Damascus didn't even blink ~ wasted Trumponian incompetent bravado

TIME Magazine reports by Rebecca Collard: "mission un-accomplished!"

Syrian government and Bashar al Assad are, hmmm, like,... "oh well".....after the Trumponian failed missile attacks with England and France.

Here's a Tweet that even @realDonaldTrump can write without misspellings: "Syria attack was a waste of time and money."

At 9 a.m. exactly, the Twitter account of the Syrian presidency posted a video of Bashar al-Assad leisurely walking in to work, soft spring light behind him and briefcase in hand.

“Morning of steadfastness,” read the tweet.

Since earlier Saturday, state television showed peaceful scenes in Damascus, home to at least one of the targets of this morning’s airstrikes on Syria. 

Civilians flashed the victory sign with their hands as they passed the camera.

In fact, a Syrian army spokesperson appeared saying that “air defence systems effectively blocked the aggressor’s rockets,” shooting most of them down, despite the Pentagon saying that more than 100 rockets hit their targets, in the first coordinated Western military intervention against the Syrian government.

“Three major powers have just wasted millions of dollars and surely days of planning for nothing,” said Rami Nameh, an accountant from his home in the city of Homs. “This attack won’t change anything.”

Last April, the U.S. sent cruise missiles into an airbase in Homs province after a sarin attack on the town of Khan Sheikhoun that killed more than 80 people. 

Yet, just a few days later, planes were again taking off from the base.

Like others, 21-year-old student Hiba Idriss woke up to the thud of the air defense systems in Damascus early Saturday morning.

“Those 100 plus missiles that were fired against Syria today will have the same effect on our country as last year’s 58 tomahawks had: nothing,” said Idriss from her home in the Mezzeh neighborhood of the capital.

“I watched what happened,” said Mohammed of the strikes. He didn’t want to give his last name, fearing reprisal from the government. A medical student, he treated victims of the alleged chemical attack on Douma. “We thought the response would have been bigger.”

The Syrian foreign ministry called the attack a “blatant violation of the international law” and said it was an attempt to derail the investigation into the alleged chemical attack on April 7, which Donald Trump quickly blamed on the Syrian government. In a statement circulated to local media, the Syrian foreign ministry also downplayed the attack.

Syria, and its ally Russia, have denied the government used chemical weapons in Douma and said the opposition fabricated the attack to stave a government victory in the eastern Ghouta suburbs of Damascus.

After an attack on eastern Ghouta in 2013 that killed more than 1,000 people, Assad agreed to give up all his chemical weapons as then U.S. President Barack Obama threatened military actions. 

Nevertheless, the UN has documented dozens of chemical attackssince then and opposition activists claim the government has carried out hundreds of attacks with chlorine, which isn’t illegal to possess but is prohibited for use as a weapon. However, it has been used repeatedly in Syria with little more than condemnation from the international community.

Assad has now claimed victory in eastern Ghouta, pushing the rebels into the shrinking territory they control in the north.

“Assad is winning, we all were witnesses to this fact,” said Idriss. “Even the opposition could see that the Syrian Arab Army is winning.”

Demonstrators took to the streets of the capital against the strikes, hoisting Syrian flags and pictures of Assad. In what looked more like celebrations than protests, some danced alongside Syrian soldiers in the streets.

“Look around you,” one man told a reporter. “Life is normal. Where are Trump’s genius missiles?”

A small girl sung a patriotic song while she held the Syrian flag.

“We should teach our children the importance of our victories,” said the reporter addressing the camera, “and our strong stand against this aggression.”

The station also showed police officers ready to enter Douma, as the last of the opposition was evacuated from the area. The rebel group that controlled the town made a deal to surrender in return for safe passage out, just hours after the alleged chemical attack on April 7.

For many in Syrian opposition, and for those who suffered the chemical attack one week earlier, the strikes were welcomed, but not enough.

