McCain in Syria
The Washington Times reports that Senator John McCain found his way into Syria recently to meet with Syrian rebels secretly.
The rebel leaders who met with Mr. McCain asked for help in the establishment of a no-fly zone, delivery of anti-aircraft weapons and U.S. airstrikes on military targets associated with the government of Mr. Assad and on Hezbollah, the militant Shiite Muslim movement based in neighboring Lebanon. Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has said his militias are committed to helping Mr. Assad defeat the rebels, many of whom are members of Sunni Muslims factions.
A spokesman for Mr. McCain confirmed that the senator made the trip, which was first reported on the news website The Daily Beast, but provided no further details.
From NBC News;
From the Associated Press;
A State Department official said the department was aware of McCain crossing into Syrian territory Monday, but referred further questions to McCain’s office. McCain spokeswoman Rachel Dean confirmed the Monday trip, but declined further comment.
I could go along with limited involvement by US troops, but this is another tar baby in the Middle East which could be effected by “mission creep” and it’s hard to tell who is who in this particular fight. The rebels you help today might be al Qaeda by nightfall. But at least McCain is giving the appearance of finding out what the situation is in Syria.
Category: Terror War
If we get involved there, both (all) sides will be trying to kill Americans. Can’t we “just say no?”
Senator McCain, meet irrelevance. Irrelevance, meet Senator McCain.
I agree, Bill C. On one hand we have the Assad regime – a dictatorial bunch friendly with Iran, who are little more than thugs and thieves with bloody hands. On the other hand, we have groups intimately connected to al Qaeda, who are little more than thugs and thieves with bloody hands.
Which group of murdering bastards do we want to back?
IMO Shakespeare had it right: “A plague o’ both your houses.”
Do what the Israelis do, feed arms and ammo to BOTH sides of an intramural mozzie/arab fight, until they mutually exhaust/kill themselves…
Is Syria worth the life of one American soldier?
If McCain thinks we need to be there, we need to run the other way. Fast.
When I saw that report on the news last night, my first thought was “oh, here we go again.”
The AQs are embedded with the rebels. The Hassad bunch have Hezbollah. They’re simply destroying what was a prosperous country and if the rebels had not hooked up with the AQs, I might have more sympathy for them. Now, they will never get rid of them. But what do you do? Do you take ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ stance? Or do you just let nature take its course? If the Israelis are funneling arms to both sides, they may have the right approach.
These wars have gone on since long before the days of the Persian empire. It goes back to those 15,000 year old tower foundations uncovered in northwest Syria.
They only had peace in the Middle East when the Cold War was underway, and it was spotty peace at best.
Oh, well, McCain is at least trying to find things out.
Neither choice is all that appealing, but I would trust a FSA controlled Syria to clamp down on Al Qaeda more than an Assad controlled Syria to clamp down on Iran/Hezbollah.
@7: “They only had peace in the Middle East when the Cold War was underway, and it was spotty peace at best.”
LOL!
The only difference during the Cold War was that SOME of the Arabs wore uniforms in battle. That small comfort ended in 1973. Let me direct you to the fedayeen raids, the PLO’s early years and the IDF (and even Jordanian) campaigns against the PLO, and the First Lebanon War.
There was never a peace where all the Arabs stopped shooting at the same time.
If the largest group of victims were not innocent civilians I would say arm both sides and stand back.
BohicaTwentyTwo: considering that the most effective fighting groups in FSA are directly linked to al Qaeda – if not the majority overall – I’m not so sure I can agree.
Sometimes it’s better the Devil ye know . . . .
@9 – I said it was spotty at best. Didn’t say it was universal. 🙂
I never liked when Democrats would run abroad and do their own fact-finding when President Bush was in office. They undermined foreign policy. Congressmen McDermott and Senator John Kerry would jet around trying to show up the State Department.
Same here. McCain, who holds no leadership positon in the Senate (which is embarrassing given that he’s been in the Senate since 1987), is immersing himself in foreign policy. He’s on the foreign relations committee, but not as a leader.
This trip was absolutely wrong. McCain needs to go.
There should be NO involvement by our government, not to mention our soldiers, in Syria, period. Both sides are butchers.
I’m surprised he didn’t offer them amnesty to immigrate.
Can’t we just give them John McCain and be done with it?
Every thing this administration has done in regards to the Arab Spring has come back to bite us in the ass. We haven’t gotten a straight story about Benghazi from these yahoos to date and McCain wants us to wade in to this no win situation.
Give the RINO a case of c-rats and send him back across the border…maybe he’ll take his daughter along and we can mark it as a double win…
There are no “Good Guys” in this conflict. The Assad regime has abused its own people for years, but I don’t think we really want to get on board with the other side either. There are videos on the internet showing rebel leaders using 10 and 12 year old boys to behead government officials in the streets while shouting “Allah Akbar”. Not the kind of folks I want to be in the same corner with.
