Welcome! Jesus Christ is my LORD and Savior! Romans 10:9-10,13; John 3:16

[For EU visitors, I do not personally use cookies, but Google or any clickable link (if you choose to click on it) might. This is in compliance with mandatory EU notification]

I am a Natural Born United States Citizen with NO allegiance or citizenship to any nation but my own, and will use this site as a hobby place of sorts to present my own political and religious viewpoints, as a genuine Constitutional Conservative and a genuine Christian Conservative.

Thank you for coming.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
In the Year of our LORD Jesus Christ
2024
The New World Order Globalists (Satanists / Devil Worshipers, if you will) have successfully overthrown the Constitutional Government of the United States with willing Deep State & Shadow Government traitors to the United States Constitution & this Republic, having committed a Coup D'Etat by not just a vote count corruption and foreign electronic voting manipulation, but by control of Mossad (Epstein Island) pedophile very top judicial & executive & legislative branch compromised actors, so that they have literally stolen a Presidential Election, placing an extremely corrupt US politician pedophile completely owned & controlled by the Communist Chinese Government, who will step down & hand his position to an illegal to run or be in office (anchor baby of 2 alien citizens), who also is Chinese Communist Party owned for all practical political purposes.


It is likely that the entries to this blog will be less frequent than in years past. I do intend to keep this blog active as long as it passes under the mass censorship radar of extreme hostility & vindictiveness now underway, and I do intend to offer insightful information and/or opinion (and sometimes humor and/or entertainment on occasion) when I do post.
We shall see what the future holds.

Peace and Liberty. Semper Fidelis.










Thursday, August 29, 2013

Guest Blog: Robert D. Kaplan of Stratfor - Syria and the Limits of Comparison




 "Syria and the Limits of Comparison is republished with permission of Stratfor."

Syria and the Limits of Comparison

Wednesday, August 28, 2013 - 04:57 

 


Stratfor
By Robert D. Kaplan
 
 
Because so many war plans simply do not survive the reality of war itself, each war is a unique universe unto its own and thus comparisons with previous wars, while useful, may also prove illusory. One of the many wrong assumptions about the Second Gulf War before it started was that it would somehow be like the First Gulf War, in which the pessimists had been humiliated by the ease of the victory. Indeed, the Second Gulf War unfolded in vastly different ways, this time proving the pessimists right. That is why the recent media refrain comparing a military operation in Syria with the one in Kosovo in 1999 worries me.

There are profound differences.

Syria has a population ten times the size of Kosovo's in 1999. Because everything in Syria is on a much vaster scale, deciding the outcome by military means could be that much harder.

Kosovo sustained violence and harsh repression at the hands of Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, which was met with a low-intensity separatist campaign by the Kosovo Liberation Army. Violence was widespread but not nearly on the scale of Syria's. Syria is in the midst of a full-fledged civil war. The toppling of Milosevic, moreover, carried much less risk of ever-expanding anarchy than does the toppling of Syrian ruler Bashar al Assad.

Kosovo was more or less contained within the southern Balkans, with relatively limited chance for a spillover -- as it turned out -- into neighboring countries and territories. Full-scale sectarian anarchy in Syria threatens to destabilize a wider region.

The Kosovo Liberation Army may have been a nasty bunch by some accounts, with criminal elements. But it was not a threat to the United States like the transnational jihadists currently operating in Syria. For President Bill Clinton to risk bringing to power the Kosovo Liberation Army was far less of a concern than President Barack Obama possibly helping to midwife to power a Sunni jihadist regime.

Kosovo did not have a complex of chemical weapons facilities scattered throughout its territory as Syria does, with all the military and logistical headaches of trying to neutralize them.

The Kosovo war campaign did not have to countenance a strong and feisty Russia, which at the time was reeling from Boris Yeltsin's incompetent, anarchic rule. Vladimir Putin, who has significant equities in al Assad's Syria, may do everything in his power to undermine a U.S. attack. Though, it must be said, Putin's options should Obama opt for a significant military campaign are limited within Syria itself. But Putin can move closer to Iran by leaving the sanctions regime, and ratchet-up Russia's anti-American diplomacy worldwide more effectively than Yeltsin ever wanted to, or was capable of.

The Kosovo war did not engage Iran as this war must. For all of the missiles that America can fire, it does not have operatives on the ground like Iran has. Neither will the United States necessarily have the patience and fortitude to prosecute a lengthy and covert ground-level operation as Iran might for years to come, and already has. A weakened or toppled al Assad is bad for Iran, surely, but it does not altogether signal that America will therefore receive a good result from this war. A wounded Iran might race even faster toward a nuclear option. It is a calculated risk.

The Kosovo war inflicted significant pain on Serbian civilians through airstrikes, but the Syrian population has already been pummeled by a brutal war for two years now, and so it is problematic whether airstrikes in this case can inflict that much more psychological pain on the parts of the population either still loyal or indifferent to the regime.

The goal in Kosovo was to limit Serbia's geographic influence and to ignite a chain of events that would lead to Milosevic's ouster. Those goals were achieved: Milosevic was forced from power in the fall of 2000, largely because of a chain of events stemming from that war. His ouster, as I wrote in The New York Times on Oct. 6, 2000, meant the de facto death of the last ruling Communist Party in Europe, even if in its final years it had adopted national-fascism as a tactic. Because the war was in significant measure a result of the efforts of a single individual, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, it demonstrated how individuals can dramatically alter history for the better.

