I see no evidence that the CIA directly gave weapons to Al-Nusra or other Al-Qaeda affiliates. And zero evidence of any direct funding or support of ISIS as conspiracy theorists and Putin propagandists love to assert.

It's possible that these weapons fell into the hands of Al-Qaeda, but more evidence needs to be presented and it's doubtful that arming Al-Qaeda was ever the original intent.

As for arming the SDF/YPG, that has been well known and public for awhile. Morever, the Kurdish forces are pretty much the only ones actually making significant progress against ISIS and will likely be the ones to free Raqqa. Arming and supporting them is completely justifiable, just as supporting the Iraqi army in their fight against ISIS was and remains justified.

They aren't; there are even areas controlled by the Syrian government. Here's a map of Idlib that someone tried to make recently[1]; HTS is the group that includes al Qaeda/al Nusra (though it should be noted that al Nusra is officially no longer part of al Qaeda). I don't think any Idlib groups are currently being aided by the U.S. either (unless I missed something); the CIA program was ended, and the DoD program seems to mostly support SDF (and I believe a small amount of support to other groups like the al Tanf rebels).

There are plenty of reasons to criticize the CIA effort to arm various rebel factions, but it's a shame that misinformation stating that the CIA armed al Qaeda is being spread around and accepted uncritically.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/syriancivilwar/comments/6yovaq/map_...

You stick a very key word there, directly. In fact the US is who funded and armed Osama bin Laden and his followers jihad against the secular government of Afghanistan in the late 1970s and 1980s - but the CIA did it via the Pakistan ISI. The Maktab al-Khidamat actually had connections to organizations all over the USA.

The US press says Cambodia was taken over in 1975 by communists led by Pol Pot, and in a de facto sense that is somewhat true but in a strict de jure sense it is not. Sihanouk, the Cambodian king who had been ousted by a CIA-backed coup by Lon Nol was who officially ran the government. He was in a political, governmental and military coalition with the communists. The US government and press saw his role as a figurehead and it's not that inaccurate. OK, the Cambodian communists are ousted in the 1979 and suddenly the US is looking to oppose Vietnamese communist influence in Cambodia. So who do they fight to keep the UN seat of? Who does US intelligence fund and arm? The political/military coalition of Sihanouk and the Cambodian communists. Which in the 1970s was called the Khmer Rouge. But suddenly things aren't happening directly, and the fig leaf of Sihanouk and other minor figures and groups becomes much bigger. This was reported in the New York Times at the time, and Nightline went even further, taking a camera crew to Cambodia and showing exactly what was going on - that the US was arming the "Khmer Rouge" rebels whom it had been accusing of genocide a few years earlier.

If a direct link is what is needed then you're not going to find much, as they're not that dumb and incompetent.

If you’re spending billions on weapons I doubt you didn’t make sure they go to the right person.

meaning more than 50% of weapons?

That's not true. The U.S. has never armed al Qaeda in Syria (al Nusra). The U.S. has bombed them[1], and cut off arms to other groups when it looked like there was a possibility of them getting into al Qaeda's/al Nusra's hands[2].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/20/world/middleeast/us-airst... [2] http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-rebel...

That's not true[1]. The USAF might have bombed them, the CIA certainly supported them. The war between the CIA and DoD is described here [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Division_(Syrian_rebe... [2] http://www.latimes.com/world/middleeast/la-fg-cia-pentagon-i...

> The group received funding, including salaries for its fighters, from the CIA, before being cut off in December 2014 following battlefield reversals at the hands of the al-Nusra Front.

> In mid-2015 the group renewed cooperation with the al-Nusra Front as part of the Army of Conquest during the northwestern Syria offensive (April–June 2015).

The CIA having supported groups that have at times worked with al Qaeda in Syria (and at times fought against them) is quite different from the CIA arming al Qaeda.

The only mention of al Qaeda/al Nusra in your second link is this:

> President Obama this month authorized a new Pentagon plan to train and arm Syrian rebel fighters, relaunching a program that was suspended in the fall after a string of embarrassing setbacks which included recruits being ambushed and handing over much of their U.S.-issued ammunition and trucks to an Al Qaeda affiliate.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/how-america-...

> Most of the arms shipped at the behest of Saudi Arabia and Qatar to supply Syrian rebel groups fighting the government of Bashar al-Assad are going to hard-line Islamic jihadists, and not the more secular opposition groups that the West wants to bolster, according to American officials and Middle Eastern diplomats.

...

> The United States is not sending arms directly to the Syrian opposition. Instead, it is providing intelligence and other support for shipments of secondhand light weapons like rifles and grenades into Syria, mainly orchestrated from Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The reports indicate that the shipments organized from Qatar, in particular, are largely going to hard-line Islamists.

The only mention of al Qaeda in the New York Times article is this:

> The disorganization is strengthening the hand of Islamic extremist groups in Syria, some with ties or affiliations with Al Qaeda, he said: “The longer this goes on, the more likely those groups will gain strength.”