They are posturing. So they can cover-up more of the Benghazi bullshit stories. We were/are arming the Syrians but now we’re trying to pay people off to make it look like we were doing it before Benghazi.
Not just no, but hell no! Let them duke it out for themselves. Once one group gains control, then we find out who we’re dealing with and go from there. Not one drop of US blood should be shed in that shithole.
Just what the *BLEEP* is McCain trying to accomplish other than a political stunt? Syria, IMHO, IS NOT worth American lives!
“When we were at war with the Nazis, we wouldn’t have said ‘Well these Nazis are bad, but these moderate Nazis, well they’re fine, so what we’ll do is we’ll work with these moderate Nazis[.]'”
@19 I agree. A fight there will be worse than trying to figure out which of the Vietnamese were farmers by day and black PJ’s by night. I say stay out unless WE are DIRECTLY threatened. He should have taken Jane Fonda with him. What was he expecting to accomplish? Some kind of Jesse Jackson plea for peace? He has no authority to speak for the Administration, the State Department or the military. Not one Syrian worth one American life. Let them kill each other off and there will be less of them to export terrorists here and around the world.
Doesn’t this make McCain an illegal immigrant?
@ #21: Exactly!
Meanwhile, McCain and his buddy sKerry will take of it for us.
Wow, so because one faction associated with AQ is fighting dictatorship all muslims fighting for democracy in syria are automatically members of Al-Quaida? Reminds me of how all indians are seen the same as the Hurons. I guess because the US Military is involved in accidentally killing innocent people overseas that all Americans are guilty of murder and valid targets in war too. Yea, a senator involved in these issues going to find out facts himself is cowardly, and we should ignore the cries for freedom and democracy because they just aren’t racially able to handle freedom. Kill em all, let god sort it out.
When did you people lose your base humanity?
@13: I think, though I’m sure someone will correct me if I’m wrong, that McCain isn’t in a leadership role on that committee because there are actually limits to how many terms you can be in that role for.
I don’t care one whit about what he thinks either way, but given his seniority in the senate and that rules apparently forbid him from being head of that committee, I’ll grant him some leeway to still pursue ‘fact-finding’ missions that jive with his interests & concerns.
I do not trust McCain or his motives.
It’s hardly one group, Isanova. The NYT put it most succinctly:
“Nowhere in rebel-controlled Syria is there a secular fighting force to speak of.”
And the Economist backs that claim, stating that the only important non-Islamist group was in the Kurdish areas, which is virtually an autonomous zone.
The so-called “Supreme Military Command” rebel leadership is essentially a figurehead group. The people actually fighting are Islamists and/or extremists linked to al Qaeda.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/how-obama-and-al-qaeda-became-syrian-bedfellows/5336711
@25 Were you being tongue in cheek? Because if you are serious then know I never lost my base care for humanity. I lost my care for Islam after 9/11 and before. Lest you forget…THEY want all of AMERICA…dead! So who has lost their humanity? I am worn with the constant political correctness that most Muslims are peace loving, democracy craving, good ole’ folks at heart. They have PROVEN that to be bullshit! You want to unite the “factions” in Syria in a hurry, be they A-Q or “democracy loving Muslims”…just tell them they have a shot at wiping America and Israel from the face of the earth. That will unite them in short order!
@28 Thank you for the link. It was very informative.
* IF * they want a free country, let them fight for it alone. If this is just a precursor to yet another hardline islamist state, fuck em all.
@31 Well said. Let them fight their own shit out. I say not one American life for them! You are right. When the rubber meets the road, another hardline islamist state is all there will be left.
@25 If McCain is fact-finding, it’s to support a progressive agenda. He’s a RINO. Nothing he comes up with will do anything but get us in a latrine up to our noses, politically and militarily.
We’ve shed more than enough American blood in that part of the world. Let them fight each other for awhile and stay out of our hair.
When did you people lose your base humanity?
Why don’t you pick a fucking side and stick with it? When we’re in Iraq and Afghanistan we’re accused of occupation and worse. When we don’t get involved in Syria (and I don’t think we should, given it is a no-win situation) you accuse us of losing our base humanity.
I’ll put it another way at the risk of getting your panties all bunched up: Islam and democratic government are pretty much incompatible. Even examples like Turkey and Indonesia are not good ones of where democracy works.
I’d think turkey and Indonesia are good examples as to why they aren’t compatible. Both countries are turning less secular and more fundamental. Moderates don’t shout nearly as long or as loud as radicals.
A religious based democratic government is better than an authoritarian one, even if most democracies round the world don’t function very well.
Personally my beef with Iraq and Afghanistan wasn’t going in there militarily, but installing nepotistic and theocratic governments. That and the huge dollars and lives wasted there for idiotic washington choices.
I don’t think the US should march into Syria… if we do that why not march into Saudi Arabia, Nigeria and half the dictatorship allies we have in the world? I do support arming people fighting against Assad, particularly if he did use chemical weapons against civilians again.
