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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

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The goal was to topple Assad from day 1. The US was egging the Turks on, helping the inept Saudis administrate their own proxy war. Besides, who stands behind Qatar and Saudi Arabia anyway, who supplies the arms they sent on? Qatar is not known for its flourishing domestic arms industry.

Qatar and Saudi are, however, known for having a lot of money to spend on arms, and pursuing their own regional interests. This goes back to eclipsing other party's agencies by attributing their agency to the US as a puppet-master, as opposed to alignment of interests.

Few, if anyone, in the US were going to sympathisize with Assad. But no one in the US government had the institutional consensus to actually determine a goal. 'Topple Assad' is not an end-goal in US policy terms, it is a means to the end, but that lack of clear end-state is what kept the Americans indecisive even as the Turks and the Saudis actually funeled what they could as they could. If 'topple Assad' was the goal, the US military could have acted, the US aid could have centered to specific groups, the US support for Saudi or Ankara could have expanded rather than throttled over islamic extremist concerns.

Furthermore, there's a long history of US involvement in Sudan, they've been bombing and sanctioning and harassing and providing aid to Sudan for decades. It's not so much that the US has an incentive in manipulating, it's that the US has been, is and will continue to manipulate and mess with Sudan.

Note the transfer of the subject of what is actually being discussed. Gone is discussion of the specific conflict in Sudan, going on right now- now this is a general 'the US is present and has an influence,' and more than that a conflation of all sorts of measures of interaction as a commonality rather than a series of different relationship states and reasons. The US having a presence and an influence was never disputed, however- rather, the relevance of presence to this specific conflict was the argument, which is not actually addressed or challenged by conflating decades of history.

This goes back to the cultural chauvenism of it not all being about the Americans. Lots of people have long history with Sudan. The Americans are not the most relevant part of Sudan. The Americans are not the most relevant party to understand what is going on now. Stop inviting the Americans to live in your headspace free of charge. Other people in other parts of the world are quite capable of making their own bad decisions without it being driven by American influence.

Leaving small countries on the other side of the world to their own devices - impossible challenge for America!

By the standards you set, everyone with any sort of positive and/or negative interaction with Sudan is a form of interference. It's a meaningless jab when you set the bar so low.

If 'topple Assad' was the goal, the US military could have acted

It did act - just in an indecisive and ineffectual way and against stronger than expected opposition. There are still US troops in Syria today, doing their best to prevent any complete resolution of the conflict now that Assad has won. US sanctions are preventing most reconstruction work. US aid did eventually settle on the Kurds, who are hated by nearly all their neighbours. This is a perfect example of why interfering in these places is such a bad idea. The more interference you do, the fewer friends you make.

Note the transfer of the subject of what is actually being discussed.

It is not unreasonable to predict that, since the US has been interfering and influencing Sudan for decades, it will continue to do so and use the current crisis (and the arrival of US troops) to increase its interference. Sure, it's appropriate to use troops to get your embassy personnel out but how long are those troops going to stay there?

By the standards you set, everyone with any sort of positive and/or negative interaction with Sudan is a form of interference. It's a meaningless jab when you set the bar so low.

Yes - it's a small, poor country very far from the US. There is no good reason to be so interested in what happens there. These small, poor and irrelevant countries should be left to their own devices. And the US has been aggressively sanctioning parts of the Al-Burhan government, including the police. They've been trying to undermine it for some time - the US bears some responsibility for the conflict.