Saturday, October 10, 2015

Syria.

Below are certain facts about our involvement in Syria that shed much light on the realities of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Erroneous assertions will be corrected as error is shown:
  1. Syria has committed no act of war against the United States. We have no business interfering in Syria.
  2. Neither Obama nor any American politician has made a case for why it should be our business.
  3. Bashar al-Assad, the president of Syria, is not a war criminal.
  4. Allegations that he used poisonous gas against Syrian civilians are highly suspect. Use of such a weapon would be guaranteed to needlessly inflame world opinion against him at a time of great focus on him. Poisonous gas is a notoriously indiscriminate weapon and no military purpose would be served by using against a civilian area in the hope that some number of enemy troops would be killed. Assad had nothing to gain by terrorizing civilians and turning them into enemies or refugees, whereas terror is clearly being used by ISIL as a way of creating huge refugee flows out of Syria. A use of gas, however, provided exactly the pretext for intervention that Obama announced before, at, or after the attack. Assad had too much to lose from risking the use of gas but his enemies stood to hit the jackpot of triggering U.S. military intervention.
  5. Assad's army is composed of Sunni Muslims, Shiite Muslims, Christians and others. He has broad popular support. Other governments have been working to foment an artificial civil war in Syria.
  6. His secular rule over Syria is infinitely preferable to the cruelty and murder that would follow an ISIL or so-called Free Syrian Army (FSA) victory. The FSA (and variants) will be killed or absorbed if Assad is defeated. ISIL will dominate a post-Assad Syria.
  7. Obama and his handlers have no idea whatsoever about what a Syria without Assad would look like and any "plan" they have for Syria is no more elegant that "we will cross all bridges when we come to them."
  8. A foreign power that arms and supports troops who are operating inside Syria and attacking the Syrian government is committing an act of war.
  9. The U.S. arms and supports troops who are operating inside Syria and attacking the Syrian government.
  10. The CIA Annex in Benghazi was connected to an Obama scheme to send weapons to Turkey for delivery by the Turks to ISIL. The use of Turkey was to avoid the difficulties that President Reagan encountered under the general heading of "Iran-Contra."
  11. Arms and training provided to "moderate terrorists" for operations against Assad are simply disguised support for ISIL, to whom the "moderates" defect taking with them their U.S.-supplied equipment and training.
  12. The U.S. has deliberately airdropped supplies to ISIL.
  13. The U.S. is lying about the support it is giving to ISIL. Our "attacks" on ISIL are deliberately intended not to damage ISIL. They are sham operations.
  14. Intelligence reports are being falsified at high levels of the U.S. government to disguise the fact that ISIL is being left untouched. The falsification has been so bad that some intelligence analysts at the lower levels have protested as a group.
  15. U.S. support for the satanic ISIL is a disgrace to the United States and is indecent by any objective standard.
  16. The U.S. support for anti-Assad forces of any kind makes us directly responsible for massive deaths of civilians and the huge wave of Syrian refugees heading for Europe. These horrible results are pointless and for no rational purpose.
  17. Obama and his handlers are doing the bidding in Syria of Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Israel.
  18. Israel is aiding anti-Assad forces in Syria.
  19. If Russian bombing of non-ISIL targets in Syria is an outrage, so is Turkish bombing of the Kurds.
  20. Turkey is heavily involved in trying to bring down Assad by, among other actions, allowing arms, supplies and volunteers for ISIL to pass over Turkey's border.
  21. Russia will do more to damage to ISIL in 30 days than the U.S. has "accomplished" in a year.
  22. More than 10 years of U.S. involvement in Iraq and Syria has created chaos and death in the region, especially after Obama withdrew U.S. troops from Iraq. Obama squandered the stability that previous military actions in Iraq had helped make possible.
  23. Putin is not the new Anti-Christ and his intervention will be enormously beneficial to Syria. Were Russia and the U.S. to cooperate in stabilizing Syria and destroying ISIL this would be an enormous contribution to the peace and good order of the world. The killing in Syria and Iraq needs to stop but the Obama is a dissembling fool and Putin is correct to proceed unilaterally.
  24. Putin has been conservative in what he has attempted to do outside of Russia's borders. Crimea would be in Ukraine today and there would be no fighting in E. Ukraine at this hour if the U.S. had not worked to bring down an elected government of Ukraine.
  25. Any U.S. military operations in Iraq and Syria are financed in part by China, Japan, Saudi Arabia. Obama has not revealed what those foreigners have demanded in return for their financial assistance.
  26. The U.S. is vastly over committed militarily and is in a substantially weakened economic condition. Europe freeloads off of the U.S. military dime and we neither demand payment from them nor scale back our commitments.
  27. Thousands and thousands of U.S. troops are engaged in pointless activities in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria while NOT ONE U.S. soldier defends the U.S. border from invasion by terrorists and other foreigners from the third world.
  28. No declaration of war against Syria has been made by the U.S. Congress. Our operations there under murky circumstances and with murky, dishonorable objectives without Congressional approval underline that the consent of the governed in the U.S. is a matter of indifference to Obama and his handlers and financiers.
  29. Republican, who control Congress, will do nothing to stop these disgraceful and unilateral actions by Obama and his handlers.
  30. The U.S. approach to the world is arrogant, unilateral, and contemptuous of opportunities to cooperate with natural allies. The U.S. Treason Class demonizes Russia and China in order to pursue a goal of U.S. hegemony. At the same time, the U.S. is willfully blind to the realities of Islamic savagery and arrogance, and has enshrined fairy tales about Islam and about human nature in all of its domestic policies.
  31. The U.S. government is as presently ruled by a shadowy oligarchy who have long since conspired to discard the Constitution of 1789. The Supreme Court of the United States is corrupt in its interpretation of the Constitution and has become a law unto itself. The president rules arbitrarily and with no care for constitutional governance. In short, the United States of America lives by lies. The Constitution is a sham.
  32. The Treason Class champions a fundamental betrayal of the founding people of the United States on the issue of mass uncontrolled illegal and legal immigration and the destruction of our free market system. The interests and values of foreigners are paramount to the Treason Class.
  33. Our foreign policy is corrupt in proportion to the degree that the soul of America has become diseased.

