You are on the nose: joint chiefs of staff, heads of state and stategists.

Here is a recent piece from the Washington Post "Obama administration considering strikes on Assad, again"

Emphasis on "again".

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/josh-rogin/wp/2016/10/04...

The Obama Administration has made it very clear that there is "no military solution". But that's been an ambition more than it has been a doctrine. The Administration absolutely may change its mind for strategic reasons. And will an election coming up any divergence could happen. The Clinton Campaign's platform on Syria is invasion (Kaine and Clinton have both long advocated for this).

I agree that Kerry is telling the opposition that US invasion is not likely to happen, because of the legal obstacles and because the legislative branch and public opinion inside the United States are against it.

But I've witnessed US propaganda flip the minds of citizens and their legislature many times. It's not impossible in Syria. Just less likely.

More likely is we'll try simultaneously to create no fly zones, we'll send larger amounts of money, weapons and training, and we'll turn on the spigot of non-traditional warfare (lawfare, economic warfare, information warfare, etc).

All in all what it means is that Syria'r proxy war is still a frozen conflict and there's bound to be years left of strife and suffering for the Syrian people.

"U.S. military strikes against the Assad regime will be back on the table Wednesday at the White House, when top national security officials in the Obama administration are set to discuss options for the way forward in Syria. But there’s little prospect President Obama will ultimately approve them."

There are no good options in Syria.

I'm not sure what you are arguing? It's impossible for every piece on Syria to include every single piece of information.

If your point is that the NYTimes is somehow systematically trying to advocate for something, then I'm unsure what that something is.

I guess the US consensus view is:

- ISIS is bad

- Nusra is bad

- Assad is bad

- The Kurdish situation is extremely complex because of Turkey

- Some groups within the FSA alliance are worth supporting

I think the US's state goal is a cessation of hostilities, Assad leaves power and democratic selection of the next government. All of those things are pretty difficult things to achieve.

I don't think any mainstream media is being particularly misleading here?

"The options under consideration, which remain classified, include bombing Syrian air force runways using cruise missiles and other long-range weapons fired from coalition planes and ships, an administration official who is part of the discussions told me. One proposed way to get around the White House’s long-standing objection to striking the Assad regime without a U.N. Security Council resolution would be to carry out the strikes covertly and without public acknowledgment, the official said."

> I'm not sure what you are arguing? It's impossible for every piece on Syria to include every single piece of information. If your point is that the NYTimes is somehow systematically trying to advocate for something, then I'm unsure what that something is.

I think other commenters understand the following: the NYTimes and other 'establishment' media outlets edit and publish material material to cohere with state narrative.

The details left out of media pieces end up being the same details everywhere: the opposition in Syria has a deep relationship with al Qaeda, the US stopped bombing al Qaeda after it changed its name, Russia is there legally, the US primary objective in Syria is regime change and is illegal.

The way you've characterized it is that the media each miss random bits of the story here and there, and each story/outlet can't be comprehensive.

But that's disingenuous. When there's very damning material (thinking of the DIA FOIA document from ~2012, or the Victoria Nuland audio recording) the media inevitably leave out all of the same information they do every time: the context, motivation, objectives and legality that would contradict the state narrative necessary for maintaining government support and sense of legitimacy.

This bit of history with Kerry is just a recent example.

The distraction, misinformation and censorship of the Snowden Documents is another example provided in the very top comment.

But it isn't as simple as that. "The opposition" isn't one group, and no one could ever sensibly claim that it is.

The FSA (such as it is) doesn't have a deep relationship with al Qaeda. But that doesn't mean that there aren't times when there interests align (ie, both are fighting the regime).

No Kurdish group has a deep relationship with al Qaeda, but there are times when they've had agreements to leave each other alone.

BUT, it gets complicated. There are plenty of Islamists groups which aren't al Qaeda/Nusra/ISIS and do have good relationships with the FSA. Groups like Jabhat al-Shamiya[1] fight alongside the FSA, and have sometimes received US aid (while at other times haven't).

the US stopped bombing al Qaeda after it changed its name

Well, no. Even RT is reporting US attacks on Nusra[2]. Interestingly, RT makes the same claim you do, apparently based on this quote: "We did carry out strikes initially, back in 2014-2015, against Nusra. But absolutely, you’re correct in that, as they became intermingled and as they became intermingled in civilian areas, we’ve always sought to limit the possibility of civilian casualties in any of our airstrikes. We wanted to work in a very strategic fashion about how to take out senior Nusra leadership like we’ve done pretty effectively against ISIL. And that doesn’t include just laying waste to populated areas that may be under Nusra’s control.".

