Senator John McCain and professional Senator John McCain imitator Lindsey Graham are upset that the current administration has no intention of deposing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and they want you to know it. In statements released by both McCain and Graham, the Trump administration’s decision to focus on defeating ISIS instead of engaging in another full-fledged regime change war has “deeply disturbed” the two Republican senators who have built their entire careers on jingoistic advocacy of regime change wars.
“I am deeply disturbed by statements today by our Secretary of State and Ambassador to the United Nations regarding the future of Bashar al-Assad in Syria,” McCain’s statement says. “Their suggestion that Assad can stay in power appears to be just as devoid of strategy as President Obama’s pronouncements that ‘Assad must go.’”
What McCain’s slowly dying brain fails to comprehend is that choosing not to invest trillions of dollars and countless lives in a regime change invasion that would likely require many years of commitment and could lead to a direct military confrontation with the nuclear-armed Russia is itself a complete strategy. Leaving the Syrian government and its allies to defeat the international terrorist factions still trying to overthrow the Assad government does not require any further strategy. How much “strategy” does it take to allow Norway and Canada to retain their leaders and manage their own affairs? That’s how much strategy is required in choosing not to overthrow the undisputed leader of a sovereign nation. It is a very American elitist attitude to think that any “strategy” is required for allowing a sovereign nation to manage its own affairs.
“[T]he Syrian people cannot decide the fate of Assad or the future of their country when they are being slaughtered by Assad’s barrel bombs, Putin’s aircraft, and Iran’s terrorist proxies,” McCain’s statement continues. “U.S. policy must reflect such basic facts.”
Those “basic facts”, of course, exist only in McCain’s dementia-addled mind. Assad may be a dictator, but dictators don’t deliberately exterminate the population of their nations, and he doesn’t enjoy slaughtering civilians so much that he invited his buddy Putin to join in. If Putin actually had some sexual fetish for the gratuitous bombing of civilians, there are many much closer to home that he could act out his perversions upon without flying all the way over to Syria. In reality, the only fighting forces still trying to oust Assad are extremist terrorist factions, and civilians have been killed by both sides of the violence. The best way for America to help end the violence is to stop deliberately arming those terrorist factions and actively perpetuating the warfare, which is what it has unquestionably been doing.
Lindsey Graham’s statement called the Trump administration’s decision “crushing news to the Syrian opposition and to our allies throughout the Middle East. I fear it is a grave mistake.”
Oh no! Nobody wants to deliver “crushing news” to the violent jihadist opposition in Syria! It might make them sad! My god, who’s gonna tell Al Nusra?
I hate neocons. I hate them more than I hate Trump; his administration might be obscenely violent but at least it’s fighting against terrorists instead of supporting them, and it’s not engaging in the infrastructure-crumbling, state-collapsing, refugee-creating policies of regime change invasions that cause exponentially more death, destruction and suffering than the idiotic “war on terror”. I hate them even more than I hate the hawkish establishment Democrats, because at least they have the decency to hide their war profiteering bloodlust by pretending to care about some social justice policies that I can get behind. Neocons are the worst of all worlds, and as far as I’m concerned their ilk can’t die off quickly enough.
