r/neoliberal • u/Brunwic Gay Pride • 18d ago
Syrian mass graves show the worst abuses 'since the Nazis,' top prosecutor says News (Middle East)
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna18464456
u/kaesura 18d ago edited 18d ago
Tons of other middle eastern states have similar systems on a smaller scale with less death ( Egypt , Jordan , Palestinian authority, Tunisia)
So Jolani freeing the prisoners made him a giant hero in the Middle East.
A lot of the dictators are now worried about unrest inspired by him since protestors are now see a new model for their leaders.
The anti Abbas protestors in the West Bank are tying him to Assad in their posters and chants.
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u/Unhelpful-Future9768 18d ago
Egypt
Do we really know what happens underneath Egyptian military sites? These things are being uncovered because the Syrian Army and regime was totally overrun by rebels and random militants were strolling through their secret tunnels taking pictures.
In Egypt the military has and unbroken line to Nasser in the 50s and outside of a brief year in 2012 they controlled the civil government too.
One thing that strikes me about some of the Syria interviews is how NOT professional it was. They just grabbed random local workers and had them operate the digging equipment to cover bodies. A British news channel interviewed one who mentioned they fucked up and didn't go deep enough at first leading to wild animals digging up bodies.
This is not at all surprising considering how corrupt and dysfunctional Syria was but definitely makes me wonder what more competent and resourceful regimes have hidden.
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u/kaesura 17d ago
It's known that Egypt has at least 60K political prisoners held in not great conditions. But I think rthere is less mass death and more releases than in Syria. https://www.newarab.com/news/egypt-had-least-60000-political-prisoners-nyt
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u/captainjack3 NATO 18d ago
There’s been talk about how the Arab World is primed for a Second Arab Spring for a couple of years now. Makes one wonder if Assad’s overthrow will be the spark that re-lights the tinder.
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u/holamifuturo YIMBY 17d ago
Tunisia
Do you have current sources on this? I'm seriously asking cause maybe this was from the Benali years but after the 2014 constitutional reform it has gotten a lot more democratic until Qais now rose to power and want to turn it to neo-ottoman dictatorship with constitution abuses akin to Erdogan.
But still no widespread systemic killings if I'm not mistaken.
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u/ProcrastinatingPuma YIMBY 18d ago
Like was said many times by many people in previously threads, while it's possible that HTS could be worse than Assad, it's really hard for them to go lower than where he put the bar.
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u/UnskilledScout Cancel All Monopolies 18d ago
I don't think "since the Nazis" is true. Hell, stuff like this is currently happening in Sudan and happened not long ago in the Tigray War.
And if those aren't comparable, I doubt this beats the killing fields in Cambodia.
Even within Syria's modern history, Hafez Assad was worse with his suppression of protests in 1980s Hama.
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u/Melodic_Ad596 Anti-Pope Antipope 18d ago
Obama, Trump, and Biden have all joined the long parade of presidents who have failed to live up to the promise of "Never Again" (Biden even did so twice with what is going on in Sudan!)
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u/AutumnsFall101 18d ago edited 18d ago
I mean no President post Bush wanted to start another Forever War. No matter how well intentioned getting involved in regime change could be by 2016 the American Public had no will to fight in another one and would likely punish a President who tried to start another. So it’s hard to blame any President who more or less listened to the will of the people when it comes to foreign policy.
It’s the foreign policy of this.
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u/Melodic_Ad596 Anti-Pope Antipope 18d ago
I mean its pretty clear in hindsight that you could have solved Syria with a single airstrike.
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u/AutumnsFall101 18d ago
The only way you could sell intervention into Syria was the whole Assad Gas Attack thing. But after Bush burnt all that good will and so much disinformation about what happened was pushed no President would want to touch the situation with a ten foot poll especially after said President promises they would end the Forever Wars.
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u/Melodic_Ad596 Anti-Pope Antipope 18d ago
And then voters punished Biden for actually ending them in Afghanistan. Maybe we just focus on doing the right thing and then letting the chips fall where they may.
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u/AutumnsFall101 18d ago
Afghanistan didn’t destroy the Biden administration. Inflation and being bad at communicating with the public killed it.
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u/Melodic_Ad596 Anti-Pope Antipope 18d ago
Did you miss the massive drop in polling that happened after the withdrawal?
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u/AutumnsFall101 18d ago
I didn’t say Afghanistan didn’t hurt Biden. Just that it wasn’t the main reason he lost. He was already losing approval well before the fall of Kabul (in fact you can argue the fall eventually lead to a stabilization of his approval among independents):
If you wanna argue that Afghanistan was part of why the Dems lost then sure. But it wasn’t the main reason or there would have been a Red Wave in 2022. 
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u/JakeArrietaGrande Frederick Douglass 18d ago
I don’t think America had the attention span for it. I can’t remember a single time it was mentioned in the campaign.
