Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

Forget Syria

9 Comments

We need to neutralize Iran:

It is unseemly and stupid for Washington to remonstrate with the Russians for playing the spoiler in Syria, for example by providing the Assad regime with attack helicopters. The way to deal with this dog is to beat up the dog’s owner, namely Tehran. Washington’s pathetic display of solicitude towards a terrorist regime that uses negotiations to buy time for nuclear weapons development aggravates every other problem in the region, Syria above all.

Yup.

9 thoughts on “Forget Syria”

  1. There are a million things we could have done and should have since the 70s; all short of war. Between Pakistan and Iran I think a nuclear attack is unavoidable. It’s just a matter of time.

  2. OTOH, Syria is a weakness for Iran. It’s less stable and takes serious resources to prop up. I don’t know enough about possible strategies to say, but I wouldn’t rule out working more on Syria instead of on Iran directly.

    1. Maybe this is like the purported plot to the Prometheus movie, which is a riff on Forbidden Planet.

      Maybe by supporting the Syrian opposition, they will be imprinted by the deepest darkest thoughts of our collective Id? They may turn out worse than the Assad people, but in some way that we cannot anticipate or imagine at this time?

      We had this in the “Charlie Wilson’s War” Afghanistan, where we bled Soviet Russia by supporting the Afghan opposition, and maybe that is what could hope for here, bleeding Iran by meddling in Syria, in a low-cost-to-us-arm-the-opposition fighters way. It is not clear that the people we were supporting in Afghanistant were the proto-Taliban or proto-Al Qaeda, but our post Charlie Wilson’s War muddling may have set the stage.

      Like the guy advising Tom Hanks playing Wilson in the movie, “We shall see . . .”

      1. IIRC Osama said that his hatred for America began when we stopped supporting his efforts against the Soviets. It taught him that we were not strong and would back down when things got tough.

        1. So Mr. Bin Laden got angry with us because we wouldn’t back him? Are you saying that the Syrian opposition is OK, but if we go in, we better be prepared to give them everything they want otherwise they will switch from being pro-American to flying planes into our buildings?

          I would think a more plausible view is that Mr. Bin Laden had his own ideas of how the world should work from Day 1, but it is hard to sort out the Good Guys from the Bad Guys in these armed insurgencies. Or maybe our people figured out a long time ago that Mr. Bin Laden was a bad actor and maybe we were supporting rival insurgents instead of him because of it.

          I don’t buy the narrative that post-Soviet Afganistan is “our fault” or that it even, to a reasonable person (not Mr. Bin Laden’s fevered thinking) indicated weakness. Picking Good Guys from Bad Guys is hard, which was the point of the movie character advising the Tom Hanks character in “Charlie Wilson’s War.”

    2. Plus, it challenges Russia’s Middle East policy more effectively. Putin is playing games here. I wouldn’t mind him getting burned by losing his commitment in Syria.

  3. “The way to deal with this dog is to beat up the dog’s owner…”

    Like a drum.

    Like we own them.

    Like a red-headed stepchild.

    We need to stomp them into a mud hole, and walk them dry.

    1. Could not agree more, but you left out the final act – distribute the dust from the dry mud hole as widely as possible so that water will not reconstitute them!

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