The sad fact is that you can't really fight organizations like al-Qaeda, Hamas or the Taliban because there's no head to cut off. They're decentralized, and that structure allows them to attack like a virus from multiple directions. Removing Assad wouldn't be much of a challenge, just like removing Hussein didn't take too long (about nine months after the invasion of Iraq if I remember correctly) but trying to contend with insurgency in Syria would be an entirely different, disorganized and long-winded issue.
What you note is something that many military individuals have long noted when it comes to the ways that wars are fought in distinctly different manners than what we in the U.S are used to. There's no central monster in the Middle East - and in that world, the motivation is radically different...as well as the strategy, to get you to be like a kid who wants to get rid of a wasp nest and then thinks he is doing the right thing by putting his hand on it to "crush"/intimidate it - and yet all he does is either cause the wasps to go elsewhere/spread out aggressively in making new nests or attacking you even more ...with your hands STUCK holding the nest and the wasps going into more of a survival mode.
And even with others saying that the goal is to remove Assad, there needs to be a realization of how much we already were responsible for ARMING the wrong sides - and not seeing the ways that we are now officially (and ironically) in bed with the same people we said we were against (Al Queda) - which isn't really surprising when seeing how all the talk of being against them since 9/11 is backward in light of how we had TRAINED them to begin with before 9/11 even happened (as we created Al Qaeda to Fight the Soviets in Afghanistan ) and at every intervention, we were the ones who went into other nations - wrecked the place and left open power vaccums to be occupied by others who made it even worse and yet gave more of a reason for us to "be there" to stop things..
For me, our being present and working again with Al-queda is not really a surprise - but something that probably should've been expected when it came to the ways we distance ourselves (if it suits a goal) from the people we helped to create - and then connect together again for another issue we need (in the hopes that people forget the history of development).....and then place them back into the role of the enemy - with them agreeing to it, as if it's one big perverse play.
If a parent keeps raising their child on Gangsta rap - then unleashes that child when they're grown up into the community and they do damage....only for the parent (who happens to be a police man) to call for more police intervention/control ....and then others keep complaining about peace not occurring with police violence or feeling like they're being controlled, it'd be dumb for them to not ask "Why is it that the same thugs harming us come from you - the people who say you're here to stop it and you have nothing to do with thugs - and yet you trained them to be like they are?!" ....and then they ignore where those thugs are provoked even further by the police claiming to the community that the thugs just want to be aggressive/need to be stopped..
It'd eventually feel like a big game...
A self-fulfilling prophecy - or perhaps it's something more. But as said before, there will never be any changing of the bottom line fact that we already have ignored in the U.S the many ways in which we helped to create the problems that exist in Syria - and sad to say, we've chosen to ignore those who are suffering because of the sides we're choosing to fund - Just like with Korea when it came to manufacturing a crisis and making ourselves look like the hero ...and the same with what occurred in Vietnam and Laos when WE in the U.S enabled the Drug Trade to increase by fueling it in order to give funding for the war we were waging ( #
52 #
74 ), never mind many of the facts that got ignored in the process.
And on top of that, when people say we have to intervene to stop inhumane methods of killing such as chemical weapons, that has never made logical sense when we already allow for devastating weapons on OUR side to be used like mines and guns.....
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