U.S. Provides Assad's Forces the Equipment for a Whole Armored Brigade

Shocking news.  We have been told for a long time how the Syrian leader is the most evil man since Hitler.  Okay, we are told that about everyone, but he is less than a nice guy with that genocidal war in Yemen.  Oh, one forgets, that is being waged by our ally, the saintly Saudis.

Anyway, we did not plan on arming the Syrians, it just kind of happened...stupidly.

From a post at Sic Semper Tyrannis,

The FSA unicorms have surrendered enough equipment to the SAA in the last couple of weeks to equip an additional armored brigade once the Syrian Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (SEME - my neologism) and their Rooshians work it over.  Hey! We Americans under Obama's policy paid for all that.  At last someone will know what to do with it.  

Well Done!  Arming the FSA (Free Syrian Army) was always a joke.

Like all our post 1945 interventions, Syria is not working out well.  for us, it is a zombie war.  We have no reason to be there, but we shall stay anyway.

Bring the boys and girls home.

Is Obama worse than Assad?

Shocking? Uncalled for? It shouldn't be.

Some talking heads are wising up. They have come to the conclusion that dumping Bashar Assad might not be an act of genius. Every such pronouncement has to be preceded by a formula similar to; “Of course, President Assad is gross, and disgusting, but what comes after might be even worse.”

No one really wants to take it any further because in a point by point comparison, their analysis might lead them to a sort of riff on Henny Youngman's “How's your wife. Compared to what?” How about compared to President Obama.

In his joint session with President Hollande, Obama blamed Russia for the downing of its own jet.

President Barack Obama said the downing of a Russian fighter jet along the Syrian-Turkish border Tuesday is evidence of an "ongoing problem" with Russia's military operations in Syria, and that Turkey had a "right to defend its territory and its airspace."

The president said this before there was much information available. Unfortunately for the narrative, one of the crew-members survived and returned to his base. If the man is to be believed, there were no warnings given as claimed by Turkey.

The plane, even if it crossed into Turkish air space was there only for seconds and did not deserve to be downed. No word from our president if he stands behind his words.

There is no lack of evidence that Turkey is in the oil biz with ISIS. We had been going after the tanker trucks in a most desultory manner. Our air force got around to it on November 16^th and took out 116 trucks. Maybe it was long planned or maybe the Russkies showing us up had something to do with it. Of course that is a small point in the thesis that Assad is a nicer guy. There are bigger arguments in that direction.

If, as our administration would have it, the Syrian Government is a foul regime that we could never support, this begs the question as to why are in bed with the brutal regime in Bahrain?

In the April 13, 2012 Huffington Post, journalist Ahmed Shihab-Eldin, wrote;

Obama has demanded that Bashar al-Assad step-down, slapped sanctions on Syria, and is funding opposition groups in the country. But when it comes to Bahrain, he has colluded in the King's efforts to downplay the civil unrest, distract from proposed reforms and failed to hold Bahrain accountable. This, from a president who promised to restore America's human rights reputation abroad.

Ahmed, it was only a campaign promise. The tradition in the exceptional nation is to break them.

Bahrain used to torture dissidents, but fortunately that has all stopped. Well, no it didn't.  According to Human Rights Watch on November 22, 2015;

“The claims of Bahrain and its allies that authorities have ended torture in detention are simply not credible,” said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director. “All the available evidence supports the conclusion that these new institutions have not effectively tackled what the BICI report described as a ‘culture of impunity’ among security forces.”

Bahrain is a country where a Sunni Royal family lords it over a Shia population. How come the spreaders of democracy are not calling for elections. Bahrain would claim they have them, but it is only for the lower house and the king appoints the upper house which makes the whole thing a sham. Obama, being from Chicago could only admire such a system. Not that he would sign an executive order...

There is no evidence that Assad supports the brutally corrupt Bahraini regime.

A little bit of water separates Bahrain from another shining example of a human rights non-paradise. Saudi Arabia has been our ally since near forever. Whatever that kingdom's concept of democracy is, they don't like it much. Oh, they have municipal elections, but for the country, if you get the king's vote you're in, literally. He appoints all 150 members of the majlis or consultative assembly.

No one seems to be calling for regime change. Then again, maybe I'm being a little too harsh on the desert monarchy. They are not without grievances and they refuse to take it lying down. The justice ministry intends to sue a person on twitter for comparing the death sentence handed out to a Palestinian poet for apostasy to the punishments handed out by ISIS. Oh such a foul slander!

