By Walt Zlotow
America has defiled Syria since the 2011 civil war which we entered to support Islamic jihadists seeking to overthrow Syrian President Bashar Assad. We called the jihadists getting our weapons to depose Assad ‘moderates’ who could be controlled. These folks aligned with the 911 attackers were now cool to work with because they supported our real agenda… depose Assad to please Israel.
We stationed soldiers in Syria to capture Assad’s oil fields, choking off his main source of wealth. It took 13 years but our jihadist buddies finally toppled Assad a year ago. Then we embraced al-Qaeda terrorist Mohammad al-Julani who morphed into Ahmed al Sharaa when his HTS terrorist rebels toppled Assad. HTS quickly installed Sharaa as new Syrian strongman. Sharaa swapped his al-Qaeda fatigues for a western business suit to visit the White House and his new fan Donald Trump. For someone who toiled for years to kill Americans, a lifetime trip to Guantanamo was more appropriate.
But US support of the violent new Syrian government killing Alawites, Christians and others associated with Assad, did not protect the thousand US military and civilian personnel with a target on their back for continuing their senseless occupation having nothing to do with US national security interests. Two US soldiers and a civilian US interpreter were ambushed and killed in Palmyra, central Syria on Saturday.
Trump vows revenge but has no clue, never will, who did the foul deed. Suspects include anti-American Syrian government forces, Iranian militias, ISIS, Turkish backed forces opposed to our Kurdish support, possibly even Russian mercenaries.
Our troops – needlessly in harm’s way – are not wanted by Syrian’s new jihadist government, not authorised by Congress, violating Syrian sovereignty and violating international law by stealing Syria’s oil treasure. Every US death, every US injury of military and civilian personnel having no business defiling Syrian sovereignty is on Trump while in office.
Trump’s imminent bombing of designated scapegoats is sure to backfire. Besides anti-US government forces, there are numerous armed factions surrounding US positions likely to respond in kind. The attack may have been deliberately planned to provoke further violence against US retaliation.
Trump’s wisest response would be to extract all remaining US forces from Syria. Fourteen years of US meddling that helped kill hundreds of thousands, turning Syria into a failed state, is fourteen years too many.
Chances of Trump being that wise? Zero.
Walt Zlotow, West Suburban Peace Coalition Glen Ellyn IL
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The Donald doesn’t need to know anyting beyond what his “intuition” and “gut feelings” tell him. He’s a genius whose itellect knows no bounds and just…gasp…KNOWS everything. In other words a clueless, gormless and blustering bullshit artist of the first water.
The US fucked Syria by arming Islamist Jihadists, resulting in the removal of, yes, a dictator but one who presided over a secular state and, far from being the monster he is portrayed as, was a reluctant inheritor of his family’s control of Syria. So many lies were told to justify ending Bashar-Al-Assad’s regime, including that it used poison gas agains its own people. A fully functioning society was destroyed by the US in service to Big US Oil with even the sainted Obama involved. Australia’s reporters in the Middle East rushed to join the pile-on that the regime change was popular but what has been done is installation of yet another brutal, ignorant, fundamentalist Islamic militia where once there was a relatively peaceful, albeit autocratic regime. What we are now seeing daily, although filtered through a rose tinted lens, is the slaughter of adherents to religions which once were protected. Of course it also helped the narrative justifying the regime change that the Arch Enemy of the US, Russia, supported the Assad Regime. Well done, again, the US.
Never mind “I’ve stopped 8 wars” – he’s too busy trying to start some