This article from an American think tank is a classic example of lies and half truth misinformation promoting their own self interests. Have seen a good analogy of what some western countries, particularly the US and also Israel have long been attempting and doing from the point of view of victimised countries. They covertly set fire to your house. Then race around pretending to help fight the fire while in fact seeing what they can loot and set up opportunities for future theft.

When governments in other countries are not compliant to the interests of US banksters, corporations and military industrial complex, they resort to all sorts of dirty tricks, sometimes claimed to be "Promoting Democracy" or whatever to facilitate "regime change". Want leaders that act in the national interest of their own people replaced with US puppets and stooges. Often don't seem to care about killing large numbers of people, destroying infrastructure of other countries and causing enormous suffering for their citizens. Syria is a sovereign state that is much more democratic than many others and President Bashar al-Assad is obviously popular with his own people. It is also secular with Syrians with different tending to overall stick together. Meanwhile many terrorist groups sponsored by foreign interests to try and overthrow the legitimate Syrian government have sometimes been fighting each other. Russian intervention helping the Syrians quickly exposed what had really been going on.

The Islamic terrorists have largely been sponsored by the US, Israel and their allies including Gulf countries who hope to help their own interests by breaking up larger middle eastern states into many small ones inclined to fight each other so people can more easily exploited and resources plundered. Also obviously the long term aim of some Zionists is to create a large "Greater Israel" by stealing Arab land.

Nowadays thanks to the Internet, anyone in Western countries can now easily check news and views other than that from their own mainstream media. eg Try www.globalresearch.ca from Canada for a start. From it can soon find links to many others.

Well, well well, glad to someone is awake.

According to figures I read the greatest military fighting force the world has ever seen, a force several times greater than the next biggest military force in the world flew 5,000 missions IN 5-6 YEARS in an attempt to clean out about 10 - 20,000 poorly trained and lightly armed Kung Foo lookalikes AND COULD NOT DEFEAT THEM.

I wont bother about how many missions were flown by their vassal states, including the brits and us.

The Russians come along and within about 8-10 missions inside 3-4 weeks they had all but cleaned out 20k or so gun wielding dancing jihardi's.

Yea right, ISIS is not a creation of uncle Sam and may be someone else is it?

mox,
>>Syria is a sovereign state that is much more democratic than many others and President Bashar al-Assad is obviously popular with his own people. It is also secular with Syrians with different tending to overall stick together. <<

I would agree to the point that Syria during 2000-2011 under Bashar al-Assad (not so much under his father’s reign) was the most democratic and most secular Arab country, albeit not very democratic and not very secular by Western standards. I think it is because of memories of this among the remaining population that Assad is still so popular.

Assad’s “mortal sin” was that he embarked on the gradual westernisation of his country as an ally of Russia and not as that of the US, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Isn’t this the reason the IS, Al-Nusra and other jihadists had to be unleashed on him?

I believe the west has no other option but to declare war on Assad's Syria or risk losing the emasculated Sunni rebels to ISIS?

With the first step taking out the Syrian air force, then declaring a no fly zone over exclusively held rebel territory?

And Turkey need to be warned they could, once again, wind up on the wrong side of history by attacking the Kurd, who seem to be the only boots on the ground driving back ISIS?

Yes the Russian involvement helped keep as mass murder in power! And simply cannot be accepted as fait accompli!

Acceptance of the current status quo and a permanently ensconced Assad regime is hugely counterproductive!?

Love is just not served by just forgiving this monster and thereby allowing the continuing massacre.

But rather, by stopping it and the ongoing future slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocents!

Is war ever righteous and absolutely justified? Certainly, absolutely!

Moreover, sometimes there is no other virtuous or moral choice!
Alan B.

People seem to be forgetting the elephant in the room. Saudi Arabia has over the last decades, spent around 60 billion $ on promoting their Wahabi Islam around the world. It is a particularly divisive and militant version of Islam, promoted right under our noses in Saudi textbooks etc, in many countries.

The result is ideology as followed by ISIS and similar and ever more fighting between Sunnis and Shia.

I don't know why but I've noticed in recent years that so many people seem to be happy for the media to decide for them who the good guys are in the world and who the bad guys are.

A couple of years ago, I read that up to the 2005 (I think it was) the US has invaded over 37 countries in the last 100 years and has bombed 11 countries since the days of Bill Clinton. However during both these time periods, Iran has invaded none, yet somehow or other, so many people seem to regard Iran as the evil empire. I wonder if this is because the the man on TV and the US and other western govts keep saying it is so?

A lot is made about Iran's nuke aspirations but no one says anything about Israels nuke stockpile? Funny that.