Maybe it's time to exempt WMD users like 🇸🇾Assad from 🇺🇸Executive Order 12333 banning political assassinations. If Assad refuses to turn himself in to the Hague, put him on a kill list.
"🇸🇦MBS is a murderer." -- Bernie Sanders before surgery. axios.com/sanders-last-p…
Rojava is cancelled apparently. 😳
This is the country Trump just handed all captured ISIS fighters and much of northern Syria to. politi.co/2VnglBk
This is the family business running American foreign policy.
"Foreign policy is too hard, let America's enemies figure that stuff out. I have hamberders to eat and Fox News shows to tweet about!"
Re-upping Mattis' resignation letter from the last time Trump decided to embrace Jimmy Dore's foreign policy wisdom. militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-…
You can tell Trump knows a lot of Kurdish people and how they feel about America...
You know Cheeto Jesus dun fucked up on foreign policy when Mitt Romney, Mitch McConnell, and Pat Robertson are repeating Ilhan Omar talking points slamming the decision. 😁
Who says bipartisanship is dead?
Who says bipartisanship is dead?
Fortress 🇬🇧Britain didn't win any world wars going it alone you daft racist buffoons.
#HandsOffSyria has led to nothing but mass murder and forced displacement. Way to go 🇸🇾🇷🇺🇹🇷"anti-imperialists"!
Long before #HongKongProtests, #NBAChina, and #Blizzardboycott, Bernie Sanders was calling for a consistent pro-democracy foreign policy towards China's communist autocracy. Speech is from 1992.
Call me crazy, but obsessing over what's in your or other people's bios is probably not the right approach to foreign policy in general or U.S. Syria policy in particular.
NATO vs NATO. 😳
Remember how mad Republicans were about Obama's ill-conceived withdrawal from Iraq in 2011? This is 1,000 times worse.
Trump handed ISIS get out of jail free cards by throwing their jailers under the bus.
Make ISIS Great Again -- #Trump2020!
"America First" means American taxpayers paying American pilots to fly American jets to drop American bombs on American ammunition while abandoning one American ally to be slaughtered by another American ally thereby strengething America's enemies.
cnn.com/2019/10/16/pol…
cnn.com/2019/10/16/pol…
Same energy.
Baghdadi was not just a terrorist and a war criminal; he was a serial rapist. One of his victims, American aid worker Kayla Mueller, fought and undermined ISIS even as a hostage.
abcn.ws/2bAqF3Y
abcn.ws/2bAqF3Y
Kayla Mueller was an internationalist. In college, she was active in drawing attention to genocide in Darfur. jackcentral.org/news/us-milita…
Kayla Mueller couldn't stay neutral as Bashar al-Assad engaged in mass murder to crush peaceful Arab Spring protests in Syria. She was captured near Aleppo on a trip installing communications equipment in a hospital, one of Assad's favorite targets.
abcn.ws/2bfXB17
abcn.ws/2bfXB17
The Obama administration threatened to prosecute Kayla Mueller's parents if they paid ISIS to free her. The families of ISIS hostages Peter Kassig and James Foley were similarly threatened.
newyorker.com/magazine/2015/…
abcn.ws/2bAqF3Y
newyorker.com/magazine/2015/…
abcn.ws/2bAqF3Y
The group Kayla Mueller was working with, Doctors Without Borders, covered up her abduction which led to other humanitarian aid workers being captured by ISIS. abcn.ws/2bAqF3Y
Kayla Mueller always put others first, even passing up a chance to escape so Yazidi children being raped by Baghdadi would have better odds of making it out. Her Christian faith was both a source of strength and a call to act. Remember her, not Baghdadi.
