Posted on 02/23/2016 7:55:22 PM PST by MinorityRepublican
Assad has done some bad things in his day. There is no doubt about that. What choice did he have? The Alawaites are a tiny minority group (12%) surrounded by a sea of intolerant radical Sunni Arabs. He has made deals with horrible people. As an Israeli, I know this all too well. At the same time, I can take a step back and understand that the Middle East is a tough place and tough places call for tough measures.
As I mentioned above the Alawites are a 12% minority. Most of their neighbors consider them pagans who worship the moon. This is not a good reputation to have when living is a sea of Arab Muslims. Their only option was to blend in when they could and arm up and prepare for the worst. Had they not sided with Egypt in the Pan Arab days, they could not have survived. If they hadn't allied with Russia all of these years they would not have survived. As much as I find their relationship with Iran very troubling, the reality is that in the Middle East you have to do whatever is necessary to survive. Anyway, who should they have sided with? America? Look what happened to Mubarak. If Assad had been pro-western the Alawites would have shared the same fate as the Yazidis.
I hear many people in America saying Assad has to go. I raise a question to all those who say that. Do you support the genocide of the Alawites? What about the Druze? This is what will inevitably happen if Assad is overthrown. There is nothing that can be done to prevent radical Jihadis from gaining control of the country.
(Excerpt) Read more at jpost.com ...
If I see one more Zionist activist/politician parade some archaeological finding so that the whole world accepts that we have a historic claim to this land, I'm going to convert to Islam. It's the stupidest thing I have ever seen. ...He goes on to make the point that such things as archaeological finds verifying the Jewish history of Israel will not convince antisemites. But that means he thinks the entire world is antisemitic.
Enlightening article considering the source.
He’s right about the Alawites position. If a minority people rules a nation, they must be absolutely ruthless, or they will quickly lose their power, or worse, they will be exterminated. This is no truer than in the Mid-east.
Right now, the situation is as about the best Israel could imagine. A weakened Assad will depend on the Russians for survival, and have no stomach for adventurism. ISIS and Al Qaeda are caught between the Russians and Iran, and all of Israel’s enemies are spilling their blood on each other.
We've got no business screwing around with the politics in a region with dozens of variations of three religions, where the inhabitants have been inbreeding for centuries and cutting each others throats for millennia, and where all of them are or soon will be your enemy. American diplomacy in the region has become the equivalent of a chimpanzee with a machine gun.
So demanding the Golan from Israel is being “enlightened”. Got it.
The export company I was working for in 1982 was visited by an Armenian businessman from Aleppo. At the time we had another customer (an Arab Christian) in the same town doing some small business with us and the Armenian tried to persuade us to switch. So it was decided that I should go and check things out to make an informed choice.
This was a few months after the government massacre of the Sunni Muslim population in Hama. And because my seat on the Syrian Airlines flight from Damascus to Aleppo was mysteriously cancelled when I got to the airport I had to take a ten hour Karnak Co. bus ride instead. Hama, the remnant Christian quarter, was one of the rest stops. The rest of Hama was nothing but neatly formed round mounds of rubble. So I've personally seen how Papa Hafez held on to power. Possess no illusions about his son, but he's nothing compared to his old man.
Once Iran gets stronger thanks to the JCPOA “deal”, Assad just may catch up to his dad with their backing.
All the more reason for the US to stay out of the Syria fight.
Syria & much of the ME needs brutal tyranny to end the fighting & terrorism. The politically correct Western solutions have failed miserably in Afghanistan & Iraq.
You cannot democratize savages. You must remove the savagery from them first. The solution is often deadly. The savagery of Nazi Germany was only ended after the vast majority of the savages were exterminated. Same for Japan. Both were forced to surrender unconditionally. Strict martial law over several years, not voting booths, turn these countries back to civilization.
A brutal Putin MAY be a better solution for the ME. If not, it will be Russian lives & assets wasted AGAIN trying to civilize the savages.
What is sure is that decades of Western strategy has only yielded a very dangerous, more savage ME with nuclear capability.
No pun intended, but alliances in the Middle East are built on sand. There are layers of influence, ethnicity, relative religious affiliation, language, sheer power calculations that would make Machiavelli’s head spin, all the way down to tribe and family. The Iranians and Alawis will be solid friends so long as they’re useful to each other. Sooner or later the Alawi will recall that they’re Arabs and the Persians are their enemies, and the Iranians will notice that the Alawi are, after all, just a heretic offshoot of the true Shia. The last time we had diplomats who could come close to fathoming the permutations and navigate the minefield their names were Kissinger, Baker, and Rice.
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