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u/icyserene 17d ago
Trump brought it up multiple times on ads and made the families of the soldiers who died in Kabul Airport the centerpiece of the Republican National Convention other than his attempted assassination.
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u/Lmaoboobs 18d ago
Afghanistan was the beginning of the end of the Biden admin. Is when his polling dropped and never recovered.
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u/TheAtomicClock United Nations 18d ago
This is a major misattribution. That was around the same time the delta wave hit, causing significantly more deaths than ever under Trump. Biden was elected to “solve” COVID and when nature made that impossible, he tanked.
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u/talktothepope 18d ago
Correlation doesn't equal causation. It was around the time that inflation got going. The only thing that matters is the price of eggs and shit.
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u/Lmaoboobs 18d ago
Inflation wasn't really that big of an issue at the time (nor was the media portraying it to be), it's pretty clearly causative along with the whole vaccine mandate discourse.
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u/Mddcat04 18d ago
We will continue to see how “solved” Syria is now.
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u/Melodic_Ad596 Anti-Pope Antipope 18d ago
It is better now than it was under Assad, and the world would have been a better place had that happened a decade ago, that much is clear.
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u/jtalin NATO 17d ago edited 17d ago
It's not hard to blame them at all. Listening to the will of the people on foreign policy is almost always a mistake, and it hasn't happened nearly as often until the last three Presidents.
Foreign policy has typically been the area where serious leaders burn all the goodwill and political capital gained from domestic policy and political victories at home. The last three administrations, in their infinite wisdom, have figured out that selling out allies and failing to commit to any foreign crisis is easier than scoring political wins at home.
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u/JebBD Immanuel Kant 18d ago
You can safely blame Bush (and to an extent, LBJ) for this. Foreign intervention post-Iraq was (and very much still is) electoral poison
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u/Melodic_Ad596 Anti-Pope Antipope 18d ago
Obama intervened in Libya and most people didn't know or care.
Biden intervened in Mozambique and I would wager less than 10% of voters even know.
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u/AutumnsFall101 18d ago
I mean they did…like Trump’s whole thing against Hillary was Benghazi and how Hillary left Americans to die due to her supposed incompetence and how he presented himself as an isolationist while presenting Hillary as a War Hawk.
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u/Melodic_Ad596 Anti-Pope Antipope 18d ago
Benghazi happened before the Libyan intervention did?
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u/AutumnsFall101 18d ago edited 18d ago
It happened in 2012.
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u/Melodic_Ad596 Anti-Pope Antipope 18d ago
So I fail to see how that is "voters being aware of the intervention"
The scandal had nothing to do with the intervention and everything to do with the bogus allegation that Clinton ignored intel and let an embassy be attacked.
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u/AutumnsFall101 18d ago
The US got involved in Libya in 2011
The attacks happened in 2012.
Through talk about Hillary’s supposed scandal it popularized conversation about Libya insofar of it being “yet another Forever war” even if they weren’t one of the big two. People did care insofar that US intervention destabilized a nation and allegedly got servicemen killed by a Presidential Candidates’s incompetence. If the US never got involved those men would still be alive (and Libya would not be anywhere near as bad as it is by proxy).
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u/JebBD Immanuel Kant 18d ago
Yes, and Obama was accused of being a war criminal and even himself later said it was a mistake to intervene.
No idea what the Mozambique thing is about, though. Got a link?
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u/Melodic_Ad596 Anti-Pope Antipope 18d ago
Obama was accused of being a war criminal
Not by anyone credible. I can accuse anyone of being a war criminal, doesn't make it true.
As for the later you are kind of proving my point. You are, I presume, a highly engaged individual if you post here and even you had no idea we have troops in Mozambique that were just deployed in 2021.
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u/Okbuddyliberals 18d ago
Not by anyone credible
Well this relates to the whole "democrats don't want to say no" problem more broadly. Even when the Dem establishment aren't locked step with the useless radical left and take some different stances from them, they often seem to have a quiet sort of agreement with them on fundamentals and don't really want to fight with them. Even if the folks who accuse Dems of being war criminals shouldn't be seen as credible, perhaps a lot of liberals/Dems still quietly yearn for the approval of those sorts and have more sympathy with them than they publicly let on
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u/bashar_al_assad Verified Account 18d ago edited 18d ago
I think a number of people on this subreddit are often too online and tend to view things solely in the context of their experiences on twitter, and this comment is a good example of that. For example, when Obama said that intervening in Libya was his biggest mistake, it wasn't because
Even if the folks who accuse Dems of being war criminals shouldn't be seen as credible, perhaps a lot of liberals/Dems still quietly yearn for the approval of those sorts and have more sympathy with them than they publicly let on
It was because after Gaddafi was killed there was a power vacuum in Libya that he hadn't properly planned for, which resulted in extremists getting a foothold. We know this because he said so in an interview! If anything he's making the argument that if they were going to intervene, they should have done more intervention than what they did.
