But he’s already wrecked his country. The non-ISIL people that have been at war with him for years now, had their families gassed and barrel bombed, houses destroyed, forced to flee, and so on aren’t just going to lay down their arms and agree to live under Assad just because the US is freaked out over ISIL. For one thing, they know that Assad’s secret police would just round them all up and either imprison or execute them for being terrorists, even if their only motivation was to carry the Arab Spring to Damascus.
The State Department people are completely right in one respect: there’s no future for Syira that involves Assad staying and any kind of end to the civil war. The problem is that they have the wrong suggestion on how to hasten his departure.
Syria is already fucked. It is inconceivable that it will ever be a productive state again, in any shape, form or fashion. The only real question is not how to manage the disaster.
I say they line up defenses on every border and just kill everyone trying to leave. Start torpedoing the refugee boats. Problem solved. The little shitheads can rot in their fucked up non-country for all I care. Fixing it is not now and never was our problem.
I’m not either, but I could possibly see how the State Department might have a different view. Part of their “diplomacy” is predicated on the projection of American power. If the US abandons Syria and the entire Middle East without any favorable results, it diminishes America’s ability to project power. People will see the hollowness of American power. If Assad survives this, which he probably will, then the axis of Syria, Iran, and Russia emerge stronger, and the US becomes weaker, both in the Gulf and in Europe. And in East Asia as well. In reality, an America that has to rely more on negotiating for what it wants and building stronger political coalitions is not a bad turn of events, but for careerists in the State Department who are used to doing it their way, it’s probably hard to fathom that world. It’s probably even a little scary.
Jeez, if you’re gonna be extreme, be productively extreme: give every refugee a submachine gun and two grenades, and send them back in. Airdrop crates of guns and grenades. Weaponize those refugees! Why waste them by killing them, when you can get them to kill each other.
That’s actually quite a rebuke. It doesn’t make it less so to calculate some % of the whole staff of the State Dept. In theory there’s no career retaliation for using this mechanism of dissent, but let’s be real. It takes strong conviction to risk using it in reality, and it’s not a handful of people.
It doesn’t really give direct ammo to rightist populist critics of Obama on Syria though, for example Trump. Among his various contradictory statements the general theme I get is that we’d lean more toward Assad, and definitely be less confrontational w/ Putin.
I think the protest would most practically be interpreted as an opinion on what we should have done. It’s debatable whether we should have, back in the ‘red line’ days. But attacking Assad once we’ve allowed a power vacuum to form into which Russia put its forces directly, would seem obviously unfavorable in risk/reward.
Anyway there’s no way anything will happen between now and next president.
Yeah. If we were going to do this, we should have done it years ago, before the Russians showed up and Daesh got really dug in. Going in now just leads to a direct conflict with Russia over a country we don’t actually care about (provided they leave Isreal alone.)
Did anyone else click on the OP’s link, look at the picture and think it was an advert for The Walking Dead?
There are enough militarily strong countries in the region who are much, much more threatened by Da-esh than we are. If they are not willing to take on the job, I sure as hell don’t want to do their dirty work for them. And once you get past the region, you have Europe, which is also much more threatened by Da-esh than we are.
No, I think we should sit this one out. But thanks for the invite!
And Obama isn’t going to start a war just before the election. And he’s not going to start one after the election. He already told us, explicitly, that getting rid of Da-esh was going to be left for some future president. He has no taste for war, but he’s not politically strong enough to just stay the fuck out. Hence the one foot in position we’re in now.
Assad’s use of unconventional weapons probably complicated matters. If there was ever a humanitarian case to be made for military intervention, that was it. Obama looks indifferent for not intervening at all. At the same time, it has probably always been in our interests to keep out of Syria and Assad in power, if for no other reason than to give Iraq a chance to find its footing and to limit the spread of instability in neighboring countries. So now Obama looks stupid for getting involved. A classic case of being damned if he doesn’t, damned if he does.
Well, leaving all that aside (and not saying it’s unimportant, but just leaving it aside for a minute), why is it our business to go around trying to fix shit in the world? Why do Americans have this sense that if there is some problem somewhere in the world, we’re either the cause or the solution or both?
There is no easy answer to Syria… Killing Assad will do absolutely nothing to stop the slaughter, after all the Alawites see this war as a war for their very own survival (meaning, a must win)
What needs to happen is for the US and Russia (with Iran on the bleachers) to sit down and find another person to replace him that is tolerable. This person: 1) must not be Assad, 2) must guarantee no ethnic cleansing
The refugee crisis is probably something Assad & his thugs don’t mind that much, since its basically getting rid of a whole lot of possible sunnis/others that could potentially rebel again…