An interesting 'Take' on the Syria / USA situation ( Amongst other things )

[Phil Perry]

I just need to preface this with my thoughts, Read it and believe, or alternatively Don't believe any of it. Since it was promulgated by RT, it is bound to be spun from the Russian perspective.

 

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Here's a shrewd and entertaining mockery of the Exceptional Americans and their empire clothed in arrogance by 'Collapse' Orlov, who admittedly seems to be doing pretty well out of them himself.

 

http://russia-insider.com/e...

 

Military Defeat as a Financial Collapse Trigger - The Epic US Fail in Syria

 

"The Syrian defeat is not the result of a single operation, but an entire sequence of them, each resulting in what can only described as an epic fail."

 

"The entire US Syrian campaign can be described as a relentless pursuit of failure."

 

We have fast US navy ships, equipped with all of the most modern radar and navigation equipment, inexplicably colliding with large, slow-moving cargo ships, resulting in the death of sailors. We have the example of Syria, where several years of concerted effort to dismember the country and dislodge its president have resulted in one disaster after another. And now we have the example of North Korea, which tests ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons to everyone’s great consternation while the US holds meaningless military exercises—meaningless because it has absolutely no military cards to play that wouldn’t result in the complete annihilation of the very same ally the US has sworn to protect....

 

Key elements of this failure are:

 

The complete inability to hold accountable those who are responsible for failure, be they politicians or military officers.

 

The complete inability to learn from mistakes and adjust strategies, doing things that have been proven not to work over and over again.

 

The complete inability to accept the truth of the situation, instead preferring to inhabit a fictional realm full of moderate terrorists, friendly tribal leaders, rainbows and unicorns.

 

The complete inability to resist corruption of every sort, including fraudulent schemes that include outright theft of government property...

 

He also announced the start of a program to “train and equip” Free Syrian Army with the goal of overthrowing Bashar Assad. The CIA picked out promising groups, gave them weapons, and then watched as they joined either ISIS or Jabhat an-Nusra en masse. As this went on, US officials continued to refer to these eager new terrorists as “moderate opposition.” Eventually, the US-cultivated myth called the Free Syrian Army fell apart altogether, to everyone’s great embarrassment. But once again the embarrassment was insufficient to cause those responsible to do the honorable thing and shoot themselves in the head...

 

Saudi money was used to buy up obsolete Soviet-era weapons, primarily in the Balkans, and then ship them to Turkey and Jordan, all using forged paperwork to avoid appearance of illegality. From there they were supposed to filter into Syria and end up in the hands of the Kurds, who were at the time defending the town of Kobani from ISIS. Quite unsurprisingly, none of this went according to plan. The arms black market in the Middle East started overflowing with weapons, including heavy weaponry. US intelligence officers started buying up Ferraris, refusing to accept bribes in paper money—only in gold bars.

 

 

 

Small-time arms dealers suddenly became very rich and started battling each other over market share. Just one shoot-out at a Jordanian army base claimed the lives of two Jordanian officers, two American contractors and one South African. (What illegal arms deal can ever go down without a South African being involved?) When the scale of the fiasco became obvious, the Jordanians involved in it were fired, but nothing was confiscated. Hillary Clinton was particularly livid; she was made to look really bad when some smart person posted a contract for the delivery of tonnes of weapons from Bulgaria to the ports of Tasucu (Turkey) and Aqaba (Jordan) on a US government web site, and Wikileaks started digging up more details.

 

It turns out that altogether the Obama administration squandered half a billion dollars on just the Free Syrian Army and Timber Sycamore. Instead of blaming themselves, those involved (most of them still on the job, with nary a much-deserved bullet to the head among any of them) got busy blaming Russia for not letting them “finish the job.”

 

And yet the Americans consider it reasonable to think that once ISIS is completely routed (a matter of a couple of months at this rate) these same Kurds will help them establish and maintain control over the entire eastern shore of Euphrates all the way to the Iraqi border. Not only are the Kurds quite unmotivated to do so, but the Syrians are currently busy fortifying a beachhead and erecting a pontoon bridge in Ayash north of recently recaptured Deir ez-Zor. In the past couple of days they have moved heavy weaponry across the Euphrates to its eastern shore, knocked ISIS remnants out of the surrounding villages and are getting ready to advance toward the Iraqi border. They have made no secret of their plan to reestablish control over all of Syrian territory.

