The what the History books will record -has already been written. It is not like there is some doubt as to what happened here. The effort to arm the radical jihadist proxy army (which was led initially by Al Qaeda/Al Nusra and other groups of the same ilk) was a massive global effort involving over 20 Nations. A group of rag tag head choppers does not take on a Nation State - and sustain themselves for 5+ years - with AK-47's. The amount of sophisticated military equipment that poured into into Syria was massive and the logistics complex. Declassified DIA memo's tell us "A declassified October 2012 Defense Intelligence Agency report revealed that the shipment in late August 2012 had included 500 sniper rifles, 100 RPG (rocket propelled grenade launchers) along with 300 RPG rounds and 400 howitzers. Each arms shipment encompassed as many as ten shipping containers, it reported, each of which held about 48,000 pounds of cargo. That suggests a total payload of up to 250 tons of weapons per shipment. Even if the CIA had organized only one shipment per month, the arms shipments would have totaled 2,750 tons of arms bound ultimately for Syria from October 2011 through August 2012. More likely it was a multiple of that figure". https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/how-america-armed-terrorists-in-syria/ Above is a Howitzer. It's not like you move 400 Howitzers across the border in the backpacks of a few Jihadists - and that was just part of the shipment.. This was a coordinated effort among many nation states. Saudi Arabia - Turkey- Qatar - and other gulf nations - Jordan Israel and the West - USA - Britain - France - and other EU nations. Eastern Europe - Bulgaria, Croatia, Serbia - moving all the weapons from the war in Yugoslavia to Syria - and other stuff. This effort to arm a radical Islamist proxy army resulted in the death of over 400,000 - and plunged most of the cities of Syria into a dark age strict sharia nightmare - war crimes, crimes against humanity and so on - the destruction of a nation - and was responsible for the rise of the modern incarnation of ISIS. That is what will be written in the History books.
Thank you for a well-informed reply. I'm just picking through this ..... The U.S./Israel in the lead with NATO states in tow as well as U.S. petrol bed-buddies. But not a single Russian - Iranian - Chinese - North Korean in the basket. Imagine that! But when will that book be written? I want to see it published for my children's benefit.
Your post & the post it responds to, both illustrate the quandary facing Obama during his last term, trying to find anyone he & the U.S. could work with to promote a better outcome for Syria & its people.
... and your post illustrates the ignorance of the Amerian population who haven't realized that the Syrian people had an excellent existence in Syria before Obama started creating war in their country.
I believe ISIS was started by one of Sadam Hussein's ex-generals, who was able to elude American capture after the fall of Iraq in 2003. So, how do you conclude ISIS was ever backed by America?
Obama had absolutely NOTHING to do with the civil war in Syria. That was all internal to that nation.
1. Since Trump sucks all the oxygen from the media newsrooms nowadays, there's very little coverage of Syria except when there's some crisis involving the U.S. or an adversary. So, no, I've not been keeping up with Syria lately. 2. Explain.
Rooting for Al Qaeda is moral and idealistic? You have strange notions of morality. Ayn Rand is your god or something? You keep quoting her like she is the smartest and best person who ever lived. I prefer John Locke and Adam Smith, myself. At any rate, I highly doubt Ayn Rand would have rooted for secular government in Syria to be overthrown by a bunch of Islamic terrorists.
This is just deliberate dishonesty. No other way to describe it. There are mountains of evidence demonstrating how government officials lie to the public. Take the Pentagon Papers, for example. According to the government's own documents, they were lying about Vietnam for years. And now with the release of the Afghanistan War Papers, we see the exact same thing has happened in Afghanistan. Bunch of lies spun in furtherance of corruption. One has to be extremely dishonest to pretend like this is some kind of "conspiracy theory". It's not even a theory at this point. It's just a basic fact of political reality in the USA. Hell, Eisenhower himself expressly warned the American people about the "military-industrial complex" decades ago. The level of hubris it takes to deny the blatant and extreme corruption driving the US "national security" state is truly mind-blowing.
There was no quandary. The only choices were Syria's secular government as represented by Assad or the thousands of Al Qaeda and ISIS savages who want to overthrow the Syrian government. The US and UK and Israel and Saudi Arabia all chose to back the Al Qaeda savages because Assad is aligned with Iran and Russia. It had nothing to do with promoting a better outcome for Syria and its people. It was just another imperialist "regime change" operation in furtherance of greed and corruption. Nothing the US government does is motivated by altruism or humanitarianism.
Oh my God! I cannot believe you just said that! The U.S. were "the good guys" in WW 2, a term they will bear forever! Don't you know? That gives them a Free Pass to any (and all) treacherous deeds they may commit until the end of time!
Ayn Rand is to philosophy what Copernicus was to physics. She has changed everything I don’t get the Al Qaeda reference.
Ayn Rand is a cult leader whose influence was greatest among cult followers, not any seriously trained philosophers or other academically trained social thinkers. Indeed, while accreditation of even meritorious ideas from legitimate scholars may sometimes find resistance and take some time due to various self protecting mechanism which are developed to protect academic orthodoxy, when it comes to Ayn Rand her status as a cult leader (as opposed to a significant philosopher of merit), or put differently, using a different analogy, her status as a "snake oil' salesperson as opposed to a legitimate physician, is already clear. (What I quote below from Wikipedia just for ease of reference can be quoted from any other source on the subject). Posthumous overall assessments As for the comparison to Copernicus, it was ironically the dogma of an actually significant (but not as insightful as some imagine) philosopher, namely Aristotle (a hero to Ayn Rand), adopted by the Catholic Church, which even made Copernicus a noteworthy figure. Otherwise, what Copernicus said was already understood by many others including in the Islamic world (including many Persian scholars and astronomers), and would have been understood sooner but for the dogma (cult) that was being enforced by the Catholic Church. Which points to the fact that the biggest threat to true enlightenment is and has always been 'dogma' -- and the ability of some to make that 'dogma' into a cult. Which is ironic as it relates to Ayn Rand, since her hostility to 'faith based' beliefs is actually well placed (but nothing unique to her). But practically every other idea she developed is devoid of serious philosophical or academic insight.
Actually, she just repeats what far smarter people have already said. And she is easily the most overrated writer in human history. I couldn't even get through the first five pages of Atlas Shrugged. Total snooze fest. If Ayn Rand were alive today, she would not be rooting for the Syrian government to be overthrown by a bunch of terrorist savages. She would see that the Syrian government is much closer to her own beliefs than the savages who seek to overthrow it.
The Obama administration stoked the civil war by providing both direct and indirect aid to the terrorist-cum-rebels that the lying media styled as moderates. Not even close. Thousands of foreign fighters were encouraged to flood into Syria, not only by the US, but by the UK, Israel, and Saudi Arabia. It was a blatant "regime change" operation executed under the aegis of the CIA. The intent by the US and others was to overthrow the Syrian government using a terrorist proxy army.
