So, what do we see in Syria at the moment? It's almost a reversal of Iraq, with the only common denominator the Ba'athist political affiliation of the dictator.
- In Iraq, the Ba'athist leader was a Sunni in a majority Shiite nation. In Syria, the leader is an Alawite (sub-sect of Shia) in a majority Sunni nation.
- In Iraq, the Iranians supported the majority, in Syria, they support the minority.
- In Iraq, oil was a big issue, in Syria, not.
- In both cases, there is documented evidence of the dictator using poison gas against his opponents.
- In Iraq, the dictator had already brutally suppressed armed opposition to his regime, in Syria, there is an ongoing civil war, and the dictator's chance of victory is not as certain.
- In Iraq, the dictator had a long history of provocations against the United States, some minor, some major, and the United States was already militarily involved in Iraq, having maintained a no-fly zone there for over a decade before the invasion and having already fought one war against Iraq to expel Iraq from Kuwait; in Syria, I can think of no provocation aimed at the United States ever in its history, and we have had no military involvement there previously. Syria has supported the Shiite terrorist group Hizballah, but that is aimed at their arch-enemy Israel, not the United States.
But, let's not get too worked up about this, because what is Obamawar? Nothing more than lobbing a few cruise missiles at Assad, that won't do anything except piss everyone off: the Assad regime, because now we really have made ourselves their enemies, and the Sunni rebels that will rightly say that we didn't do anything that amounted to anything. This technique is copied from the Clinton (after the African embassy bombings killed hundreds), and depressingly, Reagan (after Khaddafi's agents committed the Lockerbie airline bombing, killing at least 100 Americans), method of responding to Muslim terrorism: lob some cruise missiles, or drop some bombs and call it good.
There are no good guys or good answers for Syria. To me, the best option is to stay out of something that is none of our business. Islamic fundamentalists will never be on our side, and at least Assad is not working actively against us, murderous tyrant though he is. Maybe Obama will deign to ask Congress their opinion, but doubtful. He doesn't need to. The imperial president, with the press in his pocket, can do whatever he wants and not worry about being called on it.
Slightly off topic, but it's interesting that even the Egyptians believe Obama is a Muslim Brotherhood supporter . And are not happy about it!
Obama is a Muslim Brotherhood supporter. The U.S government is working with the Muslim Brotherhood. It supported an Arab Spring that led to the a MB leader coming to power in Egypt and supported that leader when he was in office and expressed disapproval of his being thrown out of power after the Egyptian people realized that this MB leader was making himself a dictator.
ReplyDeleteA longtime Clinton aide has connections to the MB.
http://www.wnd.com/2013/07/huma-abedin-muslim-brotherhood-princess/
“In a nutshell – quoting former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy writing at National Review this week – Huma Abedin 'worked for many years at a journal that promotes Islamic supremacist ideology that was founded by a top al-Qaida financier, Abdullah Omar Naseef.” That would be for at least seven years (1996-2003), by the way, during which Abedin also worked for Hillary Clinton.'”
“Given these alarming professional and family associations, it is hard to imagine how Huma Abedin ever received the security clearance necessary to work closely with the secretary of state. But she did, and from her powerful post, she undoubtedly exerted influence over U.S. Policy-making.”
You also have Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamic terrorist visting the White House. “The White House confirmed to Fox News what the Investigative Project on Terrorism reported two days ago — that the administration met with the deputy of a radical cleric who is barred from entering the United States, and whose organization supports Hamas.” http://hotair.com/archives/2013/06/28/fox-white-house-confirms-meeting-with-deputy-of-banned-muslim-brotherhood-cleric/
“Barack Obama is compromising American security by allowing “radical Islamists” access to the White House, according to a report by the Investigative Project on Terrorism.” http://www.wnd.com/2012/10/radical-islamists-routinely-visit-white-house/
http://www.wnd.com/2013/02/sources-confirm-u-s-gun-running-to-jihadists/
Benghazi was about running weapons to Syrian rebels that are composed of Islamic terrorist.