I'm not sure the quibble. Neither ISIS or KSA have a good word to say about apostasy and will not spare you. One would think the ministry does not have the the sense to be embarrassed.

Though, according to the Independent, the Kingdom has executed 151 victims this year, there is leniency. Blasphemy only gets you flogged fifty times as in the case of liberal writer Raif Badawi. With his ten year sentence, he can contemplate his sovereign's clemency.

Maybe Assad should start handing out death sentences for apostasy and Obama might bow to him too.

Does the Syrian president have a fleet of drones flying over the Levant? That is a is a question to be answered. One might expect if his drone force was having the success Obama's has had, we would have heard about it with a certain prejudice.

Whether or not our drones can hit the broad side of a barn door is not known. They can tag a lot of people, innocent ones. According to the Intercept, about 90% of the drone kills get the blameless. This is a failure rate that would get any CEO fired. The mainstream press should be howling, if we could find them.

It is a heck of a thing if our high tech is more of a human rights travesty than barrel bombs.

Can't say if Assad has a penchant for suppressing whistleblowers but our jefe máximo does. It is something of a hallmark of the administration that promised transparency. Than again, they all do.

In spite of everything above, Assad has never had the bad manners to call for Obama's removal from office.

Maybe some quant can tell us which of the two presidents has more to answer for. All that is nice, but there is one trump that allows Assad extra points. He is not flirting with starting a war with a nuclear power that could turn much of the country into glass. The Syrian president just wants to survive, we are adventuring in Ukraine and the Middle-East against Putin.

None of this should be construed as support for the Syrian regime Of course, President Assad is gross, and disgusting and he can forget ever being awarded the Nobel Prize.

Just sayin' Relatively speaking Assad's not a bad guy

911 -No involvement by B.Assad

Shoe bomber -No involvement by B.Assad

Tsarnaev bombing -No involvement by B.Assad

Charlie Hedbo -No involvement by B.Assad

Paris attacks -No involvement by B.Assad

This list is not conclusive.  Assad has no hand in any incident.  

The governments of the 'west are run by jerks.  One cannot be kind.

What makes sense in Syria-Somebody knows and it ain't the USG

Thanks to Isegoria, I know some of what the War Nerd writes, or at least some good stuff.  The War Nerd is behind the Pando Paywall, and the Neutralist, having never had a successful fundraising campaign, must work on the cheap.

As the Neutralist has noted before, the American media is all propaganda all the time.  As regards Syria, it publishes or broadcasts the mantra of Assad must go while tacitly supporting the entity they consider the enemy in Iraq.  That it is in no sense sane was up until a few short weeks ago irrelevant.

Then something happened that changed everything.  The Russians arrived and acted like they had a viable plan.  Immediately, the media sniped at the Commie Russian intervention.

the War Nerd writes for Pando.  I never warmed to the site.  Maybe it's because there is just too much out there on the web.  More it's attitudinal.  Pando writers are not without a holier than though outlook.  Everyone else is racist and stupid or something.

The War Nerd is a pseudonym, but the persona is of a loser cubicle slave who has a war jones.  A little more endearing than the "we're cool guys and your not" vibe of the rest of the columns.

Anyway, The Neutralist agrees with the words of the War nerd as posted to Isegoria;

Russia is using its air force to try to blast out a viable territory for an Alawite/Shia state along the Syrian coastal hills. Assad’s people are longtime Russian clients and allies, and the Russian air force is helping them maintain their key turf against a much more numerous enemy. It may fail, but at least that’s a reasonable plan.
At the moment, Russia’s planes are focusing on a triangle of Sunni-held territory north of Homs, trying to blast a path for Assad’s weak infantry. If you look at these verygood graphics put together (it pains me to admit) by the New York Times, you can see what a sensible, traditional military move that is. Scroll down to the two maps captioned “Many of the Initial Airstrikes Were Near the Boundaries Between Government and Rebel Zones” and go to the second map. You’ll see a T-shaped yellow zone marking Sunni-held territory due north of Homs, along the key road to Hama and Aleppo.
That’s where the Russian strikes have been hitting hardest lately, in Sunni-held crossroads towns like Ter Maela, right on the M5 highway that runs north to Hama and Aleppo, south to Damascus. That highway is the key to Syria, a kind of spinal cord like the big vein down a shrimp’s back. If the Russians can obliterate Ter Maela’s defenders thoroughly enough to let Assad’s weak infantry (or maybe his much better Hezbollah or Iranian ringers) take and hold these villages, then the Alawites have the makings of a viable state.

