Posted on 09/17/2013 8:50:27 AM PDT by elhombrelibre
Israel wants to see Syrian President Bashar al-Assad toppled, its ambassador to the United States said on Tuesday, in a shift from its non-committal public stance on its neighbor's civil war.
Even Assad's defeat by al Qaeda-aligned rebels would be preferable to Damascus's current alliance with Israel's arch-foe Iran, Ambassador Michael Oren said in an interview with the Jerusalem Post.
His comments marked a move in Israel's public position on Syria's two-and-1/2-year-old war.
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
New here on FreeRepublic? Did you find this one instead of the Nazi Storm Trooper sites?
I think you can see the difference between actually fighting alongside al Qaeda, and staying out of a conflict inside an ally of a country that manufactures devices that kill Americans.
This may be public posturing on Israel's part to confuse one or several of its numerous enemies.
China alone is said to have spent over $10b financing foreign communist insurgencies during the Cold War (i.e. an average of ~$300m a year), a big chunk of which occurred during the 40's and 50's, back when (1) a Mickey D's burger cost 15 cents, (2) its annual GDP ranged from $50b to $200b and (3) tens of millions of Chinese starved to death. A China with annual output averaging $100b spent an average of 0.3% of that output financing communist insurgents during the Cold War. Assad's $1b in food imports represent .013% of China's current annual output (~$8t), at a time when China's famines are a distant memory.
From a food supply perspective, Assad has little to worry about unless his foreign sponsors cut off his oxygen. The rebels are presumably well-provisioned via a combination of Gulf Arab, European and American aid. The outcome of this war will ultimately be decided based on which side has more money to burn, more to lose and no place else to go. It's hard to tell just how committed Assad's foreign sponsors are to him, but it's possible that Alawites (and perhaps Syria's other minorities) face extermination if Assad loses. Alawites appear to have nowhere to run*, whereas Sunni Arabs could depart for any one of a dozen Arab countries or even the dozens of Sunni Muslim majority countries that have accepted Bosnian and Kosovar refugees in the past. I think the Alawites have a decent chance of winning for the same reason that the Jews won in 1948 - they have nothing to lose and nowhere to run, whereas their adversaries can escape with their lives into the (at least initially) welcoming arms of their Sunni brethren abroad.
* They've made a political accommodation with the Shiite leadership of Iran, but they're really pagans at best and apostates at worst, which would leave them subject to persecution or worse in devout Shiite-majority states like Iraq and Iran.
I must correct you. IEDs in Iraq were from ordnance originated from many countries. Not just Iran. Further, they were rigged by Iraqis.
Your comment reminds me of how Marxist used to think they could do agriculture by just going to the library and looking things up. And I really think you’re deceiving yourself if you believe Russian and Cuba are going to feed the hungry in Syria.
[Bibi, do you not care about the plight of Syrian Christians who are being slaughtered by Syrian rebels?]
Christians have been persecuted and murdered in all the 57 Islamic countries on the earth and somehow Israel is to blame for murdering Christians? I think not.
Netenyahu is taking care of Israel and must protect them from Islamic jihad without and communist left wing politicians within.
May the good Lord Jesus Christ given him wisdom to destroy Israel’s enemies from with out and with in.
[So Assad falls and who gets the power, the Muslim Brotherhood again?
I don’t see how that’s gonna end well for Syria’s Christians.]
That is so true and Mr. Benjamin Netenyahu knows it as do all true Christians and Conservatives.
[“Really stupid of Bibi to go down this road.”]
What are you saying? He has so many everywhere and will defend Israel from the Islamic Jihadists and American and worldwide left wing communists without. I see a man staying one step ahead of them and who is smarter that we think he is.
And America should go isolationist as long as it continues to win wars and lose control over the nations it defeats by allowing them to decide who will rule over them until an American Constituional Bill of Rights is put in place for their citizens. It is stupid to allow defeated nations elect corrupt politicians. We have not won a war in America since South Korea and the big II because of stupid American politicians who are fools and liars.
Without foreign help, Assad's regime would already have collapsed. Civil wars often result in famine, due to all sides disrupting agriculture, for both sustenance and tactical advantage. Russian funding for Assad isn't some kind of aberration. For 50 years, Syria has been a Russian client state. The subsidies abated after the Cold War ended, but seem to have stepped up again, now that Putin appears to have chosen Syria as the place where Russia will make a stand, as regards the rollback of Russian influence.
I think it's unnecessary to resort to analogies involving unrelated fields to predict the outcome of this conflict. Take Libya, for instance. Gaddafi had a military headed up by incompetents who were defeated by a motley force of black African irregulars in Chad during the Toyota War. And yet the Libyan rebels were unable to defeat him without American intervention. Absent US military intervention, and assuming continued Russian (and other allied) funding, it's highly likely that Assad's regime will still be standing a year from now, and may even have driven the rebels out of the country.
Having a Naval base there, tends to do that.
He’ll have to recapture 60 percent of his country. It seems unlikely he can capture and hold any of it. The rebels will be even better armed soon, and each tank they destroy makes his army that much weaker. By the way, when will the military genius Assad retake the neighborhood he gassed? Even using Sarin gas he cannot take an urban neighborhood. Face it. He’s going down. How much are the Iranians, Hezbollah (fine Christians both), and the President for Life of Russia willing to pay to keep Assad’s crime family and Socialist monarchy in power? I don’t think they’ll pay as much as is needed.
Russia carried dozens of economic basket cases (including Angola, China, Cuba, Ethiopia, Nicaragua, South Yemen, Somalia and Vietnam) during the Cold War, in addition to spending 1/3 of its GDP on defense. And this happened even as Russia's centrally-planned economy was imploding. I doubt Russia will break a sweat over spending $1b a year propping up Assad, now that it's adopted capitalism and benefited from the commodity price boom of the past decade. For the Chinese, backing Assad is pocket change, and it's likely, from the animosity expressed towards them by the rebels, that China is supporting the regime with more than just words.
The Russians have abandoned lots of naval bases before, including the excellent one built with US tax dollars during the Vietnam War at Cam Ranh Bay. It's just that Russian client states have been falling like dominoes ever since the Cold War ended, mainly because we backed the opposition while they stopped funding their client regimes. Their welfare cases have become our welfare cases.
For what are probably reasons of national pride, Russia appears to have decided that Syria is somewhat important to them. Nobody knows how deep that support is, but if they feel it to be important enough to go nuclear, there is no prospect of American intervention, mainly because they would tell the occupant of the White House and he will back down.
Could a nuclear exchange occur over a piddling issue like Syria? Stranger things have happened. Who could have predicted that the assassination of Austria's crown prince would result in tens of millions of European dead and the destruction of Europe's ability to maintain its overseas empires, both in manpower and economic terms? The one thing Marx said that I've found amusing is his view that "history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce". During WWI, the Great Powers were at least fighting over worthwhile things - the possession of vast overseas empires. Fighting a nuclear war over the right of Sunni Arabs in Syria to exterminate its minorities seems to define the essence of the word "farce". But as history has shown again and again, man does not live by bread alone. Napoleon's Grand Armee won victory after victory against numerically superior opponents based in part on the principle, as Napoleon put it, that a soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon.
Both have made statements that seem to imply that they consider regard the US as little more than their mercenaries in the Middle East.
Can you provide those quotes?
When the Saudis or Israelis say that Assad must be overthrown, whose military do you suppose do they expect to help the rebels do the overthrowing?
Oh, okay. They didn’t say it. There is no quote. But you’ve inferred that they said the US must overthrow Assad.
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