Posted on 01/01/2019 3:11:47 PM PST by Kaslin
"Assad must go, Obama says."
So read the headline in The Washington Post, Aug. 18, 2011.
The story quoted President Barack Obama directly:
"The future of Syria must be determined by its people, but President Bashar al-Assad is standing in their way. ... the time has come for President Assad to step aside."
France's Nicolas Sarkozy and Britain's David Cameron signed on to the Obama ultimatum: Assad must go!
Seven years and 500,000 dead Syrians later, it is Obama, Sarkozy, and Cameron who are gone. Assad still rules in Damascus, and the 2,000 Americans in Syria are coming home. Soon, says President Donald Trump.
But we cannot "leave now," insists Sen. Lindsey Graham, or "the Kurds are going to get slaughtered."
Question: Who plunged us into a Syrian civil war, and so managed the intervention that were we to go home after seven years our enemies will be victorious and our allies will "get slaughtered"?
Seventeen years ago, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan to oust the Taliban for granting sanctuary to al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden.
U.S. diplomat Zalmay Khalilzad is today negotiating for peace talks with that same Taliban. Yet, according to former CIA director Mike Morell, writing in The Washington Post today, the "remnants of al-Qaeda work closely" with today's Taliban.
It would appear that 17 years of fighting in Afghanistan has left us with these alternatives: Stay there, and fight a forever war to keep the Taliban out of Kabul, or withdraw and let the Taliban overrun the place.
Who got us into this debacle?
After Trump flew into Iraq over Christmas but failed to meet with its president, the Iraqi Parliament, calling this a "U.S. disregard for other nations' sovereignty" and a national insult, began debating whether to expel the 5,000 U.S. troops still in their country.
George W. Bush launched Operation Iraq Freedom to strip Saddam Hussein of WMD he did not have and to convert Iraq into a democracy and Western bastion in the Arab and Islamic world.
Fifteen years later, Iraqis are debating our expulsion.
Muqtada al-Sadr, the cleric with American blood on his hands from the fighting of a decade ago, is leading the charge to have us booted out. He heads the party with the largest number of members in the parliament.
Consider Yemen. For three years, the U.S. has supported with planes, precision-guided munitions, air-to-air refueling and targeting information, a Saudi war on Houthi rebels that degenerated into one of the worst humanitarian disasters of the 21st century.
Belatedly, Congress is moving to cut off U.S. support for this war. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, its architect, has been condemned by Congress for complicity in the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the consulate in Istanbul. And the U.S. is seeking a truce in the fighting.
Who got us into this war? And what have years of killing Yemenis, in which we have been collaborators, done to make Americans safer?
Consider Libya. In 2011, the U.S. attacked the forces of dictator Moammar Gadhafi and helped to effect his ouster, which led to his murder.
Told of news reports of Gadhafi's death, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton joked, "We came, we saw, he died."
The Libyan conflict has since produced tens of thousands of dead. The output of Libya's crucial oil industry has collapsed to a fraction of what it was. In 2016, Obama said that not preparing for a post-Gadhafi Libya was probably the "worst mistake" of his presidency.
The price of all these interventions for the United States?
Some 7,000 dead, 40,000 wounded and trillions of dollars.
For the Arab and Muslim world, the cost has been far greater. Hundreds of thousands of dead in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Libya, civilian and soldier alike, pogroms against Christians, massacres, and millions uprooted and driven from their homes.
How has all this invading, bombing and killing made the Middle East a better place or Americans more secure? One May 2018 poll of young people in the Middle East and North Africa found that more of them felt that Russia was a closer partner than was the United States of America.
The fruits of American intervention?
We are told ISIS is not dead but alive in the hearts of tens of thousands of Muslims, that if we leave Syria and Afghanistan, our enemies will take over and our friends will be massacred, and that if we stop helping Saudis and Emiratis kill Houthis in Yemen, Iran will notch a victory.
In his decision to leave Syria and withdraw half of the 14,000 troops in Afghanistan, Trump enraged our foreign policy elites, though millions of Americans cannot get out of there soon enough.
In Monday's editorial celebrating major figures of foreign policy in the past half-century, The New York Times wrote, "As these leaders pass from the scene, it will be left to a new generation to find a way forward from the wreckage Mr. Trump has already created."
Correction: Make that "the wreckage Mr. Trump inherited."
Very well said Mr Buchanan.
“Assad must go, Obama says.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Kenyan from Indonesia is gone.
Assad is still there.
It was never our business.
The tribes of the Middle East have been fighting each other since Old Testament times. A thousand years hence, they’ll still be fighting.
I say develop domestic energy production, and let the Middle East regress back to the Stone Age, from whence they came prior to discovery of oil there.
The ONLY strategic importance of the Middle East to the rest of the world is OIL. Oh Eye Ell.
