Tuesday 20 November 2012

Bad Recognition

Today's announcement that the United Kingdom now regards some cobbled together collection of Islamist insurgents as "the legitimate representatives of the Syrian people" itself represents this country's most significant, and worst, foreign policy decision at least since the invasion of Iraq.

7 comments:

  1. Well, at least now Assad can phone the Taiwanese to ask for advice when countries stop recognising you.

    Then again, Taiwan is more deserving of statehood than Syria ever will be isn't it David?

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  2. Why ever not?

    You can actually criticise the government in Taiwan without fear of being shot anymore. You can VOTE FOR THE GOVERNMENT AS WELL!

    What a novel concept. Maybe they'll get to doing that in Syria in, Oh I don't know, another few centuries?

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  3. That has absolutely nothing to do with it.

    If a British Civil War ended with the losing side holed up on the Isle of Wight, then the Isle of Wight would not thus become a country.

    Furthermore, the ideological arguments advanced for Taiwan (or Georgia, or Israel) a some sort of "outpost of Western values" not only bear little resemblance, ever-less in the Israeli case and never very much in the other two, to what those societies and cultures are actually like.

    They also presuppose the "Western values" formulated by the post-War New York Jewish Left in general and by its Trotskyist wing in particular. Those are not the real ones, nor anything like them.

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  4. Are you trying to claim Georgia shouldn't be a country now?

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  5. It is not the Western outpost that its neocon partisans claim it to be, not even in their own terms, which are wrong anyway. The same is true of Israel. But they are both countries, even if they are both occupying parts of other countries. Taiwan just isn't a country. Like Kosovo.

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  6. Which other country is Georgia occupying exactly?

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  7. Parts of Russia, unless Stalin is to have the last word.

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