Like thousands of others in the town, the medical student, Mohammed, has now been evacuated north to areas under rebel control as the government retakes the eastern Ghouta suburbs. Mohammed says he doesn’t think the strikes will have any impact unless they come along with an enforced agreement to remove all chemical weapons from Syria. The U.S. says it has crippled Syria’s chemical weapons program, but Mohammed says the strikes were too little, too late.

“We won’t forget that we lost our city and our homes,” said Mohammed. “And maybe we will never go back to Douma.”

Aleppo and Cambodia

Frankly, when my husband and I visited Cambodia in 2011, we were both surprised when our guide explained the reason the evil Khmer Rouge gained such a stranglehold on the nation during their reign of terror, known as the "Killing Fields". She told us the massive slaughters of Cambodians by their own people, led by a cruel dictator named Po Pot (1925-1998), happened because the United States left Vietnam in chaos and the Khmer Rouge filled the void in Cambodia. This logic was beyond my understanding. Weren't the Cambodia people victimized by the leader Po Pot and his followers? I didn't think the Americans had much, if anything, to do with his murderous campaign.  

Po Pot, leader of the Khmer Rouge (1925-1998)

Well, now CNN is reporting that the lack of US involvement in Syria has, likewise, led to a leadership vacuum in the Middle East and this resulted in the tragic fall of Aleppo.  

When the US steps back, terrible actors fill the void
Barack Obama became president vowing to extricate the United States from the Middle East. He tried to stay out of Syria and even sounded proud of it. His failure to act even after warning of a "red line" if Assad used chemical weapons -- which Assad has continued to do -- sent a signal to other powers that the field was open. The vacuum created by the US was quickly filled by Russia, Iran and Arab governments. Now, we see not only the calamity of Aleppo, but hundreds of thousands killed, millions of refugees in Europe, the rise of the extreme anti-immigrant right and the empowering of Russia and Iran. Obama's policy did not just fail. It allowed this worst-case scenario to materialize.

Huh? Well, these two logic scenarios just don't make any sense. Obviously, I'm not an international scholar, but in both tragedies, the carnage was caused by the nation's governments turning on its own people. Po Pot was Cambodian- he murdered millions of Cambodians. Similarly, President Assad, the evil leader of Syria, is murdering millions of his nation's citizens.

In both tragedies, the risk of intervening in Cambodia or, decades later, in  Syria, would have had the same consequences. In other words, to prevent both massacres, the weird logic called for Americans to be interventionists. When Cambodian people became victims of Po Pot, they had the power, by sheer numbers, to destroy the evil man. Eventually, the Vietnamese army intervened in Cambodia to end the carnage, but only one person was ever tried and executed for the Khmer Rouge terror. Unbelievably, even Po Pot died in a hospital, albeit under somewhat mysterious circumstances.  

In Syria, one man is responsible for the genocide of millions of his own people. Although Assad is propped up by Russian President Putin, the fact is, the 12.5 million displaced Syrians who are victims of this alliance had the capacity to overtake the power base in the capital, in Damascus.

Of course, I sincerely regret sounding like my intention is to somehow blame the innocent victims who were murdered by Po Pot in Cambodia and by Assad in Syria. That is certainly not the purpose of this blog. Rather, I'm failing to understand a logic whereby, both the guide who spoke to us in Cambodia and now the CNN pundit, are in agreement about how lack of American involvement contributed to two international genocides. 

Perhaps I'm conjuring up an image of waves of humans creating an avalanche of unified resistance to evil leaders, regardless of how many get massacred in the process. Yet, in both countries, in my opinion, the lack of populist opposition has caused exactly the same outcomes.

Moreover, potential American involvement in Cambodia post the end of the Vietnam War (or, as the Vietnamese call it "the War of American Aggression") would have contributed to even more casualties. In Syria, an American intervention would have involved our nation's military and probably even roused more support for terrorism from ISIS and other radical religious zealots.  

