Well fine, but that DOESN'T answer my question.
No, the Syrian rebels were not the Islamic State. And it's very cruel to refer to them as such.
I only said that some Syrian rebels were IS. Islamic State gained a great deal of support in Eastern Syria during the opening stages of the Syrian Revolution. If they hadn't had that support they wouldn' have made Raqqa their capital. And that support and those relationships are likely to continue even if the Syrian Regime succeeds in recapturing Raqqa. The Viet Cong were initally prevented from holding territory they took. And IS couldn't hold territory in the face of US troops either. Which did not stop them from coming back. So yes, there are Syrian local rebels in IS. If that isn't so, maybe Deir Az Zawr and Raqqah shouldn't be part of Syria.
I don't have any fondness for the Saudis, but don't have any evidence that they aided Al Qaeda in Iraq.
The Saudis would not be allowed to annex territory. I could care a rat's ass what they do to drive American fossil fool producers out of business. I hope they do! And I don't know if they help ISIS elsewhere in the Middle East (in which case it can't be called ISIS, but only IS, which is the proper initials).
They are actually called Khalifa. And allowing Saudi to annex Sunni Iraq and eastern Syria would be a compromise that would prevent a Shia Crescent aligned with Iran and isolate Russia backed Alawite Syria while permitting it to continue to exist--without the messy business of attempting to make a nation out of "Sunnistan". It's realpolitik, pure and simple. No ideal behind it. But it would recognise the fact that Wahabism has a real following in that part of the Mideast and separate Shia, Sunni and Kurd permanently.
I guess they
dose not, if they are such good inventors. I would think the USA developed drones by themselves, or could have.
Americans are very good inventors. But inventing something like a drone is one thing. Getting the military to buy it is something else. Especially when careers are determined in the Air Force by piloting time. Drones were ignored because they were a major threat to military careers--until after 9/11 when they became a military neccessity to patrol Afghanistan.
That was the early 1970s. Yom Kippur War and before. Israel trusted the United States then. Opinions in Israel began to change after Nixon held up TOW anti-tank missiles during the Yom Kippur War (Alexander Haig finally sent them without orders in time to turn the tide for Israel), after Jimmy Carter's pressure on Israel to trade land for peace in the Sinai (Israel finally connived with Iran on the hostage crisis and the Republicans to help get Reagan elected and get rid of Carter
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octobe...spiracy_theory and then the revealations of Jonathan Pollard, Israel changed it's policy and especially after the exodus of Russian Jews in 1989, both became more neo-liberal and expanded it's high tech and armaments sector using that Russian talent. At that point, Israel began to develop--and market--it's own drones.
http://www.airspacemag.com/flight-to...970502/?no-ist
The Iron Dome was a joint venture, but what does it do for the USA? It just protects Israel. My initial question remains. What has Israel done for us, besides get us involved in the Middle East to protect its imperial ambitions?
If and when the US gets back into military interventions in the Mideast or elsewhere, we will see Iron Dome deployed to protect many US bases from incoming missles. Also to protect ships against Chinese short range missiles.
And here is another reason why the US continues to work with Israel. Israel is perfectly capable of shifting it's R&D to China, a nation which has even greater cultural impediments to innovation than the US if the US attempts to exert too much leverage on Israel. See
http://www.wrmea.org/2007-april/has-...-warplane.html and
http://www.thetower.org/article/chin...est-in-israel/ . China is more than capable of making up for any business Israel loses to BDS moves in Europe and the US. Israel is more than capable of surviving as a free agent and pressure on Israel for a peace settlement that Israel sees as slow suicide will backfire on the US and Europe horribly.
You seem to have quite a bit of ESP to divine what our government and allies are thinking. I don't agree. Maybe I'm just dense, but there's nothing about the "petrodollar" that I can figure has anything to do with this. Oil companies; maybe. But I think that is old hat, and not in Obama's calculations. He knows that wars for oil are nonsense. It's time to get off oil, NOW.
The petrodollar is the basis for our current economy. The US protects and dominates Persian Gulf oil producers. In return, these producers agree to sell oil exclusively for US dollars. That means that countries from Europe to Japan to China to Southeast Asia to Africa require US dollars to buy crude oil. And they get those dollars by manufacturing goods for the US market that are priced cheaply because the dollar is dear for them. That is the basis for the "strong dollar" that has encouraged US firms to move plants abroad. And US ability to have things like near zero interest rates in an economic crisis and have quantitative easing without sparking inflation.
Protecting the petrodollar was the real reason for the Iraq War. Saddam Hussein's real sin was to sell oil to France for Euros and to China for renminbi and gold. The US could not stop France and China from buying Iraq oil so it invaded Iraq to stop Iraq from selling oil. The US found, though, that Iranian oil could not be stopped in this manner. Thus the initiative to Iran to try to get Iran back on the West's side.
Frankly, it is the petrodollar and it's importance (as a function of market share) that is the major reason why the US government was so reluctant to push investments in renewable energy. From Carter to Bush the US pursued a policy of protecting and fostering OPEC's position as long as they would keep oil priced in US dollars. That was behind the policy of "drain America last" that retarded a lot of drilling on public lands for the last 30 years. Which did not stop technology from advancing to the point where first natural gas and then oil started to be "frakked" from beheath private land in places where oil and gas production had been uneconomical. And then during the Bush Administration, the US began to emphasise diversification of international oil production AND domestic production when it became apparent as the Iraq War soured that the US could not protect the petrodollar by keeping oil and gas production centred in the Middle East. Though there is still, obviously a lot of resistance to giving up the petrodollar entirely. Even if we are giving it up for solar and wind (and probably also nuclear) power.
I am predicting a settlement by 2017, which would have to involve a new government. However, it may not last. I don't disagree with your skepticism. But from 2017 on, it may be able to help defeat ISIS. The question for me is, if Europe gets tired of being attacked, it might decide to send troops. Then we should expect both the USA and especially Turkey to do so too. Allies need to act together. I am sure such a powerful alliance could wipe up the IS in Syria. But what happens afterward will not be certain.
Europe, even Russia share the same pressures that the US does to attempt to beat Islamic State on the cheap in terms of money and manpower. Islamic State is perfectly capable of dropping back to insurgent warfare if doing so will a) create a long, open ended war that will exhaust Western commitment and b) cause Western and Western backed opposition reaction that will keep locals alliegiant to them. The strategy has worked before, in the Iraq War but also against the French in Algeria. The strategy has not been that successful against Kurds, Iraqi Shiites on Shia soil, Alawites (which is why the Syrian Civil War is still a civil war) or against Israel, which not only is not going anywhere but has developed some of the best counter-terrorism on the planet.
To truly defeat Islamists would take the kind of commitment the West and Russia showed for the war against the Nazis. And Islamists have been quite careful not to rachet up terror attacks to a level that will bring on that kind of commitment. These attacks are actually pinpricks (even 9/11 produced results that were unexpectedly high for Al Qaeda, who only expected the top half of the towers to fall), comparable to the attacks on shipping of Barbary Corsairs that resulted in payment of tribute for 300 years. The French did not decide that they had enough of paying the Corsairs until they found under Louis Phillippe that they had a technological edge over Algerian Islamists--an edge that is being eroded.
I doubt an Islamic State can flourish there either.
Originally Posted by marypoza
