If you want an illustration of how incompetent Barack Obama is, just consider the answers to this question “Had Obama established a no fly zone in Syria, what might have happened?” to contrast it with the strategic failures facing the U.S. in the Levant region today.
In 2014, under the pretense Obama was willing to consider a no fly zone in Syria to protect the civilians from the Assad regime – after many of his cabinet members urged him to consider it – he ordered the Pentagon to produce an outline for such an endeavor. General Martin Dempsey proposed an inflated 70,000 U.S. troops needed to carry out the responsibility. Later, the numbers dropped to 30,000 when discussed to provide the same zone to the Kurdish separatists. The point was made amply that Barack Obama did not want to establish a Syrian no fly zone at any cost in order to appease the US flag burners in Tehran.
Had he, what would have happened?
For one, Syrian refugees would have stayed home knowing that Assad can no longer gas them or drop his deadly barrel bombs while they slept. Europe would not have been flooded by Syrian refugees, and Aylan Kurdi, the little boy who drowned on the beaches of Turkey, might still be alive today. SO hundreds of other refugees who drowned trying to escape the Assad terror and tyranny.
More importantly though, ISIS would have been far weaker because if Syrians had the protection of the United States, they would not have relied on ISIS and al-Qaeda to protect them from Assad by fighting on their behalf. People in the West do not understand how Syrians felt. They felt abandoned, alone in the world, being used as guinea pigs for arms merchants, weapon testers, and an apathetic west watching and talking. ISIS and al-Nusra provided that protection. Imagine for a moment, the Police Department of NY City no longer exists and the Russian mafia comes along to provide protection to understand the dilemma of the Syrian people.
A weaker ISIS means we could have avoided San Bernardino, Paris, Istanbul, and now Brussels. Obama abandoned the Syrian people for his own political convenience and it backfired in the form of extreme terror the world is at a loss how to stop in the aftermath of Barack Obama who ignited it all. Never forget that ISIS showed its true ugly head for two reasons: Because Assad committed atrocities against the Syrian people most Sunni Muslims saw as a sectarian war, and because Obama refused to protect the Syrian civilians by establishing a no fly zone the Saudis were content to pay for.
Furthermore, Syrians, as Muslims, are mostly Hanafis. Hanafism is the most moderate and liberal schools of thought in Islam. Hanafi Syrians tend to reject the more extreme Hanbali school ISIS and al-Qaeda preach – this is why hundreds of thousands of Sunni Muslims still support Assad – as such, Barack Obama missed a golden opportunity, when he refused to build a no fly zone, to tilt most Syrians towards the West. Had the inept Denis McDonough and Ben Rhodes understood how precious a Hanafi is to Islam as a future reformer, they would not have made the terrible mistakes of ignoring those America needs the most in Arab countries to stand in the way of terror that reached all the way to San Bernardino on its way wreaking havoc in Europe and the Middle East.
Historians must ask these rhetorical questions when writing about the disastrous era of Barack Obama. When asked, the research would reveal so much more about the incompetence of this administration and its utter ignorance of world affairs.
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