Posted on 09/19/2014 5:24:10 AM PDT by lifeofgrace
Yesterday, the Senate approved a bill to arm and train Syrian rebels, who fight against Bashar Assad, so they can eliminate ISIS, which possesses hundreds of millions of dollars, and no shortage of fighters willing to die for them. I fail to see the wisdom in this action, or what good can come of this. It appears cowardly, and even immoral to pay others to fight for you.
The New York Times penned almost 1,800 words describing and analyzing this vote, and even got the tally wrong in the original version.
Correction: September 18, 2014Even libertarian-leaning (read: isolationist) Rand Paul voted for this measure.An earlier version of this article misstated the vote tally because of incorrect information announced in the Senate. The vote was 78 to 22, not 73 to 22.
“I’m not sending your son, your daughter, over to the middle of that chaos,” said Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, whose libertarian views have propelled him into contention for his party’s 2016 nomination. “The people who live there need to stand up and fight.”President Obama made a five minute statement from the White House after the vote, in which he reiterated the false claim that his coalition has 40 countries, including Arab countries (yeah if you include every possible type of “aid” like humanitarian, or paying the families of suicide bombers, or if you believe that Saudi Arabia has an extensive border with Syria). Obama did add that France will be joining in, and like clockwork, the French have started bombing ISIS (Obama stubbornly calls them ISIL). Merveilleux!
Obama also held to his “no combat boots on the ground” doctrine. So U.S. troops will be there to train, advise and equip whoever we select to fight ISIS. As for Syrian rebels, a week ago a number of senior leaders were blown up, either by Assad’s forces, or by ISIS. I’m sure we know a guy who knows a guy who can take us to the rebels we’re looking for. There’s nothing good that can ultimately come from providing American weapons and training to people we don’t know, who likely hate us and are working with us only because their own survival depends on it. It's a devil's bargain.
Let’s say you had a bully threatening to beat you to a pulp, and I had some brass knuckles to help you defend yourself, and I could show you how to use them, but first I wanted you to use those brass knuckles to beat up the guy dating my sister. You might do it. It’s immoral as hell for me to make such a bargain with you, and after you took care of my sister’s boyfriend, and whipped your bully, you’d probably come looking for me with a can of beat down. I’m pretty sure I’d deserve it. This is, in essence, the bargain we are making with Syrian rebels.
Not to mention the fact that it will likely drive Assad further into the loving arms of Vladimir Putin, who just can’t wait to provide more arms to Syria’s ruling regime in exchange for money and influence. Israel is not commenting, but they are surely feeling more squeezed, since Syrian rebels have a tendency to pass their weapons over to their Hezbollah friends. Israel watches closely, and sends a few F-16’s to intercept these weapons when it happens. I imagine they won’t be too thrilled to face American weapons, or the possibility of bombing Americans present during these transfers.
This bill that the House and the Senate passed just has “bad idea” written all over it. But in the “do something!” climate in Washington, with elections scarcely 50 days away, and Obama refusing to do anything except arming or convincing other people to fight ISIS on the ground, Congress caved.
Never to waste the opportunity to kick all the cans down the road past the election, Congress hid a bonus in the bill--an Easter egg: the reauthorization of the Export-Import Bank through June 2015. They could have just let it die, but no, they snuck it in under the news cycle.
I can’t see our elected officials appearing any way but indecisive and cowardly to the rest of the world. We put on this strong show, and we certainly have the technology and weapons to defeat ISIS. But I think they see through that and realize there’s not much substance behind the airstrikes (though they may be effective). We may simply have become a paper tiger, later to be drawn fully into a conflict that will make Vietnam or Iraq look like Grenada.
Cowards make poor leaders, and paying someone else to take care of bullies is a devil’s bargain. Americans are made of better stuff than that.
Prediction: This will come back to haunt the US many fold.
So, once again, the people we will be fighting two years from now will be people we trained, fighting with weapons we gave them. Brilliant.
Like we paid Solyndra to make solar panels?
So is he suggesting that we do nothing or that we send the army in and invade Syria?
Prediction: they won’t fight ISIS, and we will be effectively arming ISIS.
What if the newly armed ‘rebels’ turn and use their weapons against Assad instead of ISIS? Or they join up with ISIS? Or surrender to or are defeated by ISIS? What happens to the weapons? We have fools in DC and GOP just voted for Zero’s loser objectives. Rolled again by Bamster.
So Obama was given permission to arm,train, and finance rebels we can't be sure of? How's that going to work when the ones we were sure of, like ISIS, have created such a mess? They didn't even grow brains and decide to work with Assad and his military toward a common goal.
Why is this framed as ‘paying others to fight for us’?
This is not our fight so no one would be ‘fighting for us, in our place’.
Nor should we be there in person with our own troops fighting Assad ... or whomever the current person or group is that we are supposed to be fighting ... it seems very flexible and arbitrary at best.
I couldn’t agree with you more. That we will financing the large scale murder and injury of our troops and quite possibly many dozens of people here in the US absolutely sickens me.
More like a few weeks or days.
The Sultan in Washington is sure of them. He knows where the aid is going. He needs to offset the desultory air attacks he was forced to make on his friends.
Things get strange when a great nation chooses someone from among its enemies to be its ruler.
Cowardly Congress authorizes not very indirectly arming ISIS with more modern weapons and training.
What would it take?
Taking back the oilfields in Iraq (with existing Kurd regiments) would be a good start.
Now I'm confused because isn't that what this guy is talking about? "Pay others to fight?" I don't have a problem with arming the Kurds and letting them take on ISIS. They seem to be the only ones with the motivation to fight and win. But the author of this peace calls that cowardly. So aren't you supporting the cowardly path?
Finding ISIS money-making operations and destroying them, along with weapons caches is another step.
You can dry up ISIS funds through the international financial community. You don't need troops on the ground to do that.
Two days ago, Speaker “Blank Check” Boehner approved the spending of $ 500,000,000 of US Taxpayer Dollars to “train” 5,000 Syrian Muslim Rebels in Saudi Arabia for one year. IOW, another Boehner Bailout Bill to Obama.
Here are a few discussion points that were NOT mentioned by Boehner:
* Each Syrian Muslim Rebel will cost $ 100,000 to train.
* 5,000 Syrian Muslim Rebels will be removed from the battlefields in Syria to a training site in Saudi Arabia for one year.
* The removal of 5,000 Syrian Muslim Rebels will leave their families with reduced protection from attack by Syrian Army troops, for one year.
* The removal of 5,000 Syrian Muslim Rebels will leave their families with NO protection from attack by ISIS troops, for one year.
* The removal of 5,000 Syrian Muslim Rebels from the battlefields of Syria will help both the Syrian and ISIS troops to more easily take over areas controlled by the Syrian Muslim Rebels.
BTW, did anyone notice if before the US Senate approved Boehner’s Bailout Bill yesterday, did any US Senator mention that removing 5,000 Syrian Muslim Rebels from the battlefields of Syria, was in effect, “Giving aid and comfort to the ENEMY” for the period of one year?
boots on the ground means the wonderboy has now declared he is a flip-flop
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