Russia intervenes in Syria

Marcel said:

do we want to wipe isis from the earth.

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Never going to happen. You can kill people but you can't kill an idea.

Steve

A friend of mine sent me a document about the situation...


Hi All,
A highly restricted briefing document on Syria …

President Assad ( who is bad ) is a nasty guy who got so nasty his people rebelled and the Rebels (who are good) started winning (Hurrah!).
But then some of the rebels turned a bit nasty and are now called Islamic State (who are definitely bad!) and some continued to support democracy (who are still good.)
So the Americans ( who are good ) started bombing Islamic State ( who are bad ) and giving arms to the Syrian Rebels (who are good) so they could fight Assad ( who is still bad ) which was good.
By the way, there is a breakaway state in the north run by the Kurds who want to fight IS (which is a good thing) but the Turkish authorities think they are bad, so we have to say they are bad whilst secretly thinking they're good and giving them guns to fight IS (which is good) but that is another matter.
Getting back to Syria.
So President Putin ( who is bad, cos he invaded Crimea and the Ukraine and killed lots of folks including that nice Russian man in London with polonium poisoned sushi ) has decided to back Assad (who is still bad) by attacking IS (who are also bad) which is sort of a good thing?
But Putin ( still bad ) thinks the Syrian Rebels ( who are good ) are also bad, and so he bombs them too, much to the annoyance of the Americans ( who are good ) who are busy backing and arming the rebels ( who are also good).
Now Iran (who used to be bad, but now they have agreed not to build any nuclear weapons and bomb Israel are now good ) are going to provide ground troops to support Assad ( still bad ) as are the Russians (bad) who now have ground troops and aircraft in Syria.
So a Coalition of Assad (still bad) Putin (extra bad) and the Iranians (good, but in a bad sort of way) are going to attack IS (who are bad) which is a good thing, but also the Syrian Rebels (who are good) which is bad.
Now the British (obviously good, except that nice Mr Corbyn in the corduroy jacket, who is probably bad) and the Americans (also good) cannot attack Assad (still bad) for fear of upsetting Putin (bad) and Iran (good / bad) and now they have to accept that Assad might not be that bad after all compared to IS (who are super bad).
So Assad (bad) is now probably good, being better than IS (but lets face it, drinking your own wee is better than IS so no real choice there) and since Putin and Iran are also fighting IS that may now make them Good. America (still Good) will find it hard to arm a group of rebels being attacked by the Russians for fear of upsetting Mr Putin (now good) and that nice mad Ayatollah in Iran (also Good), so they may be forced to say that the Rebels are now Bad, or at the very least abandon them to their fate. This will lead most of them to flee to Turkey and on to Europe or join IS (still the only constantly bad group).
To Sunni Muslims, an attack by Shia Muslims (Assad and Iran backed by Russians will be seen as something of a Holy War, and the ranks of IS will now be seen by the Sunnis as the only Jihadis fighting in the Holy War and hence many Muslims will now see IS as Good - Doh!)
Sunni Muslims will also see the lack of action by Britain and America in support of their Sunni rebel brothers as something of a betrayal (mmm…might have a point…) and hence we will be seen as Bad.
So now we have America (now bad) and Britain (also bad) providing limited support to Sunni Rebels (bad) many of whom are looking to IS (Good / bad) for support against Assad (now good) who, along with Iran (also Good) and Putin (also, now, unbelievably, Good) are attempting to retake the country Assad used to run before all this started?
I hope that clears all this up for you.
Regards,

Paul

That is great, as Homer would say "its funny cos its true" !

Elmas said:

I hope that clears all this up for you.
Regards,

Paul

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The west always has a good guy and a bad guy, it comes from watching too many movies, the result is what you posted.

Very good!
But let's not forget why the whole sorry mess got started in the first place! You organise or fund the removal, or attempted removal of a 'bad' guy (Saddam, Gadaffi, Assad being the most recent) and you get something even worse. What you don't get is the democracy we keep promising to people who don't want it in the first place

Did someone mention Iran. One name, Mossadegh, all he wanted was his own oil and look what's happened since 'we' removed him from power. There's nothing new under the sun.

Steve

stona said:

Very good!
But let's not forget why the whole sorry mess got started in the first place! You organise or fund the removal, or attempted removal of a 'bad' guy (Saddam, Gadaffi, Assad being the most recent) and you get something even worse. What you don't get is the democracy we keep promising to people who don't want it in the first place

Did someone mention Iran. One name, Mossadegh, all he wanted was his own oil and look what's happened since 'we' removed him from power. There's nothing new under the sun.

