I'm sure that there will be a fair amount of disagreement here with me on this, but the choice to not get involved in Syria until it was already too late was one of the dumbest fuckups of the obama administration. Unlike Libya - where we just killed any powerstructure whatsoever - in the early days of the Syrian Civil War you had a large contingent of defected Army Officers and politicians running actually organized secular resistance units. Many of whom would have been able to easily assert control over the Syrian Arab Army after a quick decisive victory.
Instead - Obama watched as red line after red line was crossed. As these resistance units ran out of money and bullets. And then who conveniently shows up? AQI. They offer men and bullets for loyalty. The alternative was death. It was an easy choice. So the Free Syrian Army loses trained fighters to AQI - which later becomes ISIS. And the guys going to them weren't fanatics. They were fighters who needed the tools they needed to fight. Thing is - you don't spend long around crazies without getting pretty crazy in the process. Everyone around you is saying the same things. It's what we see now in all our groups in the US. Reinforcing narratives. Doesn't matter if the ideas are true - just that they are repeated.
And that's how we ended up with ISIS. Because we got involved in a country when we shouldn't but not another when we should. We seem to be good at that. Never hit where we should, and always intervene when we shouldn't.
I'm sure that there will be a fair amount of disagreement here with me on this, but the choice to not get involved in Syria until it was already too late was one of the dumbest fuckups of the obama administration. Unlike Libya - where we just killed any powerstructure whatsoever - in the early days of the Syrian Civil War you had a large contingent of defected Army Officers and politicians running actually organized secular resistance units. Many of whom would have been able to easily assert control over the Syrian Arab Army after a quick decisive victory.
Instead - Obama watched as red line after red line was crossed. As these resistance units ran out of money and bullets. And then who conveniently shows up? AQI. They offer men and bullets for loyalty. The alternative was death. It was an easy choice. So the Free Syrian Army loses trained fighters to AQI - which later becomes ISIS. And the guys going to them weren't fanatics. They were fighters who needed the tools they needed to fight. Thing is - you don't spend long around crazies without getting pretty crazy in the process. Everyone around you is saying the same things. It's what we see now in all our groups in the US. Reinforcing narratives. Doesn't matter if the ideas are true - just that they are repeated.
And that's how we ended up with ISIS. Because we got involved in a country when we shouldn't but not another when we should. We seem to be good at that. Never hit where we should, and always intervene when we shouldn't.