Losing hearts and minds – the ‘dangerous price of ignoring Syria’?
President Obama has “doggedly resisted” US engagement in Syria, despite the killing of over 70,000 and the plight of over a million refugees, says a prominent analyst and former administration official.
[ed note:the above is pure bs!!!
“That is because Syria challenges a central aim of Obama’s foreign policy: shrinking the U.S. footprint in the Middle East and downplaying the region’s importance to global politics,”writes Vali Nasr, dean of the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. “Doing more on Syria would reverse the U.S. retreat from the region.”Washington is providing considerable amounts of humanitarian assistance,(ed note:weapons,technology,and logistics) reports suggest.“Yet because of security concerns, the United States can’t advertise its successes, undermining what has always been regarded as one of the goals of American aid: to win hearts and minds,” The Washington Post’s Liz Sly, reports from Aleppo:It is a battle the United States appears to be losing. On a two-day visit to the unnamed international agency’s projects in the province of Aleppo, it was clear that Syrians don’t know that the United States is helping them and that hostility toward the United States is deepening.But among Western donors, “there is no doubt that America has taken the lead,” according to Wissam Tarif, who oversees the provision of aid for the Syrian Opposition Coalition. “And for the U.S., it shows courage to be pushing organizations to operate in this area.”Analysts believe that the Western democracies’ reluctance to provide military assistance (ed note;allows them plausible deniability) isgiving a clear advantage to violent Islamists, the Muslim Brotherhood and other illiberal forces at the expense of Syrian moderates and liberals.(ed notes:us allowed its allies to use violent etxremist factions and jihadists to destroy and disintegrate the states infrastructure,(moderates and so called liberals couldnt achieve that goal)wich will require later western loans to rebuild,if Assad is overthrown)
[[[[[[[[[[“It is time the U.S. took over from Qatar and Saudi Arabia in organizing the Syrian opposition into a credible political force — failure to do that accounts for the chaos that has paralyzed the group,” writes Nasr, author of the forthcoming book The Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in Retreat.]]]]]“America should build ties with the Free Syrian Army with the goal of denying extremist groups the ability to dominate the armed resistance and gaining influence with groups that will dominate Syria’s future,” he argues. “It was failing to build those ties in Afghanistan that allowed the resistance groups who opposed the Soviet Union to disintegrate into the Taliban and Al Qaeda.”
[ed note;more on vali nasr from john hopkins and Syria... zionist,neocons,cia front weigh in on zio - THENAKEDFACTS  Can 'Dispensable Nation' still be democracy's 'ven... - thenakedfacts i should mention vali nasr is also a member of the CFR'S iran crisