened because we left in a hurry. Syria still has a functioning state! Surely they'll be able to handle a quick withdrawal, whenever DJT distracts the Pentagon long enough to get it done.
> ...and these are appreciable agendas which are only deemed "centrist" because they are shared by the two major parties. Outlets like CNN closely reflect the consensus of the governing elite...Labeling positions which don't enjoy the endorsement of state-affiliated institutions as "extremist" is a common tactic to solidify control of the discourse. This comment reads to me as nothing more than naked worship of power.
I guess this is technically true, except you can also apply the same argument for anything that's far enough outside of the mainstream. The "governing elite" also doesn't want to legalize heroin, establish Scientology as the state religion, outlaw ranching, adopt communism, reestablish a monarchy, abolish Medicare, or turn California into an independent country. (Unless they secretly do.) "My particular non-mainstream view is only non-mainstream because of TEH ESTABLISHMENT" is a classic conspiracy theory.
The things you listed don't have a great deal of endogenous support among the populace, either.
I'm most interested in cases where there is shear between popular opinion and The Establishment, and who wins in those cases.
It seems to me that The Establishment consistently wins, and popular opinion slowly changes to conform with The Establishment, and not the other way around. It's a peculiar characteristic of Our Democracy.
At least we've come a fair way from the original claim that pro-establishment media outlets have no "appreciable agenda," so I feel the exchange has been productive.
> I'm most interested in cases where there is shear between popular opinion and The Establishment, and who wins in those cases.
> It seems to me that The Establishment consistently wins, and popular opinion slowly changes to conform with The Establishment, and not the other way around. It's a peculiar characteristic of Our Democracy.
Having same-sex marriage turned into a constitutional right, cannabis legalized in a couple dozen states, and Donald Trump in the White House are very prominent counterexamples to that contention.
The election of Trump was definitely point scored for populism. It also triggered a full scale immune response that we're still in the throes of. Generally, it seems to be working. His orders are blocked by the courts, his executive branch employees undermine him, his own party wouldn't fund his signature campaign proposal, the special counsel investigation drags on... I mean, it's not called the Resistance for nothing.
You can send a shock through the system at the ballot box, but you cannot divert its course.
> The election of Trump was definitely point scored for populism. It also triggered a full scale immune response that we're still in the throes of.
The fact that you ignored the other two examples kind of implies something about how you perceive the “establishment conspiracy”. One could just as easily say that Trump is a shadowy plot to distract people from the shadowy billionaire agenda of tax cuts, if they were so inclined.
What you have here is basically an unfalsifiable conspiracy theory. If I tell you about a time when public opinion changed the status quo and overturned the preferences of the “establishment”, you can just tell me it was the establishment all along. If I tell you about a time that “the establishment” tried to do something (the Vietnam War maybe?) that the public hated and resisted so much that they forced it to stop, you can explain that away, too.
It’s not even wrong so much as oversimplified. There’s no monolithic neoliberal establishment operating out of George Soros’ basement or anything. There is a general bias towards centrism and the status quo, but that’s because the status quo, almost by definition, is something that most people tacitly accept.
When it comes to foreign intervention in particular, the question is usually “which intervention”. We actually tried it your way, once—in 1993 we elected a non-interventionist president who wrapped up withdrawal from Somalia and refused to intervene in Rwanda. He didn’t stay that way, but a change in perspective just happens sometimes when your inaction leads to millions of innocent people getting hacked to death with machetes.
Obama's withdrawal from Libya was perfect, but for a few drone operators who seem to have lost their maps. We should do that again for Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Jordan, Niger, Somalia, Cameroon, Djibouti, Uganda, Tunisia, Ukraine, Georgia, etc.