Obama: Yep, We’re Training the Syrian Rebels Whom I Said in August Couldn’t Be Trained!
09.19.2014 | Matt Fox | 0
Late Thursday, President Obama emerged to speak to reporters for a whopping four minutes about his ISIS strategy. His main objective was to communicate how pleased he was to see that Congress had approved his plan to train and arm the Syrian rebels for this fight. Unfortunately, his remarks came off as disingenous at best…and completely discombobulated at worst. That’s because it was barely five weeks ago that he said this in a New York Times interview with Thomas Friedman:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZkV1f4y-2k“This idea that we could provide some light arms or even more sophisticated arms to what was essentially an opposition made up of former doctors, farmers, pharmacists and so forth, and that they were going to be able to battle not only a well-armed state but also a well-armed state backed by Russia, backed by Iran, a battle-hardened Hezbollah, that was never in the cards.”
Okay, so…it’s in the cards now, I take it? The fact that Obama has done a complete 180 on this one in such a compressed amount of time can only indicate that he hasn’t got the faintest idea what he’s doing, and is desperately trying to come up with something to save face. Furthermore, the authority to arm the Syrian opposition has only been approved by Congress through this December. That’s only three months, and the approval was granted on the same day that Joint Chiefs Chairman Martin Dempsey admitted that it could take an entire YEAR to train that army.
If that’s not a recipe for disaster in itself, consider this. Obama has explained that he’ll use the Syrian fighters on the ground as replacements for U.S. ground forces, so that we don’t have to risk American blood. But if the Syrian rebels are now going to be our go-to guys on the ground, wouldn’t we want to make sure they’re trained to run point before our airstrikes begin? Press Secretary Josh Earnest made it quite clear on Thursday that the U.S. will NOT wait for training of the Syrian army to be complete before we begin the big strikes on ISIS from the air. Doesn’t that sort of defeat the purpose? What good are ground forces if they can’t help protect us in the skies? If we’re not going to build the Syrians up in time for our airstrikes, then why risk giving them weapons at all?
It just seems like one gigantic “throw crap at the wall and see what sticks” strategy. I’m all for wiping ISIS off the map, but this plan is poppycock.
Read more at
http://dailysurge.com/2014/09/obama-train-syrian-rebels-said-august-couldnt-trained/