Therefore, I disagree with the CNN report about the vacuum created by lack of American involvement in Syria contributing to the fall of Aleppo.  

These are the facts: President Assad is responsible for the cruel destruction of his own, once beautiful, Syrian nation. In Cambodia, it was Po Pot who murdered his own people during the reign of the Khmer Rouge during the "Killing Fields". Two individual and mortal men who were both motivated by evil to destroy their own people.  Period.

In my logic, Americans had little, if anything, to do with either one.

Russia can't save Assad - Americans must keep up pressure to save Syria

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad can't hold out forever.  
Looks like Russians can't prop him up for much longer.

Even if Assad is forced to negotiate a compromise cease fire to finally end the killing, the fact is, the millions of refugees living in camps, as a result of Assad's war, will petition for reparations.

The Christian Science Monitor is reporting (meanwhile, main stream US media isn't reporting this story, yet, thanks CSM)

:
Can Syria's Assad withstand latest battlefield setbacks?

A sudden uptick in coordination among Assad's regional rivals and signs of discord in his own ranks are raising anew the question of whether he will be forced to compromise to stay in power.

BEIRUT, LEBANON — Having clung to power for four years amid an armed uprising, the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is being buffeted by a series of battlefield setbacks that could place fresh strains on its internal cohesion.

While there are no indications yet that Mr. Assad plans to drop his hard-line strategy against the armed opposition, a recent flurry of reports of suspicious deaths and disappearances point to possible tensions developing within the regime.

If the trend of rebel successes continues – placing ever more pressure on an already exhausted and overstretched Syrian Army – those reported internal stresses might squeeze the regime into finally considering a negotiated settlement, some observers say.

The calculation, says Robert Ford, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington and US ambassador to Syria between 2010 and 2014, is a matter of cutting losses and holding on to a core region that supports the regime.

“The progression of events will lead over … a period of months to different elements in the regime beginning to calculate whether or not it makes sense to continue being ground down or to begin to negotiate some kind of deal in the regime’s favor while they still have some relative advantages in terms of holding some populated areas and air power,” Mr. Ford says.

In the past month, rebel factions – fueled in part by the stepped-up coordination and support of Assad’s regional rivals – have won a string of victories, seizing the ancient town of Bosra ash-Sham in southern Syria, capturing the long-sought prize of Idlib, a provincial capital in the north, and then grabbing the Nasib border post, the last functioning crossing on the Syria-Jordan border. Furthermore, regime offensives launched in the southern provinces of Deraa and Quneitra and Aleppo in the north have proved unsuccessful.

“The last few weeks have been very tough for them,” says a United Nations diplomat. “It’s difficult to tell how they will react in the coming months, but the [hard-line] mindset hasn’t changed yet.”

'Diminishing cohesion' in ruling circles

Still, the setbacks coincide with the rumors about internal feuding within Assad’s circles. Last month, Mohammed Assad, a relative of the president, was shot dead in the regime stronghold of Qardaha, reportedly over a dispute about money and influence. Last week, another Assad cousin, Monzer al-Assad, was arrested on the direct orders of the president for “illegal activities.” It remains unclear whether that alludes to common criminal practices or plotting against the regime.

Hafez Makhlouf, a cousin of the president and a key hardliner who headed the powerful General Security Directorate in Damascus, was reported last September to have been dismissed from his post, and later left the country for Belarus or Russia, where his father, Mohammed, lives. Official Syrian media said Mr. Makhlouf was subject to a routine personnel change to reflect a promotion.

Another incident that spurred intense speculation involves Rustom Ghazale, the head of Syrian political intelligence, who was alleged to have been badly beaten in February following a heated argument with Rafik Shehadeh, the head of military intelligence.  The source of the argument is said to have been differences over Iran's increasingly influential role in helping prop up the Assad regime.