But when you operate in a context where the most important political event to you is whatever fight you come across on your twitter feed, you view that as being the driving motivation for everyone, when it just... isn't.
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u/PrimarchVulkanXVIII 17d ago
We've had troops in Mozambique since Obama because of his light footprint approach. My old unit consistently has deployed there since even before Trump.
Most don't know this unless they're in the deploying units or they keep track of AFRICOM. The information is public about what USACAPOC(A) or the marines do, but the only things that usually catch the news are JCETs.
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u/Sloshyman NATO 18d ago
There are people who will call the US president a war criminal no matter what; they're not worth listening to.
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u/jtalin NATO 17d ago edited 17d ago
If each subsequent President found within himself the political courage to use force to resolve foreign crises after Vietnam, the last three could have found the courage to do it after Iraq.
Continuing to blame Bush a generation after Iraq is just deflection. The problem is that both Obama and Biden were true believers in the wishy-washy idea of diplomacy and multilateralism without the backing of hard power, and Trump is a moron.
War was never popular and is never going to be popular unless America itself is attacked. It needs to be done anyway. Every President outside of the last three understood this.
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u/AutumnsFall101 15d ago
I mean the problem is a war in the middle east is a high risk low reward deal post Bush for any President. Why would Trump willingly break his promise of “no more forever wars” in the hope that whoever takes over in the aftermath of Assad’s defeat is maybe possibly slightly more Pro-American and (in theory) democratic than Assad. All this while dealing the Dems placing every dead G.I at his feet and claiming Trump got the United States into yet another “Forever War” after bashing Hillary for wanting to get involved in Syria. There is just little benefit for the United States in going into Syria after Iraq became a shitshow and Libya blew up in everyone’s face beyond the chance that someone more Pro-US COULD be elected in Syria (all while ignoring how Iraq became an Iranian proxy state). A Middle East War is a raw deal that no President would willingly subject themselves too unless it was broadly backed by allies or if the United States is attacked directly.
America didn’t get involved in any major wars after Vietnam until the Gulf Wars about twenty years after. Every other war between them was either about small island nations no one has ever heard of with pathetic militaries or covert operations. I think it is going to be a while until any President is truly willing to go to war again.
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u/Apprehensive_Swim955 NATO 18d ago edited 18d ago
r/ redscarepod users will still say the rebels are worse because Assad’s regime was secular and liberals are dumbdumbs for celebrating his downfall.
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u/D10CL3T1AN 18d ago
Assad was horrible but I don't know about that. Cambodia and Rwanda are hard to top.
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u/Wassertopf 18d ago
Deutschland ist wie hier kein anderes Land gefragt.
1) Wir haben die Aufklärungseinheiten der stasi noch da. 2) wir haben als einziges Land Gerichtsfeste Forensik was Syrische Geheimdienste anbelangt - kein anderes Land hat das! 3) nur Deutschland ermittelt seit über zehn Jahren gegen den syrischen Geheimdienst - das macht kein einziges anderes Land der Welt.
4) wir bilden seit Jahren syrische Juristen genau für diesen Tag aus. Nur Deutschland macht das. 5) wir haben als einziges Land felsenfeste Forensik was Assaads Geheimdienst anbelangt - das hat kein anderes Land auf der Welt.
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u/richmeister6666 18d ago
Cranks trying to not make anything concerning the Middle East about Israel challenge. Difficulty: impossible
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u/niftyjack Gay Pride 18d ago
Syrians start uprising against unpopular, violent leader
Unpopular, violent leader commits atrocities en masse against Syrians
Unpopular, violent leader turns country into a narco state and weapons smuggler for the rest of the region, uses those funds to continue mass atrocities
Must be the Jews...
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u/looktowindward 18d ago
What does this have to do with Israel? Talk about low effort trollbait
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u/actual_wookiee_AMA Milton Friedman 18d ago
I shat my pants last week on the bus
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u/kiwibutterket 🗽 E Pluribus Unum 18d ago
Thanks for adding important information about how this sub is moderated.
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u/neoliberal-ModTeam 18d ago
Rule III: Unconstructive engagement
Do not post with the intent to provoke, mischaracterize, or troll other users rather than meaningfully contributing to the conversation. Don't disrupt serious discussions. Bad opinions are not automatically unconstructive.
If you have any questions about this removal, please contact the mods.
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u/One_Emergency7679 IMF 18d ago
The article doesn’t really expand on what he means by comparing this to the Nazi regime. It discusses the secret police and up to 100k killed, but I don’t understand how this is substantially worse (at least in scale) to the countless other genocides that occurred since the Nazis.
To be clear, I’m not trying to downplay Assad’s crimes. In fact, I think Assad should be hung for his crimes.