ReplyDelete“WND has reconfirmed with multiple knowledgeable Middle Eastern security sources that the U.S. special mission in Benghazi was used to coordinate Arab arms shipments and other aid to the so-called rebels fighting in Libya and later in Syria.”
“Now knowledgeable security sources have reconfirmed WND’s original reporting on the use of the Benghazi mission in aiding the rebels who are known to be saturated by al-Qaida and other Islamic terrorist groups.”
“Days after the Benghazi attack, WND broke the story that Ambassador Stevens himself played a central role in recruiting jihadists to fight Assad’s regime in Syria, according to Egyptian and other Middle Eastern security officials.
Stevens served as a key contact with the Saudis to coordinate the recruitment by Saudi Arabia of Islamic fighters from North Africa and Libya. The jihadists were sent to Syria via Turkey to attack Assad’s forces, said the security officials.” http://www.wnd.com/2013/03/hillary-clinton-snagged-in-benghazi-cover-up/
An airstrike on Syria would be helping Islamic terrorist.
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2013/08/29/syrian-rebels-us-about-to-help-connected-to-benghazi-terrorists-n1684515
“As President Obama prepares to make good on his Syrian "red-line" promise, new information shows the very people a U.S. strike would benefit are connected directly to the same al Qaeda terrorists who attacked the U.S. consulate in Benghazi on 9/11.”
There is an interesting pattern in this administration in that it likes to fight wars for our enemies. America is becoming Al Qaeda's air force. America basically fought a war for rebels in Libya whose leadership included people that physcially fought against America in Iraq and or Afghanistan, America is working with the terrorist group the MB, and America supported an Arab Spring that lead to the MB coming to power in Egypt. The Middle East in being transformed in a way that will not be good for America or the West. Islamic extermistism is taking hold with help and support from America in just about all of the major nations in the Middle East. None of this should be surprising to anybody that knows what is really going on.
After looking at what is happening in Iraq and America's support for our enemies in the Middle East, Ron Paul is starting to make more sense. http://www.ronpaul.com/2013-04-29/ron-paul-were-already-very-much-involved-in-syria/
ReplyDeleteI am so busy right now that I have less and less time for national politics and news. I can't believe the similarities with OIF and Syria. Wow.
ReplyDeleteRon Paul baby
Sacred Cow. The military.
DeleteBig difference: OIF was completely justified, Syria not in the least.
ReplyDeleteRon Paul's foreign policy: when the US is threatened, the US runs away.
I think its pretty clear that these are similar cases. The foundation of the argument for OIF and Syria is that there are hated dictators who are using WMD's on its people. Then there is the argument that our government, in both cases, drew a line in the sand and the opposition crossed it. These were the main justifications that were told to the American people by our presidents.
ReplyDeleteNeither of these countries pose a threat to our national security. Even if you can draw a long line of reasoning that leads to America being threatened, the solution would only take a few bombs placed in good spots. One aircraft carrier has the capacity to defeat both these nations and coerce them in to being good little regimes. But of course, Obama will expend huge amounts of resources to help the citizens after we kill a few more of them. It probably wont add up to the colossal mess that Iraq was.
The bigoted bakery in Gresham Oregon has closed shop because they adhered to their religious beliefs. http://www.oregonlive.com/gresham/index.ssf/2013/09/gresham_bakery_that_refused_to.html#incart_m-rpt-2
ReplyDeletehttp://hotair.com/archives/2013/09/03/oregon-bakery-closes-doors-after-state-investigates-over-refusal-to-cater-same-sex-wedding/
I think that there was far more of a justification for Iraq than there is for Syria. I use to hold the opinion that Bud-D does about Ron Paul, but I am starting to question all of these wars in the Middle East after seeing that Iraq is falling apart and coming under the influence of Iran and the fact that America has been supporting the rise of Islamic extremism and actually fighting a war for our enemies in Libya and possibly soon in Syria after already given weapons to the rebels through Benghazi. At the end of the day what did Iraq achieve? America defeated an enemy of a greater enemy of ours so that this greater enemy could gain influence over their enemy that we defeated. The attempt to create democracy in the Middle East seems to not be working and appears to be based on a false assumption that all people was freedom in the American sense of the word. Ron Paul was rambling on for decades about how destructive the Federal Reserve is to the economy and freedom in general and he was labeled a crackpot, but after 2008 a lot more people are accepting his view on this issue as it is becoming evident that he was correct. Peter Schiff was getting laughed at on business channels while telling people in 2006 and 2007 that there was a housing bubble and a deep recession headed our way. He turned out to be correct. (He is also saying a much bigger crisis is coming our way.) The point being that people that sound crazy, far-out-there, or conspiracy nuts end up being correct seemingly more often than not.
