Some go so far as to argue 9/11 is such blowback. Hard to prove or refute that because of the large number of unknowns, the facts as we know them today leave enough room for either interpretation.
One can wonder what both Iraq's invasions will result in.
I still wonder how many Iraqis casualties are dead from Iraqis bombings. I often read numbers like 60 at a time. Makes me wonder if political change in a country is worth that kind of situation.
There is nothing weird or surprising about it: they are fighting over who will rule the country now that the old government is gone. The government we set up is not what the Kurds had in mind, nor is it what the Shiites had in mind.
All "terrorism" is "blowback". Terrorists aren't just crazy folk who come out of the blue and go "I know, I'll blow some shit up just because" - they're politically motivated and use fear as a weapon.
They're politically motivated due to actual or perceived past injustices perpetrated by their targeted nation or organisation.
On the note of using fear as a weapon however, our own governments have become absolutely expert, and media reports can now almost have the same impact as an actual terrorist attack in terms of controlling patterns of thought through fear.
So, by the definition of a terrorist as being someone who controls a population through fear, or in fact the fear of fear... you can see where I'm going.
Not to mention the terrorists that planned 9/11 were, decades earlier, "freedom fighters" to the State Department as they were denying control of Afghanistan to the Soviet Union.
Funny how quickly the prevailing winds can change.
AQ has been and continues receiving DoD contracts in Afghanistan[1]:
“I am deeply troubled that the U.S. military can pursue, attack, and even kill terrorists and their supporters, but that some in the U.S. government believe we cannot prevent these same people from receiving a government contract,”
I don't even know if you can call this blowback any more, because it sounds like some people in power are playing a big game of red team vs blue team and take everyone else along for the ride… which goes along with "So, by the definition of a terrorist as being someone who controls a population through fear, or in fact the fear of fear... you can see where I'm going."
It is not as though she was just some random school girl:
"In early 2009, at the age of 11–12, Yousafzai wrote a blog under a pseudonym for the BBC detailing her life under Taliban rule, their attempts to take control of the valley, and her views on promoting education for girls. The following summer, a New York Times documentary was filmed about her life as the Pakistani military intervened in the region, culminating in the Second Battle of Swat. Yousafzai rose in prominence, giving interviews in print and on television, and she was nominated for the International Children's Peace Prize by South African activist Desmond Tutu."
As sad as this shooting is, it is not a refutation of the claim that terrorists have political motivations.
The goals of terrorism need not be worldwide. The point the gunman was trying to make when he shot Malala Yousafzai was not to the West. It was to the local people in Pakistan that education of girls would not be tolerated even if it were mandated. It was not to stop schools from opening, but it was to deter interest in the parents and girls from attending those schools. That is a political goal, and it absolutely motivated the shooter to commit an act of terror.
One may argue about the legitimacy of that goal (it's certainly taken as a religious teaching in that part of the world), but that does not make the goal apolitical.
Something tells me you were aiming for that. But in fact it isn't, it's just people with a few screws loose in their head that are afraid of emancipated and educated women closely aligned with a religion.
Think 'insecure males' before you think 'terrorism' in this particular case.
> It's not like there's a whole ideology and movement and organization that supports their actions.
The same can be said of the culture of illegal invasions, illegal detentions, secret trials, secret jails, spying, drone attacks and other fun things brought by the National Security State.
The Taliban is far younger than and wouldn't exist but for the American National Security State. Let's keep cause and effect in mind here.
You are now engaging in a particularly uncreative and disingenuous form of goalpost moving. Just because it's blowback doesn't mean it's for American policies. It's local blowback for local policies. You can continue to fake at naive, but seriously - you are smart enough to follow hacker news, you are smart enough to understand context. (Hint, it's basically the same as variable scoping).
What is the point you are so uninterestingly trying to make? Are you just super sad and annoyed that someone dare suggest that the US didn't do something good? Or are you just a sockpuppet loser who needs to continue the "terrorism is evil and we are stopping it!" propaganda?
Right. So a girl wants self determination and education and local policies allow her to do that and she gets shot in the head for that.
The point is that there are real people in the world that have very regressive views and are willing to murder school girls to promote their ideology.
These are dangerous people. As much as you would like to bury your head in the sand and pretend that it's all a government conspiracy, these people do exist and they are smart and ambitious.
