Saturday 27th of April 2024

don't do as we do or say...

don't do as we do or say...

Nato has urged Russia to end air strikes "on the Syrian opposition and civilians", days after Moscow began raids to support Syria's government.

Moscow says it is targeting Islamic State and other Islamist positions, but US-led allies and Turkey say government opponents are targeted.

Turkish F-16 fighter jets were scrambled after a Russian plane entered Turkey's air space on Saturday.

Russia said the violation was for just a few seconds and due to poor weather.

Saturday's interception took place near Yayladagi in the southern Hatay region, Turkey says. The foreign ministry in Ankara said it had summoned the Russian ambassador to issue a "strong protest".

Turkish jets patrolling the border were also "harassed" by an unidentified plane on Sunday, Turkey said.

statement by Nato's 28 members, that include Turkey, warned of "the extreme danger of such irresponsible behaviour" and urged Russia "to cease and desist".

US Secretary of State John Kerry said Turkey would have been within its rights to shoot the jets down.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-34448942


 

meanwhile, our new elegant bunyp in canberra...

Living in the dreamland swamps of international sewer diplomacy, Canberra, our new elegant buyip in charge of us, the unwashed and the thankless, declared without laughing that once Assad is removed from Syria, the world will smell of rose petal scented Turkish delight

 

Turnbull echoed Bishop’s suggestion that the focus must now be on a political solution “because a military solution is now so complex and is not going to be the answer to stopping this bloody conflict”.

In an interview with the ABC’s Insiders program on Sunday, Bishop said Russia’s intervention in Syria had “complicated the matter and changed the dynamics quite significantly” and appeared to be targeting areas where Daesh was not apparent.

Russia was acting at the invitation of Assad and appeared to be part of an effort to bolster the president’s position, she said.

Assad said in an interview on Sunday that calls for him to leave office or bow out after serving in a transitional government “mean nothing to us” and he declared that“western officials are lost, lack clarity of vision and are feeling the failure of their plots [toward Syria]”.

read more: http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/oct/05/malcolm-turnbull-says-transition-from-assad-is-the-only-option-for-syria

NATO's incompetence...

NATO is pissed off for being shown how to do it by the Russians.

 

Of course, NATO is being measly about hitting anything that looks like terrorists (a "moderate" rebel with an intent to kill someone IS NOT A MODERATE)— since NATO is under instruction to make this conflict last as long as possible, like Afghanistan, in order to feed the military machine with more and more dollars. NATO, of course, with the help of the Aussies in red underpants bulging with budgies, wants a long drawn out campaign against ISIS, because ISIS is fighting the Shiites and the non-Wahhabis, in the region.

 

ISIS is a bit over the top and we think we should hemm them in a bit... The sunnis, including other extremists and possibly ISIL, are our friends because of the oil, while the Shiites are our nemesis because they are... There.

adding shiite to the confusion...

 


Why Assad Has Turned to Moscow for Help


By Christoph Reuter


Iran has long been sending troops and material to help Syrian autocrat Bashar Assad wage war against his own people. But now Tehran is busy establishing a state within a state -- which is why Assad now wants help from Russia.

Fear of his enemies was the primary reason for Bashar Assad's call for help to Moscow. "But right after that came the fear of his friends," says a Russian official who long worked in his country's embassy in Damascus. The friend he refers to is Iran, the Syrian regime's most important protector.

"Assad and those around him are afraid of the Iranians," the Russian says. Anger over the arrogance of the Iranians, who treat Syria like a colony, is also part of it, the Russian continues. Most of all, though, the Syrians "mistrust Tehran's goals, for which Assad's position of power may no longer be decisive. That is why the Syrians absolutely want us in the country."

What the Russian diplomat, who wants to remain anonymous, has to say is a bit jarring at first. Without the Shiite auxiliaries from Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and Lebanon -- whose recruitment and transfer is organized by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard -- Assad's rule would long since have come to an end. Yet his comments are complemented by a number of additional details that add up to an image of a behind-the-scenes power struggle -- one which casts a new, scary light on the condition of the Syrian regime and on the country's prospects as a whole.

The Iranian Revolutionary Guard has long planned and carried out the most important missions and operations of the Syrian regime. They were responsible, right down to the details, for the sporadically successful offensives in Aleppo in the north and Daraa in the south, which began in 2013. In Iran, the Revolutionary Guard is one of those groups intent on continuing the "Islamic Revolution" -- the victory of Shiites over the Sunnis. They are a state within a state, one which owns several companies and is answerable only to Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. President Hassan Rohani has no power over the Revolutionary Guard whatsoever.

