Why the West is Standing by Amid Russia's Campaign in Syria

Interesting polling conducted by social media as to what the US Plan B is/was......

Its safe to say we are heading toward Obama's plan "B" which is by the way..
pic.twitter.com/b4WF8Hhj0m

US MSM and US politicians often really forget what Syria is all about....one major genocidal dictator...........where a civil society rose up and demanded initially peacefully the rule of law and good governance and got massive Iranian supported sectarian terror in return.

I posted the video link on the Syrian thread and the response is from a SWJ commenter on the Syrian thread.

BREAKING
Leaked video from inside #Homs Central Prison, detainees protesting
#Syria FEB 27
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kQlaC6KLTk …

A rather sad reminder about what is this war actually about.

I've got an entire group of friends incarcerated in one of such a shxxxhole since eight years already...

(Note: nah, it's neither your monitor, nor 'cameraman lacking skills': it's ALWAYS THAT DARK INSIDE.)

BTW..there are literally thousands of Sunni's being held in Assad security prisons today and an estimated over 100,000 Sunni's have been tortured, raped, killed OR simply disappeared without a trace since 2011....and not much as being reported about this genocide in US MSM.....that is why at Geneva an Munich 1938 the HNC demanded that the detainees be released.

And the West thought Argentina was bad..for their disappearances....

Noticed Kerry is concerned about the IS genocide BUT says not a single comment concerning Assad's genocide and war crimes...why because Iran is his chief sponsor....and there is a strong indicator that Obama has decided that Syria belongs in the Iranian sphere of influence..so he says nothing.

The Iran Deal will come back to haunt the next US President in ways we cannot yet imagine.

Reference Kerry's famous Congressional Plan B statement......

Obama and Kerry both waffling again and again...before Congress Kerry states a Plan B is in progress......NOW they are just talking about it......

So far, "Plan B" is more an idea than a specific course of action and nothing has yet been agreed to"
http://edition.cnn.com/2016/02/26/po...ces/index.html …

Total ME FP failure and neither want to admit it.....

Both are literally ...."standing by"....

Where is exactly that so called successful Syrian strategy that the Obama WH "claimed" they had going for them...it was just we the public did not seem to understand it and we the public just needed more "messaging"...????

Hope Obama and Kerry fully understand what the Russian MoD released air strike map yesterday means for the so called CoH agreements......

First comment in from the FSA/HNC........

If #Russia is serious with this map all hope for the ceasefire should be buried immediately. It's total war.

Strong signal that Russia has sent to Turkey and the Saudi's...so it might be a war after all as both did not trust the Russians at all about their so called ceasefire and the US (Obama and Kerry) even less.

Nothing yet out of Obama WH and Kerry...silence...total silence....

Since Russian MoD has declared 90% of the FSA areas can in fact be bombed which actually contradicts the Russian/US CoH agreements and the UNSC resolution....this is not surprising....and Kerry's response...absolutely nothing....

Kremlin: "#Russia operations against the "terrorist organizations" in #Syria will not stop after the start of the ceasefire"

REMEMBER both Putin and Assad have defined "terrorists" as anyone resisting Assad......period end of story and they have not come off that definition nor has Kerry attempted to even "publicly attempted to clarify that definition"

Here is that "existential thing" that the Obama WH has been avoiding for over two years since Crimea.....maybe that is why it is rumored yesterday that EUCOM wants to move its HQs to Azores from Stuttgart Germany...maybe for safety sake?

NATO Supreme Allied Commander: "Russia 'Existential Threat' To West. Via @RFERL
http://www.rferl.org/content/nato-br.../27574037.html …
pic.twitter.com/pdzBtKlMs0

Here is the my core problem with the so called Obama Kerry use of negotiations as their so called key to soft power....an explains exactly why they are indeed "standing by".

Dec 2012 I spent over 20 hours in direct negotiations with three senior Russian officers (LTC/COLs)in just getting to a "mutual understanding" in the use of the US MDMP process...I would literally haggle over key words until they fully understood what it meant and then locked the word in and had them agree physically state that it had been locked in.

So if Kerry did not spend anything close to this in his dealings with the Russian FM who I know negotiates exactly as did the Russian MoD then this is the cause for the coming failure that can actually now be laid at the feet of Kerry and Obama.

Kerry got "took" and he knows it and thus his recent statements to Congress about a possibly Plan B......heck he now needs a Plan Z......

Even a close to Moscow twitter commenter sitting in London actually said the same thing.... that the definition of groups especially since they are so intermingled will eventually lead to failure.

So from Germany this morning the following....BOMBING will not stop as the Russian military defined the areas to not be hit at 10% of where the FSA has been fighting.....THAT means simply...the FSA will continue fighting once they also realize that the Russians are still going to attack them and not hold to the CoH.

On top of this problem the so called humanitarian aid via the UN which was suppose to be reaching the first seven key locations AS defined even by Kerry and his DoS spokesperson STILL have not arrived as Assad is holding it up as is normal for him AND Kerry should have known this.

100% of social media tracking Syria knew this would happen and where was Kerry?

In German:
Der hässliche Clown ist aus der Kiste!
Russland erklärt 90% des Rebellengebiets zur zum legitimen Ziel.

Translated...the ugly clown is out of the box...Russians declared 90% of the rebel territory as legitimate air strike targets.

Does this sound like that recently stated hugh Kerry/Obama success.....? sounds like utter failure to me.

AND one wonders why we have today 2/26/16 a full scale war in eastern Ukraine that the WH and the US MSM seems to have completely forgotten about in the rush to cover trump and company and Obama's rush to leave office in under 300 days.

BTW with close to 700K Syrian Arab Sunni's living in besieged locations and starving THEY are surprise surprise ALL in the air strike zones SO just how is the UN to delivery aid to them a key component of the CoH?????

The disinformation coming out of the Obama WH is just as bad as that coming from Putin out of Moscow lately....

Now explain to me again just why the article stating Obama is "standing by" does not fit.....?

CrowBat......can you confirm any of this Kerry statement.......but against that the Shia militias climbed from 30 to 60.....

Kerry: "Iran's Revolutionary Guards withdraws from Syria in large numbers"

No trace of confirmation for this - and I really couldn't imagine this happening (even if, say, Russians would replace these 35,000-40,000 IRGC-run troops that are in Syria, with those two brigades supposedly about to deploy there).

Even with all of its PMCs, and new NDF/Hezbollah units (established last year), regime has at best about 70,000 combatants - which is not enough alone to hold all the frontlines, not to talk about conducting offensive or defensive operations of any sort above battalion-level.

