Senators McCain and Graham know how to fix Syria, and it kicks ass!

The Syrian civil war is a complicated, convoluted, FUBAR situation.
Without a solution to it, the refugee crisis won't end, the slaughter will continue, and Islamic jihadists will have a safe haven to export their deadly trade.

So what's the solution?
1) We could continue the current strategy of "do something", which involves dropping some bombs and giving weapons to "moderate" rebels, but that's been going on for over a year and it's now becoming obvious to even the average American that it isn't working.

2) There are the peace talks in Vienna. A transition plan was agreed to, which sounds promising.
However, there are several problems with the plan:
a) The Syrian exile group in attendance called the plan unrealistic
b) No actual Syrians were invited, which makes one wonder what peace did they have in mind
c) ISIS and the al-Qaeda alliance that hold almost 70% of the country aren't included in this plan. Ahrar al-Sham, declared that they would consider the participation by any rebel troop in the peace talks as “treason”.

3) We could take the advice of someone who knows what they are doing. General John Allen (Ret.), Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL, said this

“If we don’t get at those issues over the long term, not just be compelled to constantly be fighting the symptoms of the problems, which is al Qaeda and which is Daesh - if we don’t get to the left of those symptoms and try to solve these underlying circumstances, working collaboratively with those who are in the region, who best understand the region, then we’re going to be condemned to fight forever.”

Long-term issues? Like the political, cultural and economic issues of the region? Boring stuff like working to make people's lives better, winning hearts and minds, and ensuring peace and prosperity?

America doesn't do that! America opens cans of whoopass,so get a job, hippie!

Fortunately, Senators McCain and Graham have come up with a fourth solution that involves all the things that make America great:
1) a quick fix
2) a catchy sound bite
3) throwing money at the problem
4) rewriting history

McCain and Graham are calling for a New Surge.

American boots on the ground.
That was the call from Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham on Monday as they pushed for President Barack Obama to send U.S. forces to fight ISIS in Syria and Iraq.
"The surge worked, we had it under control," McCain told Chris Cuomo during an interview on CNN's "New Day" in a joint appearance with Graham.
"Call in those people that are really the most respected in America and the world," he added, naming former Gen. David Petraeus as one. "They'll give him a strategy."

YeeHaw! Gonna Surge on them bad boyz!

Surprisingly, McCain and Graham actually have a worthy idea....with one small catch.
A Syrian Surge might get positive results if we actually repeat the historical events of the Iraqi Surge, and not the fictional Bush "Surge" that has no connection with reality.

The Myth of the Bush Surge goes something like this:

Against political pressure from the Democratic Cheese-Eating, Surrender-Monkeys, a Heroic President Bush added 20,000 troops, and extended the duration of the troops already in Iraq temporarily.
In response, the Iraqi terrorists were defeated, the war was won, and freedom and apple pie triumphed over Democrats.

Or something like that.
Why after four years of fighting a temporary 20% increase in troops was supposed to accomplish this was never explained, and never will be.

There's just one little problem with this idea that Bush won the Iraq War.
That problem is the word "won".

You see, normally people can't declare a war to be "won" until the enemy is defeated and the fighting is over.
When you try to apply the word "won" to the Iraq War you run into two basic problems:
a) the enemy wasn't defeated, and
b) the fighting wasn't over.

For starters, 395 troops died after The Surge ended in 2008.

The thing I can't figure out is how the Republican Party, which firmly believes that the only way to conduct wars is to kill the bad guys until there are no more bad guys to kill, can declare the Iraq War "won" at the end of The Surge, when obviously we hadn't killed all the bad guys.
The bad guys weren't even aware that they had lost.

“The surge didn’t ‘win’ anything. It bought time.”
-retired Lieutenant General Daniel Bolger

The reality is that violence continued to escalate during The Surge for months until three things happened:
1) Muqtada_al-Sadr ordered his shia militias to stand down in late August when fighting between the various shia factions started getting out of control.
2) The ethnic cleansing of Baghdad was largely over by mid-2007.
It should be noted that America had a hand in that as well. Not in a good way.