> a sockpuppet loser who needs to continue the "terrorism is evil and we are stopping it!" propaganda
Oh I disagree with you so I must be a shill. What a liberal and open minded person you are.
Please fucking go back to reddit. Actually, on second thought, please invite all your friends here so this place burns down faster.
You're some person who has been here for all of 13 hours and you're complaining about quality degradation of the site? Sure you aren't a sockpupptet.
You just act like one and have a hard time with explanations that answer your questions rationally. Oh and you are goalpost moving because each rational explanation is met with a change of topic as if it invalidates the explanation - the definition of goalpost moving basically.
Come back when you're old enough to do simple logic and basic reading comprehension.
Not all acts of terror are blowback for American policies. Nobody ever claimed that they were. Just that all acts of terror were blowback for something.
Religious fanatics are committing atrocities all over the world. In Algeria they behead people, in Iraq they blow each other up, in Ireland they used to blow each other up (including schools) and in the US they shoot each other and innocent bystanders or professionals.
Northern Irish here. We have a cultural division that aligns roughly with a religious division. The political leanings of Unionism and Nationalism stem from that cultural division - the historical inequalities and injustices. Religion is not the source of the division.
Sometimes it has been part of the problem. It has encouraged the establishment of separate school systems for Catholics and Protestants and it has been used a tool by the extremists to give legitimacy to their violence.
Sometimes it has been part of the solution. It has given emotional healing to victims, and it has motivated community leaders on both sides to push for peace.
I'd suggest that the same is true of most conflicts that you think of as stemming from Islam.
In actual fact, it's pure tribalism. When you are born into one tribe, you adopt the cultural aspects of that tribe. Those include the religious denomination and political beliefs, including hating the other tribe.
In Northern Ireland, religion is correlated to political belief because the two major tribes are divided along those lines. Nobody who believes Northern Ireland should be part of the UK does it because of their interpretation of the Eucharist.
And you could say exactly the same about Islamic terrorists too.
Abortion doctors are often the target of violent actions. Bombings and fatal shootings have happened intermittently, but with enough regularity as to paint a pattern. Collateral damage is hardly a concern for those engaging in these events.
> Religious fanatics are committing atrocities all over the world ... in the US they shoot each other and innocent bystanders or professionals
This is really just a platitude.
If we call anti-abortion attacks "Christian terrorism" (and we certainly should), then there have been 8 deaths in 16 years from fundamentalist US Christian terrorism.
Compare this to the nearly daily, and sometimes more, bombings, shootings, and executions carried out by fundamentalist Islamists. Adding up to thousands of deaths and hundreds of attacks every year, Islam is several orders of magnitude more violent than any other religion (specifically 10^4 or 10^5, depending on what you are comparing it to).
You can't just talk about religion without talking about geopolitical and demographic pressures. In poor Christian countries in Africa there is a lot of violence, too. Same goes for Hindus in the more destitute parts of India. Societies that are educated, where the population is not exploding, are generally more peaceful regardless of religion.
You said it yourself with 'history of violence' - for the most part, all the Christian religion(s) seem to have left it in the past. A few fringes have hung around, but that's probably to be expected.
I think it's more to do with Christianity being the majority religion in the west, where we have a cultural history of tolerating (even celebrating) differing opinions. Under a different set of circumstances, I could easily see Islam being more open and liberal (see how it used to be) and Christianity being more... like modern day Islam in many places? But that's not where we ended up.
Christianity isn't the majority religion in the west, it's secularism. Countries like Norway, Sweden and England are only officially Christian, but in practice are pretty much non-religious.
If you're coming from an American perspective you've been taught that America is tolerant, inclusive, etc. but that's hard to argue in the face of facts. The level of racial separation is higher than in Apartheid South Africa, the income disparity is huger than in all but the most destitute banana republics, and non-Christian religions and non-believers are constantly persecuted by the Christian majority.
In the 1400s Islam was more liberal and open only because the countries in which it was practiced were relatively affluent. Christians at the time were waging bloody wars of conquest, especially the series of brutal Crusades to the Middle East.
If America had a demographic like Egypt, you would be seeing riots, blood in the streets, and major religious conflict. It's only because the people are too old to raise a fist in anger that there's peace. Baby Boomers are not going to riot no matter how riled up they are. Just look at how pathetic the Tea Party protests were compared to what happened in Tahir Square.
