Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

>>>1. US foreign policy over the last decades has been disastrous -- trillions of dollars and thousands of lives expended on middle eastern wars, culminating in utter defeat.

Lost me in the first paragraph. It hasn't been "thousands" but tens or hundreds of thousands dead. Thousands may be how many american military lives have been lost but that is certainly nowhere near the actual cost of any war. Such little assumptions belittle the value of non-american lives. If you want to muse about the decline of american exceptionalism, a good start might be to avoid repeating its mistakes in your own writing.

And there is more:

>>>Wars involving primitive religious fanatics in unimportant regions of the world should not distract us...

Um... "primitive religious fanatics" don't exist in only the "unimportant regions of the world". That is unless the author meant to include Europe, SE Asia, Africa and the US as unimportant. (I'd include south america but cannot recall any off the top of my head).

Certainly hundreds of thousands, even the low end official figure for the Iraq war alone is 110,000 (top-end more pessimistic estimate is 1m+)[1]. Add on to that Afghanistan[2] (estimates of 110,000 to 360,000) and you’re up to a lowball quarter of a million total.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_in_the_war...

One hopes neoconservatism is good and dead. It was an ambitious ideology which presumed everyone in the world shared western values or wanted them.

I think the American public tired of this neocon hawkishness and I'm hopeful we see a change in our foreign policy.

> It was an ambitious ideology which presumed everyone in the world shared western values or wanted them.

Eastern European here. After the fall of the iron curtain, what we really craved for was economic cooperation with the West, liberty of expression and civil and property rights.

Instead, we got US-sponsored liberal NGOs to steer the public opinion in certain directions, NATO military bases to protect us from evil Russia and crappy mass culture in the form of Hollywood movies. It was a great disillusionment for most people.

Now it seems the baton has passed over to EU who now want to impose their world view on eastern Europe with the carrot and stick of economic cooperation. Time will tell if their effort is equal folly.

That's not to deny China as well as Russia take opportunities to push their own visions.

I would argue that the disillusionment in the Czech Republic not only the fault of the Americans, but also the fault of the former communists, who remained in power for the most part. During the privatization process the countries assets were sold to the corrupt ex-communists and westerners for pennies on the dollar. There is as much evil and profiteering from within as there is evil from outside.

Which NGOs are you talking about? What have these NGOs done to harm the countries?

I will outline the Bulgarian perspective of events.

By the mid 1980s, "perestroychiks" in the Bulgarian communist party had prevailed over the old generation of die-hard communists. Despite officially calling themselves "communists", these people were avid pro-westerners and believers in market economy. One such key figure in Bulgaria was Andrey Lukanov, a minister of foreign trade during that time. When the Berlin wall fell, he headed the first democratic government and remained an influential force until his murdering in 1996.

Andrey Lukanov spoke eloquent English and was actively seeking economic ties and advices from the US. He even went so far to ask two American economy professors to devise a detailed economic plan which would guarantee the optimal transition to a market economy. Even the long-time president and communist dictator Todor Zhivkov officially admitted during his final resignation speech in 1989 that "communism was ill-conceived and we must be welcoming all foreign western capital". The trouble is, western capital didn't come as quickly as expected. We were left with factories and enterprises which were unable to compete with their western counterparts and our market was quickly flooded mostly with foreign goods. Everything else follows from this.

The privatisation therefore was more of an emergent act of saving the failed state enterprises. They were sold for pennies because they couldn't export their production and the domestic market was dire.

Nowadays, we have tens of US-backed NGOs (most notably "Otvoreno Obshtestvo", America for Bulgaria Foundation, Bulgarian Helsinki Committee, etc.) which work very hard to persuade us that gay rights, minority rights and saving the polar bears are the most important problems on our agenda, without ever acknowledging the deep economic problems that cause social tension and emigration.

Do you think that the America for Bulgaria Foundation's promotion of gay rights is somehow harming your economy?

"The privatisation therefore was more of an emergent act of saving the failed state enterprises. They were sold for pennies because they couldn't export their production and the domestic market was dire." I do not know the situation in Bulgaria, but in the Czech Republic, the enterprises which were bought by the elites and foreign interests were not failing, and several ex-communists have become USD billionaires by having "purchased" them.

Few of the privatised enterprises in Bulgaria actually remained profitable, but their new owners (ex-communists and foreigners with questionable reputation) benefited greatly mostly from inheriting their assets like buildings and production lines, which were quickly disassembled and sold for hefty sums. Those money were then spent on luxury cars and political bribery, not reinvested in any way.

