Syria: How can the Assad regime be got rid of?

[KingOrfeo]

Have we learned nothing from Iraq and Libya?

We need to stay the hell out of their affairs. Let them blow each other up. They've been at it for centuries longer than the US has existed.

Quit talking sense; the MIC can't make any money that way, and the rest of us would get bored.

 

[renard_ruse]

He is clearly no less a murderous monster than Saddam Hussein

Always figured you were a crypto-Bush supporter Rory. Now you've confirmed it.

Do you have any redeeming views on anything?

 

[KingOrfeo]

Always figured you were a crypto-Bush supporter Rory. Now you've confirmed it.

Voted against him twice.

 

[KingOrfeo]

So now we're attacking Assad too . . . but I doubt losing one air force base is going to fatally weaken his regime.

 

[RobDownSouth]

If you have Facebook, THIS is an excellent five minute video that explains the last 6 years of conflict in Syria.

So simple maybe even AJ could understand it.

 

[hashtag46]

If you have Facebook, THIS is an excellent five minute video that explains the last 6 years of conflict in Syria.

So simple maybe even AJ could understand it.

Thanks.
It's obviously biased as in "The US hyped up their intervention because Assad used chemical weapons on civilians (yeah right..)
But one can't find any information nowadays that isn't heavily biased.

But it was an excellent summary. It made Me understand things.

Why doesn't one of you guys start a generic thread in this line, about the Syrian conflict? Even starting with this vid.
So that anyone could express their views about the covert motivations of all parties involved?

THAT woulld be an interesting thread too.

 

[Christobal]

Trump bombed Syria and therefore Assad. Why isn't everyone thrilled someone did something?

edited to add

That was a rhetorical question. I know the answer.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Trump bombed Syria and therefore Assad. Why isn't everyone thrilled someone did something?

Because it won't make any difference in the civil war.

Paul Krugman writes:

In other words, showy actions that win a news cycle or two are no substitute for actual, coherent policies. Indeed, their main lasting effect can be to squander a government’s credibility. Which brings us to last week’s missile strike on Syria.

The attack instantly transformed news coverage of the Trump administration. Suddenly stories about infighting and dysfunction were replaced with screaming headlines about the president’s toughness and footage of Tomahawk launches.

But outside its effect on the news cycle, how much did the strike actually accomplish? A few hours after the attack, Syrian warplanes were taking off from the same airfield, and airstrikes resumed on the town where use of poison gas provoked Mr. Trump into action. No doubt the Assad forces took some real losses, but there’s no reason to believe that a one-time action will have any effect on the course of Syria’s civil war.

In fact, if last week’s action was the end of the story, the eventual effect may well be to strengthen the Assad regime — Look, they stood up to a superpower! — and weaken American credibility. To achieve any lasting result, Mr. Trump would have to get involved on a sustained basis in Syria.

Doing what, you ask? Well, that’s the big question — and the lack of good answers to that question is the reason President Barack Obama decided not to start something nobody knew how to finish.

 

[Noor]

Hire the Mossad to take it out piece by piece

 

[Hard_Rom]

If you go in and fuck up a country you can't leave until it is fixed. After WWII the US flooded billions into Germany and Japan to rebuild them and set up stable governments. Expensive as fuck but the proper way to effect regime change. You can't go in, destabilize and declare premature victory before bailing at first opportunity leaving the country worse off than when you went in.

Iraq and the ME was not about deposing people like Saddam. It was to give radicals an excuse to stay home and not export organized terrorism abroad. Hence all we get are lone wolf or small domestic bred groups not international well funded terror organizations conducting terrorist attacks against the west.

 

[KingOrfeo]

If you go in and fuck up a country you can't leave until it is fixed.

Of course you can, but don't be surprised if you find yourself obliged to invade again next year for more or less the same reasons as before.

 

[BotanyBoy]

If you go in and fuck up a country you can't leave until it is fixed.

Yea you can....

What rule of war says you have to bend over and let the other guy fuck you up the ass for winning?

That some idiotic dipshit Canadian thing?

Iraq and the ME was not about deposing people like Saddam. It was to give radicals an excuse to stay home and not export organized terrorism abroad.

No it wasn't, it was about getting contracts and billing the taxpayer.

