Syria under Bashir Assad (closed end 2014)

[ganulv]

instead of cleaning the 'backyard' (see: removing all the debilitating regimes in the Middle East, which are core root of the problem), the West is still happily cooperating with any of them pretending to be 'friends'.

Gaddafi and Mubarak are gone. Have the lives of ordinary Libyans and Egyptians improved for all that?

[davidbfpo]

Crowbat is right, from his latest post:

And one just can't 'kill' ideas: only provide more attractive alternatives.

For many good reasons the US and by implication all of the Western post-9/11 response has relied on "might is right". Sadly those options fail to recognise and counter that the violence of the jihadists is based on ideas and grievances.

That is unless there is a covert operation based on a strategy which the public know nothing about. If this exists I do wonder if it has any success.

One commentator, John Schindler refers to this in a wide-ranging commentary:http://20committee.com/2014/09/11/de...-how-to-guide/

All this is not just about Syria!

[AmericanPride]

Gaddafi and Mubarak are gone. Have the lives of ordinary Libyans and Egyptians improved for all that? .

The problems in Egypt and Libya are structural - they won't be fixed just by removing the old regime; there has to be an active process in constructing a new system of political and economic relations. In Egypt specifically this means bypassing or removing the entrenched military elite that owns something like 20% of the country's economic activity. With that kind of dependency on the military as an institution, there should not be any surprise that changes faces in power doesn't really change who exercises that power. We talk about state-building in the context of rebuilding a state after destroying it in war - why not talk about state-building in the context of reform prior to war?

[CrowBat]

Indeed: 'state-building before it provides growing ground for extremism'.

BTW, it's much more than 20% of the Egyptian economy that is owned by the military elite. The 'problem' in assessing the actual situation is that much of that military elite consists of retired generals. Best example is tourist industry: any 'decent' brigadier or major-general there owns at least a hotel, or construction business or something of that kind.