PATRICK ARMSTRONG—One cannot avoid asking when did the USA last win a war. You can argue about what “win” looks like but there’s no argument about a surrender ceremony in the enemy’s capital, whether Tokyo Bay or Berlin. That is victory. Helicopters off the Embassy roof is not, pool parties in a U.S. Embassy is not, “Black Hawk down” is not. Doubling the USSR’s record in Afghanistan is not. Restoring the status quo ante in Korea is not defeat exactly, but it’s pretty far from what MacArthur expected when he moved on the Yalu. When did the USA last win a war? And none of the post-1945 wars have been against first-class opponents.
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MoA—
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MoA—More foreign involvement in the war in Libya will be bad for that country but it might be good for Syria. In 2011, after NATO had supported Islamists to destroy the Libyan state, many of those fighters were transferred to Syria to help to destroy that country. Weapons from Libya were transported via Turkey to Syria to support the ‘rebels’ against the government. Both flows are now reverting
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RAMIN MAZAHERI—The Basij are also not comparable to Nazi Brownshirts or Italian Blackshirts. The reason for this simple: Iran has a modern, democratic, anti-racist, anti-imperialist & anti-capitalist ideology which is fundamentally different from the fascist, imperialist, war-mongering, racist, faux-socialist ideology of those two European groups. No such comparison is legitimate in the slightest, and it is fear-mongering anti-Iranian propaganda not based on facts.
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P GREANVILLE—Still, Fisk is Fisk, and he knows his priorities, one of the first apparently being to report and underscore the truth with a view to putting out the numerous fuses lit by the compulsive arsonists in the region, the chief creep in this regard, by a wide margin, Benjamin Netanyahu, a man who clearly has no real respect for life, or else would not be such a pathological warmonger.