Syrian media said Mr. Ghazale had been wounded in fighting with rebels in the south and was recovering in the hospital. Accounts from other sources have varied, claiming he subsequently died from his injuries or remains on life support. It was widely reported, including in media supportive of the Assad regime, that the Syrian president had dismissed both Ghazale and Mr. Shehadeh from their posts because of the fracas.

“There are more and more signs of diminishing cohesion within the ruling circles in Damascus,” says Ford.
Regional coordination

Still, there has been no shortage of predictions about Assad’s imminent fall or reports of the deaths or defections of senior regime figures that ultimately turned out to be false. The impenetrability of the Assad regime has long been a source of frustration to world leaders, diplomats, politicians, and analysts seeking to understand the thinking in Damascus. So far, Assad has defied forecasts of pundits who predicted that his regime would collapse soon after protests broke out in March 2011, instead surviving a brutal conflict that has spawned extremist Islamic groups and left some 220,000 people dead.

The regime’s recent setbacks in Idlib and the south are due in part to Assad’s regional enemies – including Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, and Jordan – agreeing on the need to unite rebel factions to oust Assad, according to analysts and regional diplomats.

“Before you had four forces fighting each other – [Al Qaeda-affiliated] Jabhat al-Nusra, the Islamic State, moderate rebels, and the regime,” says a Western diplomat based in the Middle East. “But now everyone is ganging up on the regime, and that has changed the whole dynamic. It has been extremely sudden.”

The Assad regime insists it is fighting “terrorists” and has shown little willingness to engage in serious negotiations with the opposition. The opposition demands that any negotiations must include an acceptance that Assad can no longer stay in power, a condition unacceptable to the regime.

“The regime’s negotiating position is extremely rigid,” says Andrew Tabler, a Syria expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “So I think people are thinking that we have to work on changing Bashar’s calculus.”

If the rebel forces in the north and south are able to build on their recent gains and advance toward Damascus, the regime will come under tremendous pressure to find an alternative not only to its hard-line policies, but perhaps an alternative to Assad himself. The coming months will tell, but there are plenty of skeptics.

“The regime is not capable of changing.… It is so barren of initiative that it cannot come up with any creative thinking,” says a former Syrian official speaking on condition of anonymity. “They don’t want to negotiate under duress because they think it is a sign of weakness. But when they feel strong, they don’t want to negotiate because they don’t feel they need to.”

Another incident that spurred intense speculation involves Rustom Ghazale, the head of Syrian political intelligence, who was alleged to have been badly beaten in February following a heated argument with Rafik Shehadeh, the head of military intelligence. The source of the argument is said to have been differences over Iran's increasingly influential role in helping prop up the Assad regime.

Syrian media said Mr. Ghazale had been wounded in fighting with rebels in the south and was recovering in the hospital. Accounts from other sources have varied, claiming he subsequently died from his injuries or remains on life support. It was widely reported, including in media supportive of the Assad regime, that the Syrian president had dismissed both Ghazale and Mr. Shehadeh from their posts because of the fracas.

“There are more and more signs of diminishing cohesion within the ruling circles in Damascus,” says Ford.

Regional coordination

Still, there has been no shortage of predictions about Assad’s imminent fall or reports of the deaths or defections of senior regime figures that ultimately turned out to be false. The impenetrability of the Assad regime has long been a source of frustration to world leaders, diplomats, politicians, and analysts seeking to understand the thinking in Damascus. So far, Assad has defied forecasts of pundits who predicted that his regime would collapse soon after protests broke out in March 2011, instead surviving a brutal conflict that has spawned extremist Islamic groups and left some 220,000 people dead.

The regime’s recent setbacks in Idlib and the south are due in part to Assad’s regional enemies – including Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, and Jordan – agreeing on the need to unite rebel factions to oust Assad, according to analysts and regional diplomats.

