The Obama administration wants to expropriate half a billion dollars from American taxpayers to redistribute this wealth to back armed rebels in Syria who are trying to overthrow the government of Bashar al-Assad.
Moon of Alabama comments:
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.
Indeed. I wrote in September last year that “U.S. Policy Is To Prolong the Violence in Syria“. In that article, I concluded:
Thus, the U.S. policy is to prolong the conflict and escalate the violence by backing the rebels enough to eventually coerce Assad into agreeing to step down, but not enough to assist them in actually overthrowing the government.
Read my entire analysis here.
