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Thread: In my great and unmatched wisdom...

  1. #31
    Praefectus Fabrum Senior Member Anime BlackJack Champion, Flash Poker Champion, Word Up Champion, Shape Game Champion, Snake Shooter Champion, Fishwater Challenge Champion, Rocket Racer MX Champion, Jukebox Hero Champion, My House Is Bigger Than Your House Champion, Funky Pong Champion, Cutie Quake Champion, Fling The Cow Champion, Tiger Punch Champion, Virus Champion, Solitaire Champion, Worm Race Champion, Rope Walker Champion, Penguin Pass Champion, Skate Park Champion, Watch Out Champion, Lawn Pac Champion, Weapons Of Mass Destruction Champion, Skate Boarder Champion, Lane Bowling Champion, Bugz Champion, Makai Grand Prix 2 Champion, White Van Man Champion, Parachute Panic Champion, BlackJack Champion, Stans Ski Jumping Champion, Smaugs Treasure Champion, Sofa Longjump Champion Seamus Fermanagh's Avatar
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    Default Re: In my great and unmatched wisdom...

    Quote Originally Posted by Montmorency View Post
    ...Videos on Kurds not liking Americans so much anymore.
    Hard to blame them. Between the miscommunication of 1991, the inactivity on Article 140, and this last episode, we have managed to malf them over three times in a single generation.

    We should have stood up a Kurdistan in 2005 and told both Turkey and the remainder of Iraq to pound sand.
    "The only way that has ever been discovered to have a lot of people cooperate together voluntarily is through the free market. And that's why it's so essential to preserving individual freedom.” -- Milton Friedman

    "The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." -- H. L. Mencken

  2. #32
    Backordered Member CrossLOPER's Avatar
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    Default Re: In my great and unmatched wisdom...

    Quote Originally Posted by Montmorency View Post
    The infamous letter he had sent to "tough man" Erdogan the previous day to achieve peace in our time.

    Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 
    He writes like a primitive bot.
    Requesting suggestions for new sig.

    -><- GOGOGO GOGOGO WINLAND WINLAND ALL HAIL TECHNOVIKING!SCHUMACHER!
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    WHY AM I NOT BEING PAID FOR THIS???

  3. #33

    Default Re: In my great and unmatched wisdom...

    Quote Originally Posted by CrossLOPER View Post
    He writes like a primitive bot.
    https://www.newyorker.com/cartoons/d...th-trump-santa

    Vitiate Man.

    History repeats the old conceits
    The glib replies, the same defeats


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  4. #34
    Member Member Crandar's Avatar
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    Default Re: In my great and unmatched wisdom...

    Quote Originally Posted by Seamus Fermanagh View Post
    Hard to blame them. Between the miscommunication of 1991, the inactivity on Article 140, and this last episode, we have managed to malf them over three times in a single generation.

    We should have stood up a Kurdistan in 2005 and told both Turkey and the remainder of Iraq to pound sand.
    Don't forget the time when the US consciously lied and blamed the Iranians instead of Saddam for the Halabja massacre. In geopolitics, there are no friends but the mountains.

  5. #35

    Default Re: In my great and unmatched wisdom...

    Trump belting it out loud for the world:

    We don't have to defend the borders between Turkey and Syria. They've been fighting for 1,000 years. But we did keep the oil [in Deir ez-Zor] if you don't mind. We kept the oil. And we will distribute that oil.
    Assad (always a smooth and sibilant speaker) appreciates the candor:

    I tell you, he’s the best American president. Why? Not because his policies are good, but because he’s the most transparent president. All American presidents commit crimes and end up taking the Nobel Prize and appear as a defender of human rights and the 'unique' and 'brilliant' American or Western principles. But all they are is a group of criminals who only represent the interests of the American lobbies of large corporations in weapons, oil, and others.

    Trump speaks with transparency to say 'We want the oil.' This is the reality of American politics since the Second World War at least. 'We want to get rid of this person... We want to provide a service in return for money.' This is the reality of American politics. What do we want more than a transparent foe?
    As for how Trump intends to "take" the oil:

    In a major policy flip-flop, the President said that he is not only keeping American forces in Syria to “secure” its oil fields, he is willing to go to war over them. “We may have to fight for the oil. It’s O.K.,” he said. “Maybe somebody else wants the oil, in which case they have a hell of a fight. But there’s massive amounts of oil.” The United States, he added, should be able to take some of Syria’s oil. “What I intend to do, perhaps, is make a deal with an ExxonMobil or one of our great companies to go in there and do it properly,” he said. The goal would be to “spread out the wealth.”
    [...]
    Trump’s suggestion that the U.S. could expropriate a portion of Syria’s oil “sounds like the international crime of pillage,” Ryan Goodman, a former special legal counsel at the Department of Defense who is now at the New York University School of Law, said. Any such move is prohibited by the Geneva Conventions and by the precedents set by the United Nations war-crimes tribunals that the U.S. helped establish in Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone. “U.S. military commanders who engaged in pillaging Syria’s oil would risk criminal liability under the U.S. War Crimes Act,” Goodman said. The international rules of war, he added, were designed “to deter nations from engaging in predatory wars to seize other countries’ natural resources.”
    [...]
    It fit with Trump’s longstanding position that the United States should seize the oil of other countries to pay for its military campaigns. “In the old days, you when you had a war, to the victors belong the spoils. You go in. You win the war and you take it,” Trump said, in 2011. “You’re not stealing anything. You’re taking—we’re reimbursing ourselves—at least, at a minimum.”
    Most of all, the new policy—which may keep some five hundred American troops in Syria—wasn’t well thought out, U.S. officials and Middle East experts told me. “It was seat-of-the-pants type shit,” a U.S. official said. Another told me, “To say the oil stuff isn’t thought through is an understatement.
    [...]
    But any American or foreign company that offers to engage in Syria could face sanctions, unless the U.S. lifts restrictions on Syria. “Who’s going to lay billions to rehab the S.D.F. oil industry?” a U.S. official asked. A further complication is that other international oil companies, including Shell and the Chinese National Petroleum Company, held rights to the fields before the civil war—and could challenge any U.S. claim to the fields.
    What’s particularly baffling is that Syria now produces a piddling amount of oil—about as much as Utah. “Syrian oil was not significant at all to the world market. [...] But, as a result of the eight-year civil war and U.S. air strikes on oil installations seized by isis, production is down ninety per cent, to only about forty-thousand barrels per day, Yergin said. That’s a negligible amount on global markets—inadequate even for Syria’s domestic needs.
    lolsigh

    Interesting factoid: "Through intermediaries, both isis and the S.D.F. sold oil to Damascus, U.S. officials told me."
    Vitiate Man.

    History repeats the old conceits
    The glib replies, the same defeats


    Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 



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