The key to remember is part of Kerry's proposal is we "secure" the chemical weapons...that means boots on the ground. According to a Pentagon study it would take a minimum of 75k troops to secure the sites. Plus a lot of them are stored in the Bekaa valley, home to Hezbollah. That will make Fallujah look like a walk in the park.This is really a bullshit comparison. One involved regime change and sending 200,000 troops to sit indefinitely in Iraq and fight insurgency wars. Syria implies a bunch of missile strikes and thats about it.
But the real reason is the war fatigue. Almost a decade and a half of non stop pointless fighting, drone strikes and labyrinthine shifting allegiances - even I no longer give a fuck. I was a very vocal opponent of the Iraq War in 2003 but I even I can't be bothered to give a shit in 2013. I'm spent. Make no mistake, people like me, Penn, Moore and Sarandon still oppose these idiotic wars but if you think we're tacitly agreeing with Obama's decisions by not marching in the streets again, you're wrong. You got no one but yourself to blame for our apathy.
Alliances are shifting after West warns war-torn country poses greatest terror threat
Kim Sengupta
The spectre is looming of a second Syrian civil war with the head of the opposition's official forces declaring that he is prepared to join regime troops in the future to drive out al-Qa'ida-linked extremists who have taken over swathes of rebel-held territories.
General Salim Idris, the commander of the Free Syrian Army warned that in particular Isis (Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham), with thousands of foreign fighters in its ranks, was "very dangerous for the future of Syria" and needs to be confronted before it becomes even more powerful.
Western security agencies now believe that Syria poses the most potent threat of terrorism in Europe and the US from where hundreds of Muslims have gone to join the jihad. MI5 and Scotland Yard's anti-terrorist branch recently tackled the first case of men sent from there specifically to carry out attacks in London.
One senior Western intelligence official stressed that the Syrian regime's forces must be preserved for the battles ahead against the Islamists and the need to avoid the mistakes made in Iraq and Libya, where the army and police were disbanded with the fall of Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi, allowing terrorist groups to rise in a security vacuum.
I have no memory of what I was afraid of forgetting.Can I change Eyashusa's avatar yet? I think I'll forget by December.
~Pulitzer-prize winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh (who uncovered the Iraq prison torture scandal and the Mai Lai massacre in Vietnam) revealed in the International Business Times that there ismore evidence for the Syrian rebels than Assad being the culprits behind the sarin chemical weapons attackin Syria.
[Obama] didn't do it [i.e. pull the plug on war with Syria] because the American people said no. He [backed down] because he didn't have a case. And there was incredible opposition that will be, one of these days, written about, maybe in history books. There was incredible operation [sic] from some very, very strong-minded, constitutionally minded people in the Pentagon. That's the real story.
'A former senior intelligence official told me that the Obama administration had altered the available information - in terms of its timing and sequence - to enable the president and his advisers to make intelligence retrieved days after the attack look as if it had been picked up and analyzed in real time, as the attack was happening,' he wrote.
Hersh also said that his contacts spoke of 'immense frustration inside the military and intelligence bureaucracy' regarding the current President.
'The guys are throwing their hands in the air and saying, "How can we help this guy [Obama] when he and his cronies in the White House make up the intelligence as they go along?"'
Hersh also claims that the administration buried intelligence on the fundamentalist group/rebel group al-Nusra related to the sarin attacks, plus he repeated his accusation that the U.S. media fails to properly question what information is given to them by the government.
According to Hersh, the situation reminded him of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, when President Johnson's administration had reversed the sequence of National Security Agency intercepts to justify one of their early bombings of North Vietnam.
You say that like mckinley/nixon/lbj/bush didn't do that and presidents aren't capable of that.I'm totally sure Obama was like "Well here is this super unpopular decision, let's go ahead and fabricate evidence
it was nuanced but I think I said we would strike before December 31, so do whatever you want because that's obviously not happening.I have no memory of what I was afraid of forgetting.