The Syria Analysis Thread

10 posts

Niccolo and Donkey
Reino Gikman

Face it - Assad cannot realistically hope to put the sunni genie back into the bottle.

The western military intervention, a blessing in disguise, may speed up his inevitable defeat. Partitioning of Syria along the ethnic lines will help avoid the prolonged national misery.

Niccolo and Donkey
Hey, if you wanna side with Salafism, Saudi Arabia, and the perpetrators of 9/11 it's your choice. The genie was released by the USA, its brother-in-arms.

But thanks for siding with the genocide of Alawites and Christians.
Niccolo and Donkey
supplanter
[​IMG]
Team Zissou
That's not what will happen. What will happen is the Christians will be chased off, the Shia will be slaughtered and the low-IQ Sunni rabble will get the run of the place. Syria will become Yemen.
Bronze Age Pervert
Reino Gikman

Assad was a reputable player but the man is in a trap now. His modern army is incapable of defeating the rebels and he cannot possibly negotiate because that would mean exile and teh end of his personal power.

I am pretty sure there is a growing realization within the regime that Assad needs to be replaced. Not to win the war, which is impossible in a country effectively split in two, but to negotiate a partition acceptable to alawites.

President Camacho
This is the only way to rationalize the Pentagon's ambitions... by their actions beginning with the Iraq invasion, they are proving that they still don't take Sunni terrorism and insurgency seriously.

It's an interesting twist: for the past twelve years we've been warned by pundits and media mongers that the Muslims want to "turn back the clock" to the seventh century, to the Caliphate, and how horrible this would be for America. What the Pentagon seems to have decided (if in fact there is some "deep government" department hashing out a coherent plan-- it would be much scarier if there was not) is that sending the Middle East back to the seventh century is just the right medicine to better exploit the region.

The problem of course will arise when Sunni Islam gathers the resources and leverage to embark on its ultimate goal of establishing united caliphate from the Euphrates to the Nile and beyond. But the policy wonks may have calculated that too many factors-- age-old tribal fissures, Turkish ambitions (for a Sultanate , not a Caliphate), the infiltration of Western ideas, etc-- is sufficient enough to kill any such movement in the cradle. And they're probably correct.
Team Zissou

I think the Pentagon just goes along to get along at this point. The US foreign policy establishment is run by ideologues, and I'm betting it's heavily weighted with women and homosexuals.