To recap: The US has indeed claimed its primary aim in Syria is to “degrade and destroy” ISIS - but instead of allying with the Syrian army, which has been battling ISIS on the ground, Washington has spent years backing opposition “moderate rebel” forces who are fighting Bashar Assad’s government forces. In other words: Washington is backing the groups that are attacking the army which is best positioned to defeat ISIS. Or even more simply, Washington supports one anti-Assad group but bombs the other."It's Time to Admit Washington's Syria Policy Has Gone Completely off the Rails." By Danielle Ryan, RT, 9/19/16.The US supports the rebel forces in pursuit of their broader goal which is Syrian regime change. As the war has dragged on, it’s become clearer that the US-backed rebel forces are not “moderate” in the sense that you or I might use the term. They have fought alongside and “intermingled” with Al-Qaeda’s official Syria affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra (which recently rebranded itself as Jabhat Fateh al-Sham). One of the major sticking points in ceasefire negotiations between the US and Russia has been the question of Washington’s ability to disentangle the so-called “moderate” rebels from the extremists. So far, no such disentanglement has taken place, demonstrating that the US has little to no control over its proxies.
H/t: Russia Insider.
Who the F... is this guy kidding?!
ReplyDelete"The US supports the rebel forces in pursuit of their broader goal which is Syrian regime change."
Horseshit! The "rebel forces" are, and have for years been, those opportunistic, typically-ISIS-aligned individuals able to fool TPTB in Washington, D.C. that they, too, are as anti-Assad as TPTB in Washington are.
Does anyone need more than the names Gaddafi, Mubarak, and "Arab Spring", to recognize that it has been the policy of TPTB in Washington to unseat stable dictators (especially if they are secular) in the M.E. in order to de-stabilize nations and create the chaos into which Muslim-Brotherhood-sanctioned organizations (e.g. "ISIS"/formerly AQIQ/formerly AQ/formerly "declared enemies of the U.S.) will step ... with U.S. weapons, aid, training, and support ... to create a new order in the M.E.?
If so, then what one needs is a list of news articles from 2009-2015; not an essay from 2016 pretending that what happened from 2009-2015 either never happened or was spurred by some different, mythical, and preposterous motive attributed -- in retrospect -- to TPTB in Washington, D.C. (inter alia Obama[D], Clinton[D], Jarrett[D], McCain[R], & Graham[R]).
Getting rid of Assad is part of the Wolfowitz Doctrine against Russia. He's in the way of the natural gas pipeline from Qatar to Europe, which would have a negative impact on Gazprom's sales.
ReplyDeleteDesertrat
Anon, I don't understand your objection. Regime change occurred in Libya and Egypt and some amorphous lump of jihadis/MB types took over in both places. Getting rid of Assad (regime change) is getting rid of a stable dictator (though I don't care for that vague term) so that Sunni jihadi scum take over. Not sure if the MB fits in there anywhere but it's not an important distinction for the the US. Bottom line, the fanatics took over or might take over.
ReplyDeleteDesertrat, that is the best explanation (though I also like the one that has the US military champing at the bit to take on the Russians, albeit there's very thin logic to that). The Saudis don't want the Iran-Syria-Turkey pipeline so we must do their bidding.