I was curious, since my Media Machine had yet to inform me:
What in the world is the "Syrian civil war" all about?
("'Civil' war" -- talk about Orwellian euphemisms.)
Syrian civil war -- wikipedia.org
The Syrian civil war[57] is an ongoing armed conflict in Syria between forces loyal to the Syrian Ba'ath Party government and those seeking to oust it. The conflict began on 15 March 2011, with popular demonstrations that grew nationwide by April 2011. These demonstrations were part of the wider Middle Eastern protest movement known as the Arab Spring. Protesters demanded the resignation of President Bashar al-Assad, whose family has held the presidency in Syria since 1971, as well as the end of Ba'ath Party rule.
In April 2011, the Syrian Army was deployed to quell the uprising, and soldiers fired on demonstrators across the country.[58][59] After months of military sieges,[60] the protests evolved into an armed rebellion. Opposition forces, mainly composed of defected soldiers and civilian volunteers, became increasingly armed and organized as they unified into larger groups. However, the rebels remained fractured, without organized leadership. The Syrian government characterizes the insurgency as an uprising of "armed terrorist groups and foreign mercenaries".[61] The conflict has no clear fronts, with clashes taking place in many towns and cities across the country.[62] The Arab League, United States, European Union, and other countries condemned the use of violence against the protesters. The Arab League suspended Syria's membership because of the government's response to the crisis, but granted the Syrian National Coalition Syria's seat on 6 March 2013.[63]
[...]
SO, this Syrian War is really about the
Arab Spring, playing itself out, elsewhere. Somewhere where the local Military fought back, effectively.
(Hmmm, I wonder who armed them, so well? ... Were they our Friends or Foes?)
Red-lines, Rhetorical bluster, Beacons of Democracy -- supplier of Arms, and ultimately providers of Humanitarian Aid.
Here we go again -- Nation building somewhere else-ville.
Syria civil war: US will arm moderate rebels, says Barack Obama, confirming use of chemical weapons by President Bashar al-Assad's regime
by David Usborne, independent.co.uk -- 14 June 2013
The United States has signalled it is preparing to insert itself directly in the Syrian civil war by for the first time giving direct military support, including arms, to moderate rebels fighting the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.
The move, confirmed by a senior foreign policy official, coincided with a formal determination by the White House, also for the first time, that President al-Assad has used chemical weapons in the two-year-old struggle. It was that assessment, they said, that persuaded President Barack Obama to offer the rebels military hardware.
“The president has said that the use of chemical weapons would change his calculus, and it has,” White House deputy national security adviser Benjamin Rhodes told reporters in a conference call on Thursday evening. He said that that US intelligence estimates that attacks using the chemicals had killed between 100 and 150 people.
[...]
Ba'ath party ... Ba'ath party?
Where in the world have I heard about them before?
Sometimes we like them, sometimes we don't. The line between Allies and Foes are SO thin sometimes.
Geopolitics is such a boring, messy chess-game ... with all those seemingly endless rematches too.
Ba'ath party -- infoplease.com/encyclopedia
Ba'ath party (bäˈäth), Arab political party, in Syria and in Iraq. Its main ideological objectives are secularism, socialism, and pan-Arab unionism. Founded in Damascus in 1941 and reformed, with the name Ba'ath, in the early 1950s, it rapidly achieved political power in Syria.
In 1958-- with one of its founders, Salah al-Din Bitar, as foreign minister -- it led Syria into the ill-fated United Arab Republic (UAR) with Egypt. The Ba'athists, like most other Syrians, quickly came to resent Egyptian domination, and the Ba'athist members of the union government resigned in Dec., 1959. Syria withdrew from the UAR in 1961.
In 1963 a military coup restored the Ba'ath to power in Syria, and it embarked on a course of large-scale nationalization. From 1963 the Ba'ath was the only legal Syrian political party, but factionalism and intraparty splintering led to a succession of governments and new constitutions. In 1966 a military junta representing the more radical elements in the party displaced the more moderate wing in power, purging from the party its original founders, Michel Aflaq and Bitar.
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In Iraq the Ba'athists first came to power in the coup of Feb., 1963, when Abd al-Salem Arif became president. Interference from the Syrian Ba'athists and disputes between the moderates and extremists, culminating in an attempted coup by the latter in Nov., 1963, served to discredit the extremists. However, the moderates continued to play a major role in the succeeding governments. In July, 1968, a bloodless coup brought to power the Ba'athist general Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr. Wranglings within the party continued, and the government periodically purged its dissident members. Saddam Hussein, who succeeded al-Bakr in 1979, remained the titular leader of the Iraqi party until his execution in 2006. After the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, the party was outlawed and tens of thousands of higher ranking members of the party were barred from government jobs, an action that helped fuel the Sunni Arab insurgency.
Here we go again -- Keeping the world safe for good-guy 'uprisers' the world over.
Maybe the CIA might want to take a stab at it? I hear they're pretty good at flushing things out of their "rat holes." And at ensuring military-style 'Justice' is swift.
Freedom vs Oppression; Good Jobs vs Poverty;
Iron Grips on Power vs basic Human Trust and Dignity.
Where and when will the endless war-making madness ever end -- on planet Earth-ville?