 

[Hard_Rom]

Yea you can....

What rule of war says you have to bend over and let the other guy fuck you up the ass for winning?

That some idiotic dipshit Canadian thing?

No this is an American thing that America has forgotten. The US realized that forcing Germany to make huge reparations after WWI was a mistake. And led to Hitler and the Nazis. So the Marshall Plan flooded Germany and Japan with huge money. It worked very well. After Iraq the US bailed out and it led to Daesh and instability.

The US blew a huge chance to be seen as the world's leading nation. Not just some imperialist power looking for resources and a chance to fuck over the natives.

 

[BotanyBoy]

No this is an American thing

Not really.

The American thing is to get paid and then flop around about how best to be dishonest about it for some idiotic reason.

So the Marshall Plan flooded Germany and Japan with huge money. It worked very well.

Not really......Just look at Germany now LOL.

After Iraq the US bailed out and it led to Daesh and instability.

First off you forgot the 11 years and trillion bucks we poured into that shit hole for NOTHING.

No, it wasn't the US leaving that fucked it all up, it's the shithead culture and idiotic people who are incapable of getting beyond 4th century bullshit that led to instability.

The US blew a huge chance to be seen as the world's leading nation. Not just some imperialist power looking for resources and a chance to fuck over the natives.

We were looking for resources??? Then why didn't we take any?

If we wanted to fuck over the natives we had no need to start a war for that. All we had to do was lean on them and the damage would have been far worse that what we did.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Not really......Just look at Germany now LOL.

Looks great, compared to how it was in 1945.

We were looking for resources??? Then why didn't we take any?

I'm sure the war gave the oil companies access to Iraqi oil on better and more predictable terms than was possible under Hussein.

The Iraq War was done to drive the price of oil down. But it was also done to keep the price of oil up. But mainly it was done to keep the price of oil stable.

Investigative journalist Greg Palast (an American expat now working for the BBC -- and, incidentally, a classmate of Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Ahmed Chalabi at the University of Chicago in the '60s, where he studied economics under Arthur Laffer and Milton Friedman) has a book out: Armed Madhouse. It covers a lot of ground, but for this thread I want to focus on Chapter 2, "The Flow," about the Iraq invasion.

There are kooks and cranks and conspiracy nuts out there who think George Bush, from the moment he took office, had some kind of secret plan to invade Iraq and grab control of its oil. They're wrong.

There were two plans. I've got them both. One is 323 pages long, the other 101 pages.

"Plan A:"

In February 2001, a meeting organized by Colin Powell's State Department was held in Walnut Creek, California, in the home of Falah Aljibury, an Iraqi-born consultant on Iraq's oil industry. The "Three-Day Plan" they came up with was "an invasion disguised as a coup," "kind of a Marine-supported Bay of Pigs." Saddam was to be replaced by some Ba'athist general cashiered by him, possibly the exiled General Nizar Khazraji -- "the secret group was already contacting Saddam's generals to switch allegiance. Then, according to their playbook, there would be snap elections, say within 90 days, to put a democratic halo on our chosen generalissimo."

Crucially, the quickie coup-cum-invasion had friends where it counted. "The petroleum industry, the chemical industry, the banking industry," Aljibury told me. "They'd hoped that Iraq would go for a revolutiojn like other revolutions that have occurred in the past and government was shut down for two or three days" . . .

The idea was that no matter which strongman the Bush team designated, they would "bring him in right away and say that Iraq is being liberated - and everybody stay in office . . . everything as is." And by "everything" he meant, first and foremost, the key thing, the oil ministry and state oil company. While the Walnut Creek committee was busy-busy with many topics, Aljibury said, "It quickly became an oil group."

"Plan B:"

But in November 2001, following the U.S. victory in Afghanistan, the Pentagon, dominated by neoconservative PNAC members Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Elliot Abrams, had other and very different ideas:

It was nothing like State's three-day quickie. The neo-cons' 101-page confidential document goes boldly where no invasion plan had gone before: the complete rewrite of the conquered state's "policies, laws and regulations." Here's a sample:

* Pages 8 & 21: A big income tax cut for Iraq's wealthiest and complete elimination of taxes on business revenues.

* Pages 35 & 73: The quick sale of Iraq's banks, bridges and water companies to foreign operators.

