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US Prepares For Cruise Missile Attack on Syria
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Originally posted by 4eyedwillie View PostCareful! The collective says it can't be about the oil! Even if things change it can never be about the oil!
Speaking of Willy Clinton's bombings, looks like the 0bama regime is using his strategy as the template for the incoming war in Syria.
Air War in Kosovo Seen as Precedent in Possible Response to Syria Chemical Attack
WASHINGTON — As President Obama weighs options for responding to a suspected chemical weapons attack in Syria, his national security aides are studying the NATO air war in Kosovo as a possible blueprint for acting without a mandate from the United Nations.
With Russia still likely to veto any military action in the Security Council, the president appears to be wrestling with whether to bypass the United Nations, although he warned that doing so would require a robust international coalition and legal justification.
“If the U.S. goes in and attacks another country without a U.N. mandate and without clear evidence that can be presented, then there are questions in terms of whether international law supports it, do we have the coalition to make it work?” Mr. Obama said on Friday to CNN, in his first public comments after the deadly attack on Wednesday.
Mr. Obama described the attack as “clearly a big event of grave concern” and acknowledged that the United States had limited time to respond. But he said United Nations investigators needed to determine whether chemical weapons had been used.
Mr. Obama was meeting on Saturday morning with his national security staff to discuss Syria, according to a White House official, having returned from a two-day bus tour of upstate New York and Pennsylvania.
“We are going to act very deliberately so that we’re making decisions consistent with our national interest as well as our assessment of what can advance our objectives in Syria,” the official said.
Kosovo is an obvious precedent for Mr. Obama because, as in Syria, civilians were killed and Russia had longstanding ties to the government authorities accused of the abuses. In 1999, President Bill Clinton used the endorsement of NATO and the rationale of protecting a vulnerable population to justify 78 days of airstrikes.
A senior administration official said the Kosovo precedent was one of many subjects discussed in continuing White House meetings on the crisis in Syria. Officials are also debating whether a military strike would have unintended consequences, destabilize neighbors like Lebanon, or lead to even greater flows of refugees into Jordan, Turkey and Egypt.
“It’s a step too far to say we’re drawing up legal justifications for an action, given that the president hasn’t made a decision,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the deliberations. “But Kosovo, of course, is a precedent of something that is perhaps similar.”
In the Mediterranean, the Navy’s regional commander postponed a scheduled port call in Naples, Italy, for a destroyer so that the ship would remain with a second destroyer in striking distance of Syria during the crisis. Pentagon officials said the decision did not reflect any specific orders from Washington, but both destroyers had on board Tomahawk cruise missiles, long-range weapons that probably would be among the first launched against targets in Syria should the president decide to take military action.
On Friday, the Russian government called on President Bashar al-Assad of Syria to allow United Nations investigators into the areas east of Damascus where the attack occurred. But American and foreign diplomats said Russia’s move did not reflect any shift in its backing of Mr. Assad or its resistance to punitive measures in the Security Council.
In a statement, Russia’s foreign ministry put the onus on Syria’s opposition forces to provide secure access to the site of the “reported incident.” A second statement suggested that the Russians believed the attack was actually a provocation by the rebels. It cited reports criticizing government troops that were posted on the Internet hours before the attack.
“More and more evidence emerges indicating that this criminal act had an openly provocative character,” Aleksandr K. Lukashevich, a spokesman for Russia’s foreign ministry, said in the statement. “The talk here is about a previously planned action.”
However, Mr. Lukashevich may have been confused by YouTube’s practice of time-stamping uploaded videos based on the time in its California headquarters, no matter the originating time zone. The attacks occurred early Wednesday in Syria, when it would still have been Tuesday in California for about eight more hours.
Mr. Lukashevich praised the Assad government for welcoming Carla del Ponte, a member of a United Nations commission on Syria who suggested in May that the rebels had used chemical weapons, and he accused the Syrian opposition of not cooperating with the investigation by United Nations experts.
StevoOriginally posted by SSMAN...Welcome to the land of "Fuck it". No body cares, and if they do, no body cares.
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Originally posted by Pokulski-Blatz View PostNope, we needed to go into Afghanistan. We should have gone in harder than we did.
Drone strikes are the way to go in that area. That way none of our guys get hurt.
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Originally posted by 4eyedwillie View PostI disagree, we should have sent in special forces and actually done what needed to be done to get BL (he wasn't hard to find before we invaded) and that's all. Who gives a shit if the taliban controlled everything there. Same thing with who gives a shit if Iraq had chemical weapons. Neither country was worth a single one of our guys getting hurt or killed. We should have stayed the fuck out of that whole area. We will have accomplished absolutely nothing except get a bunch of our guys killed or brains scrambled once we pull out and everything returns to the way it was.
Drone strikes are the way to go in that area. That way none of our guys get hurt.
Afghanistan was a safe haven for terror cells. Had we just gone in and killed OBL it would have only made the attacks more frequent. Keep in mind, we didn't declare war on Afghanistan, we declared war on terror.
Go in, crush the opposing faction, kill leader, mop up stragglers. That is how wars are won. Not killing the top guy and hoping that things just stop. Leaders can be replaced easily.
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