The bizarre idea coming out of Washington seems to be that regime change against the democratically elected leadership of President Bashar Assad will somehow weaken the extremists and restore peace to Syria. If this fantasy becomes policy, then the US will be repeating the same regime change blunders it made in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. President Obama ordered a review of America’s strategy in Syria in light of ISIL’s resilience to coalition airstrikes. Instead of fighting ISIL in Iraq first, the US is now pivoting to Syria, claiming regime change is the main means to defeating the terrorist group. Twisted Thinking The administration’s ‘logic’ is that President Assad is enabling terrorism by continuing to be the leader of Syria, according to National Security Council spokesperson Alistair Baskey, and that his removal will somehow remove the motivation for international jihadis to flood into the country. Never mind that he was democratically re-elected with 88.7% of the vote, this despite the fact that Syrian expatriates in countries like the US and France were prohibited from voting by those respective governments. Baskey is also forgetting that terrorists from over 80 countries are fighting against the government not only because they hate President Assad, but that they — more importantly — hate Syria’s secular state and want to establish a fundamentalist Islamic regime in its place. The US wants to use the ‘Free Syrian Army’ (FSA) as a proxy to overthrow the government, but amidst its embarrassing spate of military defeats and the countless defections of its members to ISIL and other terrorist groups, that strategy is no longer as viable as before. This is why Obama asked Congress for $500 million of funding in June (on top of the other millions already provided by the CIA and other intelligence agencies for this very cause over the years) to train and supply more of them. The FSA, by the way, is the same group that was beheading its fallen enemies when it found American citizen Douglas McArthur McCain dead on the battlefield in August, having been killed while fighting for ISIL. us.sputniknews/us/20141113/1013218888.html
Posted on: Fri, 14 Nov 2014 18:01:53 +0000