Discussion
America Has Lost the Arab World
xg15: I guess in the end, Trump will have made good on his promise to pull the US out of the Middle East, bases, alliances and all.5D chess, man, 5D chess...
spwa4: Note WHEN it changed: After Oct 7 2023.In other words, the real cause of this shift is that Oct 7 showed that it is possible to beat America, and destroy Israel. The reaction in the entire Arab world? Immediately pile on!In other words: this was a great PR win for (and by) hamas, showing that US/Israel, and the entire west CAN be beaten. And it was very much a PR win, in other words: it's false information. They didn't convince many Syrians, who had to directly deal with Iranian islamist actions directly. And in Lebanon, it's about equal, which I'm going to guess is not the opinion of all Lebanese. There's 2 groups of Lebanese: hezbollah (who number in the millions) that get paid by Iran's regime and everyone else, that get killed by hezbollah, and aren't very exited, to put it mildly, that hezbollah goes out to kill Syrians in Syria and Iraq and even Iranians in Iran.The arab world is exited for this to happen. Arabs on top again! So ... this is not a failure by the (Biden or Trump 1) administration, and not a reaction to the deaths in this conflict. Also: not a chance in hell that this actually happens.Also ... how dumb are these people? "Who is committed to upholding international law?" with China consistently scoring the highest? Really? The problems with US/EU/Israel in international law is that they don't uphold international law against other actors, only against themselves (e.g. they don't defend Sudan, except Israel, and then only a little bit). But China is actively committing warcrimes by the dozens.
xg15: "After Oct 7" realistically means "after Israel's reaction to Oct 7, and the US' tolerance of that reaction".The IDF took a day to stop and repel Hamas' attack on October 7. The attack lasted painfully long, but after control was regained, the Israeli government could have chosen all kinds of long-term strategies to end the conflict with the Palestinians. Instead, they chose the most inhumane strategy possible.As for the US and the West, a certain amount of ethical double-standards regarding the Palestinians and Israeli impunity was known to everyone, I think. But I imagine most people thought that the western support for Israeli treatment of Palestinians would have some kind of limit. The tolerance of bombardment and starvation until western citizens threatened general strikes showed everyone that there weren't any.I think that was the big change that was caused by October 7.