You can't look at religion through the lens of the last fifty years. Things shift dramatically and unexpectedly.
It's also easy to argue that a lot of Islamic extremism has been instigated by America and Britain because of the various coups they've thrown (Iran, Iraq) and oppressive regimes they've supported (Egypt, Saudia Arabia). Prior to that, things were a lot more orderly.
Look at how Lebanon went from a place of peace, tolerance and harmony, with a standard of living similar to Europe, to one of bloody civil war. This could happen anywhere when the conditions are right.
I meant 'majority' as in 'biggest religion', and I wasn't counting secularism as a religion.
In regards to the rest of your post, I get the feeling you would prefer if western Christians were actually more violent, because surely each one of them is actually insane and will go Old Testament at the drop of a hat and start rounding up secularists...
What I'm really getting from it is that affluence leads to liberalization (in the classical sense) of religion, whereas the opposite of that leads to more fundamentalist religions. Which makes some sense - objective reality sucks when you are starving to death.
One could easily argue that Catholic extremism led to WWII fascism. It's not so far away in the past as you think. There's plenty of rampaging christians in Nigeria up to their necks in sectarian bloodshed as well. Same with Lebanon.
No religion has left their violence in the past, they have a book, hadtih/scrolls and vickers/mullahs which tells them they have a divine right to certain things like violent retribution for blasphemy or "blood atonement" and land titles, so violence will continue forever. Even buddhists are rampaging in Myanmar with machetes butchering up a sectarian storm.
I'm not going to argue pre-WWII Catholicism, it's about as relevant as eugenics and Aryanism (the west has changed a lot), but the violent Christians / Buddhists you are pointing out seem to be in response to violence from some members of Islam, so it's basically just tribal violence.
And Buddhists don't have such a book, so I'm not sure what you're actually arguing here other than that religious fundamentalism is bad. Most religious people in the west already believe that (unfortunately not all of them).
Ireland is nothing to do with religion. It's a handy banner. It's all about British colonialism and oppression. Fuck, we sold the Irish as slaves to west indies planters. Of course it's geopolitics.
Religious fanaticism, however, does not equate to terrorism. It is a subset of the phenomenon, and operates on its own little set of utterly irrational rules.
Great. So we've established that not every terrorist attack is blowback for purely political/nationalist reasons. Often religion and ideology comes into play.
Probably has something to do with sexual politics. Why would you order a drone strike to kill a 16 year old (along with 9 other people) eating at a restaurant?
Just cause it doesn't target the entire world doesn't mean it's not terrorism. Terrorism can be local. That murder is very clearly meant to control and coerce people. The definition of terrorism.
So because of such heinous acts that are committed by individuals (that happen everywhere around the world, everyday), the population must be subjugated with fear of entire groups of people?
Pardon me, I was just trying to preempt where cherry picking examples usually leads to by responding with a question that could from be the point you were trying to make.
Steve Kangas was ex military intel that became a journalist. In 1999, he was found dead of a gunshot wound in a billionaire's building in Pittsburgh.
He was an education for me some 20 years ago when I began learning about the depredations of the National Security Corporate State that now has us in thrall.
I consider Kangas the first internet-age reporter to die under suspicious circumstances. I won't busy up the thread with links but I urge anyone with an interest in this topic to research Kangas and his writings. He imparted much information in his short career.
I have a strong dislike of Richard Mellon Scaife and his influence on politics. But if I were a wicked billionaire who wished a bad end on a troublesome gadfly, why would I have that person assassinated in the bathroom outside my office, as opposed to knocked out, smuggled out via the freight elevator, and done to death in some deserted spot? If the goal is to demonstrate impunity of some sort, why not just have him thrown off the roof of the building?
Here, we have to posit a conspiracy powerful and cold-blooded enough to commit and cover up murder, but which is too inept to to put any significant distance between (presumed) co-conspirator and victim. I think we need to give equal consideration to the possibility of it being a 'doorstep suicide,' where a troubled person ends their life in proximity and as a reproach to a perceived antagonist, if only because of Occam's Razor.
Or what better way to consign someone to obscurity by engineering a "how pathetic... he was so obsessed with Scaife that he killed himself in one of his properties in the men's room" moment.
Occam's Razor cuts both ways when dealing with neurotic geeks or with megalomaniac billionaires.
