Posted on 09/02/2013 12:13:46 PM PDT by Ooh-Ah
The Obama national security team that wants to go to war with Syria and demonizes President Bashar Assad is the same group that, as senators, urged reaching out to the dictator.
As a bloc on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, President Obama, Secretary of State John F. Kerry, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Vice President Joseph R. Biden all opposed the George W. Bush administration’s playing tough with Mr. Assad. None grew closer to Mr. Assad and promoted him in Washington more than Mr. Kerry.
“President Assad has been very generous with me in terms of the discussions we have had,” Mr. Kerry, as a senator from Massachusetts, told an audience at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in March 2011. He predicted that Mr. Assad would change for the better.
But that same month, pro-democracy demonstrations erupted in Syria that would lead to a civil war, unmasking Mr. Assad’s brutal tactics, including the Aug. 21 unleashing of nerve gas that killed more than 1,400 civilians.
Today, Mr. Kerry is a leading advocate for attacking Mr. Assad’s regime. On Friday, he called the man he once befriended a “thug and murderer.
...
Conservatives wonder whether Mr. Assad, seeing that those who had scolded the Bush team for not talking to him are now in power, calculated he could put down the unrest in his country without U.S. interference.
“Absolutely,” said Michael Rubin, a Middle East researcher at the American Enterprise Institute. “Syria is just one symptom of a greater problem.”
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
Could it bee that Hanoi John and friends are just jockeying for position for the next election?
Waiting for Pelosi to chime in.
“You don’t bring me flowers.....anymore.”
The Washington Times is bringing Bush into this?
Wow.
No.
This blunder by Obama has nothing to do with anything any president has ever done.
It is bizarre and the people involved, such as Hagel and Kerry, have no loyalties.
They don’t call them democRATS for nothing!
They just have a longer (LIB) learning curve?
Obama has stripped our military to bare bones PLUS the fact, we are not really sure just who the rebels are fighting Assad...we do know they are radicals, members of the Muslim brotherhood on both sides, probably mostly AL-Qaeda and other terrorists...we do know atrocities other than gassing is going on, on both sides, beheading, eviscerating and feeding parts to dogs or in at least one incident, a commander eating the organs himself....America and other civilized people do not need to come to the aid of this barbarian society, they don't want any help.
Frankly, if Putin wants to try his hand at managing the region, all I can say is “Good luck with all that.”
Kerry meets Assad in Damascus
Tired of reading about this BS.
None of them care what Americans want.
We want to stay the hell out of conflicts which are none of our business.
Yea, where is nancy on this one?:-)
“But that same month, pro-democracy demonstrations erupted in Syria that would lead to a civil war, unmasking Mr. Assad’s brutal tactics, including the Aug. 21 unleashing of nerve gas that killed more than 1,400 civilians.”
There’s the rub. We keep hearing this line from the media and it does not even really qualify as a half-truth. Maybe quarter-truth. The rest of the paragraph to be ethically and morally legit should read:
“Those claiming to desire democracy and elections are backed and directly supported by groups such as Al-Qaeda and Al-Nursa making their claims for reform as much or more questionable as the actions of Assad and his regime.”
Armed with that additional information, how many Americans want to get involved here? How many want to make a moral judgement between two evils and choose jihadi terrorists to overthrow the brutal Assad? Anyone? Didn’t think so.
If our government wants to make a case for going in there, it would have to be the whole enchilada. Remove the government completely, remove the chemical weapons from the country entirely and install a new secular government that does not allow either of the two warring factions to have anything to do with governing the country... and then make sure we stay for decades if necessary to make it stick culturally. Obviously this will never happen and likely should not happen since it’s right on Russia’s doorstep and heavily in their sphere of influence. There are some things in this world that the USA can not change by force of will. This is one of them. We can certainly make it worse though.
We will make it worse if we go in there, guaranteed.
To those concerned about where the debt is spent, if Syria isn’t closed up, you’ll see some deep cuts in defense spending.
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