What To Do With Syria?

I don't. It has a persistent left-wing bias. But I trust it more than a conspiracy theory website.

In any case you're committing the genetic fallacy. You aren't actually addressing the validity of the information in the article.

It's certainly better than a lot of other sources, and orders of magnitude better in pretty much every way than that "globalresearch" site.

I'm not sure where you studied mathematics, but Saddam was in power from 1979 - 2003. So your 800,000 figure for every year of his reign amounts to 19,200,000, which is completely laughable.

You dismissed the guy's post because he used a website that you think is full conspiracies as a source.

My point is that the BBC, CNN, and every other mainstream media organisation that you use as a source can also be dismissed just as you dismissed his source because each of them have their own agenda - the BBC will never challenge the British government/establishment otherwise it will lose its taxpayer income; while CNN requires ratings and access to establishment individuals for interviews/information - ergo neither are credible sources.

I hope you make the distinction between your media sources and peer-reviewed sources.

More handwaving as usual. I'll link this for all it's worth: http://www.thenational.ae/business/energy/robin-mills-syrias-gas-pipeline-theory-is-a-low-budget-drama

80,000, sorry.

Assad has invaded his neighbours before, in Lebanon. To be fair, his father begun the invasion, but he continued it until the assassination of Rafik Hariri, probably murdered on his orders (and U.S. troops breathing down his neck) forced him to withdraw. The chinless tyrant even whimpered that "I am not Saddam Hussein. I want to cooperate."

And the weaponry which was used to launch a chemical attack on Ghouta is known to be available only to the regime. Draw your own conclusions. And the Ghouta attack isn't the first time Assad has used chemical weapons.

That would never have happened if we had taken a tougher line on Islamists, especially on al-Maliki and al-Sadr, and if we had not thrown Iraq to the mob by holding elections when the country wasn't ready for it. Iraq needed its own MacArthur, but he was nowhere to be found. Furthermore, remember that Obama withdrew troops from Iraq. If he had kept U.S. troops in place the West would still have some leverage.

Saddam's regime was imploding and it was better we removed it sooner than later, and made an organised transfer of political power from the Sunni to the Shia majority. What else would you have had the U.S. do? Not going in would have seen the regime collapse anyway and fall to Iranian-backed Shiite gangs, except with no Coalition troops to rein them in. Going in, we could at least have played a role in the proceedings, and prevented sectarian violence from being worse than it would have been. At least they won through the ballot box rather than through force.

Rich coming from the guy who hasn't given me a single source. I suppose we should discount everything you have to say since your name and avatar is that of a mass-murdering communist dictator. Oops, I forgot:

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Genetic_fallacy

You're simply attacking the source, not critiquing the info.

The fact that all those people you just listed weren't influenced by Iran does not disprove the fact that Iran is the greatest state sponsor of terrorism. Whataboutery is not an argument, it is simply a distraction from the topic.

Committing the genetic fallacy yet again. You aren't even attempting to refute the claim, just attacking the sources.

Nonsense. Again, no source, though I believe this ludicrous figure comes from the Lancet survey, a blatantly politicised report with flawed methodology that has been exposed time and time again.

http://www.floppingaces.net/2008/01/04/another-debunking-of-the-lance/

I do not believe for one second that 100,000 people died from 2003 to 2006 in Iraq. That is sheer naked mendacity of the highest order.

If it is a failure it's because we didn't intervene properly.

Even then, we shouldn't be too hard on ourselves. More people may have died if we hadn't intervened, and Libya would now be like Syria, with an embattled regime fighting against an array of rebel groups, and refugees streaming across the Mediterranean. Do you seriously think Gaddafi's sorry excuse for an army would have retaken Benghazi any time soon? It would have become the Aleppo of North Africa.

Terrible. But it would be even worse if we hadn't intervened.

Might that have something to do with the fact that Obama withdrew troops from the country?

I don't call that a serious attempt at nation-building. That was a farce from which Bill Clinton cut and ran. You can't compare that to the Libya and Iraq and Afghanistan interventions.

When did I say it wasn't? All the articles that I linked say is that it was the UK, and not the U.S., cared about the oil, and that Mossadegh wasn't a democrat or a hero. More handwaving on your part.

Whataboutery. We are talking about Mossadegh's failures as a leader and his overthrow, not the Shah's.

So the Iranian people had nothing to do with the fate of their own country? That's a pretty racist view to take. If the U.S. is to blame in any way, it is for failing to back the Shah sufficiently enough, and thereafter failing to support the secular liberal government that replaced him, allowing it to be replaced with Islamism. Many pro-Shah Iranians are disgusted at the biased Western coverage of the Iranian Revolution which painted the Shah as a murderous tyrant and Khomeini as some sort of Iranian Gandhi.

I you don't agree with me, you are a troll. The time-honoured ad hominem attack for people who lose an argument.

That's just it. He didn't even post any sources.

More genetic fallacies. You just keep coming. You can't simply dismiss the source and win the argument. You actually have to refute the claims made.

Just a point; a lot of people in this thread and similar threads talk about "the Kurds" or "Kurdish forces" as being one of the sides in the conflict. While admittedly, the movement that created Rojava was initially driven by Kurdish autonomists, it is emphatically not a Kurdish state. Rojava is a radical pluralistic and multiethnic polity, and that includes its military forces, which count among its ranks thousands of Arabs, Assyrians, Turkmen, Yazidis, Armenians and Circassians (as well as too many smaller groups to list). It has two Co-Presidents, only one of whom is a Kurd (the other is an Arab). They are not fighting for Kurdish independence, but for a radically different Syria.

As I said, Bashar has never invaded a sovereign country; and regarding the Syrian occupation of Lebanon, he withdrew after the UN Resolution 1559.

