If the country isn’t pacified before Assad steps down, there’s no nation-building that’s going to happen. Power hates a vacuum, remember? Look at Afghanistan and Iraq. We had armor and troops on the ground!

Isn’t that exactly what even the most “moderate” of “moderate rebels” is?

Dude, stop being THAT guy. You’re making stuff up and it’s making you look stupid.

I have to disagree.

Quit pulling stuff out of your ass. What’s your basis for saying Syrians “don’t want to be liberated?”

Did you even read the Court’s ruling?

You’re obfuscating the issue and lumping with up with “Republicans suck and it’s all their fault.”

I actually went through the Carter Center for Peace reports and analyses on Syria a year ago. They pretty much say the same thing, with even far more excruciating detail than that Wikipedia entry - any moderate rebel groups in Syria have been subsumed under either or both the ISIS banner, or some Al-Qaeda in Syria…

Yep. Well late last year Russia tried to broach such an approach. But the first condition was people needed to put down their arms first, so that everyone could start rebuilding and working towards a reconciliation process.

It’s THEIR city, their country.

http://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-ne…

I think one of the worst things we’ve done in modern war is develop weapon systems designed to be “precise” and “reduce collateral damage.” I think this was a reaction to the televised war in Vietnam, wherein such media did a lot to undermine public support for the war.

I don’t get this insistent on “city blocks” thing. OIF wasn’t fought in barren desert like ODS in Kuwait. We fought the Iraqis in villages and cities. We dropped cluster bombs on their cities. We killed nearly 300,000 Iraqi civilians.

We didn’t lose the war in Iraq. We lost the peace.

How do you NOT use a broad brush to define terrorists? It’s not like they wear uniforms or have specific gang hand signs, or have a certain style of haircut per group. Here in America, if you take up arms against the government, you’re going to called a terrorist and get the Patriot Act rammed up your ass sideways.

What exactly is your basis for assuming the SAA doesn’t care about civilians?

Dude, we killed nearly 300,000 civilians in Iraq. We used cluster bombs. We brought out the Wily Pete in Fallujah. We did a whole bunch of shit.

Yeah we really SUCK at it, don’t we?

See, now that I can see the sense of. Thanks for making a lucid point (compared to the other stuff on here .... LOL).

It’s urban warfare. They’re fighting terrorists, not uniformed soldiers or a regular army.