It was a delusional ideology that presumed that democratic systems can be imposed on another country by military force. This wouldn't work even if social democracy were the best possible system. To understand why just invert the circumstances and imagine China attempting to impose a (even superior) political system on the United States following an invasion or via foreign intelligence meddling. Do you think that would work?

It also doesn't work, because you cannot impose democracy. Imposed democracy isn't democracy.

> One hopes neoconservatism is good and dead. It was an ambitious ideology which presumed everyone in the world shared western values or wanted them.

I dunno, seemed to last well into Obama's tenure in practice if not in rhetoric, from what I can tell, and Syria may well be a bigger disaster than Afghanistan and Iraq combined by any measure, including realpolitik (see: its effects on European politics, maybe also on the situation in Turkey though I'm less certain on that one). Yes, yes, the war in Iraq contributed to it in certain important ways, but didn't dictate our response to it, which was about as wrong as it could have been, unless there were some serious poker chips in play with Russia that we mere observers couldn't see, i.e. aside from the obvious ones. There's been no widespread condemnation of that action or even common recognition that we're the reason it's such a big mess, as there eventually was in the case of Iraq at least, and incidentally we're still in Iraq and Afghanistan, so neoconservatism seems to be alive and well in some sense.

Mind, I protested the war in Iraq, was overall a fan of Obama's domestic policies, so I'm not a partisan looking for reasons to bash Obama or try to rescue Bush's incredibly poor legacy or anything like that.

The take I get is that both their foreign policies were pretty hawkish neocon. Hillary was of the same quilt. Only Sanders and Trump bucked the hawkish trend.

Domestically their policies differed a little bit and also Obama was more charismatic, more like B Clinton, in that respect. GW was seen as a buffoon and tool of industry.

Syria is inseparable from Iraq (it's ISIS for a reason) and almost certainly would not have happened, and happened at the scale it did if it wasn't for Iraq.

Sure, but Syria would have burnt out before that got started if we hadn't half-assedly propped up the opposition, just enough to ensure they couldn't be defeated but not enough to actually make them win. Year after year. Iraq was really bad and contributed to all this significantly, but in no way did it force us to turn the brief fire in Syria into a years-persisting human misery factory and radicalization engine of a smoldering brush fire as part of a proxy war with Russia.

We don't actually know that. From what I've seen, the Syrian government faction was maybe a third of the fighting force, but they had air power and the other factions were never able to unite for various reasons. The arms from the U.S. didn't make that much difference, and the war dragged on because the government didn't have a good way to end it without losing alot of soldiers in the cities (and massacring even more civilians). That left siege warfare and massive bombing as their only options, and both of those are slow and ineffective.

Same - I supported Obama for years, and yet my favorite bar trivia anecdote is "Name all the Nobel Peace Prize winners who have killed other Nobel Peace Prize winners" [0].

[0]: http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/obama-apology-dwb-1.3261009

I happily voted for Obama twice, but his policy in Syria and Libya was a complete clusterfuck and in retrospect I think perhaps the country would be in better shape today had we elected Romney, who while I disagreed with his policies is fundamentally a decent human being and probably would have allowed the country to blow off steam without electing a monster like trump.

Syria is a huge mess, but the U.S. isn't the one paying most of the costs there (for good or ill). It's closer to the proxy wars great powers fight all of the time while the U.S. was and is on the front lines for Iraq and Afghanistan.

Most of the U.S. response has been to ISIS in Iraq, which is winding down but can be seen more as more fallout from the Iraq war than anything else.

>> trillions of dollars and thousands of lives expended on middle eastern wars

> Such little assumptions belittle the value of non-american lives

...and american lives as well: I'm always surprised at how in some cultures it's considered acceptable mixing money and human lives in the same sentence as if they were somewhat comparable items.

On top of that, human lives are often listed after money, yet nobody seems to take notice of this.

"oh it's just semantics"...

Are you sure that money and life are not comparable? After-all, people spend all of their lives making money. People die of hunger. And to be killed is not so much a matter of a loss of life, everyone is mortal after-all, we will all die, it is a loss of time. And time is money, and money is time.

> Thousands may be how many american military lives have been lost but that is certainly nowhere near the actual cost of any war.

The direct cost to America was clearly the point of these remarks to start with.

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