Speculate all you want, but the United Nations has yet to find anyone responsible for the Ghouta attack.

A Shia majority in any country, let alone one bordering Iran, will form a government that will become subservient to the Iranian regime - it doesn't make a difference how many US troops are present.

If ever there was a time to remove Saddam it was during the Gulf War while the coalition were 600km away from Baghdad, and his forces had realised just how outgunned and poorly equipped/supplied they were.

Anything after that golden opportunity should have been left to the Shia majority in Iraq.

Ah, the ad hominem - it was only a matter of time

This isn't whataboutery - I've just given you countless examples of Saudi-backed and/or influenced groups and individuals who commit/committed acts of Islamic terrorism.

Iran has been a state sponsor of terrorism since the revolution of 1979. Their first major act of terrorism was to take the staff of the American Embassy hostage.

I would encourage you to begin the long list of Iranian-backed and/or influenced groups and/or individuals that support your argument.

I suppose we could also compare the numbers of innocent civilians killed by Wahhabist groups/individuals and Iranian-backed/influenced groups/individuals.

Because the blog you've sourced - which is probably your own - is not a credible source.

The architect of your claim - Dave - even conceded that the thousands of Syrian “moderate rebels” allegedly ready to fight Islamic State include “relatively hard line Islamist groups,” joking that they were not the people one meets at a “Liberal Democrat conference.”

And yet, here you are, still spewing the myth that not only are there moderates in a sectarian war that has been ongoing for more than five years now, has claimed the lives of almost half a million people, with half of the population of Syria displaced, and almost a quarter of the population in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and Europe, but that there are 70,000 of them just waiting for the weapons to bring democracy to Syria.

The Iraq Family Health Survey, reported by the World Health Organization.

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2008/pr02/en/

I would like you to point to one successful state/nation-building operation the West has conducted in the Islamic world, because you seem to claim that every Western intervention in the region was a failure because it wasn't conducted properly, which leads me to believe that you clearly don't understand the task at hand in rebuilding states after toppling regimes, and the minuscule chance of actually accomplishing the mission.

So your plan is to keep US troop in Afghanistan until the end of time?

I think it's about time you wake up and smell the coffee: the Taliban will never be defeated in Afghanistan. The US can spend trillions of dollars arming and training the Afghan army and police, but they are completely ineffective without US ground troops; and as soon as a President finally pulls out of Afghanistan, because it's about time the US cut its losses there, the Taliban will simply retake the country.

That wasn't my point.

Somalia today is still a mess even without an intervention similar to those of Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, which just goes to show how difficult it is for democracy to take hold in countries with limited/no experience of universal suffrage, let alone when a foreign nation is occupying the country.

Except the regime has been in power since 1979 and it has yet to invade another country or give Hezbollah the green light to fire its entire arsenal of missiles in Israel's direction. If anything, that proves that it is just as rational as Israel and Saudi Arabia - both of whom also have fundamentalists in positions of power.

You said "He was a lunatic who was rightfully overthrown, mostly because he alienated his own people, not because of a US-UK conspiracy."

Except it was a conspiracy, a conspiracy to remove Mossadegh and reprivatise the oil.

He was overthrown by the UK and US governments after less than a year in power because he nationalised the Anglo-American Oil Company.

Except the Shah was a murderous tyrant.

The lesson to be drawn from the Iranian Revolution is to leave the secular democrat - Mossadegh - in power instead of overthrowing and replacing him with a tyrant, and then whining when a tyrant who opposes you removes your tyrant from power.

I'm still waiting for your evidence to support your claim that Iran is the greatest state sponsor of Islamic terrorism in the world

I'm still waiting for your evidence to support your claim that the Western interventions in the Islamic world have been successful.

Furthermore, I'm still waiting for your evidence to support your claim that there are 70,000 moderate rebels in Syria.

Don't worry, troll, I'll wait.

I most certainly have. The Iran-Iraq-Syria pipeline is an absurd conspiracy theory. First of all any such pipeline would have to go through Sunni areas which means that the pipeline can easily be cut off, so it's not exactly cost-effective. Secondly Iran already has a gas pipeline through Turkey, and it is not in their interests to spend billions of dollars building a pipeline of dubious economic value through its unstable neighbour with very little prospect of real financial gains.

And if you'd bothered to read the article I gave you, it would have been much more cost-effective for Qatar to simply give Assad a hefty bribe (assuming the whole pipeline story is true) rather than spend so much money on an armed uprising with such a dubious chance of success. They're spending more than enough money financing the Assad regime and defending them with Shiite jihadist mercenaries. The idea that they'd sink their money into a worthless pipeline is absurd.

Aside from his dodgy actions in Lebanon, it is a fact that the Assad regime gave support to Al-Qaeda in Iraq during the days of the Sunni insurgency in Iraq, helping to kill U.S soldiers, in tandem with Iran. Assad certainly wasn't stupid enough to invade Iraq himself, he simply used proxies to do his dirty work for him.

The evidence leads where the evidence leads. It was almost certainly the Assad regime, and you know it. You cannot simply ignore all the circumstantial evidence in the UN Report and say that because the UN failed to come to a settled conclusion, one cannot come to an individual judgement that it was the Assad regime that gassed its own people in Ghouta in 2013.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/One_single_proof

That is nonsense. Of course it makes a difference. The whole point of U.S. troops being there was to stop the Shiites using their sheer weight of numbers to unilaterally dictate the course of the country. The fact that there are no U.S. troops in Iraq at this very moment has merely made the Iraqi government even closer to Iran than it otherwise would have been.