That seems pretty well aligned with how the US has been striking at ISIS too.

Russia is there legally

Does anyone dispute this? I think the primary questions about Russia's involvement is around how they are carrying out attacks in Aleppo.

the US primary objective in Syria is regime change and is illegal

How can anyone claim the US has a single primary aim? I think everyone would agree that is one aim of the US: they say that all the time, and it has been widely reported.

It isn't clear how that is illegal: at the moment the peace process seems the primary path towards settlement, and that is what the US is engaged in.

The US isn't going around bombing Assad in Damascus or anything (not withstanding the attack on Syrian troops a week or two ago, which didn't help with anything!)

[1] https://medium.com/@ryanmofarrell/jabhat-al-shamiya-is-one-o...

[2] https://www.rt.com/usa/361519-pentagon-airstrike-al-nusra/

You've described a kind of unsatisfied state with how to understand the facts, but have not yet overtly agreed that not only does US media not communicate how to understand these facts or explore their complexities - but that US media does not make the facts themselves available, preferring to exclude and obscure them.

I think we can both agree that the US media could service the American public much better if it both presented the unsavory, contradictory-to-state-narrative facts and if it deeply explored the complexities of these facts rather than resort to obscurantism like "it's complicated and there are a lot of factions on the ground and not EVERY person in the opposition has a relationship to groups formally recognized by the United States as terrorists."

That said, here's an attempt to respond to the confusion in the above comment about those complexities.

> the opposition in Syria has a deep relationship with al Qaeda

The point here is that not only are al Qaeda and ISIS incredible strategic assets to the opposition that is very important to its military success, but that the way this gets explained in US media is it gets excluded entirely.

It's not enough to point at my one line summary and say it's not enough. It's the US medias job to write non-one-line non-summaries that explain how very deeply embedded the opposition is with al Qaeda and the complexities thereof, and the legal quagmire that the US is in.

Jabhat al Sham is another great example of an extremist group that, in other circumstances the US would freely designate a terrorist organization, but fluxuates in doing so for it's objectives in Syria.

> the US stopped bombing al Qaeda after it changed its name

It did indeed for many months. Given your article is from yesterday and does not indicate that al Nusra (al Sham) was being bombed but just that a leader was a target objective of a bombing elsewhere, I'd need to do some reading.

The claim is not based on the Mark Toner/John Kirby statement, but reports from US journalists out of the DoD Press Office, State Department - National Security reporter exchanges, the stopping of bombing reports from the Pentagon for that group, and 'leaky intelligence' from the Russian, Syrian, American and Qatari (via al Jazeera) sides.

> Russia is there legally

> Does anyone dispute this? I think the primary questions about Russia's involvement is around how they are carrying out attacks in Aleppo.

There's been many questions and rumors in the US media about Russian activities in Syria depending on whatever currently is making Washington's life difficult.

> the US primary objective in Syria is regime change and is illegal

Nobody claimed here that there is a single aim. "Primary objective" is a technical term.

It's very clear how regime change is illegal. The US has hoped to achieve a political process whereby it achieves its objective without having to commit to too many illegal activities along the way. Of course that's been difficult and the Obama Administration is again considering illegally invading Syria to achieve the objective.

The question now is:

A. Will the US be able to foment a political transition away from Assad in a way that replaces the regime with one open to the future geopolitical objectives (wrt energy security, arming of Hezbollah, transit for Iran) of US allies?

B. If it is not able to achieve the political transition it wants, or one at all, how will it then intervene?

C. If a future political solution looks insurmountable, will the US choose to pump weapons into the opposition? Will it try to find a legal argument to invade Syria? Will it covertly break international law and directly attack the Syrian government (as it has several times already)?

D. Is it possible that a new administration would cut a deal in Syria to exit the geopolitical situation to focus on counter-terrorism and stabilization?

Etc.

> The US isn't going around bombing Assad in Damascus or anything

It is engaged in other types of warfare, including encouraging officials from the government to defect, attacking it's command and control structures to make it less effective at warfighting, grounding it air force with sabotage and cyber sabotage, etc.

Anyway, remember, bombing Syrian government facilities and personnel is on the table as per the article from yesterday.

Also, I'm not sure if time is serving either one of us well on this topic any more. We seem to agree, at least implicitly, about the primary driver of the thread: the dominant narrative presented by US media is the state narrative, even as this means US news organizations edit material selectively.