@Big Al
is causing your eyes to glaze over because of what?

https://harpers.org/archive/2019/02/american-involvement-in-syria/

… Rebel training became the province of US and British agents, and the Turks allocated weapons. But there was no control over fighters when they infiltrated Syria, where many joined Salafist brigades. A British trainer told me that the program was benefiting religious fanatics more than any moderate, secular oppositionists.

The TOWs from Benghazi shifted the balance on the ground in favor of the rebels, especially the better-armed and highly motivated jihadis. Assad’s tanks and helicopters were no longer invulnerable. Phil Gordon refused to discuss the issue of covert assistance, but he noted that the administration “started to publicly say in the spring or maybe June of 2013 that we were providing direct support to the opposition, including military support.” The support was a program, and the program had a name: Timber Sycamore.

Speaking in his office at Washington’s Middle East Institute, Charles Lister recalled,

"Sometimes they [the insurgents] suddenly found themselves wearing nice uniforms, new camouflage fatigues. And it pretty quickly emerged that, at the end of 2012, weapons, mostly from [the] former Yugoslavia, had started to be shipped in through Amman into the south. And then some of that started to appear in northern Syria. I don’t know exactly when an open channel was established, but it wouldn’t have been any later than the spring of 2013. Certainly [by] December of 2012, those first weapons appeared in the south. And it subsequently became clear the reason why that had started was because the CIA had received clearance, I assume from the White House, to run a pretty substantial Title 50 covert program of assistance to the vetted Syrian opposition."

CIA operatives in Turkey and Jordan screened rebels to weed out fundamentalists. Vetting, however, proved futile.

The net effect was not, as Phil Gordon hoped, to “accelerate the process of Assad’s departure.” In fact, Gordon conceded, it was the opposite: “I think that what we saw was that the more we did for the opposition, the more the backers of the regime did for the regime.” Iran’s Lebanese surrogate, Hezbollah, sent more fighters from Lebanon to back Assad. The Russians came to Assad’s rescue with troops and air power, while the Iranians introduced units of Iraqi and Afghan Shias.

On the opposition side, jihadis from Chechnya, Afghanistan, Algeria, China, and Europe joined the fight. Together with indigenous fundamentalists, they reduced the FSA to irrelevance. “We didn’t have a great understanding of who was doing what on the ground,” Phil Gordon said, “and couldn’t control it. So, you would be running the risk that, almost the inevitable risk that, in a revolutionary situation, the worst guys were the ones that would take and use the weapons.” The most extreme elements, the Al Qaeda offshoots Jabhat al-­Nusra and the Islamic State, not only used the weapons but also advertised them in videos that included beheadings, the hurling of gay men off towers to their deaths, the murder of American journalists and British aid workers, and the rape of Yezidi women.

Appreciate the articles but the one by Glass was hard to read, so I didn't. Made my eyes "glass" over.

I've never bought into the Syria "withdrawal" being anything other than a tactic in the imperial game. Nothing they say, and that includes Trump, especially Trump, can be trusted at face value. One thing Trump was consistent on during his campaign and his hires and actions has been Iran, the last country on the "seven country list" that Wes Clark revealed as the agenda.

They aren't going to stop. I believe we need an antiwar, anti-imperialism movement more than ever.

Here's an excerpt from an article (Is Trump Starting His Own War?) worth reading also:

"Suffice to say, the current discourses regarding Trump and Syria stem from what one can only call a tunnel vision. The ‘big picture’ remains elusive unless the ramifications of the NATO Mission in Iraq are properly understood. Reports suggest that the US is stepping up deployments to Iraq. The US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo just made “surprise visits” to Erbil and Baghdad. He was plainly dismissive that "there's no contradiction whatsoever" in the shifting US strategy on Syria. Simply put, Trump hopes to expand the scope of the Syrian war by bringing Iraq into it and drawing the western alliance system into the enterprise."