Their goals go far beyond merely reestablishing the status quo in Syria. In early 2013, Hojatoleslam Mehdi Taeb, one of the planners behind Iran's engagement in Syria, said: "Syria is the 35th province of Iran and it is a strategic province for us." For several decades, the alliance between the Assads and Iran was a profitable one, particularly in opposition to the Iraq of Saddam Hussein, which long had the upper hand in the region. But today, Assad depends on Iran to remain in power, and Tehran is taking advantage of the situation.

Using a variety of pathways, both civilian and military, Tehran is currently in the process of establishing itself in Syria. Military means are being employed to strengthen the holdings of the Shiite militia Hezbollah in areas near the border with Lebanon. To serve this goal, the Syrian National Defense Forces were established, troops that exist alongside the regular Syrian army and which includes tens of thousands of fighters who were trained in Iran. Still, the National Defense Forces have begun to disintegrate into local mafia militias and have actually accelerated the loss of state control over those regions.


Changes Afoot

It is, however, primarily in the civilian sector where significant changes are afoot. Just as in Damascus, Latakia and Jabla, increasing numbers of hosseiniehs -- Shiite religious teaching centers -- are opening. The centers are aimed at converting Sunnis, and even the Alawites, the denomination to which the Assads belong, to "correct" Shiite Islam by way of sermons and stipends. In addition, the government decreed one year ago that state-run religion schools were to teach Shiite material.

read more: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/syria-leader-assad-seeks-russian-protection-from-ally-iran-a-1056263.html

 

mine is bigger than yours: all for show...

 

Meanwhile in London town:

 

WAR & CONFLICT


Inside the world's largest weapons show


Every two years the UK hosts the world's largest arms fair - the four-day Defence and Security Equipment International.

 

see more: http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/10/world-largest-weapons-show-151006114526162.html

 

when putin is the most sane of all the madmen..

 

...

Whatever one thinks of Putin’s policy in Syria, at least it makes sense. He is supporting an ally, the Assad regime, against its enemies, who seek to overthrow that regime.

It is U.S. policy in Syria that makes no sense. We train rebels at immense cost to fight Assad, who cannot or will not fight. We attack ISIS, which also seeks to bring down the Assad regime. And we, too, want to bring down Assad.

Who do we think will rise if Assad falls? Do we have a “government in a box” that we think we can fly to Damascus and put into power if the Syrian army collapses, the regime falls and ISIS approaches the capital? Have we forgotten the lesson of “Animal Farm”? When the animals revolt and take over the farm, the pigs wind up in charge.

For months, Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia has called on Congress to debate and decide before we launch any new war in the Middle East. One wishes him well. For it is obvious that the same blockheads who told us that if the Taliban and Saddam and Gadhafi fell, liberal democracy would arise and flourish, are now clamoring for another American war in Syria to bring down Assad.

And who says stay out? Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, both of whom also opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

 

read more: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/buchanan/a-syrian-no-fly-zone-means-war/

See toon at top...

 

NATO is supporting ISIS — it's not pretty...

Moscow will soon start paying the price for its escalating military intervention in Syria in the form of reprisal attacks and casualties, the US defence secretary has warned, amid signs that Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies are preparing to counter the Russian move.

Ashton Carter was talking at a meeting of Nato defence ministers in Brussels on Thursday during which the ministers agreed to increase a Nato response force intended to move quickly to flashpoints.

There were no plans to deploy the force to Turkey, though the Nato secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, suggested its existence alone should discourage future Russian or Syrian incursions into Turkish territory.

“We don’t have to deploy the Nato response force or the spearhead force to deliver deterrence,” Stoltenberg said. “The important thing is that any adversary of Nato will know that we are able to deploy.”