Kosovo thus symbolized the power of human agency over impersonal forces in order to wrest a victory for human rights. This is a popular cause among liberal journalists and intellectuals, as is the desire to do something to punish the massive human rights violations of the al Assad regime. The comparison between Kosovo and Syria follows from that. But it is a flawed comparison: Elegantly toppling Milosevic incurred no negative side effects. Toppling al Assad could lead to a power center in the Levant as friendly to transnational jihadists as the one in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan was in the late 1990s until 2001.

Of course, the Obama administration will try to calibrate its military effort in a way to avoid further jihadi chaos in Syria. But even with overwhelming firepower, it is not necessarily in control. Whereas ending Milosevic's rule meant an end to ethnic cleansing, it is far from certain that sectarian carnage would end with al Assad's demise; it might possibly even intensify, with Sunnis exacting revenge on a weakened and cornered Alawite community.

Obama faces a dilemma more extreme than the one Clinton faced in Kosovo. If he chooses limited military strikes to send a message against the use of chemical weapons, he risks looking weak, especially following the powerful rhetoric employed by his secretary of state, John Kerry. If he chooses regime change -- while not calling it that -- he threatens to unleash a jihadi nightmare. He may try a middle option calibrated to seriously erode al Assad's power base while sending a message to Russia and Iran to help him negotiate a stable transfer of authority in Damascus -- something that might yet open up a wider diplomatic process with Iran. But that is obviously very difficult to do.

Keep another thing in mind about Kosovo. At that time, the United States had not been in a ground war for a quarter-century and thus the American people were not weary of war. Even so, Clinton rightly calculated that the public would not tolerate casualties on the ground in a war that did not involve a naked American interest. But the American public is now tottering from more than a decade of bloody ground war, and so Obama has even less leeway than Clinton, even as Syria presents a greater military challenge than Kosovo.

So far, Obama has handled the Middle East tolerably well. He has reduced and ended ground force commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq, while avoiding quagmires elsewhere in the face of regional change and chaos. This is in keeping with the leadership of a global maritime power that has serious military commitments in Asia and elsewhere, even as its energy dependency on the Middle East is on the wane. But Obama now faces a defining event that will test his commitment to keep America out of regional quicksand while being able to wield considerable power in the region at the same time. If Obama prosecutes a significant military operation, one thing is certain: Syria will be its own war for the United States with its own narrative, for better or worse.


---------------------------------------------------




The opinions above are that of Robert D. Kaplan.  While I do not necessarily agree with him in his friendly opinions to Obama, it is important that we are aware that America is entering this conflict with the same kind delusional political and media lap-dogs as who follow a third-world dictator idolized beyond celebrity status into near deification; and of a sort where he is at best mildly questioned as to ability, never his illegality to the nations Constitution or the nefarious motives he has.




 

As I write this, the U.S. Military is openly known to be sending military fighters to a base on Cyprus in preparation for a military strike on Syria, reports the Guardian.




 
 Obama operates as if he is "above the law" because that is precisely what Congress, the Supreme Court, the Military, and the various elite of great influence in this country have allowed this foreign national usurper of the Presidency, who voted for himself as an Indonesian citizen Barry Soetoro for himself as Barack Obama in 2012, to do. 

To the general public, this is NOT well known.  Nor is it as well known that the U.S. Military has been "hollowed out" into a shell of its former self in the past several years under Obama, so that we are no longer a Conventional super-power. 

 Obama is determined to do one of two things with a confrontation and a U.S. military attack upon the sovereign nation of Syria:  either to create a new Caliphate run by the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda terrorists by overthrowing Syria (continuing his policy in making the U.S. a State-sponsor or global Islamic terrorism), or if well opposed enough (by Russia, Iran, and others allied to them) so that he can't overthrow Syria for Islamic terrorism;  then Obama also sees the benefit in degrading the perception of U.S. Military strength in the world and showing weakness in its inability and the appearance of cowardice before Islam, in order to spur on more terror attacks against the U.S. and the "colonialist" West, to make us "pay" for the sins of our historical past in daring to have ever been world super-powers and prosperous in world trade and resources.  Never mind China's current enslaving millions of people in Africa and South America to mine and strip them of their resources, they don't count because they are Communists.  And in Obama's mind, Communists and Muslims must have the political and economic and "preference" deck stacked for them, where the only rule in "the game" is that they (the Communist-Socialists and the Muslims)  must near always "win" and Conservatives,  Christians, Republicans, Constitutionalists, Free Societies, et cetera, must "lose".  To Obama, THAT is "social justice" leaving the obvious absence of "race" out of the equation, which "domestic" application and hostile negro/black racist bigotry upon the part of Obama and his Attorney General and others is not relevant to the discussion on Syria. 

For a fairly Comprehensive Map of Syria on-line, dated 2011, you can visit 
http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/middle_east_and_asia/txu-pclmaps-oclc-746758449-syria_country_profile-2011.jpg

--Brianroy

No comments:

Post a Comment