Obama and Hillary killed a lot of people to protect their drugs and weapons trade.
“It was never our business.”
Of course it was, it was all about business, they always are... Acceptable mass human losses aside, war is very lucrative and profitable. This is why the likes of Liz Cheney are pulling their hair out because it might be over.
They are profiting while our dead, wounded, and Grandchildren will be who foots the bill for it.
for later
What Assad has done for the world far exceeds what he has done for his own country. Obama and his Muslim Brotherhood team were toppling rulers throughout the Arab world to install anti-American puppets. Assad’s refusal to turn tail and run in the face of the New World Order gave the Egyptians the courage to fight to re-gain their country. Libya is still a mess (and probably should never have been cobbled together from the three Italian components) but at least the cancer has been contained.
PROTECT THE KURDS!!! is the cry from the Neo-cons today. I remember back to the day when the word neocon was a slander and an attack against those who wished to destroy terror and Islam. It took a bit of time until I came to realize neocons had only the thought of fortune and domination of the New World Order in mind. They no more had the best intentions to destroy terror, than they had in protecting an ally named Moammar Kaddafi.
My turning point was triggered by GHW Bush refusing to do as he promised for the Kurds after Gulf War 1. Instead OUR ALLY Turkey, along with Saddam Hussein, tortured persecuted and murdered those who were essential in Bush the Elders war. These very same Kurds who now are at risk.
Then came Bush the Youngers war. He too disallowed helping the Kurds, because if he pushed for it he said, OUR ALLY Turkey would not allow us to fly over their airspace while advancing our so called common goal.
We did not care for the Kurds then, we care just as much now Yet their plight is again invoked as a reason to stay in Empire building mode.
What is it again about Turkey being a Nukular power while being a Islamist state along with Pakistan that escape the notice of todays neo-cons? Why again do we call Saudi Arabia a friend, while they build education centers for Jihad?
The answer lies not in our goal being to defeat terror, reduce the power of Islamists and save the world for Democracy. It is in sowing confusion, death and destruction. You see, it easily fills the elites pockets with gold, and enhances their power over us all. The only cost is in blood and lost limbs. Who really cares about the ones bearing the cost? Not the neo-cons, not the Democrats, not the Republicans. It is only the hoi-poloi. The one financing the venture, but never cut in on the profit.
Libya had a substantial deposit of gold, as Khaddafi was planning on backing a new currency with it. I assume it is now in safer hands. The very same hands that control the World Bank, the International Bank of Settlements, and the Federal Reserve. Of course the halfrican and Mz Corrupt Clunton got their finders fee.
Syria has had about $5 billion dollars worth of destruction to it’s infrastructure, maybe higher. We will see how that is rebuilt before I’d acknowledge the Regime has won.
That $100 million the Saudis are giving is a drop in the bucket, the country is in ruins.
We should’ve gone in, killed whoever the real mastermind was, then left.
That would have been at 1600 Penn Ave a few years ago. I hear he's still in the neighborhood though.
No peace in Syria until Assad is ousted, says Nikki Haley
In a departure from the administration’s previous stance, US ambassador to the UN suggests regime change is now one of its priorities
I’ll never support her.
Pat is now and always has been full of crap.
He is a 1930’s anachronism unfit to live in the present and certainly not the future
The Constant War Crowd (McCainiac, Grahamnesty, et al.) never met a conflict they didn’t like. They might not want to spend a few billion dollars securing the U.S. border, but by jingo they’ll spend untold billions in every third-world hellhole one can imagine.
Would have been so much cheaper and less bloody for all sides to simply hand Israel and Egypt $200 billion, load the Sinai up with fighters, bombers and missiles, and the Med and Gulf with ships, and let them kick the crap put of anyone who caused a problem.
lol
That’s not what she said apparently. Reading the article, it seems that Reuters/Guardian misconstrued her remarks as a statement of policy, not as a prediction as she seemed to intend.
It’s a grim prediction. Assad may be a nasty piece of work, but blood will really flow if he’s taken out. He’s a Baathist-secularist and seems willing to protect minorities.
That is true. But Pat is very free and loose with his "facts" otherwise. The conflation of Bush and Obama regimes is particularly inappropriate.
Obama's policies were often in direct contradiction to Bush's.
Much of the problems are a direct result of that.
Pat is engaging in sniping, but we have no way of knowing that things would have been better if we had done nothing. They might well have been much worse.
Notice that Pat does *not* complain about the first Gulf war, which had considerable cost as well.
Yet the Second Gulf War was just a continuation of the First. We never stopped being at war with Saddam's Iraq.
We should have likely toppled Iran next, as they supplied our enemies in Iraq.
We could not do it because of the horrific attacks on moral at home and on President Bush by our own Media. The were and are, the enemy within.
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