Posted on 09/17/2014 2:45:27 AM PDT by markomalley
Agreed. Assad’s Syria is secular, as were Mubarak’s Egypt, the Shah’s Iran, even Saddam’s Iraq. They all had political restrictions for good reasons too. But socially quite liberal & “westernized”.
We don’t “keep overthrowing these people”. We’ve had only one successful longterm alliance with a somewhat secular strongman in the Middle East — Egypt.
The allies of the USSR/Russia include or included Ghaddafy in Libya; Boumeddienne in Algeria; the Assads (a hereditary dictatorship) in Syria (still holding on to part of the failed state, with help from an Iranian force and Iranian proxy thugs out of Lebanon, as well as Russian advisors and mercenaries); Saddam Hussein in Iraq — literally the only one overthrown by the US, unless one counts the Shiite-head the CIA helped overthrow to install the Shah — and Nasser in Egypt.
Nasser died. Nasser and Sadat were socialists, but also members of the Muslim Brotherhood. Sadat was a member of Egypt’s armed forces, and if memory serves was the first face the world saw of the Egyptian coup against King Farouk, as Sadat announced the new regime.
Sadat engineered a military victory of sorts against Israel, forced his own country into peace talks, expelled the Russians, allied Egypt with the US, and in order to counteract a rising tide of pro-Soviet/anti-Israel sentiment among his political colleagues, released jailed Islamofascists who wound up gunning him down in broad daylight in front of thousands of Egyptians.
His successor was ousted by the military machinery which runs Egypt, and replaced by another old-timer. Money flowing in to the Muslim Brotherhood from Qatar — an ally of Iran, and engineer of the overthrow of Saddam and the Gulf War — resulted in an uprising that led to elections and the installation of MB’s own Mohammed Morsi.
The other US allies of sorts have been the monarchies in Jordan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and the other Gulf States (Qatar viewed us as an ally of convenience). The GCC bankrolled the coup that ousted Morsi.
The Reagan administration botched the restoration of the constitutional republic in Lebanon by allowing the elder Assad’s Syrian army to murder the Christian leader.
I wholeheartedly agree. Assad is our enemy, and that old saw that “the enemy of your enemy is your friend” is and always has been nonsense. The enemy of your enemy may be your enemy, and that’s the case here — the proper US policy is to make sure all sides are about equally well armed and don’t run out of ammo until there’s only one (literally) left standing. The FSA has begun an alliance with the Kurds; backing Kurdish independence should be US policy, regardless, but the FSA isn’t a “moderate Islamic” group, it’s the original armed rebellion against our enemy Assad, and like the Kurds (and Assad for that matter) the FSA was under threat from ISIS.
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