Posted on 06/16/2016 8:20:41 PM PDT by Theoria
More than 50 State Department diplomats have signed an internal memo sharply critical of the Obama administration’s policy in Syria, urging the United States to carry out military strikes against the government of President Bashar al-Assad to stop its persistent violations of a cease-fire in the country’s five-year-old civil war.
The memo, a draft of which was provided to The New York Times by a State Department official, says American policy has been “overwhelmed” by the unrelenting violence in Syria. It calls for “a judicious use of stand-off and air weapons, which would undergird and drive a more focused and hard-nosed U.S.-led diplomatic process.”
Such a step would represent a radical shift in the administration’s approach to the civil war in Syria, and there is little evidence that President Obama has plans to change course. Mr. Obama has emphasized the military campaign against the Islamic State over efforts to dislodge Mr. Assad. Diplomatic efforts to end the conflict, led by Secretary of State John Kerry, have all but collapsed.
But the memo, filed in the State Department’s “dissent channel,” underscores the deep rifts and lingering frustration within the administration over how to deal with a war that has killed more than 400,000 people.
The State Department set up the channel during the Vietnam War as a way for employees who had disagreements with policies to register their protest with the secretary of state and other top officials, without fear of reprisal. While dissent cables are not that unusual, the number of signatures on this document, 51, is extremely large, if not unprecedented.
The names on the memo are almost all midlevel officials — many of them career diplomats — who have been involved in the administration’s Syria policy over the last five years, at home or abroad.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Platitudinal observation are worthless when the rubber meets the road.
I’m against it, only because I want to see John Kerry continue to look like the ridiculous ***hole that he is when he talks about how the cessation of hostilities agreement is being undermined by, y’know, continued hostilities. Thanks Theoria.
The country is full of a lot of people who have no desire to get into another Mideast war with questionable motives and disastrous results where our best young men and women are killed and maimed and the price tag is enormous. If these 50 want such a war, they are free to volunteer for the front lines, and can be led by “Colonel” William Kristol who is about as much a military leader as Colonel Sanders.
Any military action should be in the service of a clear policy with stated goals. There needs to be a strategy and a plan, not just blowing up an aspirin factory to grab a few headlines away from some bimbo who is testifying about giving the president a blow job in the oval office.
Modern technology has made bombing something like getting up in the morning and choosing pancakes instead of eggs for breakfast. It isn’t. If you are going to hurt some organization you had better be prepared to do it hard enough and long enough to put them down permanently, because what does not destroy them makes them stronger.
Syria is a failed state that is experiencing a genocide thanks to red lines and JV squads. We have a president whose policy is to arm rebels with “no boots on the ground”, and yet we have special forces and others leading raids “on the ground”.
The time to do anything in Syria was years ago when there was a sliver of a civil society. Now it’s up to Allah to sort it out.
Why does ArchDuke Ferdinand come to mind?
Syrian Christians used to be able to go to work and to church in peace. That’s all gone now. America wants to bomb them and Russia is their only hope. Are we in the mirror universe or what?
When Trump is POTUS he should fire everyone on the petition.
Clinton DOES, and Trump must pound that point home!
Why don’t these moron diplomats (and their immediate family members) get armed and fight? They seem be quick to want others to die for their asshat ideas. What a bunch of striped pants morons.
Ding! Ding! We have a winner!
Obama loyalists trying to hand as much territory as possible to fundamentalist Islam.
Obama and Hillary happily handed Egypt to the Muslim Brotherhood and are probably still enraged that Al-Sisi threw them out. So Syria offers them a playground to repeat their experiment with Middle Eastern "Democracy" in action.
Have you ever noticed how the liberal activists who criticized George W. Bush for his support of regime change and nation building in the Middle East are usually completely supportive of Hillary Clinton when she proposes more or less the same thing?
The bottom line is they opposed nation-building by Bush because he was a Republican, not because they recognized the folly of nation-building and "democratizing" the Middle East. As long as the "right" political party is doing it, these idiots are OK with it.
I remember when this country had people smart enough to recognize that toppling a secular dictator and replacing him with Islamists is idiocy.
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