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tabatha

(18,795 posts)
Sat Jun 23, 2012, 04:07 AM Jun 2012

Why the CIA Won’t Relish Its Syria Mission

According to the New York Times, the CIA now has people deployed in Turkey trying to sort out which Syrian rebels should be armed, and which shouldn’t. That comes as no real surprise, in light of Syria spinning into worse chaos and violence, and the Obama Administration running out of good options. Isn’t the CIA always called in when nothing else works?

I’ll go out on a limb here and guess that, right now, the last situation the CIA wants to get into is Syria. Like the rest of the world, it knows next to nothing about the Syrian opposition, which is a mare’s nest of secular and religious groups. There is no one predominant figure, which leaves the CIA to sort out competing claims to political leadership and support. And, as these things usually go, it will take a lot of time to sort out the swindlers and the frauds from the real thing. A large number of Syrian exiles are in it for the money, rather than supporting, much less representing the fighters dying on Syria’s battlefields.


It should also be remembered that the CIA has had a long, unhappy history playing Syrian politics. In the 1960s, one of its operatives was accused of trying to foment a coup, and was hanged in Damascus’s central square. After Syria put down the Hama rebellion in February 1982, it found U.S.-made radio equipment in the rubble, and wrongly accused the CIA of having supported the uprising. Both State Department and the CIA came to an informal understanding that the CIA would keep away from the Syrian opposition — and it, in fact, did just that for the following three decades. So right now, the CIA is playing catch-up.

Turning the CIA on Syria is a sign that the Administration has been put in a corner not of its own making. That’s because there are no easy or obvious solutions to the Syrian conflict. When the Arab Spring first reached Syria in March 2011, the Washington’s hope was that Syrian President Bashar Assad would open up Syria to some sort of democracy and defuse dissent. Then, when the power struggle turned violent, the Administration latched on to the hope that a Syrian general would overthrow Bashar.

Read more: http://world.time.com/2012/06/22/why-the-cia-wont-relish-its-syria-mission/#ixzz1ybLGO9qg


This should throw a huge cistern of cold water on those who "assumed" without any facts that the US/CIA was involved in the uprising. If anyone had followed what was happening in Syria, it would be obvious that it was not.

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