I’m sorry, what?
WASHINGTON — President Obama on Thursday requested $500 million from Congress to train and equip what the White House is calling “appropriately vetted” members of the Syrian opposition. The request comes as the administration is trying to put some form to the president’s surprise announcement last month of plans for a $5 billion counterterrorism fund to provide training for operations in vulnerable countries in the Middle East.
The training program would be the most significant action yet by the United States in the conflict in Syria, which has spilled over the border now to Iraq, where a Qaeda-inspired insurgency is threatening the American-backed government.
Why is the idiot king more interested in toppling Assad than in helping Iraq’s government survive? Besides the fact that he’s the idiot king?
Who is going to “appropriately vet” the Syrian opposition, which includes everything from a handful of pro-Westerners to thousands of jihadists? Who? Will it not take putting some Americans on the ground in that civil war to do that?
The Syrian civil war is of interest to the United States, but it’s a sideline compared to the interests at stake in Iraq. There, the democratic government that was born out of massive American effort and expense, blood and treasure, is under mortal threat. If it goes down, Iraq disintegrates, it becomes a radical caliphate, it gets sliced up between neighboring powers including Iran. Or, if we do nothing and it survives, it will only survive with the help of the Iranians and the Syrian regime and maybe covert Russian help — making Iraq their puppet.
But Obama has pulled himself away from the World Cup to seek money that the United States does not have, to help the take down the Syrian regime, and replace it with…what, exactly?
If Obama gets his way here, America goes a bit deeper in debt to China to help midwife another Islamist regime in the Middle East.
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