Damn I love how cooldude sounds careless when he posts about pretty much anything else but wars in middle east? He suddenly becomes the posting overlord. He's on god damn fire there.
Anyway yeah. Skyab, you gotta think about it from the less morally concerned side. Or at least, from the less immedeately moral-ly concerned side, although once this becomes a topic of choosing lesser evils then it all seems compromised, but there's rarely other options in anything are there?
The issue is that it's never isolated. It's not just about whether you'd sacrifice 225 thousand innocents to liberate the rest of the population of that country, it's also about how that particular strongly centralized government communicates with all the other strongly centralized governments around it, all of which communicate with Russia, because that's just how things go. This isn't just war on terrorism or war on the middle east or war on chemical weapons or nuclear weapons. All of that is the fassade in front of the newly refurnished and decorated war on communism from the 50s or whatever kind of strongly centralized government you'd meet anywhere in Asia or Africa or anywhere.
The truth is that centralized governments hardly ever allow self-democratization and once you'd calculate the completely absent possibilities of Syria or any other similar country to deal with its own regime you should start wondering whether interventionism isn't really needed. The collapse of the soviet union happened because something miraculous happened in China in the 1989 Tiananmen incident. The image of the tank man created a blast wave of the spirit of freedom that managed the then-concidered 'impossible'. The Berlin wall collapsed and so did the SU, but in a lot of ways and for a lot of reasons that was way way way way way more possible than the decentralization of middle eastern governments. For one, the middle east is far more radical, far more dependent on its religious fanaticism and traditions, in short, far more dependent on its identification with a single regime or a single religion and the inability to assimilate anything western and free. Russia is way better off with supporting centralized governments in the middle east than it is with doing that in eastern europe, where things are riskier for them and a lot more strings need to be pulled for people to turn a blind eye on centralization.
In ex-soviet countries, thousands upon thousands were repressed for not supporting or going against the regime, for being counter-revolutionaries and enemies of the people and yet westernization happened. What one should think about is that that might've happened only because those particular dictators were too soft compared to dictators in the middle east. Barely anyone in China knows about the Tiananmen square incident now, let alone is he allowed to talk about it. Disinformation is king there but sadly it's not the only weapon. And it's not like people don't revolt there, compared to before, but how do you revolt against a government that would nuke its own people with chemical weapons and then act duh and how do you not become extreme and misguided in that quest of revolt when you fight that kind of government, which you can't just fight peacefully. Stuff like that was unthinkable in eastern europe and there were some horrible atrocities there too so bare that in mind.
Point is, you can't count on a middle eastern network of centralized governments to decentralize itself. The very system itself thrives on the complete suffocation and paralysis of any westernized, free thought, because that kind of regime knows its the strongest when its people are 1 most divided, 2 most radical/religiously fanatic, 3 most uneducated. Through interventionism (not that I an allow myself to openly support it, I'm merely saying why it's not black and white) you lead a war against centralization of governments. And I urge people like Skyab to not let themselves use the innocent victims as their main argument against it, because it's also very much about whether you allow totalitarianism to thrive and get stronger and that does mean whether you'll allow Russia to get stronger or not.
That said, it's probably near to impossible for Russia, unless in a ww3 scenario, to get a firm grip of any already westernized country, no matter how strong it gets. Then there's the question, isn't it hypocritical for America to fight extreme socialism, while in trying to do that it depends on somewhat-socializing its own government and somewhat-socializing its international relationships and policies through making it seem like any country in the world can be directly dependant on american intervention and support, which is the basis of socialism, only in international scenarios. It's also socialist when the government controlls a market that's supposed to be free and America needs that to fund its wars. So basically, it's trying to kill two rabits with one bullet. It convinces its people that they're dependant on their government so that the economy crysis would be dealt with (something that already happened during Rousevelt) and it convinces every other country that they can be entirely or already are entirely dependant on it (the way ex-soviet countries used to look up to mother Russia).
So I accuse America of all that and in the same time I can't think of another way to fight extreme government centralization, concidering it's not something that can in any way and in any current circumstances fix itself. I mean I could also blame America for, through being powerful, creating a motive for Russia to try to be more powerful than it already is which will go on forever, but then I'd think of how old socialism is as a concept and you can't blame America for that, but I can blame it whenever it pulls socialist stunts. The result is frightening because you realize that in order to fight centralized governments (if it was excusable for a country to appoint itself as the one-to-do-it in the first place) America has to centralize it's own government to an extent. Right now, the more it wants to abolish centralized governments, the more it'll have to centralize its own (because it'll keep having to impose government control over the economy so that it'd fund wars and it wouldn't let gamers just participate in the free market unrestricted, because that way the money will go back to the people and not to the government which then wouldn't have money to fund its wars). Any country would've had to do the same and has done the same during war times in history. And that's the scarriest thing. In a way America was freest and most capitalist in the 18th century, before it had to fight overseas, although that is arguable too, but that's another topic.
