Hillary Clinton promised us a speech on what she’d do to destroy ISIS, but what she gave us was a speech detailing how she would destroy Syria – and drag the US down the road to another unwinnable war. What she essentially proposes is that we fight a three-sided battle – against ISIS, on the one hand, and against Bashar al-Assad, Russia, and Iran on the other.
She elaborated on her “no-fly zone” scheme, saying she wanted to set it up only in the north. This means not only that the US air force will be protecting the “moderate” Syrian rebels – a coalition of US-supported head-choppers and al-Nusra, the Syrian affiliate of al-Qaeda – but also preventing Russian warplanes from flying over the huge swath of territory in the north controlled by the Islamic State – including Raqqa, their capital. So how does she intend to keep Putin out of the skies over Raqqa – by shooting down Russian planes, Chris Christie-style?
Signaling that her main focus is still overthrowing Assad, rather than fighting ISIS, Clinton averred that Putin is “making things somewhat worse.” Yet the Russians have been pulverizing ISIS, pushing them back on every front – and there is evidence that the terrorists’ increasing desperation in the face of this merciless onslaught provoked the Paris attacks. The snake lashes out one more time before it is decapitated. Francois Hollande seems to understand the importance of enlisting Russia in the anti-ISIS coalition, but Hillary is intransigent on the subject of Assad, thus ruling out any real cooperation with Moscow.
Incredibly, Clinton called for another “Arab Awakening,” signaling that under her reign the US will continue to play the “Sunni card,” arming the “moderate” Islamist rebels, and even encouraging insurrection among Iraqi Sunnis and Kurdish ultra-nationalists. “Baghdad needs to accept, even embrace, arming Sunni and Kurdish forces in the war against ISIS,” she declared. “But if Baghdad won’t do that, the coalition should do so directly.”
There is no limit to this woman’s arrogance: here she is openly proclaiming her contempt for Iraq’s sovereignty and all but declaring war on the central government in Baghdad – a government thousands of Americans died to install.
And while abjuring the need for 100,000 US ground forces, Clinton would increase the number of US Special Forces and “embed” them in greater numbers with “indigenous forces.” In other words, she would escalate the US presence gradually, Vietnam war-style, so as not to alarm the American public, which wants no part of another war in the Middle East. So it’s time to dust off her plan – rejected by the Obama administration – to arm and fund the “moderate” Islamist opposition on a large scale. But there’s a slight problem with getting her favored head-choppers to go along with the plan, as she was forced to acknowledge:
“On the Syrian side, the big obstacle to getting more ground forces to engage ISIS, beyond the Syrian Kurds who are already deep in the fight, is that the viable Sunni opposition groups remain understandably preoccupied with fighting Assad who, let us remember, has killed many more Syrians than the terrorists have. But they are increasingly under threat from ISIS as well.”
To begin with, the “moderates” Hillary loves to praise are ideologically aligned with ISIS: their only disagreement with the “Caliphate” is over tactics. Both want to hang Assad from a lamp post, impose Sharia law on Syria and dispense with “unbelievers.
Secondly, what Hillary wants us to “remember” is a baldfaced lie: according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights – hardly a pro-Assad group – the Islamist rebels have killed more people than the government’s forces. If we go by the Observatory’s numbers, government forces suffered the largest number of deaths, some 88,616. This accounts for around one third of all the deaths recorded. Hillary’s rebels suffered 42,384 dead, and “foreign fighters” have seen 34,375 killed. All sides quibble about who is and is not a civilian, but by any measure Hillary’s moral rectitude in this context in misplaced.
Her insistence that “Assad must go,” reiterated repeatedly during her tenure at the State Department, effectively blocks any diplomatic-political solution. If she should ever occupy the Oval Office her fulsome support for the hetereogeneous “opposition” is a prescription for prolonging the war rather than ending it.
With the putative Democratic nominee’s goals in mind – a new “Arab Awakening,” arming the “moderate” Islamists, overthrowing Assad, confronting the Russians – her support for congressional authorization to use military force is ominous indeed. Any such measure should and must be defeated, and by as wide a margin as possible. If and when it comes up for a vote in Congress, mobilizing opposition is the main task of the antiwar movement.
The Paris attacks are being used by the War Party to not only gin up another war in the Middle East but also to discredit civil liberties advocates who have been pushing back against the Surveillance State. The media has been shamelessly stoking panic in the population and virtually all major political figures are calling for a crackdown on the home front and unleashing the US military in Syria.
We haven’t seen this level of warmongering since September 11, 2001.
We are back in the post-9/11 war hysteria, with war propaganda filling the media 24/7 – and very little in the way of resistance, either from the politicians or public figures of any stature.
Have these people learned nothing from the history of our failed interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan? The answer to this question is, unfortunately, no – they haven’t learned a damned thing.
Reprinted with permission from Antiwar.com.
