The facepalm was for your extremely crass analogy.
Who's 'et al?' I'm not playing your game of 'the entire opposition are head chopping loons.' Once again the Assad regime is off the hook for you because it simply doesn't matter to you he's barrel bombed, tortured, raped and murdered vast swathes of his own people, him being his regime of course. That is and always will be the back drop of this whether you choose to ignore it or not.
As I've said to CR, I don't dispute Russian intervention has changed this massively. It's not exactly surprising it has given that they bombed the shit out of the opposition that initially rose up against Assad and I'm not surprised this is the outcome. Note how they've hardly touched IS which controls over half the country, ya know, the real head chopping loons. In the long term though where is this heading. Syria, to my mind, can't hope to move past this while that murdering fuckwit sits on the throne.
America has had a largely hands off approach to the whole thing, you can fantasise all you like they've had some enormous role in militarising the conflict but compare that to their history in other countries it,s pretty low level. I have no truck with them arming the opposition but they executed it really poorly and way too late.
Of course Turkey has armed Nusra, elements in Saudi, Qatar etc have armed IS as we know. None of this equates to 'America did it' just because these are US allies doesn't mean they have full control over them, they of course do provide arms to its forces though.
The outcome of this still remains to be seen and it's not going to be good for anyone, excpet some cunts in power. What I would do is neither here nor there, what I would've done has long since passed now. What I find extremely distasteful in your position is the complete and utter exoneration of Assad, he's just a poor fellow defending his country. Well the facts are the opposite. I accept you haven't been quite the arsehole a certain other poster has about it, nor have you been the cheerleader he has but the exoneration of Assad is pretty shameful. Whether or not the situation of US supporting Assad would've been possible is neither here nor there. The point is Russia has done exactly the same as the US have done for near enough a century. They've propped up a murderous, brutal dictatorship against the will of that dictator's subjects. You wouldn't support it if America did it so why the hooray for Russia? That's aimed at any cheerleader for Russia in this and not you in particular by the way.
Assads methods have been brutal that's for sure... and counter productive in large parts. The ME is a tough neighbourhood as far as governments go and I don't believe Assad is exceptional by the standards at all. Having said that, any war-zone is a terrible place where terrible things happen. Look at what happened when the Third Reich was taken down, hundreds of thousands of civilians annihilated by the allies, cities fire-bombed, summary executions and torture, untold numbers of German women raped- and not just by the Red Army either, the French, the Americans, the British all got 'stuck in'. War really is hell, cruelty, the unspeakable horrendous insanity of human inhumanity to human, killing each other off like ants...
That's why in my opinion war is always a bad idea. But war does happen, there's no point getting all up on a high horse because of all the accumulated evils that unfold from a war that
we helped start (well, the same cynical tax-spending chinless wonders that now indignantly speak of barrel bombs etc while quadrupling arms spending and escalating situations with military excersizes).
They didn't have the same concern for the Syrian people when they were figuring out ways to destabilize the situation in Syria in the first place did they, or when they were looking to see how they could get Assad to "over react" etc. And they didn't have the same concerns when they cluster-fucked Iraq or more recently when they cluster-fucked Libya (I'll assume that you've read the articles about how the CIA helped transport weapons from that little adventure to jihadis in Syria for use there of course... not the half of it either).
Well, the war is on and all sides are taking it
very seriously, vigorously applying unthinkable cruelties to each other because that's what war is. We did no less when we jet-planed missiles into civilian populations in pursuit of Shock & Awe (aka terrorism) during the invasion of someone else’s country. And own our political elite boast about how if anyone fucks with us we'll nuke em, wipe civilians out by the hundreds of millions, and for this our government is prepared to spend billions to make sure we can do it too. War and barrel bombs and civilians in fire-zones is all awful horrible stuff but it's naive and crap to think that the stink of it all is not all over us too because it is... in fact my country (Britain) is a major producer of all sorts of munitions and devices that get aimed at civilians or feed wars all over the world... plus we very diligently helped this war get going on many different levels.
Now, having played such a part the idea that anyone associated with our island gets to squeal at the horridity of it all is in my opinion out of the question. Only one thing matters now, how can the war be brought to an end. The Syrian government has Assad as president and if there was a vote tomorrow (with all Syrians able to vote, even the refugees) he'd win, by a clear margin. But it's not about him, the Syrian state will remain (no thanks to the US/UK/Saudi etc) even when he goes, and it's the Syrian state that is the apparatus that can deliver stability, security, boots on the ground in Syria going forward. It's the Syrian state that will be the framework and the subject for whatever political reforms we might hope for going forward, it's the Syrian state upon whose presidency we might hope for some future better man than Assad to take office (again, hopefully by the vote of the Syrian people).
I think it would be better for us all to grow up from this naive Assad-squealing bollocks like our vast amounts of shit that we've thrown about doesn't stink and take account of the bigger picture, take it for what it is. An attempt was made to destroy the Syrian state and carve its territory up, that has failed and many have suffered for it, Syria the state now shows the slim possibility of rising from the ashes as a political unit again (perhaps missing a Kurdish bit here or there) and that's good really, as we'll need a state in place because the power-vacuum without it will be a genocidal nightmare. The Syrians live there, shitty president or no, the world isn't here for us Brits or Americans to whine about why our troops should be placed in harms way in somebody elses country (after we barge our way in to place them in harms way in the first place) and sickeningly act like we're just selflessly trying to teach the
savages to run their own country at the cost of young Tommy and Brad... No, the Syrians will be doing that, in Syria, using the Syrian army thank you very much.
The Syrians will need to pick up the pieces when (and I atheist-pray the time comes) this is all over. This is not about Assad, but right now he is crucial to the survival of the Syrian state, without him it would fall apart and anyway on what basis can he be removed by foreign powers? If he can be removed than why not the House of Saud too, why not any number of nations that aren't exactly Sweden but who do have a seat at the UN where things are said to them and obligations are made by them. I doubt it ever was about Assad considering what our allies get up to in the region in the game of oppression. The only proper way to remove Assad is through the political processes of the Syrian people. They tried the 'freedom fighter' approach and it turns out that just means a big war or a bloody and chaotic power vacuum, so grow the fuck up and accept that boring old politics is the only legitimate way to go about any regime change.
By the way "et al" meant in terms of other jihadi war-bands, in light of the cease-fire agreement those armed groups that aren't head-choppers are therefore involved in the UN peace process, if they're not... then it means that they have no role to play in the UN peace process because they're head-chopping Alahu Akbarists hankering after their 72. Why is that so hard to understand?
