There’s not going to be a resolution to this war where the Alawi simply give up. They view themselves as fighting for their very survival as a sect, and rats backed into a corner don’t surrender, they throw themselves tooth and nail at their attacker with everything at their disposal and then some. The fact that the Trump Administration is thinking the problem is Bashar Assad is just another indication that the Trumpistas don’t have the foggiest clue about what they’re doing….
]]>The Brits put a Sunni ‘king’ to rule over a majority Shi’ia Iraq. A Hashemite king to rule a majority Palestinian Jordan. The French put Alawi in charge of majority Sunni Syria, and a Christian/Sunni partnership to control majority Shi’ia Lebanon. All of those rulers and their clans/sects regard any threat as existential. The French and British made such a dog’s breakfast of the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire that the region has seen nothing but coups & civil wars for the last century.
]]>They aren’t going to give up just because the US tosses a few cruise missiles their way, because they look at the Islamist Sunni who consider the Alawites to be heretics, and what they see is genocide against them if they don’t win. Plus there’s a hundred years of grudges at play here…
If we killed Assad tomorrow with a cruise missile, all that would happen would be that some other Alawite, probably the head of the army, would step up and take his place. It wouldn’t affect things in any way. Remember, Assad is an English-educated eye doctor who wasn’t even supposed to be the next leader of Syria until his older brother got killed and he got pulled back home for a quick crash course in Leadership 101…. he may be a brutal dictator, but he’s not doing it alone.
]]>Trump won’t let these children come to the US but he doesn’t mind spending a hundred million to look butch. If they are too dangerous to be allowed to the US, it follows that their deaths should not be our concern. Since my first ancestors arrived on the American continent to avoid wars in the Netherlands in the 17th century, I think we should continue to accept refugees as they are cheaper than wars.
A few FA-18s could drop what was needed for the runway, but they would need some ECM assistance and radar suppression flights before hand, which would probably result in Russian deaths. Yeah, a B-2 would probably be the choice to do it, but you are risking the crew and the aircraft.
]]>Yeah, really pulverizing the field to the point of it not being able to function without major repairs would have required a pass with a B2 dropping bunker busters from high altitude. Clearly the Pentagon didn’t want to risk a $1.5 billion dollar airplane on the job.
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