NYTimes: (Syria) a debacle of staggering proportions

If they are killing each other over there, they are not killing us here.

Al Qaeda Leader Al-Zawahiri Declares War on ISIS 'Caliph' Al-Baghdadi
http://abcnews.go.com/International/al-qaeda-leader-al-zawahiri-declares-war-isis/story?id=33656684

 

Hey...the Iraqi president was elected by the people of Iraq...and he didn't do his job because his military ran away from the fight. We trained them. We withdrew with them in control of security. We gave them humvees, weapons, etc. and look where those ended up. We didn't keep any forces because of some stupid sticking point about Iraqi law being applied to American troops...which Obama would not accept. Plus, he wanted to end the effort as it was expensive as hell in lives and money. And, a lot of the undoing was Shia forces wouldn't lose their lives protecting Sunni cities because of the past, i.e. sectarianism. Also, Iraqis signed up for the military not to protect their country as much as they wanted and needed that paycheck. And, Iraq couldn't protect their prisons. The same people who created IS were in an Iraqi prison and were broken out. Iraq couldn't keep their act together but a lot of them wanted American troops to leave thinking they would be better off. Only a minority of them wanted American troops to stay fearing what would happen. Yea...probably better off not to have invaded Iraq in the first place...especially knowing what we know now.

I don't think the answer is removing Assad by military force or sending in ground troops to re-secure Iraq and take back ground. It's too late for that. That's just going to create even more unintended consequences in the future. Those people over there have to take back their countries. We can help them but we're not doing it for them. The Iraqi government deserves a lot of the blame in this. Maliki was a total failure. They also didn't keep the Sunni-US allied folks, who helped defeat Al Qaeda in country, paid like they were getting paid...so they just dissolved back into society. Again, goes back to Shia not wanting to help Sunnis and wanting power control. We all know what a lot of those Shia forces did when they supposedly went to protect Sunni cities. They committed atrocities, like raping Sunni women, in revenge for the Saddam years. They certainly didn't buy into a one nation concept. I honestly don't think Iraq was ever going to be able to secure itself once we left no matter what we did. That's why intervening usually turns out badly...because you break a natural order of how things evolved in that country and try to replace it with something else (democracy) that was never going to work in a society like that mainly because of people split along religious lines with hatred for others not aligned to them.

No more US ground troops should die for what is going on over there now. And, unfortunately, a concerted ground troop operation is what it's going to take to regain everything that was lost. They won't be able to do it nearly as well or fast as our troops could...and they may not be able to hold it once they do before more extremists step in. It's a mess.

 

This article is more accurate IMO written by Israeli's debkafile

"Four parties caused Syria’s genocidal calamity. Should Israel get involved?

Chapter by chapter, a long list of the guilty parties must bear responsibility for the Syrian catastrophe hacking the ruined country into bleeding parts.

1. The first culprit is undoubtedly its insensate president Bashar Assad and his close family, who have had no qualms about spilling the blood of some 300,000 men, women, children and old people – some estimate as many as half a million – and making some 11 million people homeless, to keep himself in power. No one has ever counted the number of people maimed and crippled by the war, but they are conservatively estimated at one million. These figures add up to genocide or serial mass murder, which has been allowed to go into its fifth year.

2. Iran warrants second billing for this mass crime.

Tehran has laid out the stupendous sum of some $40 billion to keep the mass marderer Assad in power with total disregard for his methods of survival. The motives behind the ayatollahs’ military and political boost are well recorded. Worth mentioning here is that Tehran not only pressed its Lebanese proxy, the Shiite Hizballah group, into service alongside Assad’s army, but sent its its own generals to orchestrate the war, led by the Al Qods Brigades chief Qassem Soleimeni.

We can reveal here that 22 Iranian generals have died fighting for the Assad cause.

3. The third place belongs to the United States and President Barack Obama. His refusal to put American boots on the ground may have been the correct decision for the US, but it had four direct consequences:

a) The slaughter of the Syrian people continued unchecked. Even after President Obama declared that chemical warfare was a red line, he backed down at the last minute against intervening and ordered the US fleet to draw back from the Syrian coast.

To this day, Assad continues to use chemical weapons to poison his enemies.

b) Obama and his Secretary of State John Kerry let Iran use its military backing for Assad as a high card in the negotiations for a nuclear accord. Instead of making it a condition for a deal against the lifting of sanctions, Washington allowed Tehran to come away from the table with US non-intervention in Syria as one of its concessions for buying Iran’s assent to the Vienna deal.

Tehran, in a word, won Washington’s tacit approval for propping up the atrocious Syrian ruler.

c) The rest of the world, including the United Nations and the European Union, followed the Obama administration’s lead and stood aside as at least 11 million Syrians became homeless refugees.

