Beyond the illegality of that action, how the U.S. military intervention is supposed to fix things in Syria is never discussed. By strengthening Al Qaeda and its "moderate" front men, the prospects for a longer and bloodier conflict are increased, not decreased.
The long-held neocon dream of a Syrian "regime change" -- even if it could be accomplished -- would only open the gates of Damascus to a victory by Al Qaeda and/or its spinoff, the Islamic State. How that would make life better for the Syrian people is another never addressed question. There is simply the pretense that somehow, magically, the "moderate" rebels would prevail, though they are only an auxiliary to Al Qaeda's Syrian franchise.
The "group think" also doesn't permit in the inconvenient truth that the recent collapse of the U.S.-Russia limited cease-fire was driven by the fact that the "moderate" rebels are so intertwined with Al Qaeda's Nusra Front -- which recently underwent a cosmetic name change to the Levant (or Syria) Conquest Front -- that the rebels can't or won't separate themselves.
The New York Times, The Washington Post and other mainstream news outlets have sought to bury this reality because it doesn't fit the preferred narrative of the U.S. fulfilling its commitments under the partial cease-fire agreement and blaming its collapse entirely on the Russians and their dastardly behavior.
One outlier in this propaganda barrage, ironically, has been Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal, which published a serious article on this key topic on Sept. 29. It said, "Some of Syria's largest rebel factions are doubling down on their alliance with an al Qaeda-linked group, despite a U.S. warning to split from the extremists or risk being targeted in airstrikes.
"The rebel gambit is complicating American counterterrorism efforts in the country at a time the U.S. is contemplating cooperation with Russia to fight extremist groups. It comes after a U.S.-Russia-brokered cease-fire collapsed last week and the Syrian regime and its Russian allies immediately unleashed a devastating offensive against rebel-held parts of Aleppo city that brought harsh international condemnation. ...
"The two powers have been considering jointly targeting Islamic State and the Syria Conquest Front -- formerly known as the al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front -- a group that is deeply intermingled with armed opposition groups of all stripes across Syria's battlefields. The U.S. has also threatened to attack any rebels providing front-line support to the group. ...
"Some rebel groups already aligned with Syria Conquest Front responded by renewing their alliance. But others, such as Nour al-Din al-Zinki, a former Central Intelligence Agency-backed group and one of the largest factions in Aleppo, said in recent days that they were joining a broader alliance that is dominated by the Front. A second, smaller rebel group also joined that alliance, which is known as Jaish al-Fateh and includes another major Islamist rebel force, Ahrar al-Sham. ...
"In a call with Mr. Kerry on Wednesday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Syrian rebels 'refused to follow the U.S.-Russian agreement...but instead merged with [Nusra Front].'"
Misleading the American People
So, isn't that point relevant to understanding what is occurring in eastern Aleppo, an area essentially under the control of Al Qaeda terrorists? As horrible as war is, there is more than a whiff of hypocrisy when politicians and pundits, who cheered the U.S. Marines' destruction of Fallujah during the Iraq occupation and who support driving the Islamic State out of the Iraqi city of Mosul, wax indignantly in outrage when the Syrian military seeks to remove Al Qaeda terrorists from one of its own cities.
There is also the issue of why writers who helped mislead the American people and the world into the catastrophe of the Iraq War were never held accountable and are now in position to whip up more war fever over Syria, Ukraine and Russia. Far from being held accountable, the propagandists who justified the criminal invasion of Iraq have been rewarded with plum assignments and golden careers.
For instance, Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt, who repeatedly wrote as flat fact that Iraq was hiding WMDs, is still today the editorial page editor of The Washington Post, urging a new U.S. war on Syria. The Times' Friedman, who was infamously wrong about the Iraq War and pretty much everything else, is still considered a premier American columnist who is courted to make high-profile public appearances.
Now, Friedman wants to escalate tensions with nuclear-armed Russia, apparently with the sloppily thought-through mission of imposing another "regime change," this time in Moscow. As unnerving as a nuclear showdown with Russia should be, Friedman starts his Wednesday column by fabricating a news item about a leak that supposedly revealed that Putin "owns $30 billion in property, hotels and factories across Russia and Europe, all disguised by front organizations and accounting charades."
After going on for several paragraphs with his fake "news," Friedman admits that "I made it up." Ha-ha, so clever! Then, however, he cites what he claims is real news about Russia, including the dubious prosecutorial "report" blaming the Russians for the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 shoot-down on July 17, 2014. That "report" -- actually a series of videos -- had serious evidentiary gaps, logical problems and obvious bias, since it was driven largely by Ukraine's notorious SBU intelligence service which the United Nations has accused of covering up torture.
But to Friedman, the allegations blaming Russia for the shoot-down were unassailable. He writes, "a Dutch-led investigation adduced irrefutable video evidence that Putin's government not only trucked in the missile system used to shoot down a Malaysia Airlines plane flying over Ukraine in 2014, killing all 298 civilians onboard, but also returned it to Russia the same night and then engaged in an elaborate cover-up."
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