The Coming War in the Middle East (2013)

Please look at the pipelines and read about the actions and incentives of the Gulf State. In particular, Qatar supported al Qaeda in Syria (Nusra as well as the Islamic State Group in addition to a number of other terrorist factions) with the pipeline project as a key aspect of its strategic calculus, even sabotaging, in a way, relations with Iran that had been started to improve.

This is absolutely bullshit propaganda trying to tie Assad to ISIS.

The Syrian Armed Forces have been the most effective fighting force against ISIS and it's creation has been infinitely problematic for it - from the capture of key oil fields, the capture of Hasaka and Der Zor (and key Air Force fields), to the ideological turn against the Shia/Baathist government based in Alawite territory.

I don't know where you heard this, but you should carefully check that source.

> Sunni militias (freedom fighters according to US kind of like 80s afghanistan)

I don't know if you know how ironic that is...

> Turks do not wants Kurds to be powerful and are interested in marginalizing them in Northern Syria

Definitely.

> Kurds want to fight ISIS with help of US and score brownie points for Kurdistan.

Mostly they are just interested in obtaining autonomous Kurdish zones, like Kojave in Northern Syria. We have not gotten the Kurds to invade further South. Their involvement in Iraq has been similarly in land near Kurdish territory.

> Sunni militias do not have much problem with ISIS want to fight the Alawite regime and make Syria Sunni Again

More than that many have made core alliances with them, with the FSA rebuking the US labeling of ISIS a terrorist organization.

> To say the least its a giant clusterfuck and US is willingly in bed with Al Qaeda ( wannabes like Al-Nusra front)

Amen. Though Nusra is hardly a 'wannabe'...

I have not said that they have. My statement was specific about us training of "moderate rebels". The programs were done both by the CIA and DoD but both were not all that successful and policy focus has shifted.

The US still does other things. Those are not the subject I was talking about.

> we're still doing all we can to to support them

Thats why I continue to read about all those nuclear attacks ...

The War in Vietnam was far more costly and destructive then any 'damage' that was done to the Soviets. It was a absolute net lose in every way, money, lives, credibility and so on. It was a major victory for communism and all anti-imperialist colonialist struggles.

You are just repeating the same failed and disproven logic that people like J.F. Dulles were advocating. They looked at everything in cold war terms, black and white. The reality however is different. Just because some countries are neutral or maybe communist does not make them automatically Soviet puppets and the countries in the same region do not automatically fall to communism because of that.

Had J.F. Dulles just accepted the situation in 1953 the US would have been in a much better position during the cold war. Vietnam would not have been allied with China and Russia against the US. The idea of "world communism" is a fantasy that should not be a guid to policy.

> support of the Afghanistan insurgency

That was a great policy. Problem is just that even at the time people pointed out that it was unlikely (almost impossible) that the Soviets would attack threw Iran to the Golf. So there were no vital US interests at stack. The Soviet, we now know, had no plans to do so, and not the capability.

In order to support the insurgency the US had to massively support Pakistan, they ignored Pakistani spread of extremism, they ignored the Pakistani nuclear program and the money flowed to the kind of insurgence that should not get money, rather then to the moderate afghani nationalists that should have gotten the money.

How people defend this policy in still today is insane to me. A nuclear Pakistan and India is one of the greats dangers for nuclear war in the world right now.

I'm definitely repeating the logic of the state. To be clear here, this isn't old logic attributable to Dulles or Eisenhower but the rationality behind current US strategy.

This military/security logic is consistent over the past 70 years of great power struggle and I add it here not because I buy into all of the conclusions but because the arguments must be understood from the perspective of policy and decision makers in order for there to be a real dialogue between citizens and the state. Namely, citizens have to acknowledge the paranoid and aggressive tendencies of the state and understand reasoning from their perspective to counter the arguments.

When this isn't the case (look at Libya and Syria) the state interprets citizens' unhappiness to have to do with the number of soldiers killed (for example) or the financial costs of insurgency and so pursues proxy wars, support of terrorism, economic warfare, information warfare and other types of irregular aggression.

Anyway, pretty much fully agreed with your reply here.