Everybody and his brother is calling for Obama to do something in Syria. What? Strangely no one has any idea of what to do except “engage”. Of course engagement stops as soon as someone asks – how?. No one wants to put troops on the ground so how do you engage.
I heard someone say that we are not achieving our objective in Syria. What the hell is our objective? Is it to get rid of Assad or to get rid of ISIS or what? The generals don’t know. The warmongers in congress don’t know. They just want someone to blame.
Russia knows it wants to support Assad, because Assad is fighting ISIS and the Russians don’t want ISIS moving into the Muslim areas of Russia. There have also been previous events in which Assad’s father, helped to solidify a relationship between Putin and himself. Despite this relationship, if Russia can end ISIS, it still looks pretty certain that Putin would make Assad move on.
We on the other hand, don‘t know who our allies are and whom we should be fighting. The group of rebel fighters we armed in the beginning of this conflict turned out to be ISIS. We want to get rid of Assad but fear the same result that we had with Iraq and Libya, where the disappearance of any form of government has led to chaos and anarchy. Even the anti-Assad non-ISIS forces in Syria, what there is of them, cannot assure us of their loyalty and we don’t want to arm another force and have them turn into ISIS 2. So what do we do?
Our politicians want us to jump in and get involved. Into what? If we don’t put troops on the ground we have nothing to say about what goes on there. This nation definitely doesn’t want to send their kids over there to be killed for nothing. The real problem is, we don’t have a dog in the fight but we would like to be seen as the world leader, showing everyone the way to peace. Good luck!
The players in this game have nothing left to lose and they don’t give a rat’s ass about us being a world leader any more than they care about Russia and what it wants. Most of them just want to survive and the rest want to surround them selves with power.
It has been suggested that we just leave Russia alone and let them bury themselves the way the Soviets did in Afghanistan. That little war, more than anything else helped to bankrupt the Soviet Union and destroy it as a world power. Putin would like to have Russia replace the Soviet Union as a world power but it isn’t anywhere near there now. It would be stupid of us to play Putin’s game and get further involved in Syria. Better we let him play out his hand and see how he does against ISIS. Then we can have more than enough time to assess the situation and step in, if it is in our best interests.
If history is any teacher and if Russia defeats ISIS, it will be faced with the same problem we saw in Iraq and Libya. As soon as the fighting ceases, Russia will be seen by the local population as an invader and then they will either have to withdraw and possibly allow the just defeated elements of ISIS and the other terrorist groups to come back into power, or stay there and really become an occupying force with all the locals hating them. It would be interesting to see how Putin would handle that.
We’ve already destroyed two countries in the region and are on our way to doing the same to Afghanistan. Why are we still in Afghanistan anyway? It is a nation of uncivilized misogynistic pedophiles. Better we stand back and let the competing forces just destroy each other. The same is true all over the Arab world. There is simply nothing to gain by getting involved there.
The world, at least that part that is not represented by Donald Trump or the GOP, already knows that we are the strongest nation on earth. No one wants us to prove it. Maybe the same jerks that got us involved in Iraq and Afghanistan in the first place ought to shut their mouths and try to learn something about international politics. They certainly screwed up our place in the world on their watch.