Remember the Arab spring? People are still burning in hell and nobody in the West gives a shit anymore. Sure, Gaddafi was a terrible dictator, but his death is making things much, much worse. If Assad was dead, things would become even more ugly. All the West wanted is to judge and prevail instead of solving the problems, or at least try not to screw everything.
Imagine yourself as an average Syrian or Lybian person, the government is imperfect just like anyone else but life is Okayish. All of a sudden some superpowers just yell freedom in your face, then soon there's wars and bombs - your home turned into rubble, many people you were killed.
It's not only painful but also confusing and not constructive at all. Nobody learned anything. That's worse, things like these doomed to happen again, in another year, on another land, and happens to some other people.
It turns out that while sunlight is a great disinfectant, it also sometimes starts unintended fires.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_diplomatic_cable...
The material support was absolutely not token, at all.
There are also literal US troops in Syria that are used purely to prevent the Syrian government from taking control of land in Syria.
These are also in strategic places used to cut off land trading routes to Syria and cause economic pain to the government via military means, in the hopes that the government would fall.
Also, the US government actually did bomb the Syrian military multiple times.
So no, the US is actually at war in every single sense of the world against the Syrian government, and without the US government and it's allies there would be no civil war in Syria past a year or two of unrest. Not anywhere even near 400 000 deaths.
It should be noted the large degree of foreign involvement in this war. You've got Hezbollah and Iranian-backed militia groups working alongside the Syria government forces. Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar provided bases, training, and equipment to the free Syrian army. Turkey has even mounted offensives into northeast Syria. There's Kurdish forces, some funded by Kurdish nationalist elements. There's jihadist groups such as the al Nusra front and ISIL which took advantage of the power vacuum to grow in power and influence. Foreign fighters from throughout the middle east (and throughout the world) flocked to the region to join various factions. Russia has deployed troops to assist the Syrian government and is regularly striking Syrian opposition targets. And, of course, funding and training from several Western nations. None of the above was at the behest of the US, these are actions taken by different countries and groups in service of their own foreign policy goals and ideologies. It seems odd to place the blame squarely at the feet of the US when so many competing interests were involved, especially when others intervened significantly more.
And things changed significantly with the emergence of ISIL, their invasion of Iraq, and numerous terrorist attacks around the world. The US was absolutely correct in providing support to Iraq and building a coalition to stop their territorial gains and mount a counter offensive. I think expecting the US to remain neutral in such a conflict is unreasonable. It was necessary to push them back into Syria, and to take steps to make sure they could not regain ground in western Syria. And while the Syrian and Russian governments might complain about this, the fact is that the region is far outside of their area of control.
I think that blaming everything on the US belittles the decisions and actions or local groups, and groups around the world.
As for foreign support, except for US-led support, all of it was to support Assad.
Whats more, even at the very beginning the US limited Russia's support of Assad by threat of military intervention.
As for the rest, if you think it is tenable for a fractured force of over twenty different factions without an access to weapons, training or funding to persist more than a few months against a modern army, you are simply wrong. Insurgency would have been possible, but not holding territory.
In any case, the non-jihadist non-Kurdish independent (which were amenable to limited autonomy since the beginning) forces basically dissipated within a year with the fall of the Free Syrian Army in 2012. Your theory that the revolt would have been protracted and last for years without international support is completely absurd, because it was almost completely destroyed, leaving only the YPG and the Jihadists, within a year until US support returned.
Indeed, the successor of the FSA, the SMC, was explicitly backed by the US-led coalition from its very founding.
I'm not belittling the actions or decisions of local groups in anyway. I speak Arabic myself, and have friends that lived in Syria at the time. The movement was not sustainable at all, and was much, much, much less bloody until the Western weapons fell into the hands of Jihadists.
I never asked the US to remain neutral in a conflict against terrorism. If they wish to do so, they could have joined it with the accord of the Syrian Government instead of waging war against it and indirectly (and directly) supplying the terrorists.
I'm blaming the US squarely because she, and her allies which operated through the US, are the only source of armament for the opposition and the Jihadists, and knew very well that Democracy was completely impossible in Syria at the time since the very beginning, but instead saw an opportunity to pursue geopolitical interests at the cost of hundreds of thousands of deaths, yet again.
Your attempt to deflect the blame by accusing entities that never facilitated the Civil War at all of "doing it too", denying the clear pattern of US involvement in the rebel and jihadi elements of the Civil War is frankly disgusting.
From 400 000 to 600 000 people died in a Civil War that, even at the very beginning, never even had a majority amongst the rebels of support for a secular democracy, and that was prolonged 7 years past the functional collapse of the rebels - which were then swiftly reorganized under the watchful eye of the US - is denial of a horrible atrocity done for literally no possible benefit - which was clear from the very beginning to anyone that made even a cursory attempt at an independent reading of the situation.
