June 27, 2014

Syria: Obama Prolongs The Conflict

Obama Requests Money to Train ‘Appropriately Vetted’ Syrian Rebels

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 move is somewhat lunatic. Pumping more weapons and fighters into the Syrian conflict will only escalate it and will negatively affect the security situation in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan. This is thereby certainly not about "worry" of spillovers. August last year Edwald Luttwak argued that the U.S. wins it both side continue to fight and that the U.S. should prolong the conflict as long as possible:

Maintaining a stalemate should be America’s objective. And the only possible method for achieving this is to arm the rebels when it seems that Mr. Assad’s forces are ascendant and to stop supplying the rebels if they actually seem to be winning.

It seems that Obama is, even at the cost of wider regional fallout, following this policy.

The Obama spokepersons deserve another Orwell medal:

“While we continue to believe that there is no military solution to this crisis and that the United States should not put American troops into combat in Syria, this request marks another step toward helping the Syrian people defend themselves against regime attacks,” Caitlin Hayden, a National Security Council spokeswoman, said in a statement.

The biggest danger for civilians and the Free Syrian Army, who's official heads have just (again) been fired for graft, are not the government forces but the Jihadists.

The U.S. has already trained "appropriately vetted" rebels for at least two years now and has delivered tons of weapons to them. Those weapons ended up in Jihadists hands and the "vetted" rebels are now either dead or have joined AlQaeda aligned groups. The new training will likely take some six month before those trained are somewhat ready. The Syrian government will by then be in a better position than today and the main enemy for everyone else in the field will be ISIS. It will not surprise me when those "appropriately vetted" rebels will join either the government side or ISIS as soon as they are back inside Syria.

Posted by b on June 27, 2014 at 15:49 UTC | Permalink

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