Did you mean "airdropped weapons and munitions"? Probably they put "bombed" in the official expense reports as a shorter synonym. CIA has been supporting Al Qaeda and other Sunni Saudi proxies for the last 3 decades at least, and i don't see what can realistically happen that would make CIA stop now. If anything, given current Shia position - formed Shia belt from Lebanon to Iran (thus in particular killing any chances for Saudi pipelines to Europe) plus Yemen (where US openly turns blind eye to religion based genocide by Saudis) and Russia playing on Shia side (Russia no specific religious prefs here, they support Shia only because US chose Sunni) - the support would probably be increasing.

I constantly get criticized for this. "No, of course America isn't funding ISIS. We're fighting them." I then talk about The Bay of Pigs, the 1973 Coupe in Chile, Iranian Contras, The School of the Americas ... a criminal rap sheet that shows a pattern of sociopathhy by the US government -- and Syria fits that pattern: arm ISIS, bomb Assad and then bomb ISIS too .. we're creating and fighting all the wars.

I'm not surprised, but the majority of Americas would be .. if this appeared on CNN, NPR or a major media outlet. Otherwise it's "fake news."

When sales for 1984 went up after the Trump election, I was greatly disheartened. It meant the current administration had commandeered the minds of people to think that now was the age of Orwell, when in reality, we've been in 1984 long before I was born and long before my parents were born.

But yeah, the short and long of it is that Donald Rumsfeld specifically disbanded the Iraqi command structure after the invasion, against President Bush's orders, because he believed (correctly) that it would result in large groups of them forming armed militias and start a middle eastern uprising. His belief, thanks to the teachings of his mentor Leo Strauss, was that without a mortal philosophical enemy the United States could stay at perpetual war with, the US, buoyed by continued economic prosperity, would continue drifting towards liberal ideals like economic, social and racial equality, and away from things like duty, honor, and fear of god; which in his mind, made America great.

In short, they believed the fear of communism is what kept Americans in line, and that the progress of the 60s, once that fear started collapsing, was something that needed to be avoided at all costs from occurring again. So they needed a new enemy, even if we had to make it ourselves.

Rumsfeld even, at one point, came out and explicitly said that that was his goal at the time, so its not even a conspiracy. Its publicly stated fact, that gets little to no news coverage.

Its like when Dick Cheney came out in an interview over the biopic he published, and admitted on air that the reason he was for torturing people [paraphrased]: "had nothing to do with intelligence. If we tortured suspected terrorists, no one would ever be able to call the Republican party weak on terrorism". He literally admitted to a war crime, and nothing happened.

Do you have a reference for that - because that is one hell of a strong accusation?

NB Not saying that it would surprise me, but I've never heard that particular accusation before. Though it does sound worryingly like the claims that US money indirectly funded the Taliban via Pakistan - allegedly without the US knowing but that is a remarkable thing not to know....

I thought the idea was that you call them terrorists specifically so that they’re not official enemy combatants and the Geneva convention doesn’t apply?

I don't think a state actor can be accurately described as sociopathic. The expectations and interactions among nations are fundamentally different from those among people.

Using psychological terms in a strictly behavioural fashion for groups/countries seems to me to not just be an analogy but capturing the essence of what is observable. Many of the concepts are similar e.g. identity, cooperation, aggression, lying, betrayal, self-preservation, fear etc.

You can defend this further and claim that even when examining an individual, you will see conflicting identities and traits that resembles the conflict in a group rather than a constant, simple, single identity. The underlying truth appears to not be not that a group does not have psychological behaviours its that a single simple human identity doesn't really exist and is always an emergent property of some collection of heterogeneous smaller parts identities/modes/processes etc.

That's simple: they're weak and can't get away with it. The baseline conduct of nation states is basically that of fairly rational psychopaths, capable of evaluating what they can get away with. Deviations from that norm are mostly reminiscent of irrational psychopaths. Anyone who expects "moral", "just" or "trustworthy" behavior from a nation state is just out of their mind.

Some would say “submitted to” rather than “withstood”; heck, accommodating a powerful neighbor out of fear and inability to effectively resist is called “Finlandization” for a reason.

Eugenics: http://eugenicsarchive.ca/discover/tree/530b988476f0db569b00...

Kekkonen and the collapse of democracy: http://www.nytimes.com/1973/01/18/archives/finns-extend-pres...

Only after they came to a stalemate and peaceful agreement with the USSR did they split from the Axis and align with the Allies.

Interstate relations are what anarchy looks like.

