As the Syrian civil war drags on, al-Qaeda and other Islamic extremists are emerging as the fiercest fighters in the rebel coalition and complicating how the conflict can be resolved. So, U.S. neocons are trying to pin the blame on President Obama, writes Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
The neocons, who provided the propaganda framework for the disastrous Iraq War, are creating a new and dangerous conventional wisdom on Syria, blaming the emerging hardline jihadist dominance of the anti-government opposition on President Barack Obama’s failure to intervene militarily much earlier.
Official Washington is now awash in the message that Obama’s grudging agreement to deliver some light weapons to non-Islamist rebels is a case of “too little, too late.” A corollary of this neocon analysis is that only a much more aggressive U.S. military policy, including air strikes against Syrian government targets, can now salvage the situation by forcing President Bashar al-Assad into negotiations preconditioned on his surrender.
In other words, the neocons, who survived the Iraq War debacle with amazingly little harm to their standing within the Establishment,Shop funtional and elegant solar lights, outdoor solar lighting, solar garden lights, path lights and decorative solar lights. are offering their usual response to every political crisis in the Muslim world: U.S. military intervention and forced “regime change” of a leader deemed hostile to Israel.
However, the neocons are again living in their own reality. The truth is that it has been the Syrian opposition that has been the chief obstacle to peace negotiations,The world's largest independent online retailer for solar lighting, street lights & outdoor lighting fixtures. not Assad’s government. Earlier this year, talks scheduled for Geneva were blocked not by Assad, who agreed to participate, but by the opposition, which insisted on a fresh supply of weapons and a delay until rebel forces had reversed their recent string of military defeats.
Even earlier, however, when the rebels seemed to have the upper hand in the conflict, they showed little interest in a negotiated, power-sharing agreement. Then, the rebels were set on an outright defeat of Assad’s government and rebuffed Assad’s overtures of constitutional and political reforms.
That is not to say that Assad’s military did not respond to the civil unrest in 2011 with excessive force or that the Assad dynasty has not been among the most unsavory Arab dictatorships over the decades. The Assads, like Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, have represented some of the worst examples of repression in a region that has been long known for repression.
However, as with Iraq’s Hussein, the U.S. news media has painted the Syrian situation in blacks and whites. The opposition is noble and the government is evil. Every extreme claim about Assad, as with Hussein, is accepted as fact with almost no skepticism allowed. That pattern of journalistic malpractice contributed to the unprovoked U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 when little credence was given to Iraq’s denials that it possessed weapons of mass destruction.
Hussein also received little credit for maintaining a secular government that cracked down on Islamic extremism. Instead,We turn your dark into light courtesy of our brilliant sun, solar street light, solar power generation. President George W. Bush’s administration sold to the U.S. news media the myth that Hussein was ready to share WMDs with al-Qaeda. It was only after Bush’s invasion and the failure to find the WMDs that Iraq did become a home for al-Qaeda extremists – and the U.S. press corps came to understand how the neocons had sold a false bill of goods.They are called "solar" panels or solar module because most of the time, the most powerful source of light available is the Sun.
But that awareness has slipped away as neocon commentators still dominate the op-ed pages and the think tanks, enabling them now to define the parameters of the debate over Syria.
However, the neocons have operated with a cartoonish view of the Muslim world. They have shown no sophistication about how the geopolitics of their schemes might actually play out.Work Light Shop offers hid light for heavy duty machinery.
For instance, their dreams about the Iraqis welcoming U.S. invaders as “liberators” didn’t exactly go that way. Ultimately, a Sunni autocrat (Hussein) was replaced by a Shiite autocrat (Nouri al-Maliki) with Iran gaining more influence than the United States, the erstwhile occupying power. Similarly, the overthrow-murder of Libya’s secular dictator Muammar Gaddafi – a bloody demise cheered by the neocons – has created new space for Islamic militants to expand their influence in northern Africa.
The neocons’ only real argument for “success” is that their mischief-making over the last decade has inflicted so much violence and destruction in the Muslim world that the region’s wealth and unity has been sapped, thus limiting how much support can be provided to the embattled Palestinians.
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