It is possible that the chemical weapons were used by the Syrian rebels:
"What if Al-Qaeda is setting off their own chemical weapons on their own people, if the rebels are nerve gassing their own people to create exactly what is happening, us mobilizing to get rid of Bashar because they can't for some reason." So they use chemical weapons on their people, it gets blamed on Bashar, we go in and take Bashar out or do something and end up on the same side as "the rebels," in this case Al-Qaeda. “
“What if Bashar is being framed?”
“What if Bashar didn't do it?”
“Sit tight, 'cause I've got a story by a man whose credibility is intact and beyond repute. His name is Yossef Bodansky. He "is an Israeli-American political scientist who served as Director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare of the US House of Representatives from 1988 to 2004. He is also Director of Research of the International Strategic Studies Association and has been a visiting scholar at Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).” http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2013/09/03/bodansky_what_if_bashar_didn_t_do_it
Syria will not be an easy operation like Libya was. There is also the potential for conflict with Russia and Iran. It is evident that helping the Syrian rebels will be helping al qaeda. What conclusion is one to draw from the fact that our president supports our enemies?
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ReplyDeleteIt would take a separate post to lay out the multitude justifications for going to war with Iraq, and yes, it very much was a threat to the US, even in a sense, directly. But, I won't go into that here, and I do concede that WMDs was the prime justification that the Bush administration pushed to goad us and our allies into war. However, in my opinion, WMDs were a minor-but-relevent justification, among many other justifications for doing it. I think WMDs were a pretext there, to be able to pull in the liberals who don't care about America but can be goaded to war for reasons unrelated to American security or benefit.
ReplyDeleteIn Syria, alleged use of WMDs by the Assad regime is the ONLY justification. No where near enough justification, and as 00139x says, it's not even completely clear that Assad used them.
I also supported the decapitation of Khaddafy in Libya and still do. We ought not to suffer attacks without response. And when we respond it needs to be a crushing response so that our enemies will more greatly consider the consequences should they be tempted. That's how a power maintains its power. However, in Libya, there was no consideration of what would happen after the decapitation. Of course radical Islamists would take over. That needs to be accounted for. And Benghazi should never have happened because a responsible administration would have either not had a consulate there, or had it adequately guarded in a very dangerous environment. But we don't have a responsible administration.
Which is another reason to not go to war in Syria.
I do disagree with 00139x about Syria not being an easy operation. It will be easy in that our involvement will be even less than that of Libya. We're going to lob some cruise missiles and call it good. No US casualties. But, as I state in the article, it's the reactions to those strikes that will be the problem for us and everyone else.
The end result of the Iraq war ended up benefiting Iran our enemy.
ReplyDeleteIt is very amazing that Obama can say that he did not draw a red line on Syria using chemical weapons even though he clearly stated so on national T.V. without being called out for it by the media. That tells you a lot about the media. It is all propaganda.