No, I don't think it does. If I want to kill someone and consign them to obscurity as well, I'd do it in a way that didn't maximize the potential for gossip involving a famous person. For example, staging the suicide somewhere else and just scattering blackmail-type evidence around, like some particularly skeevy kind of porn which would reflect badly on the victim.
I mean, if you're going to go down that route why not stage the suicide in the lobby or even the inner sanctum of the putative megalomaniac's office, which would be even more dramatic and damning? The obvious answer is 'because that would be suspicious,' which invites the rejoinder 'and doing it 25 feet down the corridor isn't?' If you have a wicked plan to destroy someone's reputation, you might as well pick the least ambiguous way of doing it.
Apposite reading right now: "The Execution Channel" by Ken Macleod. Yes, it's a work of science fiction -- by someone with a background in fringe political groups who were being actively infiltrated/used for disinformation during the cold war, and who's been thinking about just how far things could go wrt. the internet.
This is why my friends ask me as an Iranian how the hell I can be happy living in the U.S. I can't explain them that U.S. citizens are viction of the same policies. The thing that I don't understand is, who are those elite people who make this kind of decisions? Who are they? Who leads the whole thing?
The system isn't a secret; there's no conspiracy. Obama really is president; election money has a deciding effect on elections; our "democracy" is top-down (and anyone who takes history/politics seriously knows it isn't really a democracy, though it has some democratic forms); our economic resources are owned by elites; etc.
But just as we don't use commercials to help us evaluate the technical specs of some commodity, we shouldn't believe utterances of those in power (it's no secret they're generally written by professionals called "speechwriters"). Instead, we look at their decisions, actions, institutional forces, history, etc. Tends to make things a lot clearer.
[Edit: also try looking at things from the perspective of an observer from Mars; it's oddly helpful.]
> (it's no secret they're generally written by professionals called "speechwriters")
In the same vein as "This message was paid for/approved by _______", I would love it if every political speech had to end with a credit to the speechwriter.
People behind big corporations, with plenty of money. They control a huge portion of economy and can invest huge amounts of money with lobby in the government. For these people, an independent country with lots of oil is a nuisance, something that lows profit. It's better to have a country with lots of oil with a corrupt government or something that we can control. A government that in exchange of our help will sell cheap oil to us.
Nobody. Create any sufficiently complicated system and it'll do random crap that nobody expects or desires.
The sad truth is that there's no "man behind the curtain", just a gaggle of idiots and processes that make no sense, and the rest is butterflies and hurricanes.
This is a far scarier reality than there being some mysterious illuminati-like sect running the show, as it means there is no enemy to fight but our own nature.
I can't believe it's random. If you look back in history, you will see United States had long term plans for Middle East.
Even at present time, they "fix" Libya problems in a week and let Syria burn for two years. I'm sure they have tons of thought behind those decisions
It's rather more pseudothought than thought - groupthink and machiavellian manoeuvring and politicking, rather than cohesive decision making about any given matter at hand, and the continuation of policies not because they make sense but because they are policy.
You realize that people can still for example move out, right?
I wrote in a agressive tone, because I see LOTS of US people that just keep complaining about their government, and do nothing about it, beside voting (that clearly, is not working), and when they get for example a 9/11 on their head, they don't understand why other people hate them.
It is a thing of owning up to your mistakes, if you are not making a effort to avoid supporting your government that do evil actions, you are evil yourself, because you are allowing you are providing resources to make evil.
I am Brazillian, and I am tired of hearing here from US tourists for example, that they don't understand why they are hated, if the US meddling here is not their fault, but their government fault. I don't believe the US population is stupid, or they DO support the government evil actions, or they just don't care, saying that it is "not your fault" is NOT acceptable when you are providing taxes that pay the wages of CIA people that disappear my friends.
>You realize that people can still for example move out, right?
You realize that US citizens have global tax liability, even if they've never lived in the US, right? (Certain countries' taxes count as credit, and you get some exemption, but US persons are supposed to report all foreign assets and pay taxes.)
First, our country is much less tame than US in outright evilness...
It is a government that is very inefficient, and corrupt, but does not drop bombs on other people heads to get minerals.
Aside from that, what I am doing?
First, I don't pay most taxes, literally. I don't even bother looking at what taxes I should pay. The tax that I pay correctly is the state (not federal) and municipal ones.