* Page 45: The application for Iraq to join the World Trade Organization, kindly ghostwritten by U.S. government contractors.

* Page 28: A "market-friendly" customs law -- a kind of super-NAFTA -- aiming for complete wipeout of tariffs that had protected Iraq's industry from cheap foreign imports.

* Page 44: New copyright laws protecting foreign (i.e., American) software, music and drug companies.

Odd to attach to an invasion plan. It was more like a corporate takeover, except with Abrams tanks instead of junk bonds. There wasn't a whole lot of thinking going on about strengthening the borders against insurgents, disarming private armies or securing Baghdad from looters; and not a thing about elections or "democracy." . . .

<snip>

. . . Selling off banks and bridges was just the beginning. The would-be conquistadors left nothing to chance -- or to the Iraqis. At page 74, the plan's authors required Iraq to "privatize" (i.e., sell off) "all state-owned companies." . . .

But it goes deeper than that: The core of the neocons' plan was to use Iraq to break the back of OPEC! Privatize the state-owned oilfields among several small companies, let them compete with each other, and they'll up production and drive down the price of oil and even Saudi Arabia will have to follow suit! That idea was Ari Cohen's baby, and he called it a "no-brainer."

After the invasion, the first American viceroy was General Jay Garner, who was committed to neither plan but inclined strongly towards Plan A. His own view was that Iraq's value to the U.S. was as a "coaling station," a base for projection of American power in the MENA as needed, the role the Philippines once played in the South Pacific. As for the oil, that would be left to the Iraqis to decide. Garner wasn't much committed to democracy in Iraq, for its own sake, but regarded it as an urgent practical necessity:

In his rush to democracy, Garner had planned what he called a "big tent" meeting of Iraq's tribal leaders to plan national elections. Garner knew these characters well and figured he had only those 90 days to keep the Sunni, Shia and Kurdish factions under the tent from slitting each other's throats. The general planned to seal a deal before a slighted group would launch an "insurgency."

All that was unacceptable to the Pentagon neocons. Rumsfeld fired Garner on 4/21/03 and replaced him with Paul Bremer, who put off elections indefinitely -- even municipal elections -- while proceeding to implement almost every economic and legal element of Plan B by his own fiat. Order 37: Flat tax on corporations, individual income tax capped at 15%. Order 40: Iraqi banks sold off to three foreign financiers with no bidding process. Order 12: Iraq to become the only country on Earth with no tariff barriers or import quotas at all. Iraqi industry, limping along after 12 years of sanctions, was shattered by this. Agriculture too; Cargill flooded Iraq's market with wheat, driving Iraqi farmers out of business. And "Order 100 ensures that, "the interim government and all subsequent Iraqi goverments inherit full responsibility for these [Bremer's] laws, regulations, orders, memoranda, instructions and directives," which effectively locks in the economic rules of occupation."

Hussein's prohibition on public-sector labor union activity, however, remained in place; 12/03, Bremer arrrested the entire board of the Iraqi Workers Federation of Trade Unions.

While this was going on several billion dollars in Iraqi oil revenue and U.S. reconstruction funds simply disappeared, but investigation is hampered by the Coalition Provisional Authority having been, according to some lawyers, neither an Iraqi nor a U.S. government agency -- and later on, it was dissolved. "The perfect getaway car -- one that simply disappears." In fact, some lawyers argue the CPA never had any legal existence in the first place, so there.

Every element of Plan B was implemented, except privatizing the oil industry. There were two big problems with that plan that had somehow escaped the notice of the neocon ideologues:

1. Saudi Arabia won't allow OPEC to be broken, and has the power to stop it. As Nawaf Obaid, a Saudi-born economist, think-tanker and member of the Saudi National Security Assessment Project, explained it to Palast:

Obaid explained the oil facts of life. In the short term, Iraq's fields were trashed even before saboteurs torched them. The CIA and the Pentagon knew it no matter what Wolfowitz said to bobble-headed Congressmen. In the long run, however, many years from now, Iraq, with 114 billion barrels of proven reserves, might be able to crank up above its OPEC quota.

