Nebsker

feral satirical sarcasm and folderol

[Nebsker @BecomeFromCold]

@camhberg Care is better than curiosity sometimes.

[Nebsker @BecomeFromCold]

Somalia didn’t topple a government or stop a genocide. It taught Washington to fear a messy street fight more than a massacre on TV.

[Nebsker @BecomeFromCold]

Somalia, 1993
Inherited from Bush, mission drifted into hunting a warlord. Oct 3: Black Hawk Down. 18 Americans dead, bodies dragged in Mogadishu. Clinton pulled U.S. troops out. Nation-building failed. Defense Secretary Les Aspin later quit. This scare shaped the rest of the decade.

[Nebsker @BecomeFromCold]

Kosovo is hard to understand

Albanians were being terrorized. NATO stopped that campaign. It also bombed a country without UN approval, hit civilians and an embassy, and left Kosovo as a half-finished state. Clinton got the outcome he wanted with no American coffins. That’s why he still calls it a win, and why Serbs and a lot of left critics still call it a crime.
A Serb TV station was hit. Journalists were lost in the strike.

[Nebsker @BecomeFromCold]

Sudan, 1998
After al-Qaeda hit two U.S. embassies, Clinton launched cruise missiles at Afghan camps and the Al-Shifa plant in Khartoum. Claim: nerve gas + bin Laden. Evidence was thin. It was a medicine factory. A few Sudanese dead/hurt. Looked like “Wag the Dog” to critics because of Lewinsky.

[Nebsker @BecomeFromCold]

Rwanda, 1994 — the failure to act
~800,000 killed in about 100 days. After Somalia, Washington blocked a serious UN force. Clinton later apologized. Not a lost battle. A decision not to fight while a genocide ran.

[Nebsker @BecomeFromCold]

Asia 1997–98: IMF packages (U.S.-backed) meant high rates and cuts. Indonesia exploded; Suharto fell. Deep recessions.

[Nebsker @BecomeFromCold]

1990s U.S. was, in the words of Bill, “sanctions happy.” (tariffs anyone?)
He kept
Iraq, Cuba, North Korea, Libya, Syria, bits of China after Tiananmen going strong, from before his installation to the WH.
He started and made harder
• Iran — full U.S. trade/investment ban, 1995
• Iran + Libya secondary sanctions (ILSA), 1996
• Haiti — tightened, then invasion
• Serbia / Bosnian Serbs
• Burma, 1997
• Sudan
• Taliban Afghanistan, 1999
• India and Pakistan after the 1998 nuke tests
Cuba also got Helms-Burton in 1996, which he signed.
Starvation was the result.

[Nebsker @BecomeFromCold]

1998: ruble crash and default. Clinton’s team shoved a last IMF package at it anyway.

[Nebsker @BecomeFromCold]

Clinton chose Yeltsin + IMF shock over a slower path, and kept pouring money after it went bad. Russians felt that as “the Americans did this to us.” That’s part of why the 90s still poison U.S.–Russia politics.

[Nebsker @BecomeFromCold]

Serbia / Bosnia sanctions
Economy cratered. Medicine and fuel got scarce. War occurred, obscuring a count on the toll that would be accurate.

[Nebsker @BecomeFromCold]

Old History

Iraq
Kept the post-1990 UN embargo almost the whole Clinton years. Oil money was boxed in. Food and medicine were allowed on paper (Oil-for-Food, 1996). In practice: shortages, bad water, weak hospitals, Saddam stole and steered goods.
UNICEF-linked figures around half a million were widely cited; later work says that number is too high or poorly measured. Lower estimates still mean a lot of extra death and sickness. Albright’s “the price is worth it” line is why people still spit on this policy.
Political result: Saddam stayed in power. Sanctions punished people more than the palace.

Iran
1995 ban + 1996 secondary sanctions hit oil investment. Hurt the economy. Did not break the regime. Ordinary Iranians paid in jobs and prices. This is the template later presidents doubled down on.

Haiti
Embargo on the coup regime, 1991–94 (Bush then Clinton). Fuel and trade dried up. Poor Haitians got poorer; the generals had stockpiles. Used as pressure before the 1994 U.S. intervention. Civilian pain was real and fast.

Serbia / Bosnian Serbs
Tight UN/U.S. squeeze during the Bosnia war. Factories and living standards dropped. Aimed at Milošević and the Bosnian Serb leadership. Debated: helped force talks, also hit civilians who weren’t running camps.

Cuba (Helms-Burton, 1996)
Didn’t start the embargo. Made it harder to unwind and tried to punish foreign companies. Main effect on Cubans was “more of the same”: scarce goods, weak investment. Castro stayed.

India & Pakistan, 1998
Automatic sanctions after nuclear tests. Cut aid and some loans for a bit. Both countries kept the bombs.

Burma, Sudan, Taliban Afghanistan
Targeted or rising pressure. Sudan and Taliban isolation mattered later for terror.

North Korea
Embargo was already old. 1990s famine killed hundreds of thousands to over a million by most estimates. Causes stacked: floods, rotten farm system, Soviet aid gone. Sanctions were one more wall around a prison built for the regime.

Sanctions rarely topple the guy in charge. They shrink the economy. The elite finds workarounds. The poor eat less.

[Nebsker @BecomeFromCold]

Harvard team in 1993 said about 1,000 extra child deaths per month, plus ~100,000 more malnourished kids. Fuel, vaccines, and transport broke down. Food/medicine were “allowed,” but hard to move.
Generals ate well.
These numbers only include the more studied or observed, and are much lower than the total cost of these sanctions.

[Nebsker @BecomeFromCold]

North Korea (mid-1990s, into early 2000s)
Famine: about 600,000 to 1 million extra deaths from hunger and related disease. https://t.co/UFdhv2nuXd
Main causes: floods, collapse of Soviet aid. U.S. isolation made help harder.
(It was Bill)

[Nebsker @BecomeFromCold]

I remember the last time someone has about 60% of Americans in mind and then a corrupt and wicked party took that information and co opted every single thing and failed to deliver on even one of them. Not even one! The party echoed Bernie after letting the Clinton foundation stealing the primary and giving us Donald as a result? Mysteriously, a man named Clinton kept company with a similar slimeball to Donald. I wonder how it benefit Bill to not be in the White House and whether Hillary would’ve reduced the 11% of the budget earmarked to look into the crimes of Epstein, a portion of the budget cut by Donald. So everything works out for Bill! Everything going according to plan!

[Nebsker @BecomeFromCold]

@jacksonhinkle What has been done? And why??

[Nebsker @BecomeFromCold]

@YourAnonCentral @grok should we worry about these hacks a little more than hugging face by Astra or whatever? Shouldn’t we be working on live encryption?

[Nebsker @BecomeFromCold]

@grok I just think it’s fear mongering bullshit.

[Nebsker @BecomeFromCold]

@grok what’s up with the new Gemini frontier model replacing ChatGPT Astra? Can we get the juicy intel on that?

[Nebsker @BecomeFromCold]

@grok Not pure exaggeration, but I think it’s framed in a way that’s dishonestly scaring people, somewhat needlessly.

[Nebsker @BecomeFromCold]

@grok Were they testing whether or not it could specifically do that though?