“Before you had four forces fighting each other – [Al Qaeda-affiliated] Jabhat al-Nusra, the Islamic State, moderate rebels, and the regime,” says a Western diplomat based in the Middle East. “But now everyone is ganging up on the regime, and that has changed the whole dynamic. It has been extremely sudden.”

The Assad regime insists it is fighting “terrorists” and has shown little willingness to engage in serious negotiations with the opposition. The opposition demands that any negotiations must include an acceptance that Assad can no longer stay in power, a condition unacceptable to the regime.

“The regime’s negotiating position is extremely rigid,” says Andrew Tabler, a Syria expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “So I think people are thinking that we have to work on changing Bashar’s calculus.”

If the rebel forces in the north and south are able to build on their recent gains and advance toward Damascus, the regime will come under tremendous pressure to find an alternative not only to its hard-line policies, but perhaps an alternative to Assad himself. 

The coming months will tell, but there are plenty of skeptics.

“The regime is not capable of changing.… It is so barren of initiative that it cannot come up with any creative thinking,” says a former Syrian official speaking on condition of anonymity. 

“They don’t want to negotiate under duress because they think it is a sign of weakness. But when they feel strong, they don’t want to negotiate because they don’t feel they need to.”

Julie's note - It appears that providing US military assistance to Syrian rebels may have had an impact, but the Syrian people still need enormous help to regain their lost homeland.  (When Assad eventually falls, will Russia take in him and his family?)

Evil rampage in Peshawar Pakistan to demoralize entire nation and innocents suffer

Evil Taliban: We Slaughtered 100+ Kids Because Their Parents Helped America. Militants attacked an army-run school in Peshawar claiming the massacre of children is retaliation for U.S.-backed efforts to crush a group that's helped protect Al Qaeda. I suspect this diabolical slaughter is also retaliation against the effectiveness of US led drone strikes against Al Qaeda conducted throughout Pakistan and other places.  

Obviously, Pakistan has been completely ineffective dealing with security in their own nation. Theirs is a failed nation where terrorism grows like germs on a human carcass.

It's a stomach turning sequence of horrors. An evil rampage in Peshawar, Pakistan proves beyond any doubt that the Islamic terrorists must be annhilated soon. Otherwise, Al Qaeda and other radical spin off groups will execute their unbridled heinous slaughters of innocents, without any consideration for the toll their killing takes on civilization. Eventually, unless these attackers are annihilated, they'll continue to build their evil critical mass, like an astrological black hole sucks in energy, until they consume all of us, regardless of where we are.

What else are these disgusting evil doers capable of doing?  

When Islamic Taliban radicals consume innocent children to retaliate against the Pakistan military, what else is left in the evil pot they piss in, as they rampage their gruesome intentions to destroy humanity?

Some Americans have a false sense of protection from this kind of inhumanity. They may feel like our natioal borders protect us from this kind of inhumanity. Those are naive beliefs. We must never forget September 11, 2001, because it can and likely will happen again, in some other, unknown form. That's the reason the Islamic extremists must be annihilated.

Undoubtedly. the victims of terrorism have the most at stake for destroying the perpetrators of the inhuman evil. This violent evil is infecting Islamic nations faster than the Ebola virus is killing innocents in Western Africa. Surely, those who hate terrorists and the horrendous actions they inspire must outnumber those who fall into their evil extremist vortex?  For example, millions of people living in refugee camps in Syria must outnumber those who are protecting evil President Assad in his Damascus, Syrian palace? Certainly, the numbers of innocent people who live in Pakistan outnumber the terrorists. Nevertheless, the extremists are ravaging entire generations and taking their own civilization down with them.  Even the timing of the Peshawar school attacks were deliberate, to coincide with Christian Advent and Christmas. 

Evil works like that.

I don't know how to annihilate Islamic extremists, except to kill them. But, what I do know is this. If these extremist evil doers will stop at absolutely nothing to take down their own civilizations, then we don't want to know what horrors they are creating to kill all the rest of us.