Wednesday, March 05, 2014

Pitiful little band

Barack Obama in an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg --

When you have a professional army [Bashar al-Assad] that is well-armed and sponsored by two large states who have huge stakes in this, and they are fighting against a farmer, a carpenter, an engineer who started out as protesters and suddenly now see themselves in the midst of a civil conflict -- the notion that we could have, in a clean way that didn’t commit U.S. military forces, changed the equation on the ground there was never true.

If his view of the Syrian conflict is that it's an army backed by Russia and Iran against protesters who took up arms after being attacked, but also that the US can't intervene, then he has indicted his own policy. For in that case, the 130,000 dead arise from the ability of the farmer, the carpenter, the engineer, to draw out what should be a totally uneven contest into 3 years of futility for everyone.

In other words, the US should have supported Bashar al-Assad in 2011, and at least brought things to a quick end!

Slightly more seriously, if that's his view of the Syrian conflict, is he surprised that Islamist groups don't have a hard time selling the battle against the Assad killing machine as a righteous cause?