At this point Isegoria Interjected; "The US air campaign, on the other hand, does not make much sense:"

If you were to sum it up, it’d go something like this: “Hit Sunni targets east of the coastal hills, but ignore everything to the west; help the Kurds in the north, but grudgingly, as little as possible, for fear you’ll offend Turkey; and while you’re attacking Assad’s enemies, keep reassuring the Israelis that you’re just as anti-Assad as you are anti-Islamic State.”
Sound stupid? It is. It’s a ridiculous compromise adopted to please the Israelis and Saudis, based on the dumb-ass notion that Sunni fighters in eastern Syria are evil sectarian bastards, but the Sunni fighters facing off against the SAA in the west are “moderates.”
It’s true that Islamic State is uncommonly vile, but let’s not lie; the only faction in Syria that even tries to rise above sectarian hatred are the young Kurdish commies of YPG/J. Every other group is sectarian, and militias that start out sectarian only get meaner as they go, by the iron logic of primitive war, where massacre is the norm. And this sectarian taint isn’t new. Syria’s Sunni were chanting “Christians to Beirut, Alawites to the graveyard” long before the fighting started.

Again Isegoria; "Air strikes look clean from air, messy from the ground:"

As a rule, you can tell when the media approve of air strikes by the angle. If it’s all nice clean pilot’s-view of distant explosions, it’s a good strike. If they show you funerals, weeping relatives, blasted apartments, it’s a bad strike. So you can tell, just from the headline — “This Is What the Russian Air Strikes in Syria Look Like from the Ground” — that it’s a bad strike.

Whoever is running American Foeign Policy is not doing much of a job.  This has been so since Bush I.*  Leadership fails sooner or later and even if we got a intelligent administration, it would be but an interregnum until a correlation of forces returned and dumb came back in vogue.

Thus, as Johnny one note we again state, that a neutralist ethos needs to inform our body politic permanently.  The alternative is disaster as is happening now.

So whatever we may think of the rest of Pando, el Nerdos articles are interesting and here is a link if you are inclined to subscribe.  The War Nerd is worth the rest of the site, which is like other progressive sites such as Vox except with a paywall.

*I know everyone loves to hate Reagan, but I suggest you read Suzanne Massie's book on Reagan and Russia, you might think differently about the man.

AJ Schmeltzer and the bogeyman of Syria

Bashar Assad has got to go.  It's almost a mantra of people like John Kerry.  Assad is a big meanie and if he had left at the beginning of the uprising in Syria, the country would be heaven on earth.

Why, Kerry even compared him to Hitler.  Of course, if you have not compared someone to Dolf, you probably have not been in a senior policy position, but we digress.

The media speaks as one on the Syrian president's evil.  It is all ad hominem.  They do give us little of substance, and I'm waiting.

In Massachusetts back in the 80s, a man was convicted of horrible crimes against little children.  The malefactions took place in a secret room on the property.  The secret room was never found, but the hysteria led to conviction and the press was in no way glorious.

I am surprised that Assad doesn't have a secret room.  Well, maybe his police do in that bad neighborhood.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that in this country, all news is propaganda.

The most blatantly stupid piece was Diane Sawyer and the women snipers of Syria.

So what's the point of all this?

Over at the indispensable Sic Semper Tyrannis website of Col. Lang, there is a post by AJ Schmeltzer  that goes into some depth as to Assad and his situation.  Yes he is the strongman of a country in MENA.  Someone has to do the job or you get Libya Iraq as they are now.

Two sections of the post are instructive:

2: In the original protests, Assad initially attempted negotiations, but, partly due to ingrained behavior and partly due to the quite considerably regime casulties even in the "peacefull" phase, supporters of a "forcefull" approach within Syrian security won out, and attempted to solve the issue by force.

3: Temporarly, this put Assad himself between all chairs. The opposition viewed him as a traitor (due to the security organization being very violent despite orders to the contrary) and the security state himself viewed him as a weakling due to his non-violent orders.
The American assistance that "Assad must go", as a precondition of entering any negotiations was, under that background, seen as sheer bad faith by the Russians. Assad could be utilized as a tool to rein in the Syrian Mukhabarat, and he was/is certainly more controllable/civilized then the people actually running the various Mukhabarats, removing him would achieve nothing, other then the Mukhabarat fighting completely gloves off for its own survival.

We see that Assad is not the devil and our press and government are jerks.

As neutralists, we feel a country with such a juvenile outlook as ours should not even have a foreign policy.