As I said, the collapse of Saddam's regime was inevitable, and it was preferable that we invaded the country to bring it to a less painful, less cataclysmic and less bloody end and usher in an orderly transition to civilised rule which would give us a chance to limit Iranian influence, to allowing it to implode by itself and for Iran to have unparalleled control over a deeply unstable and divided country. ISIS benefits Iran very well. It keeps the Iraqi regime dependent on it. Even if Iran was willing to expend the blood and treasure necessary to completely expel ISIS from Iraq and occupy their entire domain through ruthless suppression of the Sunni population (which detests them deeply and prefers ISIS), it is simply better from their point of view to allow ISIS to create instability in the country and move the rump of the country still under government control closer towards being an Iranian colony.

You're right, but we didn't. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't have intervened later on to make up for our mistake.

Left to their own devices they would simply revenge-kill all the Sunnis and hand the country on a platter to Iran. At least with us there we could supervise their actions. Even with our presence sectarian violence was rife and Iranian influence was pervasive. It would have been even worse if we had simply left it alone.

I think it's about breadth rather than body count. Iran has an international reach that Saudi Arabia does not.

Saudi Arabia, true, has been responsible for spreading the nefarious doctrine of Wahhabism throughout the Islamic world, but its government has never deliberately used terrorism as a matter of policy, even if certain groups have taken this ideology and used it as an inspiration for terrorism.

ISIS, as much as it is influenced by the Wahhabism promoted by the Saudi government, is in fact an enemy of the Saudi Arabian monarchy because of its alliance with the U.S. and the fact that it is seen as insufficiently Islamic. In that sense, Saudi Arabia has helped to create a monster through its exporting of the dangerous and destructive Wahhabist ideology, but its government has not been directly involved in acts of terror. It has not, as Iran has, attacked embassies, attempted to assassinate diplomats, armed and trained a terrorist group like Iran did with Hezbollah, given refuge to members of Al-Qaeda or anything like it.

Sources?

There are moderates among the opposition, no matter how much you wish to deny this fact. The fact that Assad and his allies have colluded to turn it into a sectarian bloodbath does not hide this fact.

A survey which, like the Lancet one, relied heavily on interviews and has a very questionable methodology. It also confuses combatants and non-combatants. I'll discount this ridiculous figure.

The nation-building operation in Iraq failed because of our lack of perseverance, the mistakes made by the generals and of course the fact that the country was culturally incompatible with democracy, and last but not least, Obama pulling out. That does not mean that we were wrong to go in, just that we should have gone in more forcefully than we did and been more ruthless in dealing with both Sunni and Shia extremists.

You can't put a time limit on a war with violent jihadists.

Perhaps if we had gone into Iraq with more force it would not have ended as it did.

The extremists in charge of Israel are not the same as the extremists in charge of Iran.

And I would be willing to concede that Iran is capable of acting rationally in normal circumstances as any other state would, but that does not change the fact that a strain of apocalyptic religious thinking dominates its actions.

Oh idk, it's support for Assad, its patronage of thuggish Shiite mercenaries who murder Sunnis, its support for Hezbollah, its assassination attempts, its attacks on embassies, the fatwa against Salman Rushdie...and this doesn't even begin to describe the breadth of its terrorist activities.

I claimed that the interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan were successful, mainly in ridding the world of state sponsors of terror. They have evidently failed in building sustainable governments capable of defending themselves, but that is mainly because of a lack of purpose and will by the isolationist Obama regime, and of course, our withdrawal.

I provided it. You handwaved it.

Actually, no, the pipeline will go through the Shia part of Iraq, through the desert, and into sparsely populated parts of Syria before reaching Lebanon.

A gas pipeline into the EU = dubious economic value? Yes, quite.

Except the entire point is that the Qataris and the rest of the Gulf Arabs don't want Bashar in charge of Syria - they want a Sunni puppet.

And if Bashar accepts Qatar's bribe, he would lose the support of the other Shia powers/groups in the region - so what would be the point? All he has to do is defeat the terrorists in Syria, rebuild the country, and allow Iran to build their pipeline through his country, and collect the duty his will impose on them.

You seem surprised he would do such a thing. Why wouldn't he?

It was and remains essential for him and Iran to make life as difficult as possible for the Americans in the region because they know themselves that the hawks in Washington have Iran and Syria on their 'humanitarian intervention' list.

False flag?

It would make just as much sense, if not more, for the Gulf states or the Turks to give their jihadists/groups in Syria a biological/chemical weapon and then blame the government.

Which is precisely why the intervention you continue to support was foolish from the get-go. The largest group in all Middle Eastern countries, and certainly most of the world, run the affairs of the state - why should Iraq be any different?

The problem is that it is, alongside Syria, an artificial country that must be redrawn to reflect the ethnic/religious groups that live in the country because it's clear that the Iraqi Sunnis will be marginalised under Shia rule and vice-versa.

Again, see above. You cannot expect the largest group in a Middle Eastern country to share the power equally with the others - especially not what they endured under Saddam.

The Iraqi Shiites will be subservient to Iran irrespective of whether ISIS are chopping off heads in Mesopotamia. I don't think you fully understand Shia politics whatsoever if you think they may decide to dump the Iranians and align themselves with, say, the Saudis - it doesn't work like that: Iran, Shia Iran, the Alawis and Hezbollah are one.

There was no opportunity later on - it was finished. Later on created a disenfranchised Sunni population which formed ISIS, lead to Iraq becoming an Iranian puppet state, and created the havoc in the region we see today.

It was a complete and utter failure of the highest order.

You're missing the point: with or without the intevention Iraq was always going to end up becoming a vassal of Iran; and the Shiites were always going to get their revenge on the Sunnis for the horrors they endured under Saddam.

You've obviously never heard of Bandar Bin Sultan.

Who do you think finances the Army of Conquest?

