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McCain/Graham: America Needs to Stop Being Selfish in Syria

Posted By Daniel Greenfield On October 7, 2014 @ 1:13 pm In The Point | 18 Comments

ISIS became an international monster because of the Arab Spring which led to the Syrian Civil War. Fighters and weapons pouring into Syria gave it a serious edge. If Obama and McCain had not supported the Arab Spring, ISIS would not be a major threat.

So the McCain/Graham solution is more of the same.

The airstrikes and other actions President Obama is taking against Islamic State deserve bipartisan support. They are beginning to degrade the terrorist group, also known as ISIS, but will not destroy it, for one reason above all: The administration still has no effective policy to remove Bashar Assad from power and end the conflict in Syria.

Removing Gaddafi from power, another great Obama/McCain plan, did not end the fighting in Libya. It actually made it much worse. Why does McCain imagine that throwing Syria wide open to a bunch of Jihadist militias will get better results in Syria than in Libya?

Mr. Assad all but created Islamic State through his slaughter of nearly 200,000 Syrians, and he has knowingly allowed the group to grow and operate with impunity inside the country when it suits his purposes.

ISIS was originally Al Qaeda in Iraq. Assad did help create it by promoting the passage of suicide bombers into Iraq through Syria when the US was there. But that’s not what McCain means.

Assad certainly didn’t create the Islamic State now. McCain had more to do with that through his obsession with backing Sunni terrorists.

This points to another contradiction: How can we arm and train 5,000 Syrians and expect them to succeed against Islamic State without protecting them (and their families) from Assad’s airstrikes and barrel bombs?

That’s not a contradiction since they won’t be fighting ISIS. They already fight alongside it. Let’s not pretend otherwise.

Our efforts to build up a viable Free Syrian Army to liberate Syria from the evils of Islamic State and Mr. Assad will surely fail if the Syrian ruler is not dealt with.

The FSA is a myth. It’s not liberating anyone. The people McCain is relying on are terrorist supporters. And if they can’t win without us fighting for them, then we’ll have to spend the next decade fighting in Syria.

It’s unlikely that the U.S. can maintain public support among Syrians for the fight against Islamic State, or succeed without their support, unless it does more to end Assad’s war against them.

The US doesn’t have their support. And can McCain please stop using Syrians to mean Sunni Muslims. They’re the only group that wants this. And they’re the chief beneficiaries from ISIS’s ethnic cleansing.

Unless we kill Christians and Kurds for them, they won’t support us.

Syrians are already asking why America is bombing Islamic State but not stopping Mr. Assad from bombing them. This only hardens their pervasive belief that America cares only for itself.

So? Isn’t it time we put America first? The various groups in Syria put themselves first. Maybe we should take a lesson from them.

They might even respect us for it.

We’re bombing ISIS because it’s a threat to us. We have no reason to support one side in a Sunni-Shiite civil war. Until McCain and Graham stop repeating the FSA lie and admit that this is a religious war between two sets of terrorists that they want us to intervene in, they have nothing to say worth listening to.


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