U.S. only training 60 Syrian fighters, far below expectations

[Eugene]

Source: Reuters

World | Tue Jul 7, 2015 11:15am EDT

U.S. only training 60 Syrian fighters, far below expectations

WASHINGTON | BY PHIL STEWART AND DAVID ALEXANDER

The United States was only training about 60 Syrian opposition fighters to battle Islamic State as of July 3, far below expectations, Defense Secretary Ash Carter told Congress on Tuesday, citing rigorous U.S. vetting of recruits.

The program, which launched in May in Jordan and Turkey, was designed to train as many as 5,400 fighters a year and seen as a test of President Barack Obama's strategy of engaging local partners to combat extremists.

Carter's acknowledgement of the low number of recruits will give ammunition to critics who say Obama's strategy is too limited to have any influence on Syria's brutal civil war.

"Given the poor numbers of recruited and trained Syrian fighters thus far, I am doubtful we can achieve our goal of training a few thousand this year," said Republican Senator John McCain, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

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Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/07/07/us-mideast-crisis-syria-usa-idUSKCN0PH1IW20150707

[Faux pas]

1. Why is it our job

anyway?

[Fred Sanders]

2. As predicted, Obama threw the Warhawks a bone to all chew on together....like he did Ukraine and

Libya, and any number of wars his Presidency avoided.

Pretending that these "Syrian fighters" are friends of America is funny.

[leveymg]

3. We don't do it because the Qataris do it for us, and the Saudis/GCC pay for most of it.

Going back to early 2011 when all this started in Libya and Syria, the boots on the ground have been Qatari, with some Egyptians and a few British and French special forces. The US basically stepped out of the way and arms were handed out by Qatar and Turkey to the most effective fighters, various factions of al-Qaeda. When the operation had taken enough ground in Libya, Syria and central Iraq , it morphed into ISIS.

These are essentially Sunni Jihadists funded by the Saudis and Gulf States waging a holy war against Shi'ia Iran and its allies. Of course, none of this would have happened if at any time we had gone after the funders of al-Qaeda in Riyadh and Doha. Even right after 9/11, we never went after the bankers of the Sunni Holy Wars. Why is that?

[MisterP]

4. that's how we usually like to run things: we only stepped in with the Contras after Falklands

in fact after Boland the Enterprise only plugged into the One Big Cartel directly in Mexico, while "hero of anti-imperialism" Noriega was the "cut-out" for that (don't Google how Spadafora died)

the "Iran" part of Iran-Contra was partly due to desperation--but even that was only turned into a public issue (despite 8 years of reporting) because Eugene Hasenfus resisted his fellow mercs' jibes and packed a 'chute: otherwise it would've been a short "Massive Corruption Exposed Safely in the Past, President Bush Sorta Involved" blurb after the Kerry Committee and lost amid Panama and the S&L disaster

[leveymg]

5. I'd move the timeline for that back to '76 when DCI Bush and Prince Turki negotiated the Safari Club

deal that set up the apparatus to privatize covert ops not approvable under Carter. The Safari Club, as you know, set up BCCI as the primary funding vehicle for a number of joint ops, including AQ Khan, the Saudi-ISI-Egyptian paramilitary (soon to become the Mujahadin in Afghanistan) run out of Pakistan. Cong. Charlie Wilson (D-TX) and the Dallas-Houston White Russian community was also part of that and the rest of the not-CIA black operations run against the Russians for the rest of the decade by George H.W. Bush and his Democratic allies and minions.

Most of all, the Bush and Bin Laden families made a lot of money out all this, especially the S&L "disaster." Wonder how that part escaped scrutiny with all those "investigating" committees going on. Don't Google Republic National Bank.

[MisterP]

6. don't forget Nugan Hand!

there was actually a big Gleichschaltung in the late 70s: Team B, the Baptist Coup, the "Sagebrush Rebellion"/Prop 13, RW talk radio, Murdoch buying everything he could, "real science" certifying beyond all doubt that various forms of pollution were okay and that only crystal-waving hippies were upset by Love Canal

a lot of this was tied to the Powell Memo that said the Establishment had to be defended on all fronts