The fact that Wahhabism is Saudi Arabia's state ideology and the nutjobs leaving the madrasas in Saudi Arabia end up in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, et cetera to not only spread the ideology, but join Al Qaeda, ISIS, et cetera and from new chapters there is incredibly more dangerous than anything Iran has to offer.

The fact that the Saudi ideology is poisoning the minds of Western kids and making them travel to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, et cetera; and is now present throughout the world says it all and proves that it has a considerably greater global reach than anything the Iranians can produce.

I'm sure Iran has recorded the United States' nefarious terrorist activites since 1900.

What evidence do you have to suggest that it was Assad who turned the conflict into a sectarian war?

Whether a combatant or non-combatant is irrelevant - a death is a death.

So the World Health Organization isn't good enough for you?

You just said the country was culturally incompatible with democracy.

So, tell me, on what planet do you live if you believe you can turn the country into a democracy if you believe the culture of the country is incompatible with democracy?

Sure you can. Didn't the UK end a war with violent terrorists in Northern Ireland?

But you said the country is culturally incompatible with democracy - so what's the point in more force?

They used white phosphorus in Gaza.

Give me examples of their 'apocalyptic religious thinking' dominating their actions.

If that's the best you've got against Iran it doesn't even begin to stack up against Saudi Arabia, who support more dictators; support more mercenaries around the world; have a considerably more violent ideology; share that ideology with considerably more groups/people around the world; and this doesn't even begin to describe the breadth of its terrorist activities.

And you realise the same can be said about the United States:

It's unconditional support for Israel; it's patronage of thuggish dictators across the Gulf who subjugate and murder their people; its assassinations and assassination attempts; its interventions in sovereign countries; its torture of prisoners; and the list goes on.

Or perhaps because they were unwinnable wars?

You've given me a blog and David Cameron's word on it.

Give me a peer-reviewed article.

Jesus.

https://iakal.wordpress.com/2016/08/14/the-myth-of-the-iran-iraq-syria-pipeline/

Iran quite simply does not have the money for such a project even if it wanted to do it. Nor does it need it. It already has access to the EU gas market through a gas pipeline that goes through Turkey.

This is a map from the conspiracy theory website "Global Research" of the proposed pipeline:



As you can see, the proposed pipeline goes through the Sunni areas of Iraq. It just isn't a feasible exercise.

I know that Assad most likely would have rejected the bribe, but it would still have been more cost-effective than wrecking the entire country. So the fictional gas pipeline is not enough of an explanation for the civil war. This goes much deeper than that.

Assad will not rebuild the country. Syria is going to be a hellhole for the forseeable future, quite possibly the next few decades. Iran and Russia are not going to sink billions into a permanently unstable country whilst they have economic problems of their own. They already have their work cut out keeping the Assad regime viable in battle, let alone rebuilding the entire country, not that Assad will ever succeed in doing so. He simply does not have the manpower to retake it all. The "terrorists" will simply go into the countryside and fight a prolonged guerrilla war against the thuggish regime forces and Iranian invaders. Assad will most likely cut his losses and focus on maintaining his support in the populous west of the country which is his base, and ignore the sparsely-populated eastern part of the country.

I am not at all surprised. He is a thug and a tyrant like his father before him. The U.S. was well aware of what he was doing in Iraq, and there's a reason why Bush put Syria on the Axis of Evil list. All the more reason to kick an anti-Western tyrant and state sponsor of terrorism out of power.

All the circumstantial evidence points to the government. It cannot simply be handwaved. The rebels do not have the sophisticated Russian-made weaponry necessary to have used chemical weapons in Ghouta.

If you recall what I said before, Saddam's regime was most likely going to implode anyway. It was better we intervened and took him out then rather than wait for his regime to collapse by himself and see the country overrun with Shiite gangs. At least we were able to create some semblance of a government.

Technically all countries are artificial, man-made creations. There is no such thing as the "natural" borders of a country. I have no problem with the borders of the Middle East being redrawn if necessary - Europe's borders have faced massive change over the course of its history. But I have seen no evidence that the governments of the Middle East are interested in doing this for fear that they will lose the power, prestige and relevance they have as large countries if they agree to subdivisions among ethnic lines. And no side will ever be 100% satisfied with the outcome. We've seen the kind of conflict this can create in the inter-war years of European history and as recently as in the Balkans in the 1990s. It would take a massive amount of blood and treasure to effect the kind of redrawing you want. There's a chance it'll take decades to happen, if ever.

That is precisely why we should not have indulged the Shias as we did in Iraq and forced both sides into a political arrangement. We should also have made it clear that the extremists on both sides would be pulverised if they attempted to destabilise the country. We let al-Sadr's Mahdi Army goons cause havoc in southern Iraq for an absurd amount of time. If the idiot had been shot, killed or captured we would have sent a strong message to all parties in Iraq that it doesn't matter whether you're a Shiite jihadist or a Sunni jihadist, you will be shot and killed by Coalition forces.

We had an army there for a reason. We should have used it, and forced a settlement whether they wanted one or not - a settlement imposed by force of arms if necessary. You don't play nice with sectarian nutters.

You have completely ignored the 2006 Sunni awakening which saw thousands of Sunni Iraqis deserting the terrorist insurgency and fighting alongside American forces against the jihadists. The reason why groups like ISIS and its predecessor Al-Qaeda in Iraq are because of the disenfranchisement which you have described. The 2006 awakening is an example of us successfully engaging the Sunnis and detaching them from jihadism. We gave them an incentive to cooperate with the government and to expect better treatment and integration. We made a catastrophic mistake when we pushed through extreme de-Baathification (i.e. disbanding the armed forces, sacking Sunnis in the government) alienating the Sunnis and pushing them into the arms of Al-Qaeda when we should have engaged them from day one. Three years on we had learned from our mistake. It was when we withdrew from the country that we gave al-Maliki the opportunity to disband the Sunni militias and repeat the kind of behaviour that saw the Sunni insurgency come into existence in the first place. Obama was actually presented with opportunities to remove al-Maliki and effect a more conciliatory regime, but he passed them up, and now we are in the situation we're in because of his staggering incompetence.