Certainly Iran and Russia getting a poke in the eye probably wasn't a bad thing from the CIA's perspective but they were probably not the only (or even main?) players. More like the gun store and some advisory support. For the other suspects we need only look for the folks who benefited from a buffer between Russia and Iran and their own states and a proxy army keeping Iranian/Syrian/Russian forces tied down. The whole thing is pretty inexcusable though and the people responsible are a level of criminal IMOP. It also appears the scheme isn't going to work out long term and Iran and Russia will continue to have influence in the region. Which given the behavior of our "friends" in the area I can't say I feel terrible about. But I'm probably not looking at it through a geopolitical chess perspective but more a perspective of ruined lives and societies and the spread of extremist ideology.

EDIT: "CNN says that we are at war with Eastasia. therefore we are at war with Eastasia."

Can you expand on this? Thanks.

It's been this way a long time and didn't start with 1984. There's a saying the '1984 is not an instruction manual', but with it's great proliferation amogst all the great works, one has to wonder that it's spread through society can be thought of as an instruction book on how to lead a society into fear and oppression by claiming it is literature.

In Iraq: In the contest with Saddam Hussein, at least beginning in the 1990s, the U.S. built a strong relationship with the Kurds there. The Kurds used U.S. support to create de facto autonomy from the Iraqi government (something they are voting on in a couple of weeks - potentially a major event in Kurdish history). They became a skilled combat force and strong allies of the U.S., fighting alongside the Americans through the Iraq War and now in the fight against ISIL.

In Syria: My impression is that the relationship between the U.S. and the Iraqi Kurds extends now, with the Syrian civil war, to the Kurds in Syria. Like those in Iraq, the Syrian Kurds also have used their government's weakness to establish some autonomy.

In Turkey: There is no government weakness and no autonomy, but an ongoing contest with crackdowns, terrorist attacks, and more. The Turkish government calls the PKK 'terrorists', but the government's hands are hardly clean. The Turkish government does not want autonomous Kurdish regions in Syria and Iraq, both of which would border the Kurdish region in Turkey and would encourage and support Turkish Kurds.

Are the PKK terrorists? Freedom fighters? Some of each? I can't tell you. But certainly they have some argument for seeking self-determination in the face of oppression, and unlike groups such as ISIL their goal is self-determination for their own people, not to bring down governments and to take land and liberty from others.

Evidence, yes. Even Turkish government give serial numbers of captured weapons.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1392863...

https://journal-neo.org/2015/10/09/the-mystery-of-isis-toyot...

Might be the bikeshed effect in action.

It's not uncommon to arm enemies after fighting a war. Look at Japan and Germany.

They will use the rebels to destabilize Assad's government and then try to install a US favorable one. One could say they are just using al qaeda, they are a stepping stone. I doubt either Isis or al qaeda would be the favorable government, leading to another jihad with the US.

For somebody in the middle such as myself, if you want to make a persuasive argument you'd be most convincing by demonstrating emotional stability, rationality, and evidence (links to wikipedia will suffice).

I mean it does seem weird that you have liberals cheerleading for funding a genocide, and completely losing their shit at Republicans for trying to stop it.

People across the political spectrum are sick and tired of our absurdly expensive and destabilizing foreign wars and international policing.

Republican politicians are escalating the war. We've actually increased the number of lives and dollars being sent to this war since Trump came into office. None of the Republican governing factions are seriously opposed to the Middle Eastern war.

Democrat politicians aren't really trying to stop it either. Obama de-escalated relative to Bush, but there was never a serious push to withdraw. Some of the progressive governing factions are in favor of moving foreign war spending to domestic investments, but I don't really hear the drums beating for ending the war purely for the sake of it.

There's a disgusting discrepancy between voter priorities and politicians.

"""After training as a parachutist, he fought with a special force organized by the O.S.S., the British and the Free French to coordinate elements of the French Resistance with advancing Allied troops after the Normandy invasion. He also instructed members of the French Maquis in the use of explosives.

The O.S.S. later sent him into northern Italy for an equally dangerous mission with the Italian underground, and it was there that he rekindled his passion for the classics. Holed up in an abandoned villa, he discovered a bound copy of Virgil and opened it to a section of the first Georgic that begins, “Here right and wrong are reversed; so many wars in the world, so many faces of evil.”

Professor Knox recalled, in “Essays Ancient and Modern,” “These lines, written some 30 years before the birth of Christ, expressed, more directly and passionately than any modern statement I knew of, the reality of the world I was living in: the shell-pocked, mine-infested fields, the shattered cities and the starving population of that Italy Virgil so loved, the misery of the whole world at war.”""

TRANSLATION: we've been here before, at least twice

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2010/08/17/books/17knox.html

Well the fact that antifa and all that stuff happened within a couple months of everyone donating to the ACLU is amusing on its own.

I mean, I disagree about what our (I'm French) are doing in some places, but its hardly been a secret.

The CIA and it's equivalent are not working to get those countries to a stable state, they are working to get them to a non threatening state. Big difference.

Maybe you mean they didn't realize non-state treat is bigger than threatening state? I don't really understand.

New York Times, Aug 2, 2017