RE: Breaking News: US Missile Strikes Against Military Targets Inside Syria
April 7, 2017 at 7:51 am
(This post was last modified: April 7, 2017 at 8:34 am by Anomalocaris.)
There are, from the American perspective, 5 sides in the Syrian struggle:
1. Assad's regime - target of the strike, an regime which had pursued a relatively moderate, secular, west tilting approach prior to the "Arab spring". It is now generally conceded the so called Arab spring could have gone in but one direction - replacement of failed secular state with Islamist, most likely radical, regime. Nonetheless out of sheer indulgence in the fantasy that Arab spring will lead to western democracy, Obama/clinton team took umbrage at Assad' efforts to suppress the Arab spring and Assad has been the west appointed bogeyman ever since.
2. Islamist rebel - self explanatory, trying to take down Assad and install some shade of an expansionism fundamentalist caliphate in the true spirit of the real current of Arab spring, as Assad predicted while we were basking in the Obama/clinton manufactured glow of the fantasy Arab spring.
3. Friendly rebel - a subset of Islamist rebels whom we, out of sheer desperate need for some straws to grasp, deemed to be not Islamist rebels and therefore our friends. Not sure what we would say if we manage to actually be effective in making them win.
4. Russians - who wants to make sure neither 2, nor 3, nor anything actually more resembling Obama/clinton fantasy of 2011, establishes itself in Syria. Furthermore whatever emerges will keep allowing Russia to use a naval base there the Russians had been using since the 1960s. Russia is also willing to put boots on the ground to protect Assad' troops and regime, Russia is also very close and it is logistically simple for Russia to sustain both land and air operation there indefinitely. It is also trivially easy for Russia to replace any equipment the Assad regime loses to American missiles or any rebels. Russia could also put advanced air defense there and make any American air champaign there more costly than any the US has experienced since Vietnam. If the US and Russia were to come to blows in Syria, turkey would reflexively side with Russia, unless the west were to make so much concessions to the Islamist regime in disguise in Ankara that for the pleasure of showing we are doing something, we bring the emergence of an Islamist neoottoman empire on the doorstep of the west several steps closer.
5. Trump and his smooth faced son-in-law.
1. Assad's regime - target of the strike, an regime which had pursued a relatively moderate, secular, west tilting approach prior to the "Arab spring". It is now generally conceded the so called Arab spring could have gone in but one direction - replacement of failed secular state with Islamist, most likely radical, regime. Nonetheless out of sheer indulgence in the fantasy that Arab spring will lead to western democracy, Obama/clinton team took umbrage at Assad' efforts to suppress the Arab spring and Assad has been the west appointed bogeyman ever since.
2. Islamist rebel - self explanatory, trying to take down Assad and install some shade of an expansionism fundamentalist caliphate in the true spirit of the real current of Arab spring, as Assad predicted while we were basking in the Obama/clinton manufactured glow of the fantasy Arab spring.
3. Friendly rebel - a subset of Islamist rebels whom we, out of sheer desperate need for some straws to grasp, deemed to be not Islamist rebels and therefore our friends. Not sure what we would say if we manage to actually be effective in making them win.
4. Russians - who wants to make sure neither 2, nor 3, nor anything actually more resembling Obama/clinton fantasy of 2011, establishes itself in Syria. Furthermore whatever emerges will keep allowing Russia to use a naval base there the Russians had been using since the 1960s. Russia is also willing to put boots on the ground to protect Assad' troops and regime, Russia is also very close and it is logistically simple for Russia to sustain both land and air operation there indefinitely. It is also trivially easy for Russia to replace any equipment the Assad regime loses to American missiles or any rebels. Russia could also put advanced air defense there and make any American air champaign there more costly than any the US has experienced since Vietnam. If the US and Russia were to come to blows in Syria, turkey would reflexively side with Russia, unless the west were to make so much concessions to the Islamist regime in disguise in Ankara that for the pleasure of showing we are doing something, we bring the emergence of an Islamist neoottoman empire on the doorstep of the west several steps closer.
5. Trump and his smooth faced son-in-law.