We removed a mass-murdering despot who was an exporter of state terrorism, a gasser of Kurds, a fervent Jew-hater and anti-Persian racist and who was pursuing nuclear technology as well as being father to two psychopathic heirs that would have run the country into the ground if, God forbid, they had succeeded. We know he was planning to re-start his nuclear program thanks to the help of one M. Obeidi. The invasion terrified anti-American despots like Muammar Gaddafi, who gave up his own WMD program (think of a country like Libya today rife with WMDs) and agreed to cooperate with the West and Bashar al-Assad who withdrew from Lebanon so as to avoid being on the hitlist for regime change. We won the war, but we lost the peace, because we did not stay the course and because were not as forceful as we could have been in dealing with violent jihadism.

Nonsense. Iranian influence certainly increased in Iraq after we removed Saddam, but the fact that we were there meant it could be contained and even rolled back, which it could not have been if we had simply left it alone.

What about him?

Saudi Arabia finances the Army of Conquest, but they have only been driven into funding them because of the failure of U.S. support for the moderate opposition. The Saudis feel they have no choice. How else are they supposed to counter Shiite jihadism? With Sunni jihadism of course. I hate all Islamists, but the idea that Assad's manipulation of the rebel forces and Obama's ineptitude in aiding the moderate opposition means we have to put up with Assad in order to defeat the very Islamists that he has helped create is absurd. American ineptitude in helping the moderate Syian forces makes them dependent on extremist groups which Assad's enemies in the Gulf States feel compelled to support as being less bad than Assad.

Iran operates a global terrorist network as big, if not bigger, than anything Saudi Arabia has:

"In May 2013, a 500 page report by an Argentine state prosecutor said Iran has an “intelligence and terrorist network” in Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Chile, Colombia, Guyana, Trinidad, Tobago and Suriname and elsewhere."

Now please tell me, does Saudi Arabia have terrorist networks as far afield as South America? I think not.

Iran and Saudi Arabia are both responsible for producing terrorists, but Iran has a greater reach and sophistication in its support for terrorism. As I already stated, Iran has given support to Al-Qaeda, an organisation which, despite its origins in the Wahhabist jihadism promoted by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and refined by Bin Laden, seems willing to have strategic ties with a Shia Islamist regime, ties more consequential than any it might have with Saudi Arabia. Iran even allows Al-Qaeda operatives in the country to run a pipeline which allows them to smuggle goods from the Middle East to South Asia.

There is even evidence linking Iran to 9/11, yet everyone goes on about how Saudi Arabia is to blame. Seriously, read it for yourself:

https://www.clarionproject.org/sites/default/files/Iranian-Support-For-Terrorism.pdf

There is Assad's release of jihadist prisoners in the early stages of the uprising in the hope that they'd infiltrate the opposition and destroy it's legitimacy. So far it appears to have succeeded. There is his regime's spate of sectarian mass murders to encourage the Sunnis to become radicalised and make the minorities such as the Alawites and the Christians feel that they had to support his regime in order to avoid being killed by Sunni jihadists. There is his reliance on a sectarian Alawite militia, the National Defence Forces, which his regime has encouraged to murder Sunnis, with the help of Shiite jihadists from Iran and Hezbollah.

http://henryjacksonsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/The-Situation-in-Syria-online-final.pdf

There is Assad's support for ISIS.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/assad-policies-aided-rise-of-islamic-state-militant-group-1408739733

War is war, and people that take up arms to fight do so in the knowledge that they are a target to be killed. We should not mourn over the death of thousands of terrorist and jihadist scum who deserved their fate. It's the non-combatant deaths we should be concerned about. The combatants we should mourn are the brave Western soldiers that gave their lives to free Iraq from Baathism and jihadism.

Genetic fallacy yet again. Just because it's the World Health Organisation doesn't mean the information is correct.

Japan's culture was also culturally incompatible with democracy when the U.S. occupied them at the end of WWII. Yet within a few years they were a Westernised, prosperous country. The toxic elements of Japanese culture hostile to democracy were suppressed and the country completely transformed. To this day the U.S. still has a presence in Japan. Heck, they're still in Germany. Yet not in Iraq.

Change takes time. Even if it takes decades, it's sure as hell worth it. The problem was Iraq never had someone like MacArthur who could give it leadership and direction. The generals were to blame to a great extent. That, and the U.S. fought the Japanese more ruthlessly than the Iraqi insurgency, even though the Iraqi insurgency, like the Japanese army, was fanatical and suicidal and required more force than the U.S. brought to bear to completely destroy.

Since when was Northern Ireland comparable with Iraq?

The isolationist skeptics at the end of WWII would have asked the same question about Japan. Culture can be changed, you know. It takes effort but it is possible. How did a secular country like Iran turn into an Islamist republic?

Bad, but not in the same league as the Sunni jihadists. I think the moral equivalence fallacy applies here.

From The Clarion Project:

IRANIAN SUPPORT FOR TERRORISM - FACT SHEET In June 2014, for example, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said “the coming of Imam Zaman [Mahdi] is the definite promise by Allah.” Khamenei’s representative in the IRGC likewise said that Iran must pursue “regional preparedness” so that the Mahdi can appear.14 This unshakeable commitment to jihad is stated in the preamble of Iran’s constitution. It states that the government is committed to “the establishment of a universal holy government and the downfall of all others.” 15

http://www.ibtimes.com/iran-preparing-armageddon-islamic-republic-backs-shiites-syria-iraq-afghanistan-2267065

It is worth nothing that Islam holds that the end times will coincide with a civil war in Syria. See why Iran and it rivals are so desperate?