“Just before Petraeus and Steele left Iraq in September 2005, Jabr al-Solagh was appointed as the new minister of the interior. Under Solagh, who was closely associated with the violent Badr Brigades militia, allegations of torture and brutality by the commandos soared. It was also widely believed that the units had evolved into death squads.
The Guardian has learned that high-ranking Iraqis who worked with the US after the invasion warned Petraeus of the consequences of appointing Solagh but their pleas were ignored.
The long-term impact of funding and arming this paramilitary force was to unleash a deadly sectarian militia that terrorised the Sunni community and helped germinate a civil war that claimed tens of thousands of lives. At the height of that sectarian conflict, 3,000 bodies a month were strewn on the streets of Iraq.” (“Revealed: Pentagon’s link to Iraqi torture centres”, Guardian)

However, the biggest change is the one thing that almost never gets talked about.
3) We put the Sunni rebels on our payroll.
Or to put it another way:
We paid them not to shoot at us.

The Awakening groups emerged in 2005 when Sunni tribesmen, who had previously fought the US military and Iraqi government forces, allied with US forces, accepting arms, money and training.
There are about 100,000 Awakening fighters in Iraq and analysts say they are one of the main reasons for the recent marked reduction in violence in the country.

The insurgents became our mercenary allies.

There was indeed a dramatic decline in violence during The Surge. Republicans like to say it was because of a small, temporary bump in troops numbers.
But what did Iraqis think?

In 2008, only 4 percent of Iraqis said additional US forces were responsible for the decline in violence.

The poll also found that 61% of Iraqis thought that the presence of American troops actually worsened the security situation.
But then what do they know. They only lived there.

So if more American troops aren't the solution, what is?
The most successful part of the Iraqi Surge was paying our enemy not to shoot at us.
We can do that again!
It would be cheaper than bombing them and we could pretend we are winning because we have larger genitals, just like we did in Iraq.

I know what some of you might think. It would be wrong and irresponsible to give terrorists money to not shoot at us.
I have an answer for that: Get a job, hippie!

First of all, giving money to people we were calling terrorists just months before was the Bush Surge by definition.

Secondly, our Gulf state allies have been the primary source of arms and funding for the terrorists for years. Plus, the CIA has been training al-Qaeda and ISIS terrorists for years. Our troops even share a military base with a terrorist group that also cuts prisoners heads off and sometimes burns them alive.
But then since we torture people to death too, we can hardly judge those allies, amirite?

Finally, I want to refer back to what McCain said:

"Call in those people that are really the most respected in America and the world," he added, naming former Gen. David Petraeus as one. "They'll give him a strategy."

It turns out that Gen. David Petraeus already has a plan, and you are going to love, love, LOVE IT!

Members of al Qaeda’s branch in Syria have a surprising advocate in the corridors of American power: retired Army general and former CIA Director David Petraeus.
The former commander of U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan has been quietly urging U.S. officials to consider using so-called moderate members of al Qaeda’s Nusra Front to fight ISIS in Syria, four sources familiar with the conversations, including one person who spoke to Petraeus directly, told The Daily Beast.
The heart of the idea stems from Petraeus’s experience in Iraq in 2007, when as part of a broader strategy to defeat an Islamist insurgency the U.S. persuaded Sunni militias to stop fighting with al Qaeda and to work with the American military.
The tactic worked, at least temporarily. But al Qaeda in Iraq was later reborn as ISIS, and has become the sworn enemy of its parent organization.

It's absolutely brilliant. Brilliant I say!
Just pay "moderate" al-Qaeda jihadists to fight ISIS. Not only did it work for Bush's Surge, it fixed Iraq for all time.
And now we are going to fix Syria too. Although it makes you wonder why 82% of Syrians blame the United States for ISIS and why the CIA says this idea won't work.