But that won't happen. The globe is littered with the economic skeletons of nationsl that flagrantly busted their OPEC quotas. There's the skeleton of Venezuela. In 1973, Venezuela broke the first Arab oil boycott. But in 1997, when Venezuela again ramped up production, punishment was swift. Saudi Arabia, which can live without big oil revenues for up to a year, opened its spigots and drowned the market. The price of oil dropped to $8 a barrel and Venezuela went bankrupt. Its government fell. The current President of that nation, Hugo Chavez, is now a very good member of OPEC, indeed its most frantic adherent to the quota system.

The Soviet Union was also givena price-cut whupping. In the 1980s, the Saudis dropped the price of oil to punish Russia for its wild expansion of oil-pumping capacity and for the Soviets' invading Muslim Afghanistan. This choking loss of oil income had a lot more to do with the Soviet Union's collapse than Ronald Reagan's crooked smile.

Saudi Arabia has kept its economic knife sharp for Iraq if, under neo-con influence, Iraq were to exceed its OPEC quota. The war-stoked jump in oil prices put $120 billion in Saudi Arabia's treasury in just one year (2004), triple its normal take. This gives the kingdom the cash to hold its breath economically should it need to drop the price of oil for a year to bring Iraq, or any quota-busting nation, to its knees.

Besides, said Obaid, why should President Bush allow troublemakers at the Pentagon to use Iraq to attack the House of Saud when the Saudi royals were so supportive of Mr. Bush's goals?

2. The international oil companies don't want OPEC busted.

The five big international oil companies own some oilfields of their own, but they have to buy most of the oil they refine from the nationalized oil industries of the OPEC nations. You might think they would want to buy it as cheap as they can, so they can pocket the difference, or else charge less at the pump and sell a lot more gasoline, but it's not that simple:

. . . When OPEC raises the price of crude, Big Oil makes out big time. The oil majors are not simply passive resellers of OPEC production. In OPEC nations, they have "profit sharing agreements" (PSAs) that give the companies a direct slice of the higher price charged. More important, the industry has its own reserves whose value is attached, like a suckerfish, to OPEC's price targets. Here's a statistic you won't see on Army recruitment posters: The rise in the price of oil after the first three years of the war boosted the value of the reserves of ExxonMobil alone by just over $666 billion. The devil is in the details.

Maintaining the status quo for the oil companies requires holding down oil production, and Iraq has been assigned that sorry role since it was founded (it has 74 known oil fields and only 15 in production). In 1927, the major oil company execs met at a hotel room in Belgium and signed an agreement: The Anglo-Persian company (now British Petroleum) would pump almost all its oil from Iran; Standard Oil, under the name of the Arabian-American Oil Company (Aramco), would limit almost all its drilling to Saudi Arabia; Anglo-Persian would drill in Iraq’s Kirkuk and Basra fields but it would pump very little.

When the British Foreign Office fretted that locking up oil would stoke local nationalist anger, BP-IPC agreed privately to pretend to drill lots of wells, but make them absurdly shallow and place them where, wrote a company manager, "there was no danger of striking oil."

In the early '60s, the frustrated Iraqi government canceled the BP-Shell-Exxon concession and nationalized the oil fields, but that didn’t solve the problem.

. . . The OPEC cartel, controlled by Saudi Arabia, capped Iraq’s production at a sum equal to Iran’s, though the Iranian reserves are far smaller than Iraq’s. The excuse for this quote equality between Iraq and Iran was to prevent war between them. It didn’t.

To keep Iraq’s Ba’athists from complaining about the limits, Saudi Arabia simply bought off the leaders by funding Saddam’s war against Iran and giving the dictator $7 billion for his "Islamic bomb" program.

When Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, he was hoping to increase Iraq’s OPEC production quota by adding Kuwait’s to it.

So why did Hussein -- a secular Ba'athist, no sponsor of Islamist terrorism, possessing no WMDs, contained as a military threat, yet arguably still useful as a counterbalance to Iran -- why did Hussein, finally, have to go?

The answer was that Saddam was jerking the oil market up and down. One week, without notice, the man in the moustache suddenly announces he’s going to “support the Palestinian intifada” and cuts off all oil shipments. The result: Worldwide oil prices jump up. The next week, Saddam forgets about the Palestinians and pumps to the maximum allowed under the Oil-for-Food Program. The result: Oil prices suddenly dive-bomb. Up, down, up, down. Saddam was out of control.

