This is the craziest patchwork quilt of murderers and factions you could ever imagine.
Donald Trump announced last week that he wanted out of Syria.
Our Pentagon publicly warned him against departing Syria.
Anyone who wanted Trump out would’ve sat tight and waited for America’s exit.
Several factions, including the Pentagon, wanted the US to remain in Syria.
DAYS after Trump said he wanted out - like the same scenario last year - the US is coaxed into an attack with the only thing that would coax them - poison gas.
Al Quaida, who we support in this conflagration?
The rebels, fighting Assad?
Our Pentagon?
Who benefits most from our firepower in Syria?
Think about it.
Excerpt:
Imagine that the president's national security team walked into the Oval Office and proposed the following U.S. policy in Syria: Let's create an al-Qaeda haven in southern Syria, by working with Russia to establish a cease-fire area where the terrorist network behind 9/11 is free to operate without fear of U.S. attack.
Then let's have the Pentagon tell most pro-American Sunnis who want to fight with us that we will arm and train them only if they sign a pledge promising not to fight the regime of Bashar al-Assad, which has massacred their families with mortars and poison gas — likely driving most of the fighters into the waiting arms of al-Qaeda (which promises to help them against Assad). Then let's cancel the covert CIA program under which we did allow a small number of rebels to fight Assad, and put out word that we are doing so as a concession to Moscow.
Instead of Sunni fighters, we'll team up with the Kurdish Marxist "People's Defense Force" (YPG), a terrorist organization at odds with NATO ally Turkey. We'll use the YPG to attack just the Islamic State, leaving al-Qaeda unscathed and thus helping it reassert its supremacy over its rival for leadership of the global jihad.
Let's also have Defense Secretary Jim Mattis say publicly that we shouldn't do anything to push back on the unprecedented expansion of Iranian military force in Syria, and even suggest that Iran can help with the fight against the Islamic State — totally undercutting the president's stated aim of being tough on Iran. Then we'll have Secretary of State Rex Tillerson state that "Russia has the same . . . interest that we do" in Syria so we can help al-Qaeda recruit more Sunnis to its cause by telling them that the United States is allied with Russia, Iran, Shiites, Alawites and Kurds in a campaign to annihilate them — a message against which we will have no effective response because it will be true.
Sound like a good plan? Because that is a description of precisely what the Trump administration is doing in Syria today.
"Current US strategy empowers al-Qaeda, which has an army in Syria, is preparing to replace ISIS . . . [and] is more dangerous than ISIS," says a recent report from the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) and the American Enterprise Institute's Critical Threats Project (CTP). Our approach, the report declares, "is inadvertently fueling the global Salafi-jihadi insurgency" because Sunnis see the United States as working with their mortal enemies. Al-Qaeda is taking advantage of this perception to build support among Sunni tribes, portraying itself as the defender of Sunni Arabs against a U.S.-Russo-Iranian axis intent on subjugating and destroying them.
Alienating the Sunni population is not the way to win the war against Islamist radicalism. Right now, al-Qaeda has established itself as the tip of the spear in the fight against the Assad regime, so many Sunnis who do not share al-Qaeda's ideology are flocking to al-Qaeda because it is the only game in town for fighting Assad. Al-Qaeda's goal is to take charge of the anti-Assad uprising and slowly transform it into a global jihad against Iran, Russia and the United States. Instead of undermining these efforts, we are helping them, by focusing almost exclusively on the Islamic State and driving the Sunni population to ally itself with al-Qaeda.
This is insane. We should be working to strip Sunni tribes away from al-Qaeda. And the United States has a proven record to draw on. During the 2007 surge in Iraq, we successfully rallied the Sunni tribes that had been fighting alongside al-Qaeda in Iraq and got them to turn on the terrorists and help us drive them out. The result was both a military and ideological defeat for the Salafi-jihadist cause. Not only were the terrorists driven from their havens, but also they suffered a humiliating popular rejection by the very Sunni masses of whom they claimed to be the vanguard.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/opinions/why-is-the-trump-administration-empowering-al-qaeda-in-syria/2017/07/26/6ae289f0-714c-11e7-8839-ec48ec4cae25_story.html