With other words: that would mean a complete and instant collapse for all of regime's positions in northern and most of south-western Aleppo, large parts of Eastern Ghouta, and probably in Sheikh Mishkin-Dera'a too.

...and to illustrate how many IRGC-run units are around in Syria meanwhile: it's about 60.

Repeat: 60.

That's more than double their number from back in November (and I still don't have full designations of something like 15 of them).

If I add newly-established Hezbollah/Syria units, many of which are run by Iraqi officers seconded from gangs like Abu Fadl al-Abbas, Hezbollah/Iraq etc... well, it's not getting any better.

Sound 'withdrawal'...

(After this, conclusion is on hand: gotta find a similar equivalent to 'Keystone Cops in Moscow' - for Oblabla and that gang of clowns in the White House.)

*************

EDIT: Sure, some of insignia in question are no 'units', but organizations like IRGC, Hezbollah/Lebanon, or Abu al-Fadl al-Abbas Movement and Mehdi Army. I.e. 'groups' that run multiple units deployed in Syria. But sigh... that's 4-5 such groups. Rest are their units.

...which in turn means that my estimates for their troop strength are too low too. Sure, some of them have only 400-500 combatants, but more than half certainly has at least 1000, some 2000+. So, let's say 'average' figure is at around 800 'or so'. Multiply that with, say, 55... that's 44,000 (not 30,000 as thought until now).

...or nearly two times as many as there are Daesh - in Syria AND in Iraq (at least according to newest assessments of the US intel, which say '25,000 top').

And now imagine: what these 44,000 could achieve if they - plus Russians - would fight Daesh, instead of fighting a sectarian Jihad against Syrians in Syria...

In the Absence of American Leadership, Germany Steps in to Engage with Russia—at the EU’s Peril
http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs...5Mqg1E.twitter …

Well worth listening to.........

Reuel Gerecht: Obama's reorientation in the Mid-East is the most extreme test of trasnatlantic relations since WW2.
https://youtu.be/2qjg4rgj_wg?t=50m28s …

Melodramatic about NATO taking a serious hit over Syria, refugees and Turkey and yet it is one of the core geo political non linear warfare goals of Putin..... that NATO unravels......well NATO is just about to lose Turkey....their second largest military force in the Council....and critical for nuclear defense of Europe.....

If this is the tone coming out of the second largest NATO military provider...the next US President is going to have to dig themselves out of one heck of a deep cave if he or she ever can.....

This is a direct result of "Obama standing by"........

http://www.politico.eu/article/turkey-gives-up-on-obama-syria-deal-ceas…

Turkey gives up on Obama, bristles over Syria deal

Rogue actors fill vacuum that Ankara says was Made in USA.

By

Roy Gutman

2/25/16, 5:30 AM CET

ISTANBUL — The Russian-American agreement on a partial cease fire in Syria, hailed by President Vladimir Putin as a “real chance” to stop the war, got a wary welcome this week in Turkey, whose government fears that Moscow will exploit the deal and continue with its bombing campaign to redraw the battlefield of Syria in favor of Bashar Assad’s regime.

It’s not only distrust of Russia, which according to Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Numan Kurtulmus has completed 8,000 sorties since October, nine-tenths of them directed against the moderate opposition and civilian targets, and only a tenth against the fighters of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

Adding to doubts about Moscow’s intentions in Syria is the fact that the accord goes into effect on Saturday, more than two weeks after the U.S. and Russia announced there would be a cessation of hostilities. “Apparently the Russians had some things to do on the ground,” said a senior Turkish official.

Then there’s the loophole that allows Russia — or the U.S.-led coalition — to continue bombing ISIL and Jabhat al Nusra, the Al Qaeda affiliate, whose fighters are mixed with moderate rebels in Syria’s rebel-held Idlib province.

And, above all, the skepticism about the cease-fire deal reflects the Turkish ruling establishment’s loss of confidence in Moscow’s negotiating partner in Syria — Washington. Officials in Ankara say they doubt the U.S. has the political will to see that this or any other agreement is upheld.

After nearly five years of watching Washington fumble the Syria crisis, Turkish officials say they are giving up on the Obama administration and will await its successor to craft a strategy for sorting out the Middle East’s expanding conflict.

Echoes of 1914

Since the beginning of Russia’s air campaign on September 30, Syria’s low-intensity conflict has morphed into a high-stakes geopolitical contest. From the Turkish perspective, Washington silently stood by as rebel groups, backed by the U.S., Turkey and other allies were ousted from vital locations by Assad’s Russian-backed forces. Hundreds of thousands of civilians were sent fleeing their homes.

The relentless Russian bombing of cities, towns, villages and farms to prop up the Assad regime’s tenuous hold on power has killed at least 1,500 civilians, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR). In February alone, the bombardment displaced more than 75,000 civilians in the war-wrecked country, according to the U.N. Refugee Agency.

The deliberate destruction of health facilities — 27 since October by SNHR’s count — schools, markets, camps for the displaced, even olive groves, has driven an enormous number of refugees into makeshift tent camps on Turkey’s border. The border has now been closed to all but the sick and wounded.

Were Ankara to reopen it, another surge of refugees would flow in, many of them heading to the coast to find boats and rafts that would take them to Greece and then onward.

In Syria itself, the array of foreign and Syrian fighters now under Russian and Iranian direction — Lebanese Hezbollah, Iraqi militias, Afghan Hazaras and a Syrian Kurdish militia — are in a position to close all exits to Turkey and block Aleppo, where 250,000 people reside in rebel-held territory, leading possibly to siege, starvation or even genocide.

And with so many actors on the battlefield cloaking their true intentions while issuing misleading or contradictory statements, many observers see a parallel to 1914, with any number of opportunities for a minor mistake triggering a war between Russia and Turkey.

That moment seemed close in mid-February. A Kurdish militia that the U.S. had supported in battles against Islamic extremists switched patrons, and backed by Russian warplanes captured an airbase, a strategic town and several villages and was heading towards the border town of Azaz.

In a brazen advance, the People’s Protection Units or YPG not only dealt a major blow to Western- and Turkey-backed rebels that were safeguarding a supply route from Aleppo to Turkey, but pressed their own stated goal in the war: To unite separated Kurdish enclaves in northern Syria into a single unit, the nucleus of what its parent organization in Turkey, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, views as a future Kurdish state to be carved out of Syria and Turkey.

