(December 21, 2018 at 10:26 am)Gae Bolga Wrote:(December 21, 2018 at 2:36 am)Maketakunai Wrote: You are aware that the the Obama administration was supplying "rebels" in Syria with weapons from Croatia to take out Assad, right? That all came out in 2015. Trump stopped funding the "rebels" in 2017 and about 8 months later declared ISIS was no longer a threat in Syria. Who do you think those "rebels " are exactly?
Obama had the CIA funding and training the Free Syrian Army to overthrow the Syrian government since around 2011. As it turns out, the FSA collaborates quite a bit with Al Qaeda. By 2017 intelligence was reporting that FSA was primarily Al Qaeda. Let's backtrack - From 2011 to 2014 Al Qaeda supported ISIS openly. Even though they broke ties formally, they still support each other when it's convenient. Right now there are so many groups in Syria that it's really just not worth the effort to try to keep track of them all. We can't treat them all like allies, and we can't treat them all like enemies. Here's a map from May, 2018 that shows what I mean.
The only thing anyone knows for sure is that without money from America, ISIS control has been reduced to holding a miniscule portion of the country. That only took about 8 months after President Trump cut off the flow of arms and equipment. And, like I wrote earlier, as long as we can get carriers into the Mediterranean we really don't need to put American lives at risk for this cluster-fuck.
Russian barrel bombs and chemical weapons have more to do with ISIS current predicament than scrotus does, lol. You're not talking to a person who has problems with arming and training rebels, with me. Personally, I think the failure to follow up directly on our red line back in the day was one of the worst mistakes of the obama presidency.
As you say....
I don't have a problem arming rebels, per se. I was born in a country that only exists because of a rebellion... The situation in Syria is pretty FUBAR though. We're supporting rebels we like who are supporting people we want to kill (and who want to kill us). Not all, but maybe some of this could have been avoided if we would have just assassinated Assad outright instead of open-secretly supplying the locals with arms and equipment to do the job just so Obama wouldn't have to take another political hit.
I know that opens up all sorts of ethical and moral questions, but I feel pretty comfortable in saying that I think Syria has been more trouble than it's worth to the U.S.. I'd rather see the money we're wasting there used to build a wall on our southern border, but that's a whole other conversation.
