Everything we see and hear about Syria is made up……McCain crosses the Turkish border into Syria to hold meetings with opposition commanders (a photo op) and the next day Kerry and others hold a peace conference to help determine the future of Syria…..but….
BEIRUT — Syria’s main Western-backed opposition group said Thursday it will not participate in U.S.-Russian sponsored peace talks on Syria while massacres are underway in the country, dealing a blow to international efforts to end the devastating civil war.
A spokesman for the Syrian National Coalition, Khalid Saleh, also said the group will not support any international peace efforts in light of Iran’s and Hezbollah’s “invasion” of Syria.
Saleh was referring to the increasingly prominent roles Iran and the Lebanese militant Hezbollah group have had in backing President Bashar Assad’s forces on the ground.
If you would like a conspiracy then ask…..did McCain’s visit to the opposition have anything to do with the apparently failure of peace talks?
McCain wants to arm the opposition with heavier armaments, but only the “good” guys who have been vetted…….vetted by whom? Who will decide the good from the bad? There is a folly behind the arming of the opposition…….
Nikolas Gvosdev lists the possible consequences of providing arms to insurgents in Syria. He points out that there is no way of knowing how these weapons will be used:
Indeed, America’s 1980s experiences with supplying arms to the mujahedeen in Afghanistan and the contras in Nicaragua highlight some of the problems with weapons transfers. Groups on the ground may want to horde weapons for use in internecine battles with rivals to establish their dominance after the enemy has been defeated. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the Afghan commander who received the lion’s share of military aid from the U.S., Pakistan and Saudi Arabia during the fight against the Soviets, was notorious for his attacks against rival mujahedeen groups, especially those led by Ahmad Shah Massoud. Some of the weapons he received from the West were used, not to drive out the Soviets, but to turn parts of Kabul into smoking rubble during the 1990s when he attempted to take power for himself.
One would think that America’s largely uninspiring record of arming insurgencies in the past would eliminate any desire to try again. Something that continues to impress me about interventionist arguments on Syria is how very short-sighted they are. Most Syria hawks are not concerned with who will govern Syria or how in two or five years’ time, but are preoccupied entirely with finding some way to get the U.S. into the conflict regardless of the effects that this could have in and around Syria. If an even worse government came to power through U.S. and Western military aid, or if these weapons helped fuel another decade of civil war, the U.S. would be partly responsible for condemning Syria to even more suffering, and worst of all our government would be doing this for no good reason.
Here is a ‘what if’ for you people, you war hawks, to consider…….say we arm the opposition to the hilt and after a while the situation becomes more calm and reasonable….but then someone shoots down an airliner from Israel full of people with a LAW we provided to the opposition…..who will get the blame for that? McCain and his war hawk buddies? Not a chance! It will be the NEW scandal the morons have to latch onto to keep from repairing an ailing country.
Does anyone remember Afghanistan in the 80’s? It was awash in American arms…and they have been used against us…….Or how about Libya? Same scenario. And now our boy McCain is trying to repeat history…….Syria is just nothing but a quicksand bog waiting for us to step into it….and if McCain and his buddies have anything to do with it we will be up to our necks in blood ………..something that needs to be considered and stoop using the Syrian people as a political prop……..consider the dire consequences of our actions….there are plenty of examples of our poor judgement.