There is nothing about how we've conducted ourselves over the last 14 years to suggest that we have a long-term plan for winning this war, that we can even define victory, or that we can even define our enemies. So if the best victories we can hope for are ephemeral phantoms, giving our enemies pallets of cash to stop shooting sounds like a win-win to me.

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Pluto's Republic's picture

…history about Anglo interactions with the Middle East. It wasn't as much fun to read as yours, though.

Anyway, this entire thing can end less than a week. Quietly. The indigenous peoples of North Europe (aka white people) will have nothing more to fear at home.

Islam or Muslims have asked for only one thing from the white invaders. Made only one request. The US got that request repeatedly before 9/11. Even from bin Laden. If Americans had bothered to ask after 9/11 — "Why did these people bomb the world Trade Center? What do they want?" — none of the murder and mayhem and destruction of the US economy would have happened. If only the State Department wasn't filled with insane Neocon assholes like Hillary, we would have complied. The American colonists would not have to spend the next several decades in national security lockdown, broke and uninformed, and brainwashed-for-their-own-protection.

All they ever wanted was for Anglos to remove their filthy selves and their dirty military from their lands. Any terrorist or combatant that was ever caught and questioned, when asked why they fight, gives the same answer. "The militaries of the Infidels are occupying our land."

That's still all they want.

Yankee go home.

The minute we pack up all our murderous crap and leave — this will end just like that. It's the only thing that will make the Middle East happy. If Islam was occupying the United States, wouldn't you be happy if they left?

It's the only thing we haven't tried.

And the only thing that makes any moral sense in this world.

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The political system is what it is because the People are who they are. — Plato

why the muslim terrorists don't attack Latin America, Japan, Scandinavia, and other countries that aren't bombing and invading muslim nations.
Hmmm. I wonder if there is something we are missing?

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Pluto's Republic's picture

…that the US is the only nation that roams the entire world murdering browner people. No other country does that, because it is insane.

In 2015, alone, we covertly and illegally invaded 147 separate nations and committed heinous acts.

The Roamin' Empire is the greatest terrorist threat that the world has ever known.

The rest of the world, however, has noticed that the US is run by homicidal maniacs. That's why the world is pulling its teeth. And soon. Since 1973, the only thing backing the value of the US Dollar is Saudi Arabia. And the US killed the international Dollar (Petrodollar) by attacking Russia in Ukraine, which set off a series of disastrous (for the US) events. Dump trucks of Petrodollars have been flooding the Federal Reserves all year. (That's the bond rate inversion you noticed.) SWIFT has been replaced by CIPS so banks can perform settlements without US interference. The IMF just named the Renminbi an Official Reserve Currency. The Dollar is being shunned in international trade. Some countries are even trading in Bitcoin. The US doesn't have long; it's already beginning to stink.

All in all, I think President Obama has handled the decline of Empire fairly well. That Iran agreement bought the US some temporary cover for its geopolitical collapse. He desperately hopes the TPP and TTIP will provide more cover and a softer landing. If you read the agreement and waivers, ignore what is there. Look for what is missing — the language of Dollar hegemony. By handing America's lost power to the supranational corporations, he hopes to prevent other superpowers from gaining the upper hand. That's the strategy in those agreements. It protects the US, after the end.

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The political system is what it is because the People are who they are. — Plato
mimi's picture

the smell test (to my nose at least).

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Pluto's Republic's picture

Whether you realize it or not, you understand more about Bitcoin than ninety percent of Americans. You know how to ask the questions. I just recently got up to speed, myself. Bought a simple book. All banking is quickly incorporating it. It will soon trade on Forex. Even ISIS holds Bitcoin and Bitcoin accounts can't be seized or frozen.

The Bloody Quest for Empire has consequences.

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____________________

The political system is what it is because the People are who they are. — Plato