Ankara swiftly demanded the YPG abandon the territory it had claimed and began shelling the militia across the international border.

The U.S. State Department’s evenhanded response — admonishing both Turkey and the YPG and calling on both to back off — infuriated Ankara. “The only thing we expect from our U.S. ally is to support Turkey, with no ‘ifs’ or ‘buts,’” snapped Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu on February 20.

The YPG halted its advance on Azaz, but it’s unclear for how long.

The increasingly bitter tone of the dispute with Washington — President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said at one point, “Am I your ally, or are the ‘terrorists’ in Kobani?” in a reference to the YPG’s stronghold — shows how out of synch the two NATO allies have become.

President Obama’s proclivity to disengage from the Arab world, his tilt towards Iran (the main regional rival for U.S. allies Turkey and Saudi Arabia) and his announced “pivot” towards Asia are no doubt factors in the falling out with Ankara.

Also a factor is Obama’s broader goal to avoid entanglement in another Middle East conflict, a reflection of the popular revulsion to his predecessor’s war in Iraq.
Whatever the reason, U.S. policy has been marked by frequent shifts in tackling Syria.

‘Change your attitude to Russians’

Instead of focusing on the carnage the Assad regime has inflicted on Syria’s Sunni Muslim majority, and developing a plan to protect the population and replace the president in Damascus, the Obama administration single-mindedly adapted the goal of fighting ISIL, which Turkey claims is fostered and protected by the regime in Damascus.

America’s alliance with a Kurdish militia that Turkey views as a threat to its territorial integrity and Washington’s daily praise of the fighters’ prowess on the ground may have encouraged the YPG to use the war in Syria to carve out a Kurdish state. The biggest strategic error in Turkey’s view was the U.S. refusal to step up support for Arab opponents of the Assad regime after the Russian intervention on the side of government forces.

As far as Turks are concerned, the aim of U.S. diplomacy should be to counter Russian expansionism, not to offer Moscow a permanent grip on the region. Turks view the U.S. drive for a cease-fire and the opening of peace talks as misguided. The gambit may play with U.S. public opinion, but it cannot end the war after Russia upended the battlefield unless the U.S. has the will to rebalance it, officials say.

“The Russian plan is very obvious. It is barbaric: to finish the opposition,” said one senior Turkish official. “At the end of the day they want to show the world, look there is the regime and there is Daesch,” he said, using the pejorative Arabic acronym. As for U.S. motives, Washington appears to “want to create a process to show there is a process,” said the official.

“We are trying to understand what the Americans are trying to do,” said the official, who asked to speak anonymously so he could be more frank.

Another official spoke even more bluntly, suggesting the Obama administration was pursuing a course of appeasement. Ankara’s message to Washington is that Russia has carried out devastating airstrikes “thanks to your consent,” said this official. And the Turkish admonition is that if the U.S. wants a political solution in Syria, “You need to change your attitude toward the Russians.”

Officials in Turkey, which last year saw a long truce with the PKK end, bitterly criticized U.S. support of the YPG. Their message was: “What you are doing is not reasonable or consistent, nor compatible with alliance relations. You cannot continue doing this.”

But the U.S. response is “nothing much,” the official said. “They try to evade the conversation.” That apparently “is the current policy line of the Americans up to the elections.” In response, Turkish policy will be focused on “damage control,” the official said.

U.S. officials tell their Turkish counterparts that they are powerless to rein in the YPG, this official added. “They say, ‘We are telling them to withdraw from the areas they took,’ and they say, ‘they don’t listen to us.’”

A change in the U.S. position seems unlikely. On the rare occasions that he speaks about Syria, President Obama avoids harsh criticism of Russia and uses the language of friendly persuasion. “If Russia continues indiscriminate bombing of the sort that we’ve been seeing, I think it’s fair to say that you’re not going to see any take-up by the opposition,” he told reporters in California on February 16, referring to the peace negotiations in Geneva.

When Russian aircraft destroyed a hospital in Maarat al Numan on February 15, the U.S., unlike Britain and France, refused to call it a war crime. Médecins Sans Frontières, the French NGO that supported the hospital, said four air-to-ground missiles fired in two salvoes destroyed the hospital, with a precision that military observers said only Russians are capable of showing.

The State Department waffled about the violation of humanitarian law. “There’s a very precise legal definition of what constitutes war crimes. I’m not going to get into that from the podium,” said spokesman Mark Toner. “What I will say is it’s absolutely horrific what they’ve done and they need to stop.”

He also refused to confirm that the YPG had advanced thanks to battlefield collaboration with Russia. “We’ve seen no connection whatsoever,” Toner told reporters in Washington. Nor would he affirm that the YPG also receives support from the government of Syria, which has publicly acknowledged doing just that. “No comment,” he said.

Syria’s breakdown, Turkish complicity

The credibility gap in official U.S. pronouncements on Syria is not new. That makes it a lot more difficult to repair U.S.-Turkish relations.

Turkey has made its share of mistakes in the Syria crisis. When the U.S. restricted its aid to rebel forces to allow them to survive but not topple the Assad regime,

Turkey allowed Islamic radicals to fill the vacuum — indeed it permitted volunteers to cross Turkish territory into Syria until the middle of 2015.

Other governments in the region were baffled by Turkey’s failure to craft its own strategy for defeating ISIL extremists, whose self-styled capital Raqqa is just 60 miles south of the Turkish border. Ankara’s handling of the YPG has at times been maladroit, and Erdoğan’s reliance on speechmaking has done little to sell its position to the West.

On the whole, however, Turkey proceeded with caution, generously hosting 2.6 million Syrian refugees without outside help and providing enormous but unpublicized help to internally displaced Syrians living just inside the Syrian border.

Turkish officials rattle their sabers regularly and just last week said they’re willing to send ground troops into Syria, but there’s always the caveat that it has to be with the agreement and support of the United States.

“A military ground operation in Syria by Turkey and Saudi Arabia is not on the agenda and any such move would need to involve all countries in the U.S.-led coalition against Islamic State,” Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu said Monday.

“Turkey is determined not to follow an adventurous path,” said a senior official. “We do not have crazy plans.”

In Turkish eyes, U.S. mistakes make up a catalog of avoidance — first America allowed a vacuum to take hold and then empowered rogue actors, Iran and Russia, to fill it.

Turkish officials noted the U.S. silence as the Assad regime began dropping indiscriminate barrel bombs on civilians in Aleppo and then the entire country. They chafed at Washington’s refusal to provide the rebels air defense needed to protect the civilian population. Arms supplied to moderate rebel forces have been dispensed to individual commanders, effectively creating local warlords rather than a staff structure that can respond to changes on the battlefield, such as countering the rise of ISIL.

