Syria, where the world collectively lost its humanity

[Blue_Tires]

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[Blue_Tires]

1. kick

[Blue_Tires]

2. It did not escape my notice

that 95% of the voices on the so-called "Human Rights/Anti-war" left stopped paying attention (much less getting outraged) over what was happening in Syria once they couldn't blame the "Imperialist Great Satan" USA for all the death and destruction anymore...

This capitulation and abandonment is on them.

[question everything]

4. Too true. And sad

[question everything]

3. I remember that it was hard to decide to intervene

Especially after the Egyptian regime was replaced by radicals.

And there were several groups fighting Assad so it was not clear who would have benefited. And yet, Obama set a "red line" which was crossed and he did nothing.

We often remember how the world did not help the Jewish victims of the Holocaust and, of course, there was a war going on. But I wish that Obama built a coalition to intervene. And in contrast to what Bush did in Iraq, Arab nations should have been an important part in restoring peace - more or less.

[Blue_Tires]

5. In a *small* defense of Obama

Prologue: This was France's mess to begin with since they were already balls deep in that country trying to oust Assad in the Arab Spring, and once it was bigger than they could chew, they came begging for help from Britain (who shot them down fairly early) and the U.S.


1. Senate Repubs for months screamed that he didn't have the courage or will to act. (SEE: Rand Paul)

2. Once Obama gets his ducks in order and is about to put boots on the ground, Senate Repubs yanked the rug out from under him screeching that he'd need the AUMF which they clearly were not going to grant and the Repubs calling him a coward five months earlier on NBC Sunday morning flipped 180 degrees and became anti-imperialist peaceniks (SEE: Rand Paul, again)

3. So now Obama has ZERO mandate from congress or the general public left and right and is pretty much limited to sporadic airstrikes.

4. Even though it had been confirmed by multiple independent investigative authorities that Assad was deploying chemical weapons and committing mass slaughter of innocents and children, some of the usual suspects on the "useful idiot" left (Sy Hersh, Greenwald, Scahill, Wikileaks, Counterpunch, etc) started circulating the theory (from unnamed insider sources, of course) that the chemical weapons reports were fiction cooked up by Washington as a justification to invade and it took months to properly debunk it. (And no, to this day there has never been any formal mea culpa, retraction or apology from these people for knowingly parroting agitprop cooked up in Moscow)

5. Rightly or wrongly, Obama knew in the back of his mind that he risked the involvement of Russia who is propping up Assad, and there were domestic issues needing his attention so he just decided to punt on the issue since the rest of the nation had already...

As an aside, it was Syria in 2014 that I first read about the Assad government hiring freelance renegade hacking firms for the sole purpose of tracking down underground dissidents through cell phone metadata for execution. The fact that Snowden and Greenwald talked about everything *BUT* this when they became a global sensation was when I first suspected they were frauds.

[Blue_Tires]

6. Nope, it doesn't end:

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[lees1975]

7. Lots of history there, unfortunately lessons learned too late

The problems in Syria are ancient, going back to at least Byzantium. But the modern problems are the results of European imperialism. Actually, Woodrow Wilson tried to make some sense out of the post-Ottoman Empire middle east by proposing, and then actually doing some research among the people of the region themselvesto come up with some kind of self-determination plan that might have a chance at working. But the British and the French had already secretly made a plan for the sole purpose of benefitting their own imperialist interests, and thus, we have the middle east as it is today.

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/02/the-middle-east-that-might-have-been/385410/

Maybe our response should have been to let them take care of the mess they made, but neither of them was either militarily capable, or politically competent to do so. We would have been more involved then, perhaps less so now because the political situation we currently have would never have developed. It's hard to say what would have come out of Wilson's proposal, but the US would have eventually let the mandates go and backed out.

I've run into many Syrian refugees here. One of the biggest tragedies is that the remnants of the Antiochian Orthodox Church, one of the oldest partriarchal churches of Eastern Orthodox Christianity, devastated during the ISIS occupation, is now being decimated. The Kurds tolerated and protected the presence of the Orthodox, but ISIS didn't. They had some hope when the Kurds succeeded in driving out ISIS but that was dashed when Trump turned his back on the Kurds and opened the door to Turkey and to anarchy. The last few congregations left are either fleeing for their lives or being murdered.

[Blue_Tires]

8. kick

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