Saudi Arabia, a leading supporter of Syrian rebels fighting to overthrow Bashar al-Assad, was said by diplomats to be preparing to step up its support, having despaired of the US. Ministers from Qatar and Turkey, the Saudis’ partners in the fight against Assad, are holding talks on their next moves.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/08/russia-pay-price-syrian-airstrikes-ashton-carter-us-defence-secretary

 

In the complexity of the Syrian slosh, NATO is supporting Saudi Arabia's support for "moderate" rebels... "Moderate" rebels is a euphemism for nasty Wahhabi terrorist branches of Al Qaeda which are not yet aligned with ISIS, but soon will be. The plan of the Saudis is to throw out all the other sectarian ethnics from Syria and turn Syria into a Wahhabi fiefdom, by using all its Wahhabi branches of "rebels" (who are terrorists that we support). So the plan of NATO, by supporting the Saudis, is to do the same and support terrorism in Syria. NATO is so-filled with bad-will because they hate the Ruskies and the Iranians, who could show then how to defeat ISIS with the next three months... BUT NATO has decided it needs ISIS to stay as a strong force until ASSAD is gone... and the sectarian Wahhabi take Syria over— murdering the others and exiling millions of people...

The ISIS "threat" has become a second-rate side issue as the Saudis want the ISIS Caliphate to take over the region including most of Iraq. NATO is nuts to play this stupid game.

What NATO wishes is not going to happen. Iran, Russia and Hezbollah will defend Assad against the Wahhabi/ISIS take-over of Syria. In order to defeat ISIS, NATO has to let the Russians support Assad till ISIS is gone, then you can negotiate with Assad. The fall of Assad at the moment would be a victory for ISIS. Is this what we want? NO.

So NATO has another agenda in mind... Keep the shit going, in order to promote its self-importance... NATO is run like the generals and colonels of CATCH-22...

ISIS support...

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/07/nato-member-busted-massively-supp...

 

https://www.reddit.com/r/syriancivilwar/comments/39lcuw/why_is_turkey_su...

 

See also:

 

When US special forces raided the compound of an Islamic State leader in eastern Syria in May, they made sure not to tell the neighbours.

The target of that raid, the first of its kind since US jets returned to the skies over Iraq last August, was an Isis official responsible for oil smuggling, named Abu Sayyaf. He was almost unheard of outside the upper echelons of the terror group, but he was well known to Turkey. From mid-2013, the Tunisian fighter had been responsible for smuggling oil from Syria’s eastern fields, which the group had by then commandeered. Black market oil quickly became the main driver of Isis revenues – and Turkish buyers were its main clients.

As a result, the oil trade between the jihadis and the Turks was held up as evidence of an alliance between the two. It led to protests from Washington and Europe – both already wary of Turkey’s 900-mile border with Syria being used as a gateway by would-be jihadis from around the world.

The estimated $1m-$4m per day in oil revenues that was thought to have flowed into Isis coffers over at least six months from late 2013 helped to transform an ambitious force with limited means into a juggernaut that has been steadily drawing western forces back to the region and increasingly testing state borders.

Across the region, violence has been spreading across borders, scattering huge numbers of refugees and contributing to the turmoil in neighbouring regimes. Few countries – from Turkey to Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq and Israel – remain unscathed by the tide of chaos spreading out from Syria.

read more: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/26/isis-syria-turkey-us?CMP=share_btn_tw

US war crimes in yemen...

 

Paul O’Brien reviews the terrible conditions in Yemen and castigates the administration for its role in creating them:

The responsibility for Yemen’s descent into wanton destruction lies not with the United States, but with Yemen’s government in exile, the Houthis, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf Cooperation Council, and other Yemeni political and military leaders; they are each pursuing their own short-sighted interests at the expense of an equitable and inclusive peace. But thanks to the U.S. government’s deep involvement in what many Yemenis call the “Saudi-American” military campaign, American hands are far from clean.

I agree with O’Brien’s call to halt U.S. support for the campaign and to pressure the coalition to lift its blockade on the country, but as he points out elsewhere in his article the administration hasn’t been inclined to do any of this. U.S. officials express their “concern” over the latest bombing of civilian targets or the growing humanitarian disaster engulfing the country, but then U.S. policy remains exactly the same as it has been since late March. As the U.S. has done since the campaign began, it voices alarm at the tactics used in a campaign for which it provides the arms, intelligence, and fuel and acts as if it is a mere spectator to the actions of its clients.