A power does not maintain its status by fighting wars for its enemies that have declared their intentions to destroy America. That is insane and suicidal. Before America tries to take out leaders that it has a beef with it needs to consider the consequences of doing this. It might end up being the case that the alternative to leaving a brutal dictator in power that America has beef with might be worse than leaving him in power. It was very clear that terrorist would come to power after Khaddafy was gone as the rebel leadership was composed of terrorist that physically fought against America in Iraq and or Afghanistan. America can't just go around taking out leaders that it doesn't like just because it feels good. Benghazi was about running weapons through Turkey, another country where radical Islam is coming to power, to the Syrian rebels that are largely composed of al qaeda and other terrorist. The administration is actively supporting our enemies and working against the interest of America. That causes to much cognitive dissonance for people and it is just to radical of a concept for Americans to accept therefore they refuse to see the obvious and are having a hard time understanding what Obama is doing because they are looking at his actions through the prism that he is trying to work in America's best interest.
Syria has far more sophisticated air defense systems than Libya did. Russia will possibly not sit by and let America attack Syria, and an attack on Syria has far more of a potential to lead to a broader conflict in the region.
How did OIF benefit America?
ReplyDeleteAre you saying that we should kill hundreds of thousands of people in order to show that we are not pussies? That sounds like an answer that my five year old son would give me. That sounds like the answer that got me expelled from high school.
America needs to make decisions that preserve the longevity of our nation. Your rational to invade Iraq would justify an invasion of more countries than I could count on my fingers.
ReplyDeleteOne benefit of OIF was a strengthened military. We've made leaps and bounds now that we've fought two long wars in unfamiliar territory. Did it need to happen? I suppose it's part of being a global superpower, flexing out muscles.
ReplyDeleteWe wouldn't invade just any country to do this though, Iraq was ripe for the picking. The American public didn't need much to justify the invasion, and they were already familiar with this enemy from a previous war which ended in victory for us.
How would anyone justify the killing of hundreds of thousands?
No good answers exist. Consider the U.S responses in WW2, Dresden bombing or Hiroshima. The price for killing hundreds of thousands is killing more hundreds of thousands.
Good post by Bud-D and replies by 00139X. This is the first post I find myself in agreement with, thorough and well thought.
At the time I thought the case for going to war in Iraq was a good one and I probably still would have supported it again, but after seeing what it resulted in I feel like it was a wasted war because it ended up benefiting Iran. I am starting to look at issues like America's foreign policy through a different prism after seeing how that America has and still is helping terrorist in Egypt, Libya, and possibly Syria; and after looking deeper into the nature of the global economy, learning about central banking particularly the Federal Reserve, how that the European Union was designed to fail so as to force the European nations to form a political union that the elites wanted, and how that the two political parties in America are the exact same and are designed to give Americans a false sense of having a choice in who will lead the nation, and hearing things from our leaders like “I abandoned the free market to save it”.
ReplyDeleteSadly America is being weakened and is not longer the great power that it once was. I think America is setting itself up for a military defeat by supporting our enemies in the Middle East and by weakening the nation economically by racking up massive debt thus giving foreign nations like China leverage over America by being dependent on China to continue to buy our debt. A nation can't be great with a declining economy. I read that by 2016 America will be funding China's military with the interest that we pay them on the proportion of our debt that they hold. I also know that American will face a major economic crisis in the not-too-distant-future that will drastically reduce our standard of living. When a nation chooses to elect leaders such as Obama who stands for the exact opposite of what made this country great and to do things like allow gays to serve openly in the military while persecuting and pushing out Christians that nation deserve exactly what it has headed its way.
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/09/06/air-force-cracking-down-on-christians/?test=latestnews
This was not a post about justifications for war in Iraq; I suppose one is necessary from the responses here.
ReplyDeleteI don't believe this for a second, but the one deep thinking strategy in which attacking Syria may make sense is if Obama and the Israelis are hoping to provoke Iran into a response that will justify our going after them.
ReplyDeleteAgain, I don't believe this is Obama's plan at all (I don't believe he has a plan at all), but it at least is a real strategy.
I don't agree with you characterization of Obama that he is incompetent or that he doesn't have a plan. I think there can be made a very good case that Obama's plan is to weaken America.