Obama’s emphasis on fighting ISIL shifted world attention from the cause of the problems, the Assad regime, to one of the symptoms, and the empowering of a Kurdish militia whose aim is to redraw the map of Syria.

Then there was Obama’s disastrous $500 million experiment to “train and equip” a Syrian force that would fight only the ISIL militants and not the Assad regime. Perhaps the most galling of all the U.S. policy decisions for Turkey was the refusal to establish a no-fly zone inside Syria, which could have enabled millions of Syrians to stay in their own country.

“Oh America. You did not say ‘yes’ to a ‘no-fly zone.’ Now the Russian planes are running wild over there, and thousands and tens of thousands of victims are dying,” Erdoğan said last week. “Weren’t we coalition forces? Weren’t we to act together?”

Really worth reading the entire article...goes a lot to explaining the Obama "standing by".......

Michael Weiss ‏@michaeldweiss

Kerry's floated "Plan B" for Syria looks an awful lot like the administration's "Plan A." My take:
http://thebea.st/21iiMVs

Does Obama Want to Carve Up Syria?

Quote:

A stray comment by John Kerry this week—laying out a last-ditch, now-don’t-hold-me-to-this prescription for ending a modern and globally transformative holocaust—acknowledges an unfolding reality.

Quote:

A decade ago, the current U.S. vice president wanted to partition Iraq as a political solution to a civil war that ended militarily. Now the current secretary of state believes that partition may be the only viable course left for Syria if and when a ceasefire he co-brokered fails.

The odds of such a failure are high, as John Kerry admits, because the whole accord might well be a “rope-a-dope” exercise by Bashar al-Assad, Vladimir Putin, and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to gobble up more territory and destroy more of the mainstream Syrian opposition under the guise of abiding by international diplomacy.

Testifying Tuesday before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the secretary said: “I’m not going to vouch for this. I’m not going to say that this process is going to work, because I don’t know. But I know that this is the best way to try to end the war, and it’s the only alternative available to us if indeed we’re going to have a political settlement.”

This is an interesting verbal construction to parse not just because one of the architects of a highly ambitious peace plan is confessing to Congress that he has no intention to “vouch” for his own architecture. And not just because people have been sitting down at tables for five years trying to arrive at an understanding about what Syria is going to be.

So far the yield of those sit-downs has been 470,000 dead; tens of thousands confined to torture-room prisons; half the population internally or externally displaced; and half a million of the latter category living as refugees in Europe, where far-right, anti-Muslim political parties aligned with, or financially dependent upon, the Kremlin are now thriving, much to Moscow’s propagandistic delight.

No, what made this testimony remarkable was that it was the first time Kerry crept right up to acknowledging the reality of a catastrophe he has hitherto treated as the subject matter of an academic symposium.

“Syria,” properly speaking, no longer exists. The nation-state cobbled together a hundred years ago by the great powers, albeit with borders periodically rejiggered since, is FUBAR and will henceforward remain a balkanized set of cantons or fiefs ruled by a panoply of antagonistic sectarian insurgencies, proxies, and terrorist organizations—some elements, including the one residing in the presidential palace in Damascus, adequately meeting the definitions for all three categories. And it really doesn’t matter if every last Sukhoi fighter jet, Scud missile, and barrel bomb gets put away on Saturday, when the truce is set to commence.

I say that because the best-case scenario for Kerry’s last-ditch, now-don’t-hold-me-to-this prescription for ending a modern and globally transformative holocaust is that war actually continues, only against the “right” targets, namely al Qaeda and ISIS. These are the two U.N.-designated terrorist organizations not party to or expected to abide by the ceasefire. Their spoiler potential for provoking others to violate the terms of the agreement is enormous, as both militancies collectively boast an order of battle greater than that of the mobilized Syrian Arab Army.

As Andrew Tabler, a Syria specialist at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, puts it, the central dilemma is gauging what constitutes success for Kerry’s quixotic program.

“Is the bar that fewer people are dying or is the bar that more people are fighting terrorism?” If the latter, then how do you accomplish that when every security agency of the executive branch believes that Russia is not going to stop bombing the anti-Assad opposition so as long as it can claim it is only hitting terrorists, the Kremlin’s abiding lie since September 30, when it started bombing?

Yes, the Russian Air Force does go after Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s minions on occasion, whenever they dare to interdict Russian- and Iranian-abetted regime advances against other rebel groups, as they are currently doing in Aleppo. On the whole, however, Putin’s air war, as the US-led coalition now concludes, has allowed ISIS to acquire terrain where the opposition had previously prevented it from doing so. The best the U.S. has done by way of deterrence is a ceasefire the U.S. thinks is a dud.

Then there are the terms of the truce, whereby the U.S.-backed Free Syrian Army has exactly two options in the likely event that any of a multitude of actors decides to attack it. It can forbear, or it can pick up its guns and start shooting again, in which case it risks being bombed by…the United States. No, really. According to Hadi al-Bahra, the former president of the U.S.-midwifed Syrian Opposition Coalition, Kerry spelled out the consequences for noncompliance: “We are clear, if you don’t choose to be part of [the ceasefire] then you are choosing to perhaps make yourself a target.”

If the prospect of the U.S. Air Force waging airstrikes against its own assets sounds like the foreign policy of M.C. Escher or Kurt Goedel, then consider what has occurred only a week before the ceasefire is set to go into effect.

As BuzzFeed’s Mike Giglio reported this week, the FSA-aligned Furqa al-Sultan Murad battalion, an anti-Assad faction that has received weapons from the CIA for the purpose of fighting the regime, was recently attacked by the People’s Defense Units, the Kurdish militia that represents the Pentagon’s primary ground force in going after ISIS. The People’s Defense Units have now been accused by the British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond of coordinating not just with the coalition but Russia and Assad.

Why? Because apart from seeing all Sunni Arab rebels as little more than helpmeets or cutouts of jihadists, the Kurds have a barely concealed ulterior motive: the construction of their own proto-state or autonomous region stretching across northern Syria from Aleppo to Hasakah province, including many villages and towns where Arabs constitute a plurality. Non-Kurds with guns who feel otherwise stand in the way of that project, and so must be disarmed, brought to heel, expelled, or eliminated.

Continued.....REALLY worth the complete reading of this article.

