The Archives

Iran Gets Missile Shield
  21 Dec 2012     3:36 pm      Michael Fell

Barack Obama’s administration, despite all the blood and treasure America spent in Iraq, somehow managed to fail in reaching a Status of Forces Agreement with the Iraqi government.  That means that the United States, after overthrowing Saddam Hussein, and freeing a country uniquely located on the most strategically important piece of real estate in the Middle East does not have strategic residual forces within Iraq.
That failure has allowed Iran to fly freely over Iraqi airspace, prolonging the Syrian civil war by delivering arms to Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad.  Month after …

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Is Syria Obama’s Biggest Bungle?
  15 Oct 2012     8:18 am      William Teach

The Washington Post’s Jackson Diehl thinks so
Mitt Romney and congressional Republicans are doing their best to portray the assault on the U.S. Consulate in Libya and its aftermath as a signal foreign policy disaster for Barack Obama. But my bet is that when historians look back on Obama’s mistakes in the last four years, they will focus on something entirely different: his catastrophic mishandling of the revolution in Syria.
The deaths of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans in Benghazi were a calamity — but those losses were mainly the …

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Obama Conference Call Ignoring Administration’s Syria Stagnation
  25 Jul 2012     12:56 am      Warner Todd Huston

President Obama’s reelection team held a conference call recently. The call was meant as an attack on Mitt Romney’s trip abroad, a trip meant to burnish his foreign policy creds. But one thing that team Obama seemed to want to ignore was Obama’s own foreign policy failures in Syria. And so the civil war in that far away lands was practically ignored by Obama’s advisers.
In fact, Obama’s entire policy on Syria seems to have at the very least become stalled. It is likely he’s putting off any further decisions until …

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Shocking Similarities Concealed
  3 Jun 2012     7:14 pm      Michael Fell

In a televised address to parliament, President Bashar Assad said foreign-backed terrorists and extremists were to blame for the massacres going on in Syria. Despite suspicions expressed by the UN that Assad’s forces are responsible for the Houla massacre, Assad denied it. Syrian opposition condemned his comments as lies.
Assad described protestors as paid killers, ridiculing freedom demonstrators as people not truly looking for reform. The opposition is seeking reform in a country where expressing dissent often leads directly to arrest and torture. They contend that Assad has offered nothing but …

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Memory Hole: Vogue Scrubs Syrian Fawning Article of Syrian Dictator’s Wife
  27 Apr 2012     4:04 pm      Warner Todd Huston

Look nuthin’ up my sleeve, presto! In a typical exercise of Old Media “ethics,” with the flip of the proverbial switch, Vogue erased from the Internet tubes its embarrassing puff piece on the wife of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.
In 2011, to much international derision, Vogue published The Rose of the Desert, a puff piece on Asma al-Assad, the wife of the dictator. Unfortunately for Vogue, almost immediately after the piece was published that February, the whole Assad facade began to crumble in a most precipitous way as the revolts and …

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Regime Changing
  26 Aug 2011     10:02 am      Courtney Messerschmidt

Perhaps the most charming charm Great Satan has exhibited (aside from angling her body diplopolitaire’ to create other angles) is the killer cool heap of trashed out despots, dicts and autocrats she’s tossed on the junk heap since the new millennium broke unto us.
The guy with one eye (hot rumours whisper he’s a moped enthusiast) Mullah Omar, that S’Ddam cat, President General for Life Pervez, and now Colonel Khadaffy. Not counting cats in Pyramidland or the Tunisian Squeeze.
Let’s just cut right to it, shall we?
Libyarvention made a great deal …

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Would Ottomans Do Syria?
  13 Jul 2011     12:54 pm      Courtney Messerschmidt

Janissaries!
Since the traditional despot remedial activity in Syria seems to be an endless sexercise in futility (aren’t they all? Why even tolerate their existence?) and a destabilizing factor in regional stability  – What if – the Ottomans decided to do Syria?

GsGf’s Ottomanic expert Dr Soner Çağaptay (Oh! He got game bay bee!) shares re estabbing the ancient Imperium would be totally off the hook y’all! 
“…Growing unrest in Syria is increasingly spilling over the border into Turkey. So far 12,000 Syrian refugees have crossed into Turkey, and with a crackdown on …

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Syrian Delirium
  2 Jul 2011     11:14 am      Courtney Messerschmidt

Suriya al- Kubra!
Syria – punches far above her weight class in diplopolititary deals. Instead of cool stuff like Hooters, literacy rates off the charts or creating advanced avionics – Bashar Bay Bee follows poppa Assad’s script utilizing asymmetrical assets creating a slave trading Syria, abusing Palestinians as a strategic minority resource, fiddling about with new clear WMD witchcraft, hanging with the most wanted terrorists in the world while maybe or maybe not enabling official enemies like Hiz’B’Allah with wmd delivery systems and frightened of Facebook.
So, since the …

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