O’Brien is urging the administration to bring its actions in line with its largely empty rhetoric, and he’s right to do so, but it has become hard to miss that the administration’s feeble protests have been made to create the impression that the U.S. can’t be held responsible for the war it is enabling. As evidence of Saudi war crimes becomes harder to deny or ignore, the administration seems even less inclined to have an honest accounting of the war’s costs, which is why it acquiesced in Riyadh’s squelching of an independent investigation into war crimes in Yemen. It is correct to pin most of the responsibility for the war on the main belligerents, but insofar as the U.S. is making the Saudi-led campaign possible with its considerable support the U.S. has a significant share of the blame for wrecking Yemen.

read more: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/the-u-s-is-deeply-complicit-in-the-wrecking-of-yemen/

 

The US involvement in many wars since the 1950s has transformed many places into poopoolands (see toon at top)... Is it deliberate or accidental? Or sheer stupidity? It seems the US is creating HELL by paving it with good intentions... But so far I am not so sure about the GOOD intentions, more like creating CRAP to keep itself busy... 

 

neither washington nor moscow...

 

With Vladimir Putin's Russia carrying out air strikes in Syria, John Passant reposts in En Passant an excellent explanation of the backdrop to the conflict and consequences of this new stage in the violence by Eric Ruder from Socialist Worker, US.

RUSSIA’S INTERVENTION in the civil war in Syria marks the beginning of an ominous new chapter in a conflict that has already cost the lives of hundreds of thousands and scattered more than 10 million people within and beyond Syria’s borders.

President Vladimir Putin dressed up Russia’s entry into the conflict as “similar to an anti-Hitler coalition” to include the U.S. and other Western countries, against the forces of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), which controls eastern Syria.

However, Russia’s first air strikes on September 30 didn’t target ISIS, but rather rebel groups – some of them supported to varying degrees by the U.S. – that have been fighting a war on two fronts: against the Syrian regime of dictator Bashar al-Assad on the one hand, and against ISIS on the other. Reports of civilians dying under Russian bombs have been emerging ever since.

Not only did these early air strikes reveal Putin’s real aim – to bolster the Assad regime, Russia’s last significant ally in the region – but they also illustrated the potential for a stepped-up confrontation between the U.S. and Russia, despite “de-confliction” efforts by the two nuclear-armed powers.

For its part, the U.S. government has publicly opposed the Assad regime – not because of its repression and violence against a popular uprising, but primarily because of its alliance with Iran, another enemy of Washington – while never providing the level of support for anti-Assad rebels that would allow them to match forces with the Syrian military.

The entry of Russian military forces on the side of the regime has left the U.S. government casting around for a response — while the human toll in Syria grows.

Russia to US: You bomb ISIS, we'll take the rest. Putin's counter-terrorism in Syria. http://t.co/fBaO6hJRYd pic.twitter.com/Rsu0HGKRfb

— Kenneth Roth (@KenRoth) October 6, 2015

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

THE RE-EMERGENCE of the confrontation between imperial rivals Russia and the U.S. now must be placed at the top of the many layers of hostilities that are tearing Syria apart.

The roots of the conflict lie in a popular uprising against Assad that took inspiration from the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, and other struggles that were part of the Arab Spring of 2011.

Unlike the dictators who were swept aside, Assad was able to strike back, slaughtering peaceful protesters, forcing a militarization of the conflict, and portraying all resistance as driven by the U.S., Israel and/or Sunni rebel groups bent on destroying Shia and other religious minorities. To help demonize the opposition, Assad cynically released Sunni extremists from prison, gambling that these fighters would target the same democratic forces he was confronting, while simultaneously serving as the perfect enemy to point to while shoring up support.

The conflict in Syria is a three-way war between the Assad government, rebel forces of varying backgrounds, and ISIS. It includes Syrian Kurds fighting both ISIS and Turkey on Syria’s northern border, plus proxy clashes between various armed rebel and jihadist groups backed variously by the U.S., Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries.

Now, with Russian air strikes serving as cover, Iranian troops will join Lebanese Hezbollah fighters alongside Assad’s government forces in an escalating war to regain control by the central government.

The fighting has so far taken the lives of some 250,000 Syrians — and turned half of Syria’s population of 22 million into refugees. About 7 million people are internally displaced, and some 4 million have fled the country, ending up in Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Turkey and – in smaller numbers, but with much higher-profile political fallout – Europe.

Since the Syrian uprising began in 2011, U.S. officials have stated publicly that a political settlement to the conflict must remove Assad from power. But the U.S. and Israel are keen to keep the machinery of the Syrian state intact. The reason is simple: From the point of view of Western imperialism, all the alternatives to Assad seem far worse.