Evidence plox.

No moral equivalence between a country which, though imperfect, guarantees freedom for its people, and a country which hangs gays, stones women for adultery, spreads Islamic terrorism, used children to clear away bombs during a war with its neighbour, has brainwashed its armed forces with Islamist ideology, committs mass murder against people of a rival religious sect...I could go on and on.

Only unwinnable in the minds of people like yourself who wanted the war to be lost because of your hatred for the West. Some of us are perfectly happen to stay the course, however long it takes, in the fight against Islamic terrorism.

Your standards are unbelievably high when it comes to sources. Not that it makes your arguments anymore cogent.

Because one pipeline through Turkey, a country which is currently acting against Iranian interests in Syria, is an obvious long term plan for Iranian gas.

And what makes you think Iran would have to fund the project when the EU is in dire need of diversifying its gas imports in order to reduce Russia's considerable energy influence in Europe?

Of course the conflict is deeper than a pipeline: the anti-Assad crew - the US, Israel, Turkey, the Gulf States and others - want to replace him with a Sunni puppet in order to contain Iran's influence in the region.

Assad's supporters have done a pretty impressive job in Aleppo in the past week, and are making progress in the south of the country. I agree that the war will continue - that's inevitable; however, the terrorists are in dire straits unless they receive greater support from the Gulf.

Remove him from power and you have Syriastan - the equivalent of the Taliban in Syria. Is that really what you want?

The mujihadeen in Afghanistan did not have the sophisticated weaponry to shoot down Soviet helicopters, but they received them.

I don't understand why you overlook the possibility of a similar situation taking place in Syria, especially if it could have triggered an American intervention. It seems pretty obvious that Assad had very little to gain from conducting such an attack and potentially everything to lose had Obama backed up his rhetoric.

But that's irrelevant because in the long run the government was always going be comprised of the largest group in Iraq - the Shiites; ergo the only thing the intervention achieved vis-à-vis some semblance of a government was to delay the inevitable.

Was it really worth the blood, treasure and regional instability?

Some countries are considerably more artificial than others - those that were created by other other countries with no regard for the people that live there, and Iraq is a perfect example.

The Iraqi government will have little choice in the matter but to give the Sunnis greater autonomy - similar to the status of Iraqi Kurdistan. Otherwise, the sectarian conflict in the country will only worsen.

This is precisely the sort of state-building which has disastrous consequences and achieves chaos instead of stability. It's one thing to remove Saddam because the Iraqis were incapable of mounting a successful revolution of their own; however, as soon as you take it upon yourself to be judge, jury and executioner you lose all legitimacy, are seen as a occupying, imperialist force and will give the very people you seek to help not only a reason to kill your forces on the ground, but plot attacks in the West and, much worse, create an us vs them mentality in Iraq, whereby, anyone collaborating with the coalition will be pitted against those in defiance of the 'crusaders'.

What is the point in delaying the inevitable: a post-Saddam Iraq was always going to become an Iranian puppet state.

The same parallel can be drawn to Vietnam becoming Communist.

Quite an interesting fellow.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/oilandgas/10266957/Saudis-offer-Russia-secret-oil-deal-if-it-drops-Syria.html

Let me get this straight: you believe that the financiers of ISIS, Al Nusra, and every other Sunni salafist group in Syria are funding them because the entire conflict is the fault of Assad?

I am not disputing the fact that Iran has ties to terrorism, but to suggest that it is a greater threat and exporter of terrorism than Saudi Arabia is laughable when one considers the fact that almost every designated Islamic terrorist group shares Riyadh's ideology.

“I am not arguing that all of these 70,000 are somehow ideal partners.” He added: “Do we wait for perfection?” - David Cameron

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/dec/02/cameron-moderate-syrian-ground-troops

I thought I'd provided enough evidence, but if you need more, sure.

I see you've bought the Western media's prison story hook, line and sinker.

The 260 prisoners from Sednaya prison on 25th of March 2011 were released 2 - 3 weeks into the protests for Assad to enact reforms - not to step down. To be clear: there was no conflict by this point. Furthermore, within the 260 number were 14 Kurds and Haitham al-Maleh, a prominent human rights lawyer.

This is a classic case of a strongman attempting to buy time in the face of a peaceful uprising, not some elaborate plan to unleash jihadists.

You'll have to source his Shiite killing squads committing those acts before the terrorists.

And lastly, Assad buying oil from ISIS isn't a strike against him creating a sectarian war....

Then why do you use the 400-500k figure in Syria, and hold Saddam accountable for 2,000,000+ deaths if you don't include combatants because 'war is war'?

Ok, so you're adamant that the source used by the United Nations isn't correct. In which case, how could you possibly know that the source you use is correct?

Japan's culture wasn't incompatible with democracy - quite the contrary.

First, there was and remains no Sharia law equivalent in Buddhism or Shinto, and therefore no dispute possible between the laws created by men and god;

Second, the country contained and contains one of the most homogeneous populations in the world, and therefore the ethnic/tribal tensions due to governments favouring their own ethnicity/tribe we see across the Middle East and Africa simply did not and cannot occur in Japan.

The West has had three attempts at state-building: Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya; and ss far as I'm concerned, the West is 0 for 3. Not because "change takes time", but because the Afghans, Iraqis and Libyans are the only ones capable of changing their countries in a positive way.

You said "you cannot put a time limit on war with violent jihadists."

Violent jihadists = violent terrorists.

The IRA = terrorists.

As far as the British government were concerned the time was up and they made a deal.

See Japan response above.

As far as Iran is concerned, their revolution was hijacked by Islamists.

