More arms means more war and more refugees
So much of what is wrong with U.S. foreign policy is summarized in one seeming aside in
this McClatchy article about the latest horror perpetrated by the Islamic State (ISIS):
Islamic extremists captured a major government military airport in Raqqa, eastern Syria, on Sunday, completing their takeover of the entire province and dealing a humiliating blow to President Bashar Assad.
The victory is further evidence that the Islamic State is determined to widen its grip on the region. Since it launched its brutal assaults in June, the Islamic State has captured half of Iraq and one third of Syria and operates an Islamic caliphate armed with US weapons and financed by booty seized during its lightning raids.
For more than a decade now, the United States has been pouring weaponry into the region.
Who could have imagined that some of it would end up in the hands of the bad guys?
Who could have imagined that so much of it would end up in the hands of the bad guys? Well, besides anyone who remembers
how well arming the Mujahideen in Afghanistan worked out, anyway...
More over the fold.
Less than a month ago, I noted that the Pentagon is missing many of the 747,000 small weapons it has sent to Afghanistan. Which is not in any way slowing down the shipments of more arms to Afghanistan. As for ISIS, the McClatchy article continues:
With the loss of the base, Assad’s options are diminished, and if he seeks to regain control, he’ll have to divert significant military resources from other fronts where his forces are attacking fighters of the U.S.-backed Free Syrian Army.
It will be all the more difficult, for IS captured an enormous arsenal of weapons after its attack on Mosul, Iraq, in early June.
An enormous arsenal of weapons. Any questions about how it got there, who made the weapons, and who sent them?
That bloodthirsty maniacs like ISIS should be using American-made arms to fight its wars ought to be a lesson to the American public and to American policy-makers. But there have been so many missed lessons by the American public and American policy-makers. And once again, the lesson taken may turn out to be the exact wrong lesson. The right lesson is actually very simple: being the world's leading arms merchant is a very bad thing.
