Leave It to American Government to Make Absurdity Sound Reasonable — CIA-Backed Militia are Fighting Pentagon-Backed Militia in Syria — We Taxpayers Are Paying for It

02 April 2016

American foreign policy cannot get more self-destructive, can it?

Well, yes, it can.

The Los Angeles Times recently alerted us to the fact that:

Syrian militias armed by different parts of the U.S. war machine have begun to fight each other on the plains between the besieged city of Aleppo and the Turkish border, highlighting how little control U.S. intelligence officers and military planners have over the groups they have financed and trained in the bitter five-year-old civil war.

The fighting has intensified over the last two months, as CIA-armed units and Pentagon-armed ones have repeatedly shot at each other while maneuvering through contested territory on the northern outskirts of Aleppo, U.S. officials and rebel leaders have confirmed.

In mid-February, a CIA-armed militia called Fursan al Haq, or Knights of Righteousness, was run out of the town of Marea, about 20 miles north of Aleppo, by Pentagon-backed Syrian Democratic Forces moving in from Kurdish-controlled areas to the east.

Yesterday, I quoted Conrad Black’s pertinent summation of recent American history

He said:

And then [the United States] turned into a nation of idiots, incapable of doing anything except conduct military operations against primitive countries.

The objective performance of the latter Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama administrations, and the Gingrich, Reid-Pelosi, and Boehner-led congresses, and most of the courts, have for these 25 years been shameful and as unprecedented in American history as the swift rise of America was in the history of the world.

So now — in convenient illustration of Mr. Black’s point . . .

Notice the idiotic American reasoning underlying the “we’ll pay-play both sides”:

“It is an enormous challenge,” said Rep. Adam Schiff . . . the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, who described the clashes between U.S.-supported groups as “a fairly new phenomenon.

“It is part of the three-dimensional chess that is the Syrian battlefield,” he said.

“This is a complicated, multi-sided war where our options are severely limited,” said a U.S. official, who wasn't authorized to speak publicly on the matter.

“We know we need a partner on the ground. We can't defeat ISIL without that part of the equation, so we keep trying to forge those relationships.”

“Fighting over territory in Aleppo demonstrates how difficult it is for the U.S. to manage these really localized and in some cases entrenched conflicts,” said Nicholas A. Heras, an expert on the Syrian civil war at the Center for a New American Security, a think tank in Washington.

But continued fighting among different U.S.-backed groups may be inevitable, experts on the region said.

“Once they cross the border into Syria, you lose a substantial amount of control or ability to control their actions,” Jeffrey White, a former Defense Intelligence Agency official, said in a telephone interview.

2016 Nabih Bulos , W.J. Hennigan, and Brian Bennett, In Syria, militias armed by the Pentagon fight those armed by the CIA, Los Angeles Times (27 March 2016)

You mean that we (American militarist Christians) cannot control Syrian, Iraqi, Turkish, Iranian (and whomever else) Islamic militarist militias, who are understandably fighting for things that are important to them and not to us?

Quelle surprise!

The moral? — Mr. Black’s summary judgment of American leadership’s intellect is right on the money

Double entendre about money intended.

I think Mr. Black’s use of the word “idiots” to describe our leaders and government is probably tactfully generous.

PeteFree.com

Leave It to American Government to Make Absurdity Sound Reasonable — CIA-Backed Militia are Fighting Pentagon-Backed Militia in Syria — We Taxpayers Are Paying for It