Some called my claim about the unraveling of the EU which fulfills a key element of the Putin geo political strategy "melodramatic"......but was it dramatic enough??

Today's #migration meeting in Vienna was to pressure #Greece and show #Merkel she's no longer in charge. Unprecedented split with Austria

12 members of the EU met in Vienna without Germany their major bill payer...that is not "unravelling"....and they will make their own refugee decisions without the other 16

The "free movement visa agreement" has now been suspended for eight countries and they are back to checking passports on their borders due to the massive numbers of refugees........that is not "unraveling"

UK won the right to limit the free movement of labor...1 of the 4 key foundations of the EU due to the massive refugee flows and their fears about them....and the EU is not seriously "unraveling????

We have entered a most dangerous time in the European history", says @eucopresident Tusk reporting to EP today. http://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2016/02/24-tusk-… …

Millions of people turned into billions of dollars - and Europe can’t control it:
http://reut.rs/1oGRxTw
pic.twitter.com/fF2kJD6mcr

As Obama and Kerry are "standing by" eastern Ukraine and Syria are now in the verge of open warfare.

Must be something the Kuwaiti government knows that Obama does not as it's FM just warned all Kuwaiti citizens to leave Lebanon as soon as possible.

And the Ukraine...has been in a full scale war for over four weeks now and yet not a single word out of the WH.........

Full. Scale. War. And Ukraine might be UNDERREPORTING the number of attacks
https://twitter.com/Interpreter_Mag/...66063339032580 …

Many have actually accused the Ukrainian government for under reporting the Russian attacks by a significant number in order to have the appearance for the West ie Obama and Kerry that they are achieving something from Putin and as Kerry recently stated after his visit to Putin..."with efforts and good faith" the sanction could be lifted.....

Well with "efforts and good faith" came a massive uptick in Russian shellings and ground attacks resulting in the killing of a number of Russian Spetsnaz two days ago....names were identified and yes they were active duty Russian GRU military not some kind of make believe Russian volunteers.

The good, bad and the ugly of the Obama "standing by"..........and his disastrous decision to support the Kurdish YPG along with CIA and CENTCOM.....which never ends in surprising me......

Taken from the Syrian 2016 thread....notice the UK comments which totally refutes the Dos/DoD spokespeople who stated "we see not coordination between the YPG and the Russian AF".....?

Oblabla's policy of 'no US-involvement in Syria' is getting better and better, and more interesting, day by day. It's meanwhile reaching proportions of daily soap-operas emitted by Keystone Cops in Moscow.

Obama Administration Argues Over Support for Syrian Kurds

Quote:

Syrian Kurds are now attacking U.S.-supported rebels, but U.S. officials disagree about whether the Kurds have switched sides -- and about whether the U.S. should continue increasing its arms support for them, as opposed to focusing support on Sunni Arab rebels.
...

Some administration officials told us that U.S. intelligence has documented meetings between the Kurds’ armed group and officials in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Quds Force, which has fought alongside the Assad regime against the opposition since 2011. This faction also says the Kurdish group, the YPG, is closely working with the PKK, a Kurdish terrorist organization at war with Turkey.
...

A separate group inside the Obama administration argues that unwavering support for the YPG undermines the U.S. effort to build a Sunni Arab ground force. This group contends that because the Kurds have no intention of attacking and holding Islamic State strongholds such as Raqqa, it is shortsighted to allow them to wear down the Sunni opposition to Assad. Those Sunnis are seen as the best hope to displace the Islamic State on Sunni lands. They argue for more support for Sunni Arab groups fighting in and around Aleppo and less support for the YPG.

This group is losing the internal policy battle...
But who cares nowadays any more about such obsolete issues like 'ethics'?
'Accountability'? Indeed, 'responsibility'?

Britain says uneasy after evidence of Kurdish coordination with Syria and Russia

Quote:

Britain said on Tuesday it had seen disturbing evidence that Syrian Kurds were coordinating with the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad and the Russian air force.

"What we have seen over the last weeks is very disturbing evidence of coordination between Syrian Kurdish forces, the Syrian regime and the Russian air force which are making us distinctly uneasy about the Kurds' role in all of this," Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond told the British Parliament.

[<= taking that position of a highly-inspired poet]...but in our hearts and our minds, Kurdish PKK-terrorists mimicking Syrian Kurds by carrying PYD/YPG-flags are forever going to be our most bellowed and most-dependable anti-Daesh partners there can ever be in Syria...

Obama "standing by" hypocrisy towards Ukraine.....when they were facing 500 Russian tanks....

Michael Weiss ‏@michaeldweiss
US appears to have given YPG Javelin anti-tank missiles (which it didn't give Ukraine):
https://mobile.twitter.com/michaelh9...46838267355136 …

While the Obama WH cannot seem to work together with FSA against IS and Russia is bombing the heck out of FSA...IS launched a massive 1K man assault on a critical Assad position capturing over 400 POWs....Russia threw over 250 air strikes and 6-8 SS21s TBMs at IS with no effect.....

ISis seized one #Russia T90 Tank in #Khanasser now
#Aleppo cs #Syria FEB 23

Assad ethnically CLEANSED the country.
There is NO WAY,elex could be IN ANY WAY "democratic" as long as people didn't return & he is there!

I will post my comments on this development later today as I am waiting to see if a couple of things fall into place this morning after the Assad election announcement ..especially any responses to this from Russian or Iranian sides.

I have questioned in the past when Russian entered Syria who is really the proxy in Syria...the Iranians and or Russia???

If certain things fall into place today after the Assad election announcement I will show exactly how Putin was "played" by Iranian non linear warfare AND in fact Russia is actually the proxy for Iran in Syria.....and how non linear warfare allows for that to actually function.

First Kerry and Obama with great fanfare announce the coming ceasefire BUT...-

Obama and Kerry get "fooled again and again and again"........

Just how in the heck is one suppose to have elections in all of Syria unless only held in Assad held areas.....DOES IS get a chance to to elect Assad as well since they control about 40 percent of Syria????

AND what about all the Syrian refugees and IDPs..they are not to vote and that is called by the US "fair elections"...not really just another Crimea Referendum......

Al Arabiya English 
‏@AlArabiya_Eng
#BREAKING Syria's Assad calls parliamentary election on April 13

Kerry may have gotten a so called ceasefire BUT

U.S. & #Russia agree to #Syria ceasefire (except #Russia's definition of a "ceasefire" was and is being demonstrated in #Ukraine)
http://ti.me/1Q5YsMh

NOTICE while the Russians and US name only Sunni terrorist groups ie IS and AQ...both somehow forgot the Shia side of which the US has named a few that are fighting in Syria terrorists.....