We should stand up for freedom, human rights and self-determination… whether the resulting government is friendly or not. The US should stand for something after all.
Isanova: you might want to ask the Iranians what they think about their “religious-based democratic government” – and whether they were actually more free under that “evil dictator” the Shah. If you can find anyone who will give you an answer without looking over their shoulder, that is. Make sure you ask members of Iranian religious minorities those questions, too – assuming you can find any.
Ask the Copts in Egypt those questions as well while you’re at it. I’m guessing they’re wishing they had that “evil dictator” Mubarak back, given what they’ve seen so far with that “religious-based democratic government” run by the Muslim Brotherhood.
I also question your understanding of the term “theocratic” if you’re applying that term to the current Afghan government. It’s the Taliban that wants to re-institute a theocracy there, not Karzai and his ilk. Karzai and Co. seem perfectly happy with a corrupt but more-or-less democratic government.
McCain is senile. He still thinks he has a shot at running for president. As much as it pains me to admit, Obama had more class than McCain this Memorial Day, at least he went to Arlington.
@33: I’m guessing you intended that for me (#26, not #25)? McCain may be a RINO, but that doesn’t equally mean he’s a liberal — I myself lean left on some things and right on others.
More to the point, though, I’m all for any of our senators actually doing *something* to get first-hand information on current situations and then allow a discussion to happen with that information. They’re all going to have their own biases, but most won’t even get up and do a damn thing. So, again, whether I agree with him or not on the proper course of action, I support his actions in making a ‘fact-finding’ trip. That’s all.
Yeah, well just watch. If we start arming the rebels, we’ll just end up fighting them in the next 10 – 20 years.
Aside from that, I’m with PintoNag. Let them hash out their differences for awhile while we sort out our own nonsense. Short of that, I could give a rats ass what Arabs do to one another.
Some of us in this community have been around when dignitaries have been on “fact finding” tours. It’s all pomp and no fact finding. They could get more good information using googlefoo, with much less taxpayer expense.
And for the record – I really don’t care what name the terrorists are called this week or next. They are terrorists, and I also don’t care the source of their militancy. They are nuts and should be dealt with accordingly.
@39 Anonymous: No, it was intended for Isanova in #25.
Just what, exactly, is a Senator supposed to find out in a “fact-finding” mission to an unstable, volatile country? And what kind of “discussion” is there to have? How much money we send them? And which “them” would get that money? Do you really want the same old tired “politician-spook-rebel-weapons-cash” mix that has been oh-so-successful in other countries of the world? Places where we eventually end up in a shooting war? By God, more than anything, I’d like to see our country just do something DIFFERENT for a change, if only to quit paddling around in the same stinking cesspool, time and time again.
Terrorists fighting terrorists.
It’s a temporary side distraction because the west(non Muslims) will always be the great Satan to these people.
Maybe he was trying find out how they secure their borders in Syria?
And maybe Syria let John McCain in because he’s willing to shovel the BS that Syrian politicians won’t?
BTW, if McCain thinks Sen. Ted Cruz is a “wacky bird,” then what the hell does he think about his new Syrian friends?
Think the reason McCain doesn’t have a leadership position is because he belongs to the minority party?
Build a wall – a tall one – around the whole freakin’ region and tear it down after they get it all sorted out and prove it for about 20 years or so. If they can’t get it sorted out, divert the Med and the Arabian Sea to fill in the pool.
So what happens if they set up a ” no fly” zone and Russia sends in a squadron of fighters? Lest we forget Russia and Syria have many trade agreements that go back years and Putin wont let the pansy in DC threaten them. Why is oBama goading Putin? Putin on a bad day is 10 times the man oBama is or ever will be. If Putin flexes a finger muscle oBama will go into uncontrollable fits of quivering and shaking fear and God help us if oBama puts on Michelles panties and tries to act tough.
Mike, I would love to see Putin intimidate Bodaprez. I would just love that. I think Putin could reduce that wienie to tears.
I said this about Pelosi and I’ll say it about McCain – statecraft is the sole, only, can be done by no one else than the POTUS and his direct agents The Department of State.
Why McCain is meeting with Al Queda is beyond me.
@48
My guess is that “WackoBird” McCain is the new Jimmy Carter.
“When did you people lose your base humanity?”
Latest headline: Armed Rebels Massacre Entire Population of Christian Village in Syria
http://www.islamicinvitationturkey.com/2013/05/28/armed-rebels-massacre-entire-population-of-christian-village-in-syria-2/
and here: http://www.islamicinvitationturkey.com/2013/05/28/armed-rebels-massacre-entire-population-of-christian-village-in-syria-2/
Humanity? When the Sunnis and the Shias finish killing each other to whom do you think they turn their attention?
The rebels in Syria are not fighting to free a populace from tyranny. They are fighting to inflict their own form of tyranny on the populace.
Get real….