And now training and air in Libya Syria...

Yet another story that doesn’t inspire me out of Syria:

A plan to pro­vide mil­i­tary train­ing to the Syr­ian rebels fight­ing the Assad régime and sup­port them with air and naval power is being drawn up by an inter­na­tional coalition

This is a bad idea

The head of Britain’s armed forces, Gen­eral Sir David Richards, hosted a con­fi­den­tial meet­ing in Lon­don a few weeks ago attended by the mil­i­tary chiefs of France, Turkey, Jor­dan, Qatar and the UAE, and a three-​star Amer­i­can gen­eral, in which the strat­egy was dis­cussed at length.

this is a Very bad idea

Britain, France and the US have agreed that none of their coun­tries would have “boots on the ground” to help the rebels. The train­ing camps can be set up in Turkey. How­ever, the use of air and mar­itime force would, in itself, be highly con­tro­ver­sial and likely to lead to charges that, as in Libya, the West is car­ry­ing out régime change by force.

So we have a group of peo­ple now heav­ily influ­enced by Islamists, with Chem­i­cal weapons that we are teach­ing them to “secure” chem­i­cal stock­piles and now we are going to train them, arm them and pro­vide air and navel power for them?

I’m sure folks think this is going to mean that the “New Syria” is going to be a much bet­ter place where Islamists will be weak, Sharia law will not be enforced and reli­gious minori­ties will thrive.

And it goes with­out say­ing these fight­ers when the war is over cer­tainly will not be a threat to the west or to our peo­ple on the ground when all is set and done. In fact I sus­pect it will be so safe we won’t even have to arm state depart­ment secu­rity there.

I imag­ine these same folks that brought you the “New Libya” have con­sulted with many experts who have assured them this it will work out. It unfor­tu­nate for­mer Ambas­sador Chris Stevens in unavail­able to give them a pointer or two.

We’ve seen this movie before, it doesn’t end well.

Update: Just a reminder, we only learned post elec­tion and post Beng­hazi that our admin­is­tra­tion was send­ing arms to the Libyans who even­tu­ally killed Stevens. If this goes where I think it will, I sup­pose we’ll hear the full story after the 2016 elec­tion when it can’t hurt the cur­rent Sec of State.

How did Steve Mac­Don­ald of the Grok put it?

“Only the News that’s fit to print, when it’s fit to print it.”