At least 30 IRGC linked shia terrorist militias are involved in Syria's war are of course not negotiable for Lavrov.
pic.twitter.com/XHDLmSDHWV

I appear to be not the only one stating the Obama WH is "standing by"...even a former member of his staff is saying the same thing.....

Ouch..........

“Kerry is now fully dependent on Putin, the Supreme Ruler of Iran and Assad to achieve any US objective in Syria”………Fred Hof…….”You are generally not treated with respect when you have so few cards to play”…..

This is the direct result of "standing by".......

BUT WAIT both Obama and Kerry "played" the Kurdish card that in the end "burnt them" and totally either forgot or worse ignored the Syrian Arab Sunni card......FSA who is for over two years in direct fighting daily with IS.

Russian currently uses two terms in their info war..."near abroad" and "far abroad" when they work their info war "narratives"......right now the "near abroad" meaning Russians living in Russia are being bombarded daily with the following......

Anchor on Russian TV news last night: "The world is a hair's breadth from a big war...", blames US, Turkey, EU

The goal of the "near abroad" is to create "an altered state of reality"...

Core question is ...is this an attempt to "weaponize" the Russian population for a true war?????

Obama is not "standing by"?????

War is not far away if one watches the GRU moving of intel assets into and or near Syria in the last ten days.....actually all reported by social media and US MSM has not yet picked up on them....

GRU already has SIGINT bases in+near #Syria with good coverage. Moving more GRU air+sea SIGINT assets in theater = big tell something's up

In the Indications and Warnings intel world....this is a large really red flag...

Might in fact indicate the Russians are seriously taking the not so subtle Saudi threat coupled with the very open Turkish moves....

Ex. Northern Thunder, report of Israel to allow MANPADS for rebels, Russia sending big SIGINT platforms, now this... https://twitter.com/AlArabiya_Eng/status/701474838733574147 …

BREAKING Lebanon's March 14 Alliance reaffirms support for Saudi Arabia and GCC states

BREAKING Lebanon's March 14 Alliance calls on Hezbollah to withdraw forces fighting in Syria

BREAKING Lebanon's March 14 Alliance says Hezbollah responsible for threatening economic stability

Bahrain adopts steps to counter #Iran ‘interference’
http://ara.tv/rgz3z

Sunni Front States now are going active around Syria.....and starting to push back thus the evident Russian fear the Saudi's will actually enter southern Syria.

Now does everyone fully understand the Russian non linear warfare hard at work.......using the core cornerstone..."weaponization of information"...or what some call...."winning the hearts and minds"...it really is all about UW in the 21st century.

Breaking story and it concerns a serious Russian info war attempt against Germany....using Syrian refugees..the EU is serious seriously struggling with the refugee issue vs European right wing populist political groups and parties ie Hungary, Poland, France, Spain, Italy and others..

Merkel probes claims of #Putin plot to weaken her by exploiting #migrationcrisis. My story: http://thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/news....ece#pq=bDocjk …
pic.twitter.com/z8gMzFhGJA

Now it is easy to see the Russian intertwining of a two front non linear war...directly aimed at the US.......

Back to the melodrama of an unravelling of both the EU and the EU members inside NATO...think it will not happen over Syrian refugees.....??

AND referencing the article....Obama and Kerry are indeed "standing by"...and allowing it to happen

In #Brandenburg, pamphlets call for "total resistance" against "invasion of foreigners" w/bomb building instructions
http://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/aufruf-zum-widerstand-gegen-fluechtli… …

NATO/EU is not unravelling and this is Germany supposedly one of the most stable inside the EU....Russian non linear warfare has been hammering them now for five months and the Syrian immigration issue due to massive and deliberate Russian killing of civilians is being used by Russia to drive it.

Check the article I linked to from Lithuania the only EU/NATO partner that called a spade a spade in the Russian use of "weaponization of refugees and the utter destruction of a civil society"...

Refugee shelter in Saxony, to be opened in March, burned overnight. Locals cheered, obstructed firefighters.
http://www.spiegel.de/panorama/bautzen-brand-in-kuenftiger-asylbewerber… …

AND Obama is standing by on both Syria and the unravelling of Europe......

Saudi official: "[Obama] thinks he could never do anything about [#Syria]. Well, you certainly can't from the sidelines."

Saudi official: "Can this really be incompetence … Do[es the U.S.] really think they can walk away from their responsibilities like this?"

Russia Guilty Of Syria War Crimes, Says Amnesty
http://news.sky.com/story/1645573/ru...s-says-amnesty …

AND when both Turkey and KSA makes moves to rein in the Syrian problem Obama attempts massive pressure on both to not confront either Assad and or Putin......why is that??

The US is seeking to rein in Turkey and Saudi Arabia from military action in Syria if the ceasefire fails
http://on.ft.com/1SX2ZXu

For Saudis the risk of inaction is far greater. The internal pressure is tremendous.

.@JohnKerry called Russia's Lavrov to complain about the "indiscriminate" & continued Russian bombing in #Syria$

Saudi response.......Complain is all?

Well that's something: after 5 years of war, Amos Harel reports Israel starts to side w the Syrian rebels (Heb)
http://www.haaretz.co.il/news/politi...mium-1.2856776 …

= no more Israeli objections to supplying the opposition in Syria w MANPADS

That is a clear signal to the Saudi's that they can go against the US MANPAD blockade in place by Obama since 2012.....

Here is the perfect example of the inherent failure in "standing by"..if you voice a threat THEN be prepared to carry it out....Kerry and Obama are not even close to being ready to carry out this threat while it risks ruining the Iran Deal and their legacy.....

In response to Kerry's demand Hizb & Shi'ite Iraqi militias leave Syria or be targeted, Iraqi militias threaten to hit US embassy w missiles

And #Obama donated tons of american weapons, tanks, humvees to the same shia terrorists. And still gives CAS to them

http://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/02/p...ful-new-enemy/

Putin’s winning in Syria – but making a powerful new enemy

This time he’s taking on Turkey’s President Erdogan, a ruler as ruthless as he is

Owen Matthews

Quote:

Russia’s bombing of the city of Aleppo this week sent a clear message: Vladimir Putin is now in charge of the endgame in Syria. Moscow’s plan — essentially, to restore its ally Bashar al-Assad to power — is quickly becoming a reality that the rest of the world will have to accept. America, Britain and the rest may not be comfortable with Putin’s ambitions in the Middle East, or his methods of achieving them. But the idea of backing a ‘moderate opposition’ in Syria has been proved a fantasy that leaves the field to Putin and Assad.

