President Obama requested $500 million from Congress on Thursday to train and equip what the White House is calling “appropriately vetted” members of the Syrian opposition, reflecting increased worry about the spillover of the Syrian conflict into Iraq.
The training program would be a significant step for a president who has consistently resisted providing military aid to the rebels in the conflict in Syria, and has warned of the dangers of American intervention. But military and State Department officials indicated that there were not yet any specific programs to arm and train the rebels that the money would fund, nor could administration officials specify which moderate Syrian opposition members they intended to train and support, or where they would be trained.The administration can't specify the moderates it plans to whip into a rebel army because they don't exist. The last group, the Free Syrian Army (FSA), led by Syrian turncoat Gen. Salim Idris, has not really been heard from since their storehouses of U.S.-supplied hardware were commandeered by Islamic Front (IF) fighters last December. There is some question whether the FSA freely handed the equipment over to the jihadis. IF is another Saudi-backed Sunni fundamentalist organization. Idris fled to Qatar. This prompted the Obama administration to suspend nonlethal aid to the Syrian opposition prior to the big Geneva II peace talks in January.
So we've been down this road recently, and it was a spectacular failure. Read the story that Michael Gordon, Mark Landler and Anne Barnard published on December 11, 2013, "U.S. Suspends Nonlethal Aid to Syria Rebels." It will tell you everything you need to know:
The episode that prompted the aid suspension occurred last week when the Islamic Front seized control of warehouses in Atmeh, Syria, that contain the American-supplied aid.
According to rebel commanders in Turkey and Syria, the incident unfolded with a confusing series of events that reflects the uncertainty on the front lines amid shifting rebel alliances.
By one account, news spread that the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, an extremist group affiliated with Al Qaeda that has clashed with rival insurgents, was planning an attack on the military headquarters and warehouses controlled by General Idris’s Supreme Military Council, which are near the Bab al-Hawa crossing on the Syria-Turkey border.
The Supreme Military Council is the nominal leadership of the loose-knit Free Syrian Army, which the United States has promoted as a relatively moderate force and which the State Department has supported with nonlethal aid such as food rations, computers and vehicles.
Fighters from the Islamic Front rushed to the area, they claimed, to protect the warehouses, but ended up seizing them and the American equipment and supplies inside. But other opposition officials say the report of an attack by Qaeda-affiliated extremists was merely a ruse.
Maysara, an Free Syrian Army commander from Saraqeb in Idlib Province who maintains contacts in the Islamic Front, said that when fighters from three Islamic Front battalions reached the headquarters, they found it deserted and believed the commanders there had fled.
The Islamic Front fighters, he said, told him that they then “took the opportunity and stole everything in the headquarters,” including about 40 pickup trucks and tanks.
Under the administration’s division of labor, the State Department is in charge of supplying nonlethal aid while the C.I.A. runs a covert program to arm and train Syrian rebels.
“We have seen reports that Islamic Front forces have seized the Atmeh headquarters and warehouses,” a State Department official said. “As a result of this situation, the United States has suspended all further deliveries of nonlethal assistance into northern Syria. The humanitarian aid to the Syrian people is not impacted by this suspension.”What Obama is doing is taking the main Syria dossier from the CIA and giving it to the Pentagon. The U.S., assuming Congress climbs aboard, is about to spend half-a-billion dollars on the Islamic Front, which, next to saturation bombing of Damascus, is what the neocons always wanted.
Make no mistake about it. We're talking about the U.S. creating another army. And we know how successful that has been. The Iraq Army turned tail and ran in mass (after $25 billion by the American taxpayer). The Afghan Army is even worse. Something like one-third deserts every year, not to mention anything about the green-on-blue attacks.
It is Afghanistan in the 1980s all over again. And we know how that ended. Doing the same thing in Iraq and al-Sham will destabilize the global order like nothing we have seen since the collapse of the Soviet Union that brought the forty-year World War Three to a close. An ersatz World War Four was supplied thereafter by the Global War On Terror, which is now supplanted by the real McCoy World War Four, the war against Shiite Iran and all her allies -- Russia, China, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq.
Domestically, the Grand Old Party effectively ran against the Jimmy Carter of the Iran hostage crisis and his ghost for over a decade. In 1992 Republicans went back to the trough again and would have been successful if not for the presence of plutocrat Ross Perot on the ballot. Perot allowed people a way to vote without voting for "acid, abortion and amnesty." The GOP had successfully tarred Democrats with the collapse of the social cohesion and full-employment prosperity of the 1960s. Voters elected Republican commanders in chief throughout the 1980s. Social democracy in the United States was choked off and the neoliberal race to the bottom was locked in.
Obama's final capitulation to the warpigs with this announcement of arming and training the mujahideen for yet one more wasteful, bloody, destructive adventure will be the end of the Democrats. Unless somehow enough libertarian Tea Party types join with progressive Dems to block Obama's request in the House.
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