In 2012, Russia reportedly offered to negotiate Assad’s removal from power. But with his regime seemingly about to fall, the U.S. and other Western powers ignored the offer, and spent their time promoting the political and military forces they thought would bring about a stable post-Assad regime.

But Assad managed to hang on, by means of the utmost repression and violence: barrel bombs and other scorched-earth tactics that laid waste to entire neighbourhoods and regions, as a warning to others that resistance would be met with an iron fist.

Meanwhile, ISIS – the product of the barbaric civil war in neighbouring Iraq, largely instigated by the U.S. to keep the upper hand as colonial overlord – gained a stronghold in eastern Syria, where millions of persecuted Iraqi Sunnis fled. Built out of the remnants of al-Qaeda in Iraq, ISIS recruited fighters, gained battlefield experience and seized sufficient arms and money to become a formidable force.

Today, Assad may have clung to power, but his regime controls only about 25 per cent of Syrian territory, in a strip along the heavily populated western third of the country — while ISIS, based in the east, controls about half of the country.

Neither U.S. air strikes against ISIS nor support for Kurdish and other fighters have changed the balance of forces. Another component of Washington’s strategy – a $500 million program to train a fighting force of 5,000 against ISIS – failed even more spectacularly. Last month, in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Gen. Lloyd Austin, commander of U.S. Central Command, admitted that the program had so far only produced “four or five” fighters.

If the additional $600 million requested by the Pentagon to continue funding the training program meets with the same success, the U.S. will have organized a $1.1 billion army of 11 individuals.

GOT TO WATCH: UNITED STATES General Lloyd Austin reveals failure in #SYRIA plan https://t.co/iRAxty2v1A via @YouTube @POTUS

— Guardian_Elite (@Guardian_Elite) September 30, 2015

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

ENTER PUTIN with his soaring rhetoric about leading a coalition to confront ISIS–tailored, of course, to win support at home for reasserting Russian imperial power.

Putin’s gambit led to much handwringing in Washington, with the “hawk” faction of the foreign policy establishing calling on Obama to react forcefully to Putin’s “interference” in Syria — as if the U.S. alone had the inalienable right to determine which countries should be allowed to operate there.

The debates likewise began in the media about whether Russia was acting out of strength or weakness or desperation. The answer is probably all of the above.

To some extent, Putin’s hand was forced by the recent nuclear deal between the U.S. and Iran, which pulled Iran back toward normal relations with other world powers — and thus out of Russia’s orbit. For Russia, this further elevated the strategic importance of the Assad regime.

 

But if Putin’s most ambitious goal of restoring the Russian empire might be out of reach, the Syria intervention has gained Russia a place at the table in discussions about what the endgame in Syria might look like.

And whatever weaknesses Putin may face, the U.S. grip on the Middle East has been severely tested – in both military and political terms – since its disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003.

That war toppled Saddam Hussein and created the beginnings of a U.S. puppet regime, but ended with a humiliating withdrawal of combat troops in 2011 and an inadvertent strengthening of Iran as a dominant power in the region. Al-Qaeda, which didn’t exist in Iraq before the U.S. invasion, thrived amid the resistance to occupation, and re-emerged from the catastrophic sectarian civil war stoked by the U.S. in the form of ISIS.

And through it all, the standing of the U.S. as the dominant imperial power of the region, ruling through a combination of its own economic and military power, combined with a network of allied regimes, has been severely damaged.

Putin’s latest grab for power and influence in Syria has further revealed the slippage in U.S. power.

Conservative New York Times columnist, Ross Douthatsummarized some of Putin’s accomplishments:

His annexation of Crimea, for instance, saddled Moscow with all kinds of near-term and long-term problems. But it established a meaningful precedent regarding the limits of American and Western power, a kind of counter example to the first Gulf War, by proving that recognized borders can still be redrawn by military force.

His Syrian machinations, similarly, haven’t restored the Assad regime’s control of that unhappy country. But they have helped prove that America’s “Assad must go” line is just empty bluster, and that a regime can cross Washington’s red lines and endure.

#Australia jets diverted from #Syria as #Russia's entry complicates mission http://t.co/EaFtxQhUIo @EjmAlrai pic.twitter.com/3Rju2KVGps

— маяковский (@moscow_ghost) October 7, 2015

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

RUSSIA’S INTERVENTION in Syria also provides a lesson in the limits of historical analogy — specifically, the Cold War conflict between the U.S. and the former USSR that political commentators of all kinds reached for to make sense of the Syrian tragedy.