10 comments:

furball said...

I can't argue with many of your points, but it seems to me that not one U.S. soldier should be sent fighting some foreign enemy without a CONGRESSIONAL declaration of war.

Again, maybe that's a wrong idea, but isn't that what the Constitution says?

I understand all the "modern" arguments about how fast stuff happens.

But no President should have the absolute power to deploy troops. The Constitution gave that power to Congress.

Tim Turner

Col. B. Bunny said...

That's the fundamental objection to what Obama is doing. American power and money are being used without the consent of the people.

Reg T said...

I agree with almost all of your points, but I don't understand what Israel stands to gain by supporting ISIS over Assad in Syria. I would have thought that a stable Syrian government would have been easier for Israel to deal with. If ISIS ends up controlling Syria, Israel will have to deal with them, and they have openly stated their intention of destroying Israel.

Is Assad allied with Iran in some way that makes him worse than dealing with ISIS, and more of a threat to Israel?

Ronbo said...

REVOLUTION! SHOOT THE BASTARD TRAITORS OF THE LEFT, BURN THE BODIES TO ASHES AND THEN BURN THE ASHES!

Paul Bonneau said...

My only quibble would be #3. It should read, "Bashar al-Assad, the president of Syria, is not any more a war criminal than is Obama." However many if not most rulers are war criminals, by any objective measure.

Col. B. Bunny said...

Reg T,

That's a good question. I suppose the advantage to an ISIS win is that ISIS would be a Sunni counter to Shiite Iraq and Iran. (I'm assuming the Sunni minority in Iraq is not that influential.) Too, an Assad loss would remove, arguably, support for Hezbollah, which is a thorn in the side of Israel in s. Lebanon.

Still, under the "devil you know" heading, I'd think Assad would be preferable than the ISIS maniacs. I wouldn't care if they were a Sunni counterweight to Iran. I'd be alarmed that such animals controlled a neighbor.

Col. B. Bunny said...

Ronald, that time may come. I trot out my tired quote from that colleague of Lincoln Steffens at the Versailles Conference. He poked around at private meetings of delegates and told Steffens that everybody wanted peace but no one was willing to do without what could only be had with war.

Similarly, the left and the Treason Class want power, comfort, control, and, maybe, some kind of earthly Valhalla, but they are not willing to do without the things that guarantee the destruction of our civilization and bloody internal conflict. I don't see reason deflecting the West from its disastrous short-term suicidal course.

Col. B. Bunny said...