The Syrian partial ceasefire, brokered in Munich last week by America’s John Kerry, only served to reinforce this sense of Putin’s power. Under the terms of the deal, all combatants were to cease hostilities while humanitarian aid was delivered to rebel enclaves besieged by government troops. Except Russia, whose planes have continued bombing ‘terrorist targets’ — and since Assad insists that all his enemies are ‘terrorists’, the Munich ceasefire effectively means business as usual for Russian and Syrian warplanes. In recent days, they have bombed Médecins Sans Frontières hospitals in rebel-held Idlib and Azaz, and Free Syrian Army positions in the northern suburbs of Aleppo. In response to international condemnation, the Russian foreign ministry has declared that it ‘has still not received convincing evidence of civilian deaths as a result of Russian air strikes’.

Presidents Putin and Obama have both sought to intervene in the conflict militarily, but all the successes have been Russia’s. Between August 2014 and December last year, the US Air Force made 4,669 air strikes to aid Syria’s elusive ‘moderate opposition’ and degrade Isis. But while this made little impact strategically, Russian air power has proved decisive. Since last September, a single squadron of Russian bombers flying some 510 sorties a week has turned the balance of the war in Assad’s favour. Russian armour and tanks have reinvigorated the Syrian army’s battered forces. Ostensibly flown in to protect the Khmeimim airbase, Russian T-90 tanks have since been reported in the vanguard of Syrian army assaults on rebel strongholds south of Aleppo.

Putin is also seeking to reconcile Syria’s warring factions. While the Pentagon spent billions trying to train an army of democracy–friendly moderates which turned out not to exist, Russian military intelligence has been working with its Syrian counterparts to identify rebel groups who would be willing to cut a deal with Assad. The senior Syrian officer corps was largely trained in Moscow during the Cold War. According to one well-placed Russian diplomat, the Kremlin has drawn up a list of 38 potential opposition allies and has been actively wooing them since last October. The list is said to include the Syrian National Council’s current president, Khaled al-Khoja, together with three of his predecessors — Ahmad Jarba, Ahmad Moaz al-Khatib and Hadi al-Bahra.

Throughout the winter, a number of rebel leaders have gone to Moscow to discuss terms — with mixed success. Late last month, a Russian attempt to bring several Syrian opposition parties together in Moscow collapsed. Brigadier General Manaf Tlass, a close Assad ally who defected from the Syrian Republican Guard in 2012, has drawn up an 11-point ‘national project’ which envisions a general ceasefire, followed by a joint regime-rebel assault on Isis. It is a proposal backed by Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov and part of a wider strategy that Russia pursued successfully in Chechnya in the early 2000s: reward rebels who are willing to change sides with a place at the winners’ table, while mercilessly bombing those who resist.

Russia’s new best friends are Syria’s Kurds. Earlier this month, the ‘Rojava Democratic Self-Rule Administration’ proclaimed itself the new government in Kurdish-held northern Syria and opened its first overseas representative office, in Moscow. Meanwhile, 200 Russian military advisers have been deployed to the Kurdish-controlled town of Qamishli, next to the Turkish border, to secure a military airport for Russian use. That gives Russia a stronghold from which to strike Isis in northeast Syria and protect its new Kurdish friends from attack by Turkey.

A wider Kurdish-Russian pact could be a game-changer for Assad — but it also massively raises the risk of the Syrian conflict spilling over into a wider war. A deal between the Kurdish YPG militia and Damascus would deprive the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces — a coalition that includes Arab and Assyrian groups — of some of their most effective soldiers. It would also further confuse United States policy in Syria, since the Kurds have been Washington’s closest allies in the region for years.

The danger is that Russia’s overtures to the Kurds could put Moscow on a direct collision course with the Turks. Ankara sees the Syrian Kurdish YPG as an offshoot of Turkey’s home-grown Kurdistan Workers’ Party — or PKK — which has been fighting a renewed insurgency against the Turkish state since last summer. Turkey’s tough-talking president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has repeatedly declared that he will not tolerate a de-facto Syrian Kurdish state on his southern border.

Last week, Turkey’s army — the second largest in Nato — backed up Erdoğan’s words by shelling YPG positions from across the frontier, ostensibly in self-defence. Moreover, Erdoğan recently said that a Turkish-US buffer zone mooted for northern Iraq in 2003 would have preserved Iraq from its current problems with Isis. Erdoğan added that he saw no need ‘currently’ for a similar buffer zone in northern Syria — but said that the Turkish military had all the parliamentary authority it needed to create one if the order was given.

More worryingly, Putin and Assad have accused the Turkish army of running weapons to Ankara-backed rebel groups deep inside Syrian territory via the Bab al-Salam border crossing point. The Russians expect Turkey to go further. ‘At a certain point, a full Turkish intervention is inevitable,’ Fyodor Lukyanov, who heads Russia’s Council on Foreign and Defence Policy, told Bloomberg last week. ‘That would mean a completely different conflict, with a much larger force fighting on the side of the opposition and the risk of a direct Russian-Turkish conflict.’ Nationalist-leaning media on both sides are already fighting a war of words. It’s highly likely that another clash — beginning with, say, a Russian airstrike hitting Turkish troops inside Syria — would escalate quickly. In that case, Turkey could potentially invoke article five of Nato’s founding treaty, which states that an ‘armed attack against one [member] shall be considered an attack against them all’. The terrifying result: war between Nato and Russia.

To further complicate the situation, Saudi Arabia moved fighter jets to Turkey last week to carry out strikes inside Syria — and both Turkish and Saudi foreign ministers agreed that Saudi special forces troops deploying via Turkey might be involved in a future operation to liberate Raqqa from Isis. But Saudi troops on the ground in Syria would be a red rag to Assad’s other key ally, Iran — which already has troops from its revolutionary guards fighting in Syria.

Speaking at a security conference in Munich, US senator John McCain correctly predicted that Russia would not observe the recent ceasefire. ‘Russian presses its advantage militarily, creates new facts on the ground, uses the denial and delivery of humanitarian aid as a bargaining chip, negotiates an agreement to lock in the spoils of war, and then chooses when to resume fighting,’ he said. ‘The only thing that has changed about Mr Putin’s ambitions is that his appetite is growing with the eating.’