The Economist, for example, longed for a reinvigorated and more muscular American military campaign, from Syria to Afghanistan.

The magazine argued:

‘Even if this is little more than political theatre, Russia is making its biggest move in the Middle East, hitherto America’s domain, since the Soviet Union was evicted in the 1970s.’

Meanwhile, Independent journalist and Middle East expert, Patrick Cockburn, celebrated the return of Russia to the grand stage of diplomacy, writing in the Independent:

'The US-Soviet Cold War, and the global competition that went with it, had benefits for much of the world. Both superpowers sought to support their own allies and prevent political vacuums from developing which its opposite number might exploit. Crises did not fester in the way they do today, and Russians and Americans could see the dangers of them slipping wholly out of control and provoking an international crisis.'

In reality, the superpower standoff of the past threatened the world with nuclear annihilation, and the “global competition that went with” this threat was far from positive for the countries where it was played out. But even leaving that aside, the yearning for its replay is based on a false hope of returning to the past, while ignoring the casualties caused by an escalation of a conflict in the present, as Marxist author and activist Gilbert Achcar pointed out.

Even more puzzling than Cockburn’s nostalgia for the Cold War is the self-delusion of outright supporters of the Assad regime and its new protector in Moscow. Brian Becker of the Party for Socialism and Liberation and its front group ANSWER simply echoes Putin’s rhetoric in his latest statement:

'The main force preventing Syria from being completely overrun by ISIS and al-Qaeda has been the Syrian Arab Army, the national army of the country … Now the Russian military has directly entered the battle on the side of the Syrian national army … Russia’s intervention was formally requested by the sovereign Syrian government led by Bashar al-Assad and thus conforms to international law.'

 

In order to imagine Russia’s intervention as a challenge to the U.S. empire on behalf of the “anti-imperialist” hero Assad, Becker has to ignore the barbarism of the Syrian dictatorship, responsible for the vast majority of the hundreds of thousands of deaths in the civil war — and the ugly history of Russia as an outpost of neoliberalism serving the Russian oligarchy and an imperial power in its own right, with a savage record in Chechnya among other conflicts to prove it.

The old slogan “Neither Washington nor Moscow” has become newly relevant.

As Syrian revolutionary, Joseph Daherwrote:

'There can be contradictions between … different regional actors, but at the end of the day, the U.S. wants to maintain an imperialist status quo in the Middle East, maintaining its interest in the region. This is why we should oppose all imperialist (USA, Russia and others), and sub-imperialist powers (Saudi Arabia, Iran, Qatar and Turkey) because they all oppose the interests of the popular classes, and not choose one or the other because we consider it the lesser evil.'

This story was originally published on John Passant's blog enpassant.com.au on 5 October 2015 and has been republished with permission. You can follow John on Twitter @JohnPassant.

 

One must say here that Washington is not going to give up its bone... Moscow is going to take a bite out of it nonetheless... And the Saudis will be up in arms that their dream of a Wahhabi kingdom is fading... Unless the Russians and the USA defeat ISIS together and tell the Saudis to put a sock in it, then, as proposed by the Russians in 2012, Assad can be removed gently (an option rejected by NATO) — then we are in a global stupid quagmire from which no good will come out of. 

So why would there still be some supporters of Assad in Syria? Well because they simply know that should Assad go, they are dead. and this represents more than 10 million people. Simple enough?

 

another US illegal war...

Sott Comment: Did we wake up in an alternate universe?! It's reassuring to see there is at least one American member of Congress who has a functioning brain. Gabbard pretty much tells it like it is. If only there were more like her. 

 

Speaking with Wolf Blitzer on CNN, Tulsi explains why the US allying with Islamist extremists to overthrow Syrian President Assad is an illegal, counterproductive war that will cause even more human misery in the region and help ISIS and other Islamist extremists take over all of Syria. Instead of once again being distracted by trying to get rid of a secular dictator, Tulsi explains, the US must stay out of counter productive wars and focus on defeating the Islamist extremists who have declared war on America

 CIA Must Stop Illegal, Counterproductive War to Overthrow Assad 

 

http://infrakshun.blogspot.com.au/2015/10/alternate-reality-cnn-broadcasts-us.html

 

 

Watch the video... And Gus says: Tulsi Gabbard for President.