Senator John McCain was just sure he could pick moderates in Syria worth supporting. To prove his point he made a trip to Syria this spring to demonstrate how much the insurgents were just like us, struggling for democracy and equal rights for all.
But his trip was organized by the Syria Emergency Task Force’s Mouaz Moustafa, who not long ago headed up the Libyan Council of North America. Both organizations are partly funded by the US State Department through a mirrored wilderness of NGO cutouts. But both have close ties to extremists fighting in each country. (In Libya, for example, Mustafa was with the people who killed US ambassador Stevens.) In McCain’s case, the “moderates” he met and was so attracted to in Syria tunred out to be kidnappers and thugs.
Moustafa’s key staffer until recently was war lobbyist Elizabeth O’Bagy, whose day job was with the US military contractor funded neoconservative “think tank,” the Institute for the Study of War. Shockingly enough, this “think tank” never saw a potential war it did not want to turn into a real one. O’Bagy was the bagman for the State Department, delivering goodies to the Syrian rebels while delivering fantasies of Syrian moderates needing support to Capitol Hill and environs.
She had many customers, including McCain and Secretary of State John Kerry, who were eager to cite her “studies” revealing that the rebels in Syria were by and large all moderates, with a few extremists who could simply be marginalized and ignored.
But O’Bagy wrote as an independent think-tanker while being paid as a regime-change lobbyist in semi-secret. Very naughty.
Now this week the final strategic pillar of McCain and the neocons has come crashing to the ground. Critical elements of the ever-shrinking “moderate” Free Syrian Army have this week pledged their loyalty to the local al-Qaeda franchise in Syria, which happens to be on the US terror list.
How can President Obama, McCain, Lindsay Graham, Samantha Power, John Kerry, and the rest of the neoconservatives and humanitarian interventionists continue to justify sending weapons of war to such people? How is it possible that a “global war on terror” has morphed into a “global effort to arm terrorists”? Does it not seem rather insane?
