{"id":181493,"date":"2016-06-09T18:51:00","date_gmt":"2016-06-09T23:51:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2016\/06\/09\/operation-ridiculous-clusterf\/"},"modified":"2016-06-09T18:51:00","modified_gmt":"2016-06-09T23:51:00","slug":"operation-ridiculous-clusterf","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2016\/06\/09\/operation-ridiculous-clusterf\/","title":{"rendered":"Operation Ridiculous Clusterf%$#"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Speaking of US military, intelligence, and foreign policy failures, it appears that our efforts to overthrow Assad are failing, in part because <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thedailybeast.com\/articles\/2016\/06\/09\/cia-and-pentagon-bicker-while-russia-wipes-out-u-s-backed-rebels.html\">CIA&#8217;s and the Pentagon&#8217;s proxies are literally at war with each other<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">Two Department of Defense officials told The Daily Beast that they are not eager to support the rebels in the city of Aleppo because they\u2019re seen as being affiliated with al Qaeda in Syria, or Jabhat al Nusra. The CIA, which supports those rebel groups, rejects that claim, saying alliances of convenience in the face of a mounting Russian-led offensive have created marriages of battlefield necessity, not ideology.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">\u201cIt is a strange thing that DoD hall chatter mimics Russian propaganda,\u201d one U.S. official, who supports the intelligence community position, wryly noted to Pentagon claims that the opposition and Nusra are one in the same.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">But even if the rebels were completely separated from Nusra, there would still be something of a strategic conflict with U.S. military goals. The rebels in Aleppo, these Pentagon officials note, are fighting the Bashar al-Assad regime; the American military effort, on the other hand, is primarily about defeating the self-proclaimed Islamic State.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">The intelligence community, which backed opposition forces in Aleppo, believes ISIS cannot be defeated as long as Assad is in power. The terror group, they say, thrives in unstable territories. And only local forces\u2014like the ones backed by the CIA\u2014can mitigate that threat.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">\u201cThe U.S. has two isolated programs that are not mutually supporting each other and are actually sometimes at odds with each other,\u201d said Jennifer Cafarella, a Syria analyst at the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Following the lead of the House of Saud, and allowing the CIA to engage in its regime change fantasies are no way to run a foreign policy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Speaking of US military, intelligence, and foreign policy failures, it appears that our efforts to overthrow Assad are failing, in part because CIA&#8217;s and the Pentagon&#8217;s proxies are literally at war with each other: Two Department of Defense officials told The Daily Beast that they are not eager to support the rebels in the city &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[981,969,1102,1006,982,980,1098],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-181493","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-civil-war","category-evil","category-intelligence","category-military","category-stupid","category-syria","category-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181493"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=181493"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181493\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=181493"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=181493"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=181493"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}