"Control is what it’s all about," Lapham told me. "It’s not about getting the oil, it’s about controlling oil’s price."

But neither could zealous neocon ideologues be allowed to upset the oil companies' apple cart. In May 2003, Phillip Carroll, former CEO of Shell Oil USA, former CEO of Fluor corporation, flew to Baghdad and confronted Bremer. Palast interviewed Carroll in March 2005 and got the story:

The double-CEO laid down the law to Bremer. Carroll told me: Neo-con plan be damned, "I was very clear that there was to be no privatization of Iraqi oil resources or facilities while I was involved. End of statement." Furthermore, Carroll would permit no "De-Ba'athification" purge in "his" ministry -- oil.

The diminutive Bremer did not have the political testosterone to reply that, on paper, it was Bremer's ministry and as chieftain of the Provisional Authority, Bremer, not Carroll, was in charge. But Bremer understood that in the Great Game, a well-placed pawn, even one who used to play Kissinger's game, does not overrule a knight of the oil industry. Carroll's orders stood.

Top global oil execs, including no Iraqis, met in Houston, 11-12/03, and drafted a 323-page plan, Options for a Sustainable Iraqi Oil Industry. Iraqis were to be offered seven options, all essentially the same: "seven flavors of state-owned oil companies." Privatization was not an option.

Ahmed Chalabi, a University of Chicago-educated neocon who fully supported the privatization plan and whom the neocons intended for Iraq's new president, was purged, and sought for arrest on espionage charges. His "governing council" was replaced by a new government headed by a Ba'athist blessed by the State Department. Bremer was booted out and the new Ambassador John Negroponte arrived to represent the U.S. in Iraq.

In February 2005 there was another shift in power, Negroponte was replaced by PNAC favorite Zalmay Khalizad, and Chalabi returned to power with the Shi'ites and became temporary oil minister. He fired Big Oil's favorites in the ministry -- but still did not dare try to privatize.

Where was W in all this? Who knows? But it appears both the Plan A and the Plan B team enjoyed the support of Cheney.

 

[BotanyBoy]

Looks great, compared to how it was in 1945.

Oh yea it's a real gem....LOL

I'm sure the war gave the oil companies access to Iraqi oil on better and more predictable terms than was possible under Hussein.

Not really. We were there for the contracts, not the oil.

The Iraq War was done to drive the price of oil down. But it was also done to keep the price of oil up. But mainly it was done to keep the price of oil stable.

Maybe but I don't see how.

But it appears both the Plan A and the Plan B team enjoyed the support of Cheney.

Then how come we didn't do any of that shit but had plenty of worthless contractors doing nothing out in the desert but racking up a tab on uncle sam?

 

[KingOrfeo]

Oh yea it's a real gem....LOL

The biggest and strongest economy in Europe, functioning quasi-social democracy, good HR record -- yes, a gem indeed; its only significant flaw is a tendency to dickishness towards less-fortunate countries.

Maybe but I don't see how.

By getting rid of Hussein.

The answer was that Saddam was jerking the oil market up and down. One week, without notice, the man in the moustache suddenly announces he’s going to “support the Palestinian intifada” and cuts off all oil shipments. The result: Worldwide oil prices jump up. The next week, Saddam forgets about the Palestinians and pumps to the maximum allowed under the Oil-for-Food Program. The result: Oil prices suddenly dive-bomb. Up, down, up, down. Saddam was out of control.

"Control is what it’s all about," Lapham told me. "It’s not about getting the oil, it’s about controlling oil’s price."

Then how come we didn't do any of that shit but had plenty of worthless contractors doing nothing out in the desert but racking up a tab on uncle sam?

We -- that is, American officials in Iraq -- did all that shit Palast describes, it's very well-documented.

 

[BotanyBoy]

The biggest and strongest economy in Europe, functioning quasi-social democracy, good HR record -- yes, a gem indeed; its only significant flaw is a tendency to dickishness towards less-fortunate countries.

Propped up by the USA, is a socialist shithole with a TERRIBLE HR record...one of the darkest in modern history right next to their socialist buddies in Russia and China.

Paradise for you, hell for me.

