John Wight |
Huffington Post UK
The Only Moderates Fighting In Syria Are the Soldiers of the Syrian Arab Army
Proof that the British political class hasn't learned anything after Iraq came with David Cameron's ludicrous assertion that there are 70,000 moderate rebels fighting in Syria. It was an
outright fabrication to rank with Blair's sexed up dossier on Saddam's WMD, which the then prime minister asserted could be launched against Britain within 45 minutes.
We know Cameron's claim is fiction because as far back as 2012 the US Defense Intelligence Agency produced a
classified intelligence report which identified that, "The Salafist, the Muslim Brotherhood, and and AQI [al-Qaeda in Iraq] are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria." This was a full two years before ISIS exploded across the region at the beginning of 2014.
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No sentient being would compare the Syrian president to Nelson Mandela. But comparing him to Hitler is even less credible. He leads a secular government under which the rights of Syrian minorities are upheld and protected,
a government that still enjoys the support of the majority of Syrians and a government whose survival in 2015 is indistinguishable from the country's survival. The alternative to Assad at this point - the only alternative - is Syria being turned into a mass grave of said minorities as it descends into an abyss of sectarian mass murder and slaughter that will make the status quo seem like child's play by comparison.
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Attributing the refugee crisis to Assad, or claiming the majority of civilians who've been killed have been killed by his military, comes to us straight from the
regime change playbook.
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If the Americans, who've been bombing ISIS (at least so
they've been telling us) in Syria for the best part of a year, have failed to make any appreciable difference, what makes David Cameron and his Labour supporters believe Britain's handful of fighter-bombers will or can?
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Confronting the murky relationship that exists between ISIS and Western allies in the region is also now non-negotiable.
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Here we are entitled to ponder the question of whether Turkey's real motive in taking the extraordinary step of shooting down a Russian jet was because Russian airstrikes had begun targeting the huge convoys of trucks transporting this
oil towards Turkey's border?
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Until Britain, the United States, and other Western governments are willing to deal with the role of both Turkey and Saudi Arabia in fomenting this crisis,
they are not serious when it comes to defeating ISIS and the wider issue of the perverse ideology that drives it.
As for those 70,000 moderates fighting in Syria, the only place they are to be found is in the ranks of the non sectarian Syrian Arab Army, made up of Alawites, Sunnis, Druze, and Christians fighting for their homes, their people, and their country.
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People are no longer willing to believe what the west keeps claiming.