ReplyDeletehttp://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323595004579062811443943666.html
"It is entirely understandable that Barack Obama's way of dealing with Syria in recent weeks should have elicited responses ranging from puzzlement to disgust. Even members of his own party are despairingly echoing in private the public denunciations of him as "incompetent," "bungling," "feckless," "amateurish" and "in over his head" coming from his political opponents on the right. "[...]
Summing up the net effect of all this, as astute a foreign observer as Conrad Black can flatly say that, "Not since the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, and before that the fall of France in 1940, has there been so swift an erosion of the world influence of a Great Power as we are witnessing with the United States.'"
"Yet if this is indeed the pass to which Mr. Obama has led us—and I think it is—let me suggest that it signifies not how incompetent and amateurish the president is, but how skillful. His foreign policy, far from a dismal failure, is a brilliant success as measured by what he intended all along to accomplish. The accomplishment would not have been possible if the intention had been too obvious. The skill lies in how effectively he has used rhetorical tricks to disguise it."
"The key to understanding what Mr. Obama has pulled off is the astonishing statement he made in the week before being elected president: "We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America." To those of us who took this declaration seriously, it meant that Mr. Obama really was the left-wing radical he seemed to be, given his associations with the likes of the anti-American preacher Jeremiah Wright and the unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers, not to mention the intellectual influence over him of Saul Alinsky, the original "community organizer."
"So far as domestic affairs were concerned, it soon became clear—even to some of those who had persuaded themselves that Mr. Obama was a moderate and a pragmatist—that the fundamental transformation he had in mind was to turn this country into as close a replica of the social-democratic countries of Europe as the constraints of our political system allowed. "[...]
"But foreign policy was another matter. As a left-wing radical, Mr. Obama believed that the United States had almost always been a retrograde and destructive force in world affairs. Accordingly, the fundamental transformation he wished to achieve here was to reduce the country's power and influence. And just as he had to fend off the still-toxic socialist label at home, so he had to take care not to be stuck with the equally toxic "isolationist" label abroad."
"This he did by camouflaging his retreats from the responsibilities bred by foreign entanglements as a new form of "engagement." At the same time, he relied on the war-weariness of the American people and the rise of isolationist sentiment (which, to be sure, dared not speak its name) on the left and right to get away with drastic cuts in the defense budget, with exiting entirely from Iraq and Afghanistan, and with "leading from behind" or using drones instead of troops whenever he was politically forced into military action."
"The consequent erosion of American power was going very nicely when the unfortunately named Arab Spring presented the president with several juicy opportunities to speed up the process. First in Egypt, his incoherent moves resulted in a complete loss of American influence, and now, thanks to his handling of the Syrian crisis, he is bringing about a greater diminution of American power than he probably envisaged even in his wildest radical dreams."
Yeah, I saw that article and it certainly does make sense, and also see the article I linked about Egyptians thinking Obama supports the Muslim Brotherhood as well, but, I still am of the school, particularly with Obama and his administration of 'don't attribute to deviousness what can better be explained by incompetence'. That's my paraphrase of the old saying which I can't remember right now.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I may update this post to discuss that it looks like Putin is going to bail Obama out of his mess.
It would be easier to believe that Obama was incompetent if it weren't for the the fact that he greatly deceived and lied to the American people on Obamacare, his associations with radicals like Ayers and Wright, his stabbing with the missile defense shield issue Eastern Europeans in the back when he first got into office, the intentional damage being inflicted to the economy, his surrounding himself with radicals while in the White house, and his overall general world view.
ReplyDeleteBelieving that Obama is intentionally trying to weaken America seems like a radical thing to believe until you look at the issue through the lens of human psychology. Nobody wants to believe such things about their president or that it is even possible. When a crisis is unfolding before people's eyes the most common reaction is for people to refuse to accept that it is happening. A good card trick that illustrates what happens a lot in politics is here starting at min 4:48 and lasting for a couple of minutes http://www.history.com/shows/your-bleeped-up-brain/videos/your-bleeped-up-brain-deception?m=5189717d404fa&s=All&f=1&free=false
I bet you can't figure out the trick the 1st time watching it.