Second, I support with campaigning and donations when I can, some politicians.
Third, I support protests, specially the big and loud ones (like the ones that attracted international media here, and DID resulted into a couple of law changes in our favour).
Fourth, if after next elections things don't improve, I plan in moving somewhere else, and renouncing my citizenship as soon as I can. I don't want to stay citizen of a country that I don't agree with the actions of its population, the government is only a reflection of the local population, maybe with the exception of extreme cases of autocracy.
Fifth, after I amass enough power, I plan in engaging in politics in a active manner, whatever manner is needed at the time, and where I am.
So, the CIA releases such information years later, when it's not of much relevance. 50 years from now, if they say they had a hand in some of the most inhuman things happening now, we would probably be indifferent. Not sure how can anyone hold them accountable for their actions. Probably none of those individuals who played a part in the coup would be around.
That's a strange comment. We knew a lot about what happened in Iraq just months after the war started and we know a lot more now. All the individuals responsible for that war are still around.
I don't know whether accepted is the word. It has certainly been common knowledge in the US for 20 years or more. I think that one of the principals on the US side may have included it in his autobiography, but I could be wrong.
I thought this coup was outed by FOIA documents while I was still in college around 9/11 time.
I highly recommend All The Shah's Men if you want a good run-down of what happened. Even the CIA history FOIA document reads a bit like a James Bond novel. Kermit Roosevelt Junior was quite the Bond-like character and the Operation Ajax coup gets busted by the government days before they rescue the captured agents and complete the operation. Thrilling story for a real life tale.
My favorite quote from the piece -- "There is no longer good reason to keep secrets about such a critical episode in our recent past. The basic facts are widely known to every school child in Iran. Suppressing the details only distorts the history, and feeds into myth-making on all sides."
Myth-making is the point of history. Forgive me HN for parroting a quote I first saw in a video game, "History is but a fable agreed upon."
Is it a requirement that reports become declassified after a certain amount of time? If not, then why is this being released? What does the CIA stand to gain?
Conspiracies aplenty to choose from, likely some of those will end up being true after all.
The benefit of knowing which is which is today, 50 years hence it won't matter. Some of the records are sealed for 70 years, sometimes with the most transparent of reasons for the sealing attached to them.
Is it just me who is sad for the early demise of what could've been a flourishing democracy in the Middle east (inplace of the silly regime that is now in power) ?
Thanks, very interesting read (as usual with Adam's writing). It's to be expected that playing with fireworks is liable to get one burned, unfortunately intelligence services have a very hard time understanding this sort of thing.
Now all we need to see for the other side of the story are the Soviet archives. Given that the Soviets were behind most worldwide communist revolutions (including the Cuban, North Korean, Ethiopian, etc.), did they plan to do something with/to Mossadegh via their Tudeh puppets in Iran like they did in neighboring Afghanistan later on?
No. Stalin died in March '53, leaving a directionless power vacuum until September, when Khrushchev took over. This was almost certainly a factor in the timing of the coup, as the US wanted to seize the opportunity of the USSR's disorganisation to carry out a coup on their doorstep with nominal at worst repercussions.
Iranian history is a complicated story. There's a free 2008ish audio podcast series of lectures about their history.
You could consider that Mosaddegh was doomed to fall, given that, the only question is who gets his job, and Pahlavi, at least initially, looked "better" than the previous Qajar Turks or any of the other competitors, we knew that at least some of the Qajar in the past were completely nuts, whereas Pahlavi didn't start going nuts until later. Perhaps he literally developed a severe mental illness in the 60s as some suspect, which would explain a lot about his behavior. Anyway, its one of those monday morning quarterbacking things where in retrospect everyone involved might have done better going back to the Qajar dynasty, but of course predictions are difficult, especially about the future. Currently, looking back to 1970, he looked like an epic disaster in 1970, insert lots of whining about decisions made in 1950, but in 1950 he didn't look so bad.
One big problem with talking Iranian politics is all of it resonates to present day fights, so the only people talking about it almost by definition have an economic or religious or nationalistic axe to grind, so discerning the truth (if any) is kind of hard when almost no one says anything but PR. Its a political confuseopoly. Whats better, coke or pepsi, well, good luck figuring that out from TV commercials and astroturfing.