The lifeless body of a three-year old Syrian child washed up from the sea has figured in the Western media as a symbol of the tragic fate of Syria’s refugees. However, his tragedy came after the hair-raising atrocities endured by millions of those refugees for nearly five years. Many families were forced to sell their daughters as sex slaves to buy food, their young sons to pedophile predators. The slave markets were centered on the Persian Gulf. Young Alan Kurdi died aged three. Many thousands of Syrian refugee children still live in appalling circumstances. No humanitarian organization has started an outcry or a campaign to rescue them.

d) US refusal to intervene in the most savage humanitarian tragedy the world has seen for many decades opened the door to the belligerent branch of al Qaeda, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, to march into the vacuum. The videotaped records of beheadings, the massacre of the Iraqi Yazdi people, the enslavement of its women and the burning alive of “apostates,” followed in quick succession.

The strongest nation in the world fought back with an ineffective trickle of air strikes on ISIS targets, allowing the group to go forward to conquer terrain and gain in strength.

4. Russia bears a heavy weight of guilt - and Israel would do well to watch its cynical conduct and draw the right conclusions. Like the ayatollahs, President Vladimir Putin led the second world power to total commitment for keeping Bashar Assad in power. Among other motivations, Putin pursued this policy to settle a score with Obama for the overthrow of Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi. With one world power on the sidelines and a second jumping in with two feet, the Syrian imbroglio was bound to have devastating historical repercussions.

Throughout the Syrian conflict, Israel refrained from interfering, with only one exception: It supported Syrian rebel groups holding a strip of southern Syria, as a buffer against Iranian, Hizballah and Syrian army encroachment on its northern borders. More than a thousand injured Syrians were treated and their lives saved in Israeli hospitals after receiving first aid at a field hospital on the Israeli-Syria border.

The esteemed Israeli historian Prof. Shlomo Avinery said Sunday, Sept 6, that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu did the right thing in steadfastly keeping Israel out of the Syrian conflict. He very much doubted that Syrian refugees would seek asylum in a country they regard as the Zionist enemy.

Israel's opposition leader Isaac Herzog nonetheless urged the government to take in a limited number of Syrian asylum seekers from among those flooding into Europe, and not to forget that “we are Jews.”

One wonders why he never had a word to say about US dereliction when Assad committed his atrocities across Israel’s border. Herzog’s favorite advice to Netanyahu is to go to Washington right now, beard President Obama in the Oval Office and hammer out an agreed policy on Iran. ......."[/CENTER]​

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Not sure you would say the same if it happens in India , yea sure people adore Assad But they were waiting for your stupidity to show Their true feeling


[youtube]http://youtu.be/WjwC_-bKGhs [/youtube]

 

Not sure you would say the same if it happens in India , yea sure people adore Assad But they were waiting for your stupidity to show Their true feeling


[youtube]WjwC_-bKGhs [/youtube]

 

How did India became a part of this discussion?

Nobody is claiming that the Syrian people adore & love Assad (well the Alawites probably do adore him), but it don't take a genius to see that
Life under Assad pre-war >>>>>> living in a war zone
Life under Assad pre-war >>>>>> living under ISIS or al-Nusra

The same can be said about Iraq & Libya as well.

 

Life under Assad = war zone
Life under Assad = living under Hezboallah,ISIS

It was't a secret that Assad threaten a few years a go , its either him or terror, his prediction were right though....

According to those "Reports: Assad cooperating with ISIS as regime teeters

Reports indicate that the forces of Syria’s President Assad are coordinating with ISIS against opposition groups, as Assad’s grip on power loosens.

ISIS recently captured the historic city of Palmyra and is making advances in the north of the country. Meanwhile, Islamist opposition groups including the al-Nusra Front are engaged in a fierce battle against Assad’s forces and his Hezbollah allies near the Lebanese border. Analyst Ehud Yaari told Channel Two last night that Assad’s regime is suffering.

In what may be part of a desperate attempt to retain power, it is reported that Syrian government air strikes were launched against opposition forces near Aleppo over the weekend, to enable ISIS to defeat specific Assad opponents. ISIS launched an offensive to capture the strategically important town of Azaz, near the Turkish border, which is key to opposition supply lines into Aleppo. The United States embassy in Syria said via social media earlier this week, “Reports indicate that the regime is making air strikes in support of [ISIS’s] advance on Aleppo, aiding extremists against Syrian population.” In a further indication of Assad-ISIS cooperation, it added, “We have long seen that the regime avoids ISIS lines, in complete contradiction to the regime’s claims to be fighting ISIS.”

 

#1 The USA has zero obligation to put US troops on the ground in Syria.
#2 Syria was far better off before the war under Assad than they are right now.

 

Can you explain where did you get the illusion that U.S. Troops needed or not to be on Syrian's ground !

 

You mentioned "putting boots on the ground" in Syria. The United States has no obligation to do anything in Syria. The United States has been overly involved in the Middle East. If the USA decides to take vetted Syrian refugees in moderate numbers, they may do so.

The Syria civil war has been a horrible event (and continues to be), however the USA has no obligation moral or otherwise to get involved. Syrians tend to be more secular than other regions of the Middle East and I do not doubt some of them will do well in the West.