by Richard A » Sat Apr 08, 2017 6:30 pm
I was one of the grudging supporters of the air strikes, although several friends and colleagues weren't - some felt it was US imperialism (for some reason, they seem to have less of a problem with Russian quasi-imperialism) while others made the more reasonable point that if America can afford to launch 58 Tomahawks at $500,000 a pop, how can they say they can't afford decent social welfare? But the real question that is bedevilling the West is: when Milosevic's behaviour in first Bosnia and then Kosovo became unacceptable, we went in with airstrikes (famously blowing a train full of kids into a ravine, albeit that pretty much everyone - except for the Serbs - have forgotten about that) and then limited ground troops and the result was not a disaster. Sarajevo is once again a very pleasant city (OK, unless you're a Serb, living in rather less pleasant "East Sarajevo" across the line in the Republika Srbska) - and the atrocities have stopped. But in Iraq, Syria and Libya, it hasn't. (Actually, to be fair, in Iraqi Kurdistan, it also worked for a while - until Qatar and Saudi Arabia decided to stir it and Turkey was only too delighted to help.) And that is our problem,
Yemen is a separate case - more like Iraqi Kurdistan than the others. There was an uprising that might well have been successful, replacing the President not with an enlightened democrat but at least with someone who was somewhat of an improvement. But Saudi Arabia had issues and we (Iargely the UK although I don't doubt others as well) make far too much money selling them arms to try to rein them in. Syria has been a morass - in Yemen, we have been actively culpable.