My opinion based on some study, it seems Iran is relatively cursed with poor leaders on average. I'm talking about centuries not last month timescale. Once in awhile they'll have a (poor) leader who resonates (at least superficially, temporarily) with some western-ish values, or once in a while they'll have a (poor) leader who anti-resonates with us when they nationalize their oil wells, etc, but the common theme seems to be be relatively poor at government leading to turmoil and general misery of everyone involved. Which is probably how they ended up ruled by Turks for so long, and other imperialist issues.
Its a pity, aside from the politics and the extremists 99% of the country and people are pretty cool with a nice enough culture and interesting history. Although, I suppose that's a universal truth around the whole world that if you go anywhere and get rid of the politicians and extremists, pretty much everywhere ends up a paradise...
Amen. Reminds me of Rabindranath Tagore's essay on Nationalism. Its really sad how the political interests (and madness) of the minority, governs the lives of common people for centuries afterwards.
No. US foreign policy, when viewed from a perspective other than that of the US, is one heartbreak after another. They take promise, dreams, progress and hope and crush them, in order to preserve hegemonistic power at any cost.
The US would happily turn this planet into a barren rock, and all "foreigners" (and likely their own populace) into ash, so long as they can claim dominance.
How does one even go about disagreeing with a comment like this? I guess I'll go for the obvious: If the U.S. wanted to "claim dominance" at any expense, we certainly would have felt much less constrained in the use of nuclear weapons in past conflicts.
What you are describing is a mythology. One no better, and probably less accurate, than the mythology that the U.S. is an angel of hope and freedom on the world stage.
Anyway, the hn'er below who made the comparison to /r/worldnews is spot on. New historical information is uncovered/declassified every day. This was only posted and upvoted because it's Exhibit A in the case for "The Evils of American Foreign Policy since WWII." There's a good discussion to be had about the pros and cons of America's role in the world since 1945. It's not going to be had here.
hn is going downhill faster than I'd ever imagined possible.
> I guess I'll go for the obvious: If the U.S. wanted to "claim dominance" at any expense, we certainly would have felt much less constrained in the use of nuclear weapons in past conflicts.
Nuclear weapons are defensive devices. The assurance of mutual destruction in case of an open conflict drove the cold war, and secures Israel's border, for example (not really mutual in that case).
Using nukes offensively would completely alienate the US from the rest of the world. The US govt. needs sheepish allies to play along.
It would also be unpopular at home (even though that could be spun around).
> What you are describing is a mythology. One no better, and probably less accurate, than the mythology that the U.S. is an angel of hope and freedom on the world stage.
The US, as any hegemonic nation before it, has been as bullish as politically and diplomatically possible.
It doesn't mean that US citizen are bad people. Most of us are short-sighted when it comes to politics, and politicians and other policy makers take advantage of it.
I think that the average US cit is fundamentally good, but so poorly informed as to the world around them due to the media, educational and, frankly, thought control in the state in which they reside that they end up playing straight into the hands of those who would do both them and other nations harm.
I wouldn't say the U.S. is obsessed with dominance. Rather, the U.S. foreign policy is characterized by the brutal and unprincipled service of U.S. business interests. The coup in Iran was motivated by lust for oil, and that's just one tiny example of many!
One interesting observation is when it fails, out comes the moralists and ethicist explaining the game plan is wrong. When its a success, as in we put up a guy who doesn't turn out to be a raving lunatic, silence descends on the moralists and ethicist camp. Therefore by definition all criticism of foreign policy will 100% be backed up by a subcollection of truthful, highly public, epic fail. This makes it look like a universal fail for all time, although the actual ratio of success to fail is not only non-discussed, its probably not possibly to calculate legally with non-classified sources.
This is why an apparently 100% epic fail is none the less stable and constant for multiple generations.
Its reminiscent of TV news coverage of airline operations. The only coverage is of crashes. Therefore all airliners crash all the time. Not so... Doesn't mean the few crashes are good, or the system is inherently good, or perfect, but it doesn't mean its ineffective.
"Success" would have been a dictatorship, just with a different guy in charge. I'm sorry, but the U.S. doesn't get a pass on that just because some democracies also suit their business interests. The coup in Iran was rotten by design.
Yes it was rotten by design but this turns into word games.
