They're not necessarily making chemical weapons, if I understand correctly. They're using them, including some that have been stockpiled there since they were taken out of Iraq during Desert Shield/Desert Storm.
Let's arm these guys. http://finance.townhall.com/columni...urce=thdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl
Carter's biggest problem was his incompetent leadership. With Obama, you have incompetent leadership combined with a pathological liar. It's one for the books.
American taxpayers are literally arming Al Qaeda in Syria. This should be an impeachable offense, and it coming out on 9/11? Are you fucking kidding me? And before this becomes a partisan issue, I'll point out that McCain, Corker, and some other GOP senators support this. It's funny. The government is trying to ban "assault weapons" in the US, yet it is using our money to buy military-grade weaponry for Al Qaeda in Syria. http://www.washingtonpost.com/world...cf2ed8-1b0c-11e3-a628-7e6dde8f889d_story.html
This is the "expert" that Kerry and McCain have quoted in the last week. http://www.cnn.com/2013/09/11/us/syria-elizabeth-obagy-fired/index.html?hpt=hp_t1
Great, great summation of the history and geopolitics of Syria by Andrew Sullivan. http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/09/12/syria-is-not-a-country/
No shit! this is completely ridiculous. I believe Putin has better insight into what is happening in Syria than any of our so call leaders. This war has more to do with religion and power through religion No one in the US is talking about the right thing at all! Arm Al Qaeda can't be the answer, it is an impeachable offense.
Most, if not all, of the middle eastern states had borders arbitrarily drawn by the Brits (or French) and monarchs installed. Without those borders, what would there be but one big nation the size of the former Ottoman Empire? What would the government be?
Tribal, or at least semi-feudal. And it most certainly wouldn't be one big "nation." Even under the Ottomans, power was mostly held by regional governing bodies under a suzerainty.
I don't see that working in a modern world where communication and travel to anywhere is so quick. I would think the Ottomans would want the oil revenues, for example. Someone needs to represent at the UN. And that's just the tip of that iceberg. A tribal scheme? It'd be bloody warfare all the time. All about oil
There's a wonderful book by Margaret McMillan entitled "Paris, 1919" that explains a good deal of the history. There certainly should be a Kurdistan, a larger Armenia, three countries instead of Iraq and two to four countries instead of Syria.
And yet, to what end? I have gone from being mildly pessimistic about the region to "there is no hope". You can't fix what is fundamentally broken. And, until Islam is fixed - yes all of Islam is broken in the sense that it is infected with a raging cancer that is so out of control that the entire body is in peril; until Islam is fixed, or the fundamentalism runs its course, adjusting borders, and giving certain tribes more local power, blah, blah, blah, it is all just pissing into the wind.