Using white phosphorus in one of the most densely populated areas on Earth is not in the same league as Hamas? I'd love to hear you work your way out of that one.

And you're calling someone in the thread out for a conspiracy theory website?

Let me get this straight: you believe that Iran and ISIS are fighting in Syria because they believe the Mahdi will return there?

Ok, let's play a game. It's really easy:

- Name a dictator supported by Iran and I'll name one supported by Saudi Arabia;

- Name a designated terrorist group supported by Iran and I'll name one supported by Saudi Arabia;

- Name a designated terrorist group that shares Iran's ideology and I'll name one that shares Saudi Arabia's.

Whoever fails to name one loses.

That's a fair description of Saudi Arabia.

Stay the course for as long as you wish. Just give me one successful state-building intervention that the West has conducted in the Islamic world.

Or wake up and smell the coffee: your idealism is not compatible with reality in that part of the world.

You'll eventually learn what sources are when/if you ever study at university.

Jesus Christ. The Iran-Iraq-Syria pipeline does not exist, nor will it ever exist. It's just a stupid conspiracy theory. You lose. Give up.

I will not address this point again. I have no intention of going round in circles with you.

Ah yes, very impressive work starving civilians with the aid of Russian bombs and Iranian paramilitaries.

Either/or fallacy. It is not a binary choice between Assad or the Islamists (who wouldn't exist without his help).

There is no evidence that the rebels had such weaponry in their possession.

You are using the same tactic as Holocaust deniers, ignoring all the circumstantial evidence so as to buttress your absurd denialism of anything that contradicts your warped world-view.

You act like the region was "stable" before we invaded. Yes, that's right, we should have let Saddam restart his nuclear weapons' program when the rest of the world was looking the other way, provoking an arms race throughout the most dangerous region in the world and potentially endangering all of humanity.

Please tell me what on earth was stable about a situation where 20% of the country was a ruling sectarian clique oppressing the remaining 80%? A situation in which you had Sunni Islamists going in and out of the country and forming their own sleeper cells and statelets with the regime's tacit approval? In which the most murderous dictatorship in the region was seeking nuclear technology? In which the country was a low-level warzone in any case, with the lid on the pan about to fly off at any moment?

The fact is that we killed thousands upon thousands of terrorists in exchange for historically low casualties on our side which were nevertheless blown out of all proportion by the media. Any combatant death is sad news, but, as I said before, all combatants know that there is a possibility that they will be sent into battle and will quite possibly be killed.

And that's something that was unlikely to happen under the regime of Saddam Hussein.

Technically the occupation only lasted a year. We handed over power to the Iraqis far too early. They even managed to mismanage Saddam's trial. Even his execution was done by al-Sadr's goons, and didn't do us any favours with the Sunni community at all. In any case we would have been called crusaders, invaders etc anyway. So what if they called us names? We should control our foreign policy in our best interests, not in the best interests of suicidal jihadists, who, at the end of the day, have moral agency and are not forced to blow themselves up or kill their fellow Muslims.

You also forget that during Saddam's reign he had already inculcated a virulent strain of Wahhabist Islamism into his Sunni loyalist base, so they didn't need much excuse to become terrorists once we'd invaded and deposed the regime. We certainly could have done much more to engage them from the beginning, but it was better that we went in when we did rather than waiting for them to become even more radicalised.

Not necessarily. A post-Saddam Iraq certainly opened the door to that happening, but the whole point of the U.S. presence in the country was to make that much less likely. In abandoning Iraq, we've given the Iraqi government no choice but to rely on Iran to uphold any semblance of authority in the country. The risks of keeping Saddam in power and the bloodbath that we would have been inviting were far greater than the risks associated with removing him and potentially opening a door for Iran, a door that we could swung shut if we'd really wanted to.

Eh, I don't think so. South Vietnam only turned communist because the U.S. withdrew all its forces and left them to their fate. If they had stayed, the country might be something like South Korea now.

A pity the deal wasn't made.

I believe that the only reason why Saudi Arabia is financing groups like the Army of Conquest is because of the fact that we have abandoned the moderate Sunni opposition to Assad, who could have formed a viable counterweight to both Assad and ISIS.

Ideological similarities are one thing, practical support is another. Al-Qaeda got its Wahhabism from Saudi Arabia, but this hasn't stopped them working with Shiite Iran, an avowed enemy of Saudi Arabia.

I don't see what was controversial about Cameron's comment, other than the fact that he unfairly played down the genuinely moderate nature of the rebels for fear of coming across as dishonest.

Is that why regime officials have admitted that it was a plan to infiltrate the opposition? It isn't something unusual. Assad learned such tactics from Russian intelligence.

Of course it is. He is helping to fund a Sunni terrorist group so as to push more and more of his Sunni opponents into its arms so that he can discredit the entire rebellion.

Even excluding combatants, both Assad and Saddam have killed thousands. Responsibility for the wars, however, fall mainly on their heads and less on those of their opponents. Saddam's refusal to cooperate with the international community led to his ouster, and Assad's refusal to resign from office led to the bloody sectarian conflict we are seeing now in Syria.

Committing the genetic fallacy again. Just because you like the source doesn't mean the information in it is correct.

Then please tell me, do you honestly think that Japan would have transformed itself into a democracy without U.S. invasion and occupation?

A fascist regime like the Japanese imperial regime was never going to institute any meaningful democratic reforms any time soon, especially since its ideology was deeply embedded in Japanese culture. The entire country was ready and willing to fight to the death if the Americans invaded the mainland. Even when the Japanese government formally surrendered, low-level Japanese officers, adhering to the code of bushido to the last, tried to stop news of the surrender from getting out to the public. The Emperor was viewed as a divine, infallible figure. For him to announce that the apparently invincible Japanese had been defeated was a profound shock, but something which the Japanese ended up having to live with and accept the consequences of. Fast forward to Japan today, which is much improved.