If you're convinced the current strong man is going to fall, then you push for the least rotten of the remaining set of strong men to take over. I'd argue thats pretty much what they did. Doing your best doesn't mean automatic success, it just means better than the other likely outcomes.
Yeah, I agree, I probably sound ridiculously apologist. But I'm not generally like that. The recent regime change in neighboring Iraq was just an idiotic decision, for example.
Yes the coup in Iran sucked in an absolute sense. Yes the outcome was awful in an absolute sense and remains awful for all involved. And the alternative course would have been ... and no fair promising balloons, unicorns, and santa claus, try to be realistic ... I'm saying all the realistic unmentioned alternatives would have been worse.
For example, US goes hard core isolationist. Well, thats all very well and good for us, but a disaster for the Iranian people, better have them alive and hating us than dead. How bout we let the Russians take over and create Afghanistan the 2nd, nothing could possibly go wrong there. Give it back to the Turks, uh, the ottoman empire fell awhile before the coup..
>This was only posted and upvoted because it's Exhibit A in the case for "The Evils of American Foreign Policy since WWII."
This was only posted because it was a seminal event that was largely responsible for the current situation in the Middle East, and it was denied for half a century while everyone knew it to be true.
>hn is going downhill faster than I'd ever imagined possible.
>How does one even go about disagreeing with a comment like this?
preferably by ignoring it and then moving on. Argument or refutation is merely encouragement. Best to give the impression they're nothing more than a mere annoyance to be ignored.
Nobody rational. Were you to evaluate the actions of any given nation state as those of an individual, you would probably decide that the individual was psychotic, psychopathic, deranged, and suffering from a bevy of learning disabilities. Our governments are insane, and we're all along for the ride.
> How does one even go about disagreeing with a comment like this? I guess I'll go for the obvious: If the U.S. wanted to "claim dominance" at any expense, we certainly would have felt much less constrained in the use of nuclear weapons in past conflicts.
You're the only nation to have ever used nuclear weapons in anger. Next?
> What you are describing is a mythology. One no better, and probably less accurate, than the mythology that the U.S. is an angel of hope and freedom on the world stage.
It's an objective reality. Point at ONE positive thing the US has done on the world stage since 1945. It's all coups, black ops, war, more war, war, and war.
> hn is going downhill faster than I'd ever imagined possible.
HN is diversifying and taking a particular political bent because global politics and US foreign policy are suddenly at the core of what we all do. The Iranian coup is just another data-point in a big, long, ugly picture.
You can bury your head in the sand if you like, and just talk about the best sorting algos until the cows come home, but the very medium through which HN operates is being threatened, and if we don't discuss said threat, and the history and background surrounding it, we are doomed to succumb.
> It's an objective reality. Point at ONE positive thing the US has done on the world stage since 1945. It's all coups, black ops, war, more war, war, and war.
Marshall plan. Defense of South Korea. Support for Taiwan. Public and private responses to natural disasters throughout the world.
Argument by hyperbole isn't very interesting or useful and analysis of historical events is always difficult because the alternatives not taken are hard to evaluate against the actual choices that were made.
Little to do with reconstruction, lots to do with ensuring economic dependence. Why not talk about the Dawes and Young plans?
>Defense of South Korea.
Again, not doing objective good, protecting American interests, and a direct result of USAMGIK.
>Support for Taiwan
This is solely to piss off PRC, and always has been, and again can't really be seen as "good" as the principle mode of this support is in selling them lots and lots of guns.
>Public and private responses to natural disasters throughout the world.
Public responses good, yes, but the government responses to natural disasters - not so much. Lots of ODA, but that's just an economic shackle, rather than helpful aid.
>Argument by hyperbole isn't very interesting or useful and analysis of historical events is always difficult because the alternatives not taken are hard to evaluate against the actual choices that were made.
This is true, and it's hard to condense decades of thinking into a single post, but I stand by my assertion that US foreign policy sucks.
You seem to be arguing that there is some sort of utopian national policy mechanism that would benefit its receipent(s) but would be independent of the sponsor's national interests, would provide economic assistance but not create economic shackles, provide assistance without creating dependence, and so on. Obviously you don't think US foreign policy satisfies any of those criteria.
I'd be interested in knowing what such a policy would look like or even if you've got any historical examples.