Mr. Bonneau, that's a point I wish I'd been a bit less adamant about. I reflexively recoil from glib characterizations of national leaders. Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi, and Assad (I don't equate them) all sat atop a slippery pole from which they sought or seek to hold their nation in question. To try to remove them because of their failure to measure up to some goo goo (good government) standard of political purity is reckless, ignores the realities of their nation which they know intimately, and ignores the crucial "what next?" question. Libya and Ukraine are good examples of bad results that the wise men failed to anticipate.

Andrew Bostom is quite negative about Assad and I respect his opinion. Still, to me, he seems an impressive man who has, amazingly, managed to garner support from Sunnis, Allawites, and Christians. (Don't know about Kurds....) Offhand, I would rather live in peacetime Syria if I had to choose one Arab country to live in.

I should add that I'm probably too dismissive of many negatives about China. I still do see them as quite restrained in what they have used their military for and am of the the view that another powerful nation on the planet is not necessarily evil because it chooses to act in ways that resemble how we act around the world. Allegedly Brzezinski is the evil author of the doctrine that the U.S. should just be number one in the world, thank you very much, end of story, full stop. If true, that's a heck of a stupid position and should be replaced by an "each nation is entitled to its place in the sun" approach. By this token, Putin isn't the new Hitler or Stalin and this demonization of Russia that I see everywhere is dangerous madness. Putin strikes me as quite sane, quite reasonable, and very intelligent.

I'm sick of the mindless grr woofery (h/t: Fred Reed) that seems to be the approach of choice.

Reg T said...

Col., those were my thoughts, to a large degree. Putin is doing what I think _we_ should be doing if we weren't being led disastrously astray by Obama and his handlers. Supporting Assad would have nipped this "civil" war in the bud, and there would have been stability in Syria. Hezbollah and Syria's ties to Iran would have remained to be dealt with, but not this chaos - with unpleasant end results no matter who "wins". Mubarak in Egypt, Gaddafi in Libya, and Assad in Syria would have been easier to deal with - and better for the citizens of each country - than ISIS/ISIL and whoever is actually running it right now.

Obama's willingness to accept the chaos, the destruction of the economies and cultures of those countries, and the damage to- and decimation of - their populations, indicates either a mental sickness or dysfunction that causes him to love the diseased , immoral, destructive nature of islam over any rational alternative (even Rev. Wright's "Goddamn America" being preferable to islam). Or, it indicates an endgame involving using islam and a Universal Caliphate to produce the conditions Obama and his handlers desire, including an end to Western civilization. They may believe such a UC as controllable by them or easier to lop the head off of as opposed to controlling or ending a Christian Western Civilization.

I believe they would discover themselves in error, but far too late to do any of us any good. Defeating a Universal Caliphate will always be easier at the Gates of Vienna than after Vienna had fallen, and the UC firmly established.

Col. B. Bunny said...

Reg T, Jeane Kirkpatrick's idea of relatively benign non-communist dictators being worthy of our support has been ignored. The lesson of Libya alone shows what a catastrophe ensues when you rip flesh from bone inside a nation, if you'll pardon the lurid imagery. As bad as Gaddafi was in the past he CLEARLY had moderated his behavior and, obviously, he was a thousand times better than what came after. It was madness to interfere but Hillary just had to have her opportunity to say, "We came. We saw. He died." I would like to see the families of those killed in the aftermath of that have 48 hours alone with her. She might think deposing Gaddafi was such a great idea. She was an absurd choice for SoS anyway, one following as the night the day from the even more absurd choice of Obama as president.

The insanity of having Obama as president is a direct result of our failure to demand that only natural born citizens be electable. The Framers and Ratifiers had no idea of the exact consequences of failing to enforce that requirement but the president we have now clearly is an example of what they did fear, namely, someone whose allegiance is to something other than America. I don't think in their wildest imaginings they thought that a man could actually become president who would harbor an actual, honest to gosh hatred of his "own" country or that voters would be so astonishingly incurious about his origins and life's tracks and so foolishly beguiled by the empty glibness and posturing of this pathetic fool.

The West as a whole is afflicted with a moral and intellectual failing that seems to me to be nothing less than satanic. I'm not a man who sees evidence of God in human affairs but there seems to me to be abundant evidence of an active malevolent spirit at work in these seeming last days of the West. I don't actually believe there is such a force at work but I'm hard pressed to deny that there's such compelling evidence of man's tolerance for lies and weakness and stupidity in the face of mortal threats that something a lot LIKE satanic influences are at work. Merkel, for one, seems possessed by the spirit of the Deceiver. Somebody please provide an explanation that is superior to THAT one.