Steve

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Who ever we help in the Islamic world becomes their new "bad guy" since they are being helped by infidel crusaders. We have so far deposed 3 basically secular rulers and replaced them with a bunch of fanatics. We support the house of Saud which is no different to any other Muslim "government" apart from it buys our Jets.

vikingBerserker said:

I think of all the NATO countries, Turkey is the one you don't want to push the envelope with.

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Well, Putin pushed the envelope. The sad thought to me is this might really have been an accident on the part of the Soviet pilots flying into Turkish airspace, but the Russians and Syrians with prior aircraft and drones intentionally violating Turkish airspace over time set the tone.

pbehn said:

We have so far deposed 3 basically secular rulers

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But they were bad guys weren't they? It did turn out that the chief baddie didn't have any WMDs and probably wasn't quite so bad after all. None of them seem sooooo bad when something far worse inhabits the vacuum created by their removal.

I'm not sure that the best way to deal with a wasp nest is to hit it with a stick!

Cheers

Steve

stona said:

I'm not sure that the best way to deal with a wasp nest is to hit it with a stick!

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Ah but there are two types of wasp in the nest you must hit the ones that go buzz buzz with a stick and give the ones that go buzz buzz buzz some jam. The pesky Ruskies are giving jam to the buzz buzz wasps, just how stupid can they be?

stona said:

But they were bad guys weren't they? It did turn out that the chief baddie didn't have any WMDs and probably wasn't quite so bad after all. None of them seem sooooo bad when something far worse inhabits the vacuum created by their removal.

I'm not sure that the best way to deal with a wasp nest is to hit it with a stick!

Cheers

Steve

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That's actually not quite true.

The masses were expecting to find silos of nukes and other media-promoted weapons, but the actual WMDs that were known to exists were, indeed found.

Aside from the intercepted yellowcake that Hussein was secretly purchasing from Nigeria, the Dutch Army found a cashe of Sarin-B laden artillery shells in northern Iraq, nearly every Iraqi army base had stockpiles of 55 gallon drums filled with insecticide, the U.S. Army discovered a massive cache of sulfur-mustard laden artillery shells as well as 2,400 rockets, containing nerve agents found cached in another location.

This doesn't include the large number of various chemical or nerve agent equipped munitions buried throughout the area surrounding the Al Muthanna Chemical Weapon lab and manufacturing complex.

So the truth is, yes, there were WMDs...the downside to this is, not all were ever found and they have been turning up on the black market. Which is very disturbing.

These weapons are not really the point. That Iraq had these agents was a well established fact, it's what the Iraqis were doing with them. We were all led to believe they were ready to be deployed at 30 minutes notice which was not true.
A substantial part of their stockpile had been dismantled/destroyed with admittedly not always complete cooperation from the Iraqis after the first Gulf war. It was due to this and the various reports of the UN's own weapons inspectors that the US FAILED to get a security council resolution authourising the use of force prior to the second war. That's why the British people were thoroughly misled by their government about why exactly we were joining the US in a war in Iraq.
Having failed to remove Saddam the first time the US and her allies (excluding of course the French this time) were determined to do it second time around and would use any pretext to do so. The problem was that there was no plan for what happened next.

Having had a plan for the RAF to join in the bombing rejected by our parliament the government is working frantically to use the atrocity committed in Paris as a stick to beat recalcitrant MPs into line and force a second vote. We'll probably join in hitting the wasp nest with a stick soon.

Cheers

Steve

My Lebanese friend in Tripoli sent me this ..... the local view of the situation around the shoot-down. Jeeezus.

I can see that we are starting to believe our own propaganda. The western interventions in the Middle East were never intended or about bringing democracy to the region. This is an intense and bitter struggle about control, and we are no better or worse than any of the other players. It is an extension and variation of the cold war, with some of the old players, as well as some new ones, and a whole lot of proxies to do our bidding generally in the name of an ism of one sort or another.

Big players in this are Iran, the Saudis, the US. Slightly less significant are the Russians and the Turks. Also lurking around looking for whatever scraps they can steal are the Europeans, chiefly Germany and France, and the Chinese at about the same bottom feeding level. These latter are consipicuous by their absence. They aree generally hanging back, waiting for an implosion so they can move in and clean up so to speak. There is a lot at stake here, and no one is being honest, and no one has clean hands in this. Except maybe Israel, but watch, they will surely be blamed sooner or later

It's been going on since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire

Steve

Speaking of which ....