If anything, the jihadists we saw in Iraq were nowhere near as dangerous as the Japanese had been in WWII, even if both were fanatically determined to resist the Americans for as long as possible. As you said, Japan is culturally and ethnically homogeneous. Its people were bound together in a national consciousness which made it much easier for them to resist for such a long period of time. They inflicted more casualties on America in six years of warfare than the terrorist "resistance" in Iraq did in eight. Iraq, as you noted, is a more artificial country than Japan, so technically subduing Iraq should have been easier. The inherently violent nature of pre-WWII Japanese culture has probably been responsible for more deaths than modern Islamic terrorism. That does not mean that Islamic terrorism is not a threat that should be vigorously opposed by all civilised nations, but it does mean that it is going to be nowhere near as hard to defeat Islamic terrorism as you'd like to think.

Left to their own devices, it'll take them ages to change their societies. In the meantime their dysfunction is going to have a negative impact upon us. Accelerating the process shouldn't hurt.

Since when did the IRA become the moral and political equivalent of the likes of Al-Qaeda? The IRA actually had a clearly defined political position with relatively benign demands that could be met in exchange for peace. Al-Qaeda wants a global Caliphate. You don't negotiate or try to cut your losses with people who are actively trying to kill you and spread their disgusting system worldwide, both militarily, financially and demographically.

Much like the revolution in Syria is being hijacked by Islamists.

I am suspicious of the whole white phosphorus story. It would appear Hamas has greatly exaggerated the events surrounding their use.

And even if what you're saying is the unembellished truth, there is no moral equivalence between that one-off incident committed by an unusually humane army, and a group which throws gays off roofs and uses children as human shields.

Because the Clarion Report and Global Research are equal in terms of reliability of sources.

Not that you've actually made an argument.

That is at least part of the reason. You'd be foolish to pretend that religion plays less of a role than it does, though I know how you leftists love to elevate economic factors above all else, even when such an interpretation has no validity.

Iran supports the dictator Assad of Syria and previously supported the tyrant al-Maliki of Iraq.

Iran has supported the following terrorist groups:

-Al-Qaeda
-Hamas
-Hezbollah
-Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine
-The Taliban
-Islamic Jihad
-Iran's very own Revolutionary Guards

And of course most of the groups I just listed share Iran's ideology with regard to supporting Islamic jihad, even if they're mostly Sunni terrorist groups.

Your point?

I already answered your question.

So what is realism? Allowing events to take their course only for things to get progressively worse?

This is an Internet forum, not a university.

With civil war having raged in the country for five years, and with the effects of it being felt globally with the refugee crisis and sporadic acts of terrorism, what shall we do about Syria?

It cannot simply be left unchecked.

Between the mass-murdering Iranian-backed thug Assad and the mass-murdering death cult of ISIS, hundreds of thousands of Syrians have been killed and the country is in ruins.

I think we made a mistake not bombing Assad back in 2013 when the opportunity presented itself. Perhaps less deaths would have resulted. There are those that say Assad must be supported to defeat ISIS. I don't buy that. ISIS would not have arisen without Assad's help. It was Assad who released dozens of Islamist prisoners and so enabled them to join the ranks of the terrorist group. It was Assad who gave support to the terrorist insurgency in Iraq against Coalition troops during the Iraq War, men who later joined the ranks of ISIS. It is Assad who even now is buying oil from ISIS, helping to fund this sordid enterprise of brigandage and conquest which now runs large swathes of both Syria and Iraq. I don't buy for a single second the idea that he is supposed to be a bulwark against terrorism when he is the same person fuelling it. With the removal of Assad, the appeal of ISIS to thousands of rebellious Syrians will be lost, and with it, much of ISIS' funding. Assad and ISIS are two heads of the same beast.

We must also remember that however much Assad may portray himself as a secular leader, he is a of now a puppet of the Iranian regime, the greatest state sponsor of Islamic terrorism in the world. Its dreams of building a neo-Safavid, Shia Islamist revolutionary empire throughout the Middle East are being realised, and the Ayatollah Khomeini is no doubt dancing in his grave. It is in the interests of Iran to allow ISIS to run amok, thereby allowing it to present itself as the defender of Shiites in Syria, and giving legitimacy to its rotten colonial enterprise. Even now, thousands upon thousands of foot-soldiers of the Islamic Revolution are in Syria, killing Sunnis and doing the dirty work of the regime. What could be a better means of bolstering ISIS recruitment efforts? No Sunni wants to be under the rule of Iran and its thuggish Revolutionary Guards, and ISIS is the only real alternative for these people, since we refuse to aid the 70,000 moderate rebels on the ground in the country, rebels whom, if we had supported them earlier, would not have been supplanted by ISIS, and so remain weakened, dispersed and demoralised. It is simply lazy to say that they're all extremists when talking about something as diverse as the Syrian opposition.

If Assad had been done away with, we could have set about bringing an orderly transition of power from the predatory Alawite elite around Bashar al-Assad to a truly free and pluralistic Syria. As a country on the border of the Mediterranean, Europe's strategic waterway, it is in our interests to see the country secure in the hands of a government that is not a puppet of the thuggish Iranian regime. If, God forbid, Iran gets nukes, don't be surprised if they find their way to the Mediterranean coast, where its proxies Assad and Hezbollah reside.

If I had been Mr. Cameron in 2013, I would have bombed Assad without Parliament's permission. The royal prerogative gave him the power and his own cowardice saw him fail. That said, with a pathetic weakling in the White House it's possible that it would have made no difference whether or not Cameron had been prepared to attack Assad without Parliament's permission.