abcn.ws/2bAqF3Y
abcn.ws/2bAqF3Y
The rise of ISIS has no single cause, but no matter which way you look at it the complicity of the Assad regime in that rise is undeniable. That basic truth is what anti-Assad Syrians in Idlib were communicating with this 2014 poster. 1/
The guy who started the group that would later become the Syrian component of ISIS, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, got his start as a jihadist fighting the U.S. in Iraq as part of Al-Qaeda. AQ was funneled into Iraq by the Assad regime. 2/ en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Moham…
Today, Assad pretends to be the only alternative to al-Qaeda and ISIS and casts all of his opponents as AQ/ISIS, but back in 2003 while he was sponsoring al-Qaeda, he was an al-Qaeda truther. 3/
archive.is/pBaiq
archive.is/pBaiq
In 2011, Baghdadi sent Jolani w/ weapons and men into Syria to start up an al-Qaeda franchise there. They called themselves Jabhat al-Nusra (Support Front) and their massive car bombs made them an important battlefield asset for the rag-tag FSA rebels. 4/
archive.is/yhXQ5
archive.is/yhXQ5
Under Jolani's leadership, Jabhat al-Nusra managed to win popular support by being less corrupt, more organized, and far more lethal than their FSA competitors and so many anti-Assad Syrians didn't actually believe they were al-Qaeda. 5/ archive.is/zqn3o
In early 2011, Assad (who normally exterminates prisoners on an industrial scale) suddenly released hundreds of jihadists as part of his strategy to maintain control. Manipulating terrorism is just another tool in Assad's arsenal of statecraft. 6/ archive.is/yhXQ5
Jabhat al-Nusra's success led Baghdadi to try to take it over from Iraq by asserting that he was Jolani's boss. Jolani responded saying he worked for Baghdadi's boss, Zawahiri. But Baghdadi persisted and split Nusra to form ISIS. 7/ archive.is/yhXQ5
Baghdadi's ISIS began to methodically defeat rebels+Nusra all across Syria, asserting control over territories liberated from Assad. Activists and FSA commanders were assassinated and a reign of terror imposed, but Assad mostly avoided fighting ISIS. 8/ archive.is/p6ijy
While Assad was using scud missiles and barrel bombs on Syria's second-most populated city Aleppo, ISIS-controlled Raqqa was left unmolested. The Assad regime also had de facto open borders policy with Iraq, allowing ISIS fighters to transit freely. 9/ thedailybeast.com/how-isis-retur…
Assad's 2014 go-easy-on-ISIS policy backfired spectacularly when ISIS seized a regime airbase in Taqba and marched 200 SAA troops in their underwear into the desert to massacre them. Assadists started criticizing the regime. 10/
theguardian.com/world/2014/aug…
theguardian.com/world/2014/aug…
Obama's "stay out of the Syrian war and withdraw from Iraq" policies also backfired and collapsed spectacularly in 2014 with the fall of Mosul in June to ISIS which threatened to unravel the Iraqi government the U.S. spent tens of billions of dollars building up. 11/
The 🇺🇸Obama administration ceded 🇮🇶Iraq to 🇮🇷Iran by withdrawing all U.S. troops in 2011 and by backing Maliki, an autocratic sectarian Shia for Prime Minister.
Maliki's repression of Sunnis fueled ISIS's comeback in 2014. 12/
newyorker.com/magazine/2014/…
Maliki's repression of Sunnis fueled ISIS's comeback in 2014. 12/
newyorker.com/magazine/2014/…
Maliki -- who, like his patron, Iran -- was happy to help get rid of U.S. troops from Iraqi soil in 2011 by 2014 was singing a different tune, begging the U.S. to help beat back ISIS as they swept western Iraq. Obama declined. 13/
archive.is/fZq32
archive.is/fZq32
On the Syrian side of the ISIS equation, U.S.-friendly anti-Assad rebels begged for American military aid (including a no-fly zone) to fight ISIS in spring/summer of 2014. Their pleas fell on the Obama administration's deaf ears and ISIS won the day. 14/
archive.is/yUrmk
archive.is/yUrmk
So the catastrophic consequences of the Obama administration's anti-interventionism on Syria/Iraq forced them to order the military actions they sought to avoid because the non-interventionist alternative -- letting ISIS run wild -- was unacceptable. 15/
cnn.com/2014/09/23/pol…
cnn.com/2014/09/23/pol…
Now that Assad's complicity in the rise of ISIS and the unintended but predictable consequences of U.S. non-interventionism in Iraq/Syria have been dealt w/, here's the director of Human Rights Watch seemingly justifying a war crime by Iran. 😮🤯
ihl-databases.icrc.org/customary-ihl/…
ihl-databases.icrc.org/customary-ihl/…
This is trickle-down economics but for msss-murdering fascist tyrants instead of "job creators." 🇸🇾Assad destroyed his own country and economy to stay in power which is why the Syrian lira's value collapsed. syriadirect.org/news/economic-…
Shane Bauer's tweet is in reference to the passage of the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act that sanctions entities that do business with Syria's energy and construction sectors, key revenue sources for extortion rackets by Assad and his cronies. freesyria.org/president-trum…
It took Syria activists like @SoccerMouaz @KenanRahmani @MhdAGhanem 3 long years of struggle and false starts (the House passed the bill 3 times; Rand Paul held it up in the Senate) before they won a yooj if belated victory against Assad. cnn.com/2019/12/17/pol…
Shane Bauer's claim that only "a chunk of the US-based Syrian opposition" supports the Caesar Act's sanctions is extremely misleading. The opposition's main international body has been calling for this for years and no opposition group has opposed it. en.etilaf.org/press/caesar-a…
🌹DSA lawyer has no idea 1) that U.S. troops are in Iraq with permission from their elected government 2) that the Iranian proxy "liberators" she's cheering kill democrats, leftists, LGBTs and trans people.