It was wildly successful in getting European economies rolling again, but the hook was that it ensured penetration into and possession of European markets by American business interests. It also served as a cultural hook, by massively upping the volume of American goods exported to Europe. Either way, it was pretty successful in its publicised goals, but also very successful in the less spoken about goals of US hegemony.
D&Y were overtly intended to make Germany dependent on the US, and the great depression pretty much directly precipitated the fall of the Weimar republic and the rise of National Socialism, as it absolutely buggered their economy and caused huge resentment.
Dawes of course got the Nobel Peace Prize, even though his work would ultimately set the stage for the bloodiest conflict the world has ever known.
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
The release of major new documents about a major historical event that still has major side effects today easily clears that bar. What's not related are comments like "how is this even remotely related":
Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link.
Basically, the problem with your argument is that the quality and tone of the comments on even purely technical stories is equally sad these days on HN.
> why not? is not the core of "hacking" finding alternate ways to solve problems working out side the rules meta gaming if you will.
Politics is about establishing/modifying/eliminating rules that we all live by. Like the 4th amendment, to name something germane to an ongoing controversy. Going outside the rules often leads to bad things. That's why it's called "the rule of law".
> How is not propaganda and direct action not hacking the political system.
Because there's nothing particularly clever or unique or "hacky" about it. It's what groups like the NOW, NRA, EFF, Sierra Club, ACLU, etc.... etc.... do, and have been doing for years. It's a slog and involves lots of work, and money. That's how politics works when divisive issues are involved.
You obviously haven't seen the power of a properly worded motion or amendment in the political arena.
Why does a hack have to be clever or unique or even involve computers? I have done a few hacks to solve problems which were not pretty or particularly clever but they did solve the problem.
One "hack" from my early years was projecting film from an experimental rig's high speed camera against a wall covered with graph paper and performing manual digitization of a [REDACTED] by stepping the film though one frame at a time.
So by that logic, if you got enough people from reddit to come here and upvote political stories and conspiracy theories, it would de facto be Hacker News.
You're account is not even a day old. You should read the guidelines about how when you're new here you probably shouldn't be saying this site is turning into reddit.
Also its relevant because it contextualizes the whole us intelligence apparatus -a topic very relevant given the impact on internet business and traffic.
This is a throw away. My main account is about 2 years younger than yours.
How can you not see that the rhetoric here has declined drastically over the past year? Do you disagree that there are significantly more political/non-technical stories reaching the front page?
Even if you agree with the gist arguments being made, disregard your personal politics and beliefs in coming to an assessment.
Making a throwaway and arguing the points as vaguely and indirectly as you are with it - combined with your focus on derailing conversation with tangent about politeness or whatever is certainly not helping the situation. There have been a lot of "green" accounts arguing very incoherently based largely on appeal to emotion in the last several days - I agree it's frustrating and very distracting from the usually high level of discourse. However the topics are also something a bit new for this place - extremely relevant things about policy that affects the community a whole, wrapped up in national discussion and culture wars, so there is some adjustment required.
Your actions of creating a throwaway to preserve karma or keep people from knowing your actual thoughts are contributing to the problem you are complaining about.
How should I react to a brand new user account - actually a whole set of them (not that any others are you, not accusing you of that) spewing vitriol and vague stances, and engaging in seriously poor debate form? My initial and continued reaction is that they are some form of sockpuppetry.
Well, except the fact that your hypothetical scenario isn't going to happen. The existing userbase of the site will flag such crap down.
On top of that, the 'shadow' moderation behind the scenes that makes posts go dead, nary any feedback or tranparency. I must grudgingly admit it would help in such a case.
Try again with a less reductio-ad-absudum scenario?
Wow, you're getting downvoted for this? Hacker News really has changed. Goodbye Hacker News. I learned a lot from you, but it's time to go our separate ways.
C'mon, it's on the guidelines: "Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did."
The problem is where to go. There are still a lot of good stories here, so I'm not ready to just take my toys and leave, so to speak, but I'm actively looking for alternatives.
Lots of geeks with jobs funded by the public sector have no idea of the history of some of the agencies they work for. The history of misdeeds by American intel agencies is a topic that is relevant to hackers, imo.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blowback_%28intelligence%29
Some go so far as to argue 9/11 is such blowback. Hard to prove or refute that because of the large number of unknowns, the facts as we know them today leave enough room for either interpretation.