Certainly part of Putin’s plan in Syria is to distract international attention from his own unfinished intervention in eastern Ukraine. That conflict has cost Russia dearly: international banking sanctions and falling oil prices have sent inflation soaring and halved the value of the ruble. Putin is also ambitious to restore his country’s status as a world power. And he would like to show potential allies in the Middle East and the wider world that Russia stands by its friends. For the first time since the 1980s, Moscow’s military and diplomatic backing is something truly worth having.

Putin’s intervention in Syria is an act of reckless geopolitical buccaneering — just like his invasion of Georgia in 2008 and his annexation of Crimea in 2014. But it’s worth asking the question: if Assad wins decisively, and peace breaks out, is Putin’s plan so terrible? Washington and Moscow want many of the same things: an end to hostilities on the ground, the destruction of radical Islamist groups such as Isis and the Al-Nusra Front, the establishment of a transitional government and, eventually, free elections. Even the Americans are willing to fudge on a key rebel demand — that Assad, personally, be removed from power. They agree that he could at least stay for a transitional period.

If Putin’s latest gambit does bring peace to Syria, even if it is a peace on Assad’s terms, it may one day be counted as a success, albeit a self-serving one. But it is also Putin’s riskiest move yet, and growing riskier by the second. So far Putin’s opponents have consisted of the disorganised regimes of former Soviet nations. In his Syrian war, he faces a ruler every bit as choleric and ruthless as himself — Erdoğan — and an increasingly belligerent Saudi Arabia. The prospect of peace in Syria is now dependent on the wisdom, restraint and goodwill of Putin and Erdoğan: an unsettling prospect.

Bill and Dayuhan...melodramatic........check my three points again as events are moving extremely fast now and I am not so sure the Obama WH sees just how fast.

Would fully agree with this BUT it is not Turkey Putin should be extremely worried about rather the KSA who is not a member of NATO and not tied to the US and who has declared Assad and Putin to be a danger to their national security....

.@DerSPIEGEL: "Merkel is concerned that Putin is doing what he can to provoke #Turkey as way to test #NATO" http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs...ey-hostilities …

NATO official: #Russia's & #Turkey's forces "both active in fierce fighting... just few kilometers from each other"

FINALLY Germany "sees" the Russian non linear war with Turkey......
Berlin officials have begun talking of "#Putin's #hybrid war against #Turkey"
pic.twitter.com/mkyGbbnfM3

There is no Obama "standing by"........

America Is Now Fighting A Proxy War With Itself In Syria http://www.buzzfeed.com/mikegiglio/america-is-now-fighting-a-proxy-war-… …

By trying to juggle Turkey and the Kurds, the Obama administration may lose both
http://www.bloombergview.com/article...ition-together …

http://www.voanews.com/content/shift...a/3194684.html
Shifting Allegiances, A Free-for-All in Northern Syria

Sad to say it...there is total confusion this morning on who is leading the US FP ...Putin or Obama as both FPs seem to be the same.....

Turkish answer to the Obama phone call yesterday........

Rebels groups crossing through border town of #Atmeh, y'day FEB 19 as they head towards and through #Turkish territory to join battles against #SAA & it's allies terrorists in other areas of the country. It "appears" that Turkey has new and improved cooperation and coordination with Rebel opposing the Syrian-Russian-Iranian terrorist alliance

Rebel groups crossing through #Atmeh (through Turkey)y'day FEB 19 join battles against #SAA terrorists

Another #IRGC commander by the name of Hamid Ridha Ansari was killed by FSA in #Syria in yesterday's fighting.

If kurdish #YPG advance towards Omari oil field 100km south of al-Shaddadih they are the biggest oil/gas trader in #Syria....

BUT WAIT I thought it was IS...????

al-Shaddadih was taken by the YPG yesterday and they did not actively engage the IS located in the town but rather chose to fight the FSA units which were facing the IS front lines in and near Shaddadih for literally the last two years......

Bill and Dyauhan...remember the US DoS and the DoD both publicly stated this week when directly asked "their Kurdish proxy YPG is not getting Assad and Russian CAS"....it's publicly available to be reread ....

WHY because it is simply "unthinkable that an Obama, CIA and CENTCOM" project could have run off the geo political rails so badly......

Social media is carrying now daily confirmed evidence that basically shows that either the fog of war has blinded both the US DoS and DoD OR they are badly lying........

Syria'n regime dropped barrel bombs with helicopters on northern #Aleppo housing complexes to support kurdish #YPG attacks
http://wikimapia.org/#lang=de&lat=36.247492&lon=37.144432&z=15&m=b …

These barrel bombs came immediately after a series of RuAF air strikes (videoed) on the exact FSA positions that YPG was actively attacking.....

THAT is not coordination???? So the US cannot be lying right??

BUT WAIT US info warfare hard at work right???

Billl...NATO is failing and those that know this and simply do not trust the "rest" of NATO to hold to their Article 5 commitments are Poland, and the Batlics.....AND there is some serious validity to their suspicions....

I will throw out a provocative question that even NATO is quietly side stepping...if in fact the Russians rushed into an "annexation" of say Lithuania under the same Ukrainian guise of "defending ethnic Russia speakers" out of a "snap Russian exercise" would say Holland, the UK (remember even the UK ignored their Budapest Memorandum commitments suddenly to say the least).....would even Germany or Slovenia honestly sit down and state to their own societies we are going to war over some small insignificant Baltic nation state called Lithuania...."the public response would be hell no I won't go" or "I am to die for what exactly??".....or do you seriously think they will support a regional war with possible nuclear TBM exchanges being used for a small "insignificant Baltic nation" that does not mean much for the rest of the EU???

BTW......this argument is being being hammered into Europe via the Russian info war machinery DAILY....in multiple languages and it is working...just check the latest polling for the populist right wing groups using the same exact argument.

That is the reason Poland is (pushing for forward basing of an actual US unit and the same for the Baltics)...following the mantra....the US has skin in the game so they will come...BUT WATCH the Obama tap dance on forward basing at the coming Warsaw NATO meeting....will bet a Starbucks that there will be none and that message will come from the US....

BTW...under the Obama WH IMHO I am not so sure they would indeed come..or for that fact trigger Article 5..

Open for examples that reflect the opposite of what I am saying..but it will be hard to find them....

So melodrama or not I am correctly reading NATO from Berlin...not from the US.

In some ways this is the same argument being used by Dayuhan when he constantly states...Syria is not of US strategic interest, nor why should the US get involved...actually no different....sounds super great but races past the reality of geo politics.