archive.is/sIRgt
thedailybeast.com/isis-is-gone-b…
counterextremism.com/threat/asaib-a…
archive.is/sIRgt
thedailybeast.com/isis-is-gone-b…
counterextremism.com/threat/asaib-a…
Tough break for the ringleader of the "Iraqi mourners" who besieged the U.S. embassy in Baghdad.
Who is Qassem Soleimani and why does his assassination matter? He killed far more people for far longer than bin Laden or Baghdadi. He masterminded Assad's war effort and flew to Moscow in 2015 to get Putin to bomb Syria because the rebels started winning.
archive.is/z6kCj
archive.is/z6kCj
Left Twitter's reaction to Qassem Soleimani's assassination vs. Syrian and Iraqi reactions to Qassem Soleimani's assassination:
Talk about Soleimani's killing sparking a 🇺🇸U.S.-Iran war is premature for a few reasons:
1) 🇮🇱Israel has hit 🇮🇷Iran over 1,000 times in 🇸🇾Syria and killed their bigwigs. No response. timesofisrael.com/outgoing-idf-c…
1) 🇮🇱Israel has hit 🇮🇷Iran over 1,000 times in 🇸🇾Syria and killed their bigwigs. No response. timesofisrael.com/outgoing-idf-c…
Talk about Soleimani's killing sparking a 🇺🇸U.S.-Iran war is premature for a few reasons:
2) 🇮🇷Iran is going to want to find out who in 🇮🇶Iraq sold them out and gave Trump coordinates and intel before making a move.
2) 🇮🇷Iran is going to want to find out who in 🇮🇶Iraq sold them out and gave Trump coordinates and intel before making a move.
Talk about Soleimani's killing sparking a 🇺🇸U.S.-Iran war is premature for a few reasons:
3) They can only lose a conventional fight so they're more likely to do stuff like blow up synagogues and other civilian targets as in Argentina. 👇
3) They can only lose a conventional fight so they're more likely to do stuff like blow up synagogues and other civilian targets as in Argentina. 👇
Keep in mind that Trump bombed Assad twice; Assad did nothing. Baghdadi was killed; ISIS did nothing. Hundreds of Russian mercs were killed by the U.S. in Syria; Putin did nothing.
Likewise, Iran may decide escalating isn't worth it.
thedailybeast.com/did-the-us-rea…
Likewise, Iran may decide escalating isn't worth it.
thedailybeast.com/did-the-us-rea…
Whacking Soleimani was an act of self defense and therefore legal under international law.
Twitter: #WW3 is actually happening! Right now! Aaaaahhhhhhh!
Iran: Meetings meetings and more meetings.
Iran: Meetings meetings and more meetings.
"Anti war" Twitter reacts to Qassem Soleimani's assassination vs. Iraqis (who bore the brunt of Qassem Soleimani's wars) react to his assassination:
🇮🇷Soleimani was reportedly planning a coup to overthrow 🇮🇶Iraq's elected government, paving the way for an Assad-style crackdown on demonstrators which would explain why Iraq gave the 🇺🇸U.S. intel for the strike.
🇮🇷Soleimani's successor says you'll have to "wait patiently" for WW3. jpost.com/Breaking-News/…
So if killing Soleimani was an "act of war," what were 🇮🇷Iran's rocket attacks on 🇺🇸U.S. bases and the killing of an American contractor? Acts of peace? politi.co/2MTDzvC
Iraqis really aren't listening to Left Twitter are they? 🤷♂️