We -- that is, American officials in Iraq -- did all that shit Palast describes, it's very well-documented.

Whatever you say, there were invisible oil rigs out there stealing Iraqi oil all over!!!

That's why the shit was 4 -5 fuckin dollars a gallon and Halliburton alone was pulling 800 billion.

Iraq war was clearly about stealing oil, not the commercialization of war.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Propped up by the USA . . .

Only WRT defense, which doesn't really matter, does it?

is a socialist shithole with a TERRIBLE HR record...one of the darkest in modern history right next to their socialist buddies in Russia and China.

Germany ranks 12th on the Human Freedom Index. The U.S. only ranks 19th.

Paradise for you, hell for me.

Paradise or something like it for Germans, that's what matters.

Whatever you say, there were invisible oil rigs out there stealing Iraqi oil all over!!!

*sigh* Palast never said anything like that. Read the post again.

 

[Hard_Rom]

And the fascist socialist police state BB dislikes is ranked 6th! Go figure!

Obviously I prefer freedom, but I know, and I think all history has told us, that freedom cannot flow from anarchy and disorder.

Pierre Trudeau

 

[BotanyBoy]

Only WRT defense, which doesn't really matter, does it?

No, we buy a lot of shit from them, we don't have to.

If the US were to economically lean on really any 1 country that country would be a in a world of shit.

Germany ranks 12th on the Human Freedom Index. The U.S. only ranks 19th.

I don't care what your "Slavery is freedom!!" index says.

Paradise or something like it for Germans, that's what matters.

Not just for Germans, apparently pretty much anyone can go over and rat fuck that place now.

 

[KingOrfeo]

No, we buy a lot of shit from them, we don't have to.

We have no good reason not to, do we? Germans make good stuff.

I don't care what your "Slavery is freedom!!" index says.

Do you even click links?

The Human Freedom Index measures 76 distinct indicators of personal, civil, and economic freedom around the world.[1][2][3] The Human Freedom Index is the most comprehensive index on freedom for a globally meaningful set of countries.[4] Coauthors of the index are Ian Vásquez and Tanja Porčnik. The index is co-published by the Cato Institute, the Fraser Institute, and the Liberales Institut at the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom.[5][6][7][8][9][10][11]

The index covers the following areas:[12]

Rule of Law
Security and Safety
Movement
Religion
Association, Assembly, and Civil Society
Expression
Relationships
Size of Government
Legal System and Property Rights
Access to Sound Money
Freedom to Trade Internationally
Regulation of Credit, Labor, and Business

Which of those things looks like slavery to you? And I think you'll find Germany ranks high on other freedom indices.

Not just for Germans, apparently pretty much anyone can go over and rat fuck that place now.

That's another thing -- imagining Hitler tolerating Middle Eastern immigrants and refugees. No, Germany has improved in every way since then, and the Middle Easterners are not really much of a problem.

 

[jaF0]

That's another thing -- imagining Hitler tolerating Middle Eastern immigrants and refugees. No, Germany has improved in every way since then, and the Middle Easterners are not really much of a problem.

Erwin Rommel didn't have much trouble with them then either.

 

[BotanyBoy]

Which of those things looks like slavery to you?

The part about being told how to make a living, then having most of it taken from you by force.

What part about that is free to you?

That's another thing -- imagining Hitler tolerating Middle Eastern immigrants and refugees. No, Germany has improved in every way since then, and the Middle Easterners are not really much of a problem.

What the fuck does that have to do with what I said?

 

[magicalmoments]

If you go in and fuck up a country you can't leave until it is fixed. After WWII the US flooded billions into Germany and Japan to rebuild them and set up stable governments. Expensive as fuck but the proper way to effect regime change. You can't go in, destabilize and declare premature victory before bailing at first opportunity leaving the country worse off than when you went in.

Iraq and the ME was not about deposing people like Saddam. It was to give radicals an excuse to stay home and not export organized terrorism abroad. Hence all we get are lone wolf or small domestic bred groups not international well funded terror organizations conducting terrorist attacks against the west.

Exactly, that was the lesson learned from WWI. Germany was left to her own devices and Hitler rose out of that. If you are going to tear down a corrupt regime you better be ready to put the hard yards in afterwards or you'll get worse in its place.