War with Syria

I'm with Brikker here. Let's take a looksee here. Assad, with support from Iran, Hezbollah, Russia and China have all but won the "Syrian" (read: imported Libyan, Saudi, Afghani, etc) "rebels." All that was left was to retake Aleppo and they would be done for, and that battle is either in progress or imminent, depending on what news sites you read. The rebels have quite a sordid history, from persecuting religious minorities (burning Christian churches and killing Alawites) to staging mass killings and eating victim's lungs and stuff.

Assad is no erratic madman, he is a keen politician, and so is his main financial backer, Putin. Seeing as he has all but won he/they have absolutely no reason to resort to chemical weapons, especially seeing as doing so would mean a sure fire reaction from the West. So who profits from this? Assad? Who is now staring down the barrel of a full blown NATO war which will not end until he is either dead or exciled? Or the rebels and their Western/Gulf backers who now have a casus belli to bomb Syria back to the stoneage?

Considering the West's history at false flag operations (and there is no need to go into spooky stuff like 9/11, just stick to what is known like the Gulf of Tonkin, Iraq's WMDs and the newly declassified CIA docs showing how they engineered Mossadegh's overthrow) who are we to trust here? Personally I am sceptical.

Also, very, very little has been mentioned of the dangers of going to war with Syria. Namely, that they have the full military backing of both Hezbollah and Iran, who are almost 100% sure to retaliate in some way. Both Russia and China have also said that they will not allow a repeat of what happened to Libya to happen to Syria. The Southern Russian military command and the Black Sea fleet have been put on war alert. Just how far Russia and China are willing to go is anybody's guess.

And for what? If anyone here thinks the west and it's gulf state allies give a rats ass about human rights in Syria that they are ready to go and bomb them back to the stoneage (Gadaffi was supposed to have killed some 5k people, while the "no fly zone" killed at least 50k civilians according to NGOs) has their head so far up their arse they can lick their tonsils. This is about gas pipelines, notably the proposed Quatari-Turkey pipeline that would go through Syria, that Assad has blocked (since it would put a dent in GazProm's monopoly of pipeline gas sales to Europe, hence Putin's interest in all this).

And if anyone doubts that people would go to war over a fucking pipeline think about this. The not-so-often mentioned cause for WWI was Germany's proposed Berlin-Bagdad railway, that was to lie through the Ottoman Empire, up through Serbia, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and onwards. This pipeline would have meant that the emerging German Empire would be able to ship oil home and goods out via a land line, thereby negating the UK's dominance of the seas. The British were scared shitless of this and found the weakest link in this proposed line: Serbia. Gavrilo Princip, who killed Arch-Duke Franz Ferdinand was a member of the Black Hand, a group that had strong ties, and financial backing from the British military authorities. He acted on their behalf to cause a rift in railway plans, only the UK did not expect things to escalate as much as they did.

We could well be staring down the barrel of WWIII here and for what? Sweet fuck all!

And then there is what tad10 says, all you pro-war folks, whether you have served in your nation's military or not, remember this. Those Al-Qaeda/Taliban/Al-Whatever guys who kept shooting and killing your friends over in Afghanistan, and to a lesser extent in Iraq? They will be your brothers in arms if you go to war in Syria. But hey, you already gave them Libya and it's oil wealth with which to fuel (both literally and financially) their ongoing campaign to kill infidels and turn secular Arab regimes into Sharia-law religious states.

I can understand why certain people in the very top levels of powerpolitics and business would like to see that happen, as they can both use the time tested divide and conquer strategy to keep the Middle-East fragmented, but then they can also make a fuck ton of money by selling them (inferior) Western weapons, and then using that as a perfect excuse to then use more powerful Western weapons to bomb them back again should they not do their master's bidding (while sending the bill to the US/EU's taxpayer. However, I have a hard time understanding how the average Joe can cheer this on, at least if they ever bother to get their news from some other places than Fox/CNN/Sky.

At the end of the day it's not just Ahmed regular back in whereveristan who gets to see his family slaughtered and his country destroyed, it's also Joe regular back in the West who gets to see his friends killed while serving for another pointless war and see his tax dollars get poured into this shit instead of being used to do something constructive, like educate people, or repair your country's crumbling infrastructure.

One day us regular folks are going to wake up in a ruined, bankrupted world wondering what happened to the prosperity that our fathers enjoyed but by then it will be too late. But don't worry, nothing to see here, just watch the warporn on Fox while you munch on your Hot Pockets and everything will be fine. Just let the good guys in government take your rights and your freedoms away all to keep you safe from those evil terrorists who want to kill you (because their country and family were destroyed by yours).