9 years ago
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David Petraeus’ bright idea: give terrorists weapons to beat terrorists
Former CIA director David Petraeus is advocating giving arms to members of al-Nusra Front, an al-Qaida off-shoot, to beat Isis. That is madness. By Trevor Trimm.
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http://www.theguardian.com
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David Petraeus, Whose Greatest Aptitude Lies in Rewriting History
As always in stories involving David Petraeus, this story about his plan to work with al Qaeda to defeat ISIS involves some rewriting or forgetting of history. There’s the fiction that what is usually called the surge but here... By Marcy Wheeler.
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A lot of these groups only exist because the US handed out weapons and material support to the insurgents in the area to battle the Russians. Nothing can be gained by introducing even more weapons into fragile situations.
Giving weapons, intel and ligistics to non-nation states is shooting ones own foot. How many feet the US still have to shoot ?
If they want to stabilise the region, the only was is by empowering existing nation states in the area. STABLE nations, of course. Keep Saudi Arabia out of it, they've already proven they can't be trusted, so make peace with Iran, sit them on the table with Turkey, Pakistan and Jordan, tell them they can do whatever they feel it's gonna work as long as it fixes the mess and leave the room. If that means splitting Iraq in three and giving half of Afghanistan to Pakistan, so be it.
They're neighbors to the affected areas, they share the religion, they have thousands of years of shared history, they know the culture and mentality of the people on the region a lot better than we westerners do. If anyone can stabilize the area it's are the locals.
Just be careful of the Saudis, it seems like they've been fanning the flames a whole lot since 2001.