Good read explaining Syria

[Pam]

Without getting too mired in the complexities

http://www.vox.com/2017/4/8/15218782/syr...-explainer

[bfd]

Cue: Pete Seeger

Where Have All The Flowers Gone?

[vision63]

There's the sentence "Trump felt the need." No he didn't. That's a great story tho.

[max]

Pam wrote:
Without getting too mired in the complexities

http://www.vox.com/2017/4/8/15218782/syr...-explainer

What a pile of whitewashed BS.
Full front revisionism of recent history, as if we stood on the sidelines.
In fact, it was Clinton's militarization of what was until then, civilian opposition that led to the rise of jihadi forces financed by our financial masters, Qatar, and Saudis.
We started in Jan 2012....

The idea of bolstering Syrian rebels was debated from the early days of the civil war, which started in 2011. Mrs. Clinton, along with David H. Petraeus, then the CIA director, and Leon E. Panetta, then the Defense secretary, supported arming opposition forces, but the president worried about deep entanglement in someone else’s war after the bloody experience in Iraq.

In 2014, however, after the Islamic State had swept through parts of Syria and Iraq, Mr. Obama reversed course and initiated a $500 million program to train and arm rebels who had been vetted and were told to fight the Islamic State, not Mr. Assad’s government.

This is outright false. These two paragraphs, while cleverly parsed, give the reader the impression Obama parted with the CIA and Mrs. Clinton on arming opposition forces, only to “reverse course” in 2014. But the president never “reversed course,” because he did exactly what Panetta, Petraeus and Clinton urged him to do: He armed the opposition. Once again, the Pentagon’s Keystone Kop plan is being passed off by journalists who should know better as the beginning and end of American involvement in the Syrian rebellion. Nowhere in this report is the CIA’s plan mentioned at all.

The whitewashing would get even worse:

Some Syrian rebels who asked for American arms in 2011 and 2012 eventually gave up and allied themselves with more radical groups, analysts said, leaving fewer fighters who were friendly to the United States.

But the US did get arms to Syrian rebels in 2012. In fact, Baker’s own publication reported this fact in 2012 (6/21/12):

CIA Said to Aid in Steering Arms to Syrian Opposition

Indeed, according to a rather detailed New York Times infographic from 2013 (3/23/13), shipments began, at the latest, in January 2012:

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/0...government

[Pam]

Oh please, victim blaming? You're better than that. Covert arming isn't supposed to be public, thus the covert part. Not the same as overt which would have been more substantial. However your insane finger pointing at arming the rebels as the cause for their own predicament is beyond outrageous. Do you know anything about Assad?? What utter tripe.

[max]

Bullcrap, this has nothing to do with victim blaming unless you see Clinton and her jihadi mercenary as some sort of victims.
The point always was that instead of letting Syrians and other Arabs deal with the problem and finding their traditional solution, based on balance of political, mercantile and religious forces, Clinton barged in like a blind elephant into a china shop and it was her actions, her well documented attempts to militarize the opposition that led to this idiotic disaster.

Your article is actively trying to whitewash our responsibility for the the origin of the disaster, totally writing out any references to our actions. Everybody else but us.
It is an example of blatant revisionism for the willing....

[Speedy]

max wrote:
Bullcrap, this has nothing to do with victim blaming unless you see Clinton and her jihadi mercenary as some sort of victims.
The point always was that instead of letting Syrians and other Arabs deal with the problem and finding their traditional solution, based on balance of political, mercantile and religious forces, Clinton barged in like a blind elephant into a china shop and it was her actions, her well documented attempts to militarize the opposition that led to this idiotic disaster.

Your article is actively trying to whitewash our responsibility for the the origin of the disaster, totally writing out any references to our actions. Everybody else but us.
It is an example of blatant revisionism for the willing....

So this thread isn't about Iraq and the "Mission Accomplished" guy?

[Pam]

Speedy wrote:
[quote=max]
Bullcrap, this has nothing to do with victim blaming unless you see Clinton and her jihadi mercenary as some sort of victims.
The point always was that instead of letting Syrians and other Arabs deal with the problem and finding their traditional solution, based on balance of political, mercantile and religious forces, Clinton barged in like a blind elephant into a china shop and it was her actions, her well documented attempts to militarize the opposition that led to this idiotic disaster.

Your article is actively trying to whitewash our responsibility for the the origin of the disaster, totally writing out any references to our actions. Everybody else but us.
It is an example of blatant revisionism for the willing....

So this thread isn't about Iraq and the "Mission Accomplished" guy?
Max thinks Assad would not have used military force to stay in power if it weren't for Clinton. Even though his crimes started in 2001.