generalspeaking

Too Little ... Too Late

"My bottom line is that I believe that to blow a bunch of stuff up over a couple days, to underscore or validate a point or a principle, is not a strategy.
"If we launch a military attack, in the eyes of a lot of people we become the villain instead of Assad.
[Missile strikes on Syria "would be throwing gasoline on a very complex fire in the Middle East.
"Haven't Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya taught us something about the unintended consequence of military action once it's launched?"
Robert Gates, former Obama administration defence secretary

"When the president of the United States draws a red line, the credibility of this country is dependent on him backing up his word.
"Once the president came to that conclusion, then he should have directed limited action, going after Assad, to make very clear to the world that when we draw a line and we give our word, we back it up."
Leon Panetta, former Obama administration defence secretary

Both former American secretaries of defence under the administration of President Barack Obama express skepticism over the validity of joining forces with Russia in the farcical public address of removing chemical weapons from Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's arsenal of deadly weapons. Neither feel there is any reason to trust the motivations of President Vladimir Putin, who must be quite beside himself with glee over the public humiliation of President Obama.

Who seems to be an inferior chess-player to Putin, who urged him for the sake of peace and avoidance of a maelstrom of fire and brimstone overtaking the Middle East to stand down from his intention to lightly graze Syrian defences as a warning that what America says, America means. In the process joining diplomatic forces with a country well known for its political expediency, its own alacrity toward joining in violence when it suits its purposes, and ceding international peacemaker to a political provocateur.

They have a disagreement between themselves, the two former Pentagon chiefs, over whether a limited, focused military strike would have resulted in any manner of strategic benefit to the ongoing conflict in Syria. A focus on the sanctions strategy, labelling Assad's government as war criminals and prosecution in the International Criminal Court had the favour of Mr. Gates, along with seizing state financial holdings.

Mr. Panetta felt it would have been far more congenial to the outcome of the situation -- avoiding the current perception that the United States has stepped back from intervention and its word cannot be trusted, leaving President Obama with the reputation of a prevaricator, uncertain and limited in his credibility on the world stage -- to have honoured his pledge of action over the stated red line.

Mr. Gates felt that identifying credible Syrian opposition partners, increasing weapons support to them, with the exclusion of surface-to-air missiles that could be confiscated by terrorist militants for use against civilian aviation would have been a preferred course. All of that is moot, since the time has passed for confidently supplying the opposition with advanced weaponry.

For the truth of the matter is, the Islamists among them have taken to picking off Free Syrian Army commanders.

The most current reports of the situation on the ground is that chemical weapons aside -- and they are an aside, a diversion where 1,400 civilians were annihilated in a wave of chemical death, as opposed to well over 120,000 having met death with the use of conventional weapons, including being strafed by the Syrian military, bombed with the use of rockets, hit by helicopter gunships, so the chemical controversy is a red herring.

The regime has its support in the Iranian Al Quds Revolutionary Guard units in Syria, and with the thousands of Hezbollah seasoned fighters dedicated to achieving victory over the thousand or so separate, uncoordinated Syrian rebel militias. While the rebels who had at first welcomed the jihadists who streamed into Syria now are fighting for their own survival against the better-armed, more militarily capable Islamists.

Increasingly, the two solitudes have turned their weapons on one another through turf wars and retaliatory killings. Ferocious battles breaking out between the Syrian rebel groups and the al-
Qaeda-affiliated jihadis where hundreds on both sides have been slaughtered.

"The moderates realized that they're losing a lot of territory to the Islamists and jihadi fighters, and so they're more desperate,"  According to Aaron Zelin, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Labels: Chemical Weapons, Conflict, Intervention, Islamists, Russia, Syria, United States

posted by Pieface @ Friday, September 20, 2013