And by the way, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey were solidly allied with the US in military matters in the large majority of the conflict. Qatar never actually put boots on the ground, by the way.
The Turkish invasion itself was only ever possible because Kurdish control over NES allowed Turkey to invoke the Asana accords signed by Turkey and Syria that allowed them to invade. Note that I wholeheartedly support the Kurdish cause and identify very strongly with their politics, but I cannot let that influence my analysis here. The Kurdish forces whose presence made the Turkish invasion possible are only there because of US boots on the ground that are intended as tripwire forces, which prevent Russian and Syrian forces of taking control of that territory - either peacefully in exchange for limited autonomy, or through force, the first option being significantly more likely due to Russian pressure to allow this.
No matter where you analyze the cause of the ridiculous prolongement of the war, you almost invariably find that the US is a blocker in the process of removing them.
I'm not trying to defend the Syrian Government either. I deeply dislike them. But there was, realistically, absolutely no way for a stable alternative to exist at the time of the revolution. Popular support for a preferable government was never in the absolute majority, and the inevitable conclusion of the Civil War was either a victory by Assad or something even worse - in both cases at an incredibly high cost.
This was explained and predicted to me by my father and Syrian friends all the way back in 2011, and while I did not agree at the time, in retrospect its clear that this was correct and I'm convinced the US knew as much too.
The parent thread I was responding written "I guess Thailand is due for a revolution".
There would surely be many people trying to convince Thai people "your government is evil, go overthrow it". Maybe sometimes to an extreme like "burn the parliament and everything will get better".
To be "supportive" over the Internet is almost too easy, especially if it's not someone's home country it's easier to said than done because they don't need to take consequences. Yell at your boss and you'll be at risk of losing the job, but it won't hurt to encourage foreigners to go for the rebel path.
Of course it is true that NATO, EU, the US, Russia, and China are engaged there and are part of the landscape but that's part of strategic power plays more than Westernism.
"How many people must die so that American's feel like everyone wants to live the way they do"
I didn't have an answer, and at that point barely knew enough of my own country's 'real' history (despite 24 years of US education) to understand the scope of it.
It wasn't instantaneous, but I can draw a clear line between that connection and the better and more knowledgeable person I am today.
This is completely false.
The Arab spring was not incited by the West.
It was well underway long before the West was even paying close attention.
In Tunisia, the West was not involved.
In Libya, the West stayed away as long as they could.
In Egypt, the West avoided until they were forced to pick a winner and Obama weighed in politically to 'support' a transfer of power (they were all looking to the US Pres. at that point).
In Syria, the West stayed out for a a long while, an when they did get involved, it was mostly against ISIS.
The grievances on the Arabs street are very real.
Of all possible contentious issues with respect to the Arab Spring uprising (and there are many) - this is not one of them.
It definitely was not an 'inciting' factor.
Frankly, if you want to point at 'the thing' it would be Chelsea Manning's cable leaks: determined to show her own nations foibles, she did nothing of the sort, rather she exposed the vast, totalitarian corruption among Arab state leaders, which lit the match in Tunisia and then elsewhere.
It was a raw, populist uprising against the 'dumb tyranny' of those systems and had predictable results in each of the nations.
It was completely outside the scope of US/Western control, and by and large totally outside the foreign policy objectives of most US/Western players. Nobody really wanted it - way too much instability and risk. There were also no winners, and a bunch of losers for sure, sadly.
US inmate composition analyses are great example: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092753711... https://jlc.org/news/what-foster-care-prison-pipeline
Regretfully it is hard to sue the foster-child-care system as sharing guilt for the civil damages done to these children:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
Also interesting that including high estimates for China's "re-education" camps would still only move them up to about 30th place, for incarceration, somewhere around Russia/Turkey/Nigeria. Although that's one area being diluted by the whole.
See more here: https://youtu.be/S9SMRuvnl2g
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primate_city
Second city is Chiang Mai with 960k people. So the ratio is about 10:1 and not 26:1. This puts it in line with Japan, and Austria. Hardly churn factories.
However, your link suggests a ratio of 17:1 with Chang Mai in the list, which is still quite high and also on the same page there is the contradictory mention of a 35:1 ratio with Nakhon Ratchasima (in the 'Examples' section). The Wikipedia 'Bangkok' page says the population (metro) is 14M, while this Wikipedia page says 17M.
Other sources have wildly different numbers too. 5M here for example, suggesting a ratio of 13:1 with Samut Prakan, yet another city: https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/thailand-popu... ("includes boroughs, districts, urban agglomerations, etc.")