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Update: Smart move by President Trump to cancel Klingon failing Syria program
 [Miami Herald] The Trump administration revealed it had canceled a CIA program to provide Syrian rebels with arms and training in July -- and I’ll give you three guesses as to how the story got framed. If you went with "misleading insinuations over Russia," you are correct. The Washington Post, which broke the news, ran with the headline: "Trump ends covert CIA program to arm anti-Assad rebels in Syria, a move sought by Moscow." An anonymous quote in the story -- "Putin won in Syria" -- got traction online, in print and on TV.It was a sloppy conflation: Policy that coincides with Moscow’s aims is not the same as policy meant to serve Moscow. In this case, there’s no evidence that President Trump was acting under the thrall of Vladimir Putin. More likely the president axed the CIA initiative because -- as many of us have been warning since long before Russia sent its military to Syria -- it wasn’t working. Additionally, it constituted an unwise intervention in the Syrian civil war, which holds little interest and no good options for the United States. From the start, American weapons shipments had a curious habit of ending up in the hands of al Qaida and Islamic State fighters. Among numerous examples, the Pentagon admitted in 2015 that U.S.-trained Syrian rebels had voluntarily forked over their American-provided equipment, including half a dozen pickups, to the al Qaida offshoot Nusra Front. Islamic State soldiers have been documented running around with our anti-tank missiles. Even early on, when training and arms efforts were being carried out through the Saudis and Qataris, one U.S. official admitted, "The opposition groups that are receiving the most of the lethal aid are exactly the ones we don’t want to have it." More recently, even Charles Lister, an ardent supporter of the Syrian rebellion, has estimated that 10 percent to 15 percent of American equipment was lost to al Qaida and Islamic State. Posted by: Besoeker 2017-08-03 |
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