Posted on 06/10/2013 3:44:28 AM PDT by Kaslin
There is a reason why Pat Buchanan named his cat “George Will.”
will is another one... all of those traitors are... traitors.
LLS
The dominant rebels seem increasingly hostile to our interests, and the Assad regime may be on the verge of military victory.
We've known for several months that the dominant faction of the rebels was affiliated with Al Qaida. They didn't get radicalized from our lack of intervention as Barone implies.
I will give BO credit for making the right decision not to intervene for what are most likely the wrong reason-- he was genuinely confused as to which course would be most likely to harm America's long-term interests. And by failing to decide, he may have accidentally made the decision in favor of America's long-term interests.
This is a job for the private sector. Raise funds for the rebels.
I have to agree. At this time last year, I viewed Rand Paul and his father as isolationist moonbats who shouldn't be allowed anywhere near the levers of power for foreign policy.
Then the American sheeple voted to neuter our military for at least the next generation in November.
We no longer have the choice between the world's finest military who can project our power anywhere in the world and one which can (maybe?) defend our interests closer to home.
Our current options are between a military which can (maybe?) defend our interest closer to home and one which can be used by the regime in power to maintain that power. Call me a peacenik if you must, but that's the facts.
The beltway crowd are a lot of one-note charlies.
There may be legitimate foreign policy concerns, but they haven't been explained fully by the Obama Administration.
My major reason for staying out of Syria, and other potential hotspots, is simple: I no longer trust the military chain of command to implement rules of engagement that minimize American casualties.
Today's military, in terms of leadership, is a far cry from when I was on active duty. During my last two years in Germany, my battalion commander turned our battalion from a C-3 to a C-1 in about 18 months. A major part of that improvement came from using Chapter 13 discharges on poor performers. He took a lot of flak, as he signed off on over 60 during his tenure, or about 10% of the entire battalion.
I doubt that feat could be repeated today.
Barack Obama's appointments of Susan Rice as national security adviser and Samantha Power as ambassador to the United Nations... proponents of humanitarian military intervention, a course that Obama followed, gingerly, in Libya... But of course that didn't work out so well. The murder of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans in Benghazi last September showed that terrorists have a free hand in Libya -- even if the president and Rice, along with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, managed to mislead Americans during campaign season by suggesting the attack resulted from a spontaneous protest of an anti-Muslim video... Obama called for Assad's ouster... has declined to provide aid to democratically inclined Syrian rebels. To be fair, it's hard to identify such people. There are risks to any intervention... after some 80,000 Syrian deaths... The dominant rebels seem increasingly hostile to our interests... He has spoken loudly and wielded a very tiny stick. For this he seems likely to pay no great political price back home.And a raft of congratulations to the many on this topic who missed the point of this excellent essay while backing Obama to the hilt and/or criticizing the straw man version.
If you’d like to be on or off, please FR mail me.
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The problem isn't inaction in a military sense, not sure we've a side in Syria at this point, but the administration's apparent refusal to cultivate moderate, pro-US constituencies anywhere in the region, from Iran through the Arab spring to Syria. Maybe BHO doesn't believe there can be moderates in the region, maybe he doesn't want moderates in the region.
Israel has displayed good common sense in dealing with Syria: Secure the border and stay out except to co-opt any moves against them. I guess that’s not nuanced enough for The Lightworker.
Agreed. The response must be instant and lethal.
Add it all up and you get the typical US response: Sec. of State Kerry...Israel must halt settlement building and release PLO murderers (for the 456th time) n order to bolster Abu Mazen who does not want peace anyways...So much attention being given to the Palestinians so-called “rights’ to eventually set up and kill Israel. When will the priorities of that region really be looked at
Nuts!!!Let them all kill each other off. NEITHER side is our friend.
You can not trust Muslims
This is idiocy.
There were no “good guys.” And his “democratically inclined insurgents” have every intent of slaughtering the minorities like Christians, Alawites, and Druze.
There was no “win” for us in Syria. Intervention would have been a waste of blood and treasure. We should have backed the Russians and let them handle their client state.
Not in Syria nor in the White House.
Kerry and his boss follow Churchill’s definition of appeasement, without understanding that Churchill thought it a bad thing.
“the administration’s apparent refusal to cultivate moderate, pro-US constituencies anywhere in the region”
unfortunately, what is going on in Syria today began with the U.S. under GWBush from a decade ago and did not stop or change much with Obama
and the entire project - regime change in Syria - proceeded on the same false scenario, tied to the Saudis and Islamists connected to them as we did in Afghanistan from 1979-1989, that believed, in error, we could rely on the premise of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”.
In the case of Syria, Syria was not “my enemy” because Assad was a “dictator” (what is the king of Saudi Arabia??), or even the worse “dictator” in the region, but ONLY because he had made friends with Iran (as if we never had to understand why that was the case, why Assad was not welcome in a lot of the “Arab League” with or without his friendship with Iran).
We - in the form of GWBush and Obama - did not care about actually nurturing “moderates” in Syria, because (a) we ONLY cared about Syria’s relationship with Iran, and (b) we were mindless of the fact that the egenda we were promoting was NOT the agenda of our Middle East allies that were in on it with us - and they had the cards with the boots on the ground and the core leadership of the “opposition”.
What did we get for how we operated an agenda to oppose the Russians? We helped build Al Queda up; we helped arm the Taliban and the Mujahadeen that would join them to oppose any “moderates” in the Afghan opposition to Russia; we watched as the Saudis and their friends have funded the Madrassas that have created the mush-for-brains cannon fodder who join the Taliban in Afghanistan and in Pakistan in their crusade to force everyone there into their Islamic fundamentalism. Now we are repeating the same fundamental error with Syria - when all is done with, our allies are not going to make Syria a “friendlier” place for us.
The error of not really trying to nurture moderates in the Middle East did not begin with Obama, as much as I’d like to say it did.
The error is decades old and it bought into the myth that a Middle East “moderate” is a Middle East leader that “supports or is allied with us GEOPOLITICALLY”, period and it has had NOTHING to do with what kind of leader they are or government they run internally, or what agenda of their own such leaders are working on in their neck of the woods. Meanwhile, in the very long term, in terms of our values and value systems, their own agenda has never been compatible with ours. They are all autocrats and mercantilists and not just mercantilists in world trade but internally as well (they (and their freinds) didn’t - personally - get so stinking rich cause they were smarter than everyone else).
We have been their friend in ways we thought were in our interest. They have never been our friends.
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