 

Looks like fiasco number four is already very much baked into the cake. But as usual, this is not stopping the Americans from pumping in more advisors and weapons, who will advise people who will refuse to heed their advise and arm people who will just as easily fight for them as against them. They are also pumping in other resources into constructing military bases on Syrian territory, which they will not control for any length of time. ..

 

Amazingly, even after all that has happened, they saw it fit to try to breathe some new life into the Free Syrian Army, and also to find some use for their bases in Jordan which had been thoroughly discredited by their performance in Timber Sycamore. To this end, they cozied up to some obscure armed groups that had crossed into Syria from Jordan and with their help established a base at Al Tanf, sufficiently heavily armed to hold that territory for a long time, and possibly to serve as forward position for an invasion from the south.

 

What happened instead is that the Syrians and the Iranians quickly circumvented Al Tanf, took control of the Iraq border (with full Iraqi cooperation) rendering the Al Tanf base completely irrelevant. In recognition of this fact the Americans started dismantling and evacuating the base while the obscure armed groups they had cozied up to gave up and either surrendered to the Syrians or ran off and joined ISIS. Fiasco number five is now complete.

 

Fiasco number four is still ongoing, but the end result is already clear. Pretty soon there will no longer be any ISIS left in Syria for the Americans to pretend to be fighting. Their position, both in the Middle East and all around the world, is increasingly weak.

 

...in order for a superpower to cease being a superpower a relatively small military defeat is sufficient, provided it is sufficiently meaningful. American performance in Syria is such that the US will no longer be party to international negotiations over Syria’s future—because its position is now so weak that it can simply be disregarded. And when it comes to meaningful military defeats, a self-inflicted one is by far the most efficacious.

 

Syria is not the only place where US military power is turning out to be not the least bit powerful. There is also Afghanistan, where the Taliban is busy reconquering the north of the country—the part of it that was most easily “liberated” when the Americans first invaded back in 2001. And there is also North Korea, whose leadership has successfully checkmated the US, leaving it with exactly zero viable military options—a situation the Americans are constitutionally incapable of accepting. And so they trash-talk the North Koreans, who trash-talk right back at them, making the rest of the world laugh nervously.

 

Those who have attempted it before—figures such as Hussein Saddam and Muammar Qaddafy—were swiftly killed and their countries destroyed. But now such countries as China and Russia are heading up the dedollarization drive—countries that the US cannot hope to oppose, especially when they act in concert—and the American response so far has amounted to empty threats, toothless sanctions and a great deal of angry but incoherent mumbling.

 

To describe the situation in the simplest terms possible: the function of the US military is to intimidate other countries into letting the US buy whatever it wants by printing US dollars as needed, essentially robbing the rest of the world at gunpoint. Once their ability to intimidate the world into submission is gone so will be their ability to endlessly fleece the planet. And once that ability is gone all that will remain of the “richest country in the world” is a pile of worthless paper.

 

When precisely that moment arrives is anyone’s guess, but you shouldn’t need to time it exactly provided you can plan for it.

 

It's amazing but hope inspiring; to think that we may outlive the USA and see the Exceptional Ones reduced to the degradation that they have inflicted on other parts of the world.

 

 

[Yenn]

That all sounds reasonable, but.

 

Thye US has suffered any number of military defeats without losing its superpower status.

 

The Korean war was one, Viet Nam another and Cuba was a fiasco.

 

Now the USA has been trying for many years to denigrate Cuba, who is an enemy because they threw out the corrupt Yanks way back. Cuba have not as far as i know ever tried to attack the USA, maybe Russia did use them, but that was stopped.

 

Viet Nam has been prevented from getting monetary aid by the Yanks ever since they threw out the Yanks.

 

The Korean war has never been concluded. South Korea is a state bolstered by the USA, while the Yanks have about 30,000 troops sitting on the border with N. Korea for 60 years. S Korea and USA are forever conducting military exercises, threatening N Korea.

 

The US President has now declared he can annihilate N Korea, because it is playing illegally with Nuclear weapons. He also says that Cuba is a rogue state, but I cannot for the life of me see what Cuba has done to get that description.

 

It is generally accepted that Israel has nuclear capability, but the USA is happy with that, because Israel can do no wrong in their eyes.

 

It is time that we in Australia woke up to the fact that the USA is the schoolyard bully and we are the little kid sucking up to him, so that we can feel safe. Remember your school days, did you ever see the bully doing anything that didn't suit him and only him.