"Syria’s Nightmarish Narrative"--Who is in Charge?

[KoKo]

April 28, 2015 "Information Clearing House" - "Consortium News" - The Saudi-Israeli alliance, in league with other hard-line Sunni countries, is helping Al-Qaeda affiliates advance toward gaining either victory or at least safe havens in Syria and Yemen, highlighting unresolved contradictions in President Barack Obama’s policies in the Middle East.

Fueled by a surge of support from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey – and with Israel striking at Syrian government allies – Al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front and Al-Qaeda’s hyper-brutal spinoff, the Islamic State, are making major advances in Syria with some analysts now predicting the likely collapse of the relatively secular government of President Bashar al-Assad.

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Saudi Arabia and Israel have made clear over the past few years that they regard the overthrow of the Iranian-backed Assad government as a geopolitical priority even if it results in a victory by Al-Qaeda or the Islamic State. But Obama, who has been unwilling or unable to rein in the Saudi-Israeli alliance, would then have to decide what to do with Islamic terrorists dominating a major Mideast nation.

Some of these Sunni radicals have shown that they will move aggressively toward slaughtering minority groups that they consider infidels, including Christians, Alawites and Shiites. The terrorists could leave the streets of major Syrian cities running red with blood – and give Al-Qaeda a solid platform from which to launch terrorist attacks against the West.

How Obama or his successor might respond to that is uncertain but it would be difficult for any American president to sit back and do nothing. Yet, dispatching another U.S. military expeditionary force to Syria to dislodge Al-Qaeda or the Islamic State from Damascus and across Syria would likely be a fool’s errand resulting in massive loss of life, costing trillions of dollars and promising little success.

Meanwhile, the neocon-dominated mainstream U.S. news media is already pushing the narrative that Obama’s failure was that he didn’t intervene earlier to overthrow the Assad regime so some “moderate” rebels could have taken power.

But the existence of a significant “moderate” rebel army was always a fiction. As Obama noted in a frank interview with New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman in August 2014, the notion that arming the rebels would have made a difference has “always been a fantasy.”

Obama explained: “This idea that we could provide some light arms or even more sophisticated arms to what was essentially an opposition made up of former doctors, farmers, pharmacists and so forth, and that they were going to be able to battle not only a well-armed state but also a well-armed state backed by Russia, backed by Iran, a battle-hardened Hezbollah, that was never in the cards.”

Obama added that his administration had trouble finding, training and arming enough secular Syrian rebels to make a difference: “There’s not as much capacity as you would hope.”

Read More at...

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article41705.htm

[bemildred]

1. Sen. Lindsey Graham: Send U.S. troops to topple Assad

Yep. They never give up.

Specific proposals to end the appalling violence in Syria, Yemen, and territories controlled by the Islamic State group are scarce in the nascent presidential campaign. That is about to change.

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina -- who tells Yahoo Finance he’s “92-and-a-half percent sure” he’s running for president -- wants to send U.S. troops back to the world’s most volatile region to stamp out vicious terrorism and remove Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. “Assad has to go,” he says in the video above. “We’re going to have to send some of our soldiers back into the Middle East.”

Many world leaders, including U.S. President Barack Obama, would love to see Assad booted from power. Assad has presided over a four-year-old civil war that has so far caused at least 210,000 deaths and forced nearly four million Syrians to flee the country. Assad’s troops have dropped unaimed “barrel bombs” filled with shrapnel on civilian areas, and used chemical weapons, in violation of international treaties. Desperate Syrian migrants are fueling the human trafficking crisis in the Mediterranean that has led to hundreds of drowning deaths as victims try to get safely to Europe.

Finding a way to remove the wily Assad, however, is no easy matter. The Obama administration tried to provide arms to some of the factions fighting Assad, but basically gave up, saying it was too hard to identify reliable allies. Graham’s approach would be far more muscular. He’d help form a regional force with 90% of the troops coming from Arab nations, and 10% coming from the U.S. Graham has previously said the number of troops he’d commit might total 10,000 or so.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/sen--lindsey-graham--send-u-s--troops-to-topple-assad-234303507.html

[bemildred]

2. U.S.-backed rebels team with Islamists to capture Syrian city

ISTANBUL

Rebels, including members of U.S.-backed groups and al Qaida’s Nusra Front, captured the strategic town of Jisr al Shughur in northwest Syria on Saturday, the second major setback for the government of President Bashar Assad in Idlib province in a month.

The loss of Jisr al Shugur all but closes the government’s land supply routes to two major bases in the west of Idlib, Mastuma and Ariha, both of which are surrounded by rebel forces and can now be supplied only by air. Rebels captured the provincial capital, Idlib city, on March 28.

The latest rebel victory came surprisingly quickly, apparently aided by U.S.-supplied TOW anti-tank missiles. Islamist groups announced the battle only Wednesday. The government troops fled to the neighboring provinces of Latakia and Hama.

Gen. Ahmad Rahhal, who defected from the Syrian army and now works with the moderate rebels, called it a strategic victory for the anti-Assad forces that would strengthen their ability to move their own supplies between three provinces – Idlib, Hama and Latakia. But he told McClatchy the forces “still have a lot of work to do” and noted the government still has hundreds of troops in the two bases under siege.

http://www.sacbee.com/news/nation-world/world/article19510551.html