This does nothing but help Assad and prolong the civil war. The war will never stop as long Assad is in power.

You may be right. The Saudis and Israelis and the various other participants behind the scenes can keep funding as many head choppers as they have the resources to fund and means to assist. At least the US is not participating in that clusterfuck anymore.

Let me state clearly, i have no problem with Assad and the effort to depose him was at least ill advised and and more accurately a crime. It is one of the reasons I did not vote for Hilldog, as she was not only in the room for all these decisions, but was cheerleading the kicking over of the various ant-hills.

So. You may be right in your assertion. Don't care, or at least I never said it would end the war. This is a good decision and long overdue.

Don't know how you can be OK with Assad.

Assad is the worst of the worst. So much so, that it's hard to imagine anything worse than him, outside of complete chaos.

It has to be said, though, that obviously we should not be using Syria to conduct a shitty proxy war with Iran / Russia. Whether we are doing it for the right reasons or not, unilaterally ending our side of the war was absolutely the correct decision.

How do you square that circle.

worst of the worst/unilaterally ending our side of the war was absolutely the correct decision.

Can't have both of those thoughts at the same time.

Some problems just don't have military solutions. Americans seem to have a hard time understanding this.

But this is a direct aid to Assad, the person you say is even worse than anarchy. Small expense, no risk to US person, but a risk to Assad...And this in the midst of a civil war that will not end no mater what we do. And undercuts people we sought out and lowers US credibility if we had any and lowers our ability to effect events in the region....

Oh and I almost forgot the most important reason for us doing it. Is safer for those Russian troops as well.

The US is 0 for god only knows in the 'making things better' game. Unless the US has a clear and definitive plan in how to fix this, they need to step out. You're not making this better. You're not helping.

It is not like doing nothing, doesn't have a predictable outcome. It is not like we haven't made commitments. The only thing that has changed is our new Russian Besties.

Fixed that for you.

This does nothing but help Assad and prolong the civil war. The war will never stop as long Assad is in power.

The Catholics and the Protestants finally quit, maybe the Sunni and Shea will as well.

Lets hope so.

I fear that this war that has already started will have to get worse before it gets better.

The Sunni and Shea didn't fly planes into buildings owned by disinterested third parties either. That would be Wahhabi's From The home our good buddies. And none of that has a damn thing to do with the religious war that has been going on in the Middle East .
But your atemt to conflate anything Muslim as terrorist does expose you religious bigotry even further.

Putin is funneling arms by the shipload into Syria as it is, so there is no especial moral imperative for the US to not stoke the conflict here. The decision to bail on this program is based on tactical and strategic efficiency - it wasn't working very well. That and the tacit quid-quo-pro with Putin: you give use ISIS and we'll back off Assad.

Perhaps you forget how this all started. THERE WAS NO ISIS BEFORE THE US STARTED ITS PROGRAM TO TOPPLE ASSAD. There was Al Qaida in Iraq, also a by-product of US policy, which expanded in to the chaos that was created when the US began to fund head choppers.

Syria was a functioning state before this. IS Bashar Assad Bernie Sanders? no. Was he chopping people's heads off? And by the way, the last time a part of the US tried to break away, we burned a good part of it tot he ground, so it is not unusual for a government to fight for its own survival, especially in the face of outside interference.

And Byyyyyyy the waaaaayyyyy....do any of you remember the Shah? Idi Amin? Ferdinand Marcos or Baby-Doc Duvalier? All tyrants, all gone. NONE gone because of outside interference. When a population wants their tyrant gone, they do not need outside money or weapons, and in fact, all the outside money and weapons that outsiders can provide cannot prop up the tyrant. If Assad was that hated by his people, he would not be there and all the Russian arms in the world wouldn't help.

And if this is so cool and right and proper of a thing to do, I wish someone would start funneling money to the KKK and The Order and maybe the 5%ers. They have unhappy constituencies who want to overthrow the government. They represent about as much of the population as the anti-Assaders do. That would be cool and just and proper, right?

It's not as simple as that, imo. There are other actors and motivations involved. And history.

Israel, Russia, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and scores of other sunni/ shia countries have skin in the game. It's not just those inside syria. It's been like that for more than a half century. It most definitely is a clusterfuck, and there are multiple nations and individuals responsible. But if you want to target US meddling, then you may as well include all other areas of the globe where the US is sticking it's nose into, and pull out of there as well. You should include the IMF and the World Bank.

But aside from all that, why is this administration doing everything it can to bend over backwards for putin? The neutering of NATO. Pulling the US out of climate agreements. Creating false equivalencies between the US and Russia. Lobbying to lift sanctions. I'm betting the US will side with putin and declare the donbass in Ukraine as russian territory before too long.

Ukraine, like Syria, was a totally USA funded put-up job of a "democracy movement". I don't have the energy to go over that whole thing.

Whatever the other nations of the world do is the business of the other nations of the world. What MY country does is my business, and when it find a scrap of decency to stop funding head choppers, that is an empirical good. period.

You would be wrong about Ukraine.

And it seems you are a proponent of isolationism. Fair enough.

I am a proponent of not meddling in the affairs of other countries on account of it seldom serves their interest or ours. And by seldom, I mean never so far, and why should the next time be different?

Putin is playing dumpster like a cheap violin. Mobsters notoriously go back on their "deals," and wouldn't trust him as far as I could throw him. I'm also fairly certain the deals include other actions as well. Ukraine. The Exxon $800B deal. NATO running after terrorists instead of pushing back on the kremlin. Sanctions. Etc. And more we don't know about.

The world is a different place since the fall of the Soviet Union. Yes they have nukes and no they are not a part of the central banking system of the west, but from what I can figure, they are just another olagarchy that has historical fears concerning invasion that the US has a tendency to not consider important.
The middle east and north Africa somewhat were divided up where it could be done or was worthwhile by colonial powers. The economies set on a road that did not lead to local empowerment with boarders set to screw the locals up as much as possible, you know to make it easier to rob them. As far as vile sociopaths playing hell with the populaces, when they are our sociopaths, its no big deal, only when they go against our interests. I mean how can you be more sociopathic than to bomb aspirin factories so children die of fever from disease and set sanctions that starve whole generations of children. As long as oil is as important as it is today, the place is going to be a cluster fuck. As soon as we get past the petroleum age, if we make it, the place will go through a period of establishing local dominance and be of little concern to whatever central world players are in action.