Tony Blair and tackling radical Islam (merged thread)

[carl]

David:

Maybe Tony Blair is the ideal establishment guy to bring this up. Most everybody hates him anyway so he has nothing at all to lose.

His message may be politically stupid in 2014 but it is just as much geopolitically (sic) wise and I think will become more apparently so as the years pass. The takfiri killers aren't just conservative, they are killers. Their basic religious AND political standpoint is 'you convert to Islam or we'll kill you'. They mean that. There is no quiet way to deal with people like that.

We may not like the way the Egyptian Army is handling the problem and they could probably do it and just as effectively more humanely but they are handling the problem. If they prevail it is better for us than if they do not. We may curl our lips at that but that is the way it is. It was the same thing in Algeria in the 90s. The Algerian Army won and it is a good thing they did.

This is the same argument current in the Cold War. Should we support states that are on the front line against Communism even though they do not perfectly reflect our values? Should we stick by South Korea or Taiwan even though their govs are pretty rough? We often decided to do so because they rather more closely reflected our values than did the Reds and their govs were a damn sight less rough than the Reds. It worked out to our advantage I think. It was also good because in order to influence those govs toward our view of the good, it was helpful to be buds with them. If we weren't they could tell us to go pound sand.

The ironic thing is we have such mixed emotions about helping the current Egyptian government which is trying and actually doing something about the takfiris who would kill the world, and yet at the same time we can't seem to not help the Pak Army/ISI which actively supports those same takfiri world killers.

[Dayuhan]

This is the same argument current in the Cold War. Should we support states that are on the front line against Communism even though they do not perfectly reflect our values? Should we stick by South Korea or Taiwan even though their govs are pretty rough? We often decided to do so because they rather more closely reflected our values than did the Reds and their govs were a damn sight less rough than the Reds. It worked out to our advantage I think.

In some cases yes, in some cases not so much. They weren't all Taiwan and South Korea: we also ended up harnessed to a fair number of thuggish dictators who were as corrupt and ineffective as they were brutal, and who turned out to be substantial liabilities rather than assets. These situations have to be evaluated, and regularly re-evaluated, on a case to case basis, we can't simply assume that anyone who's fighting people we don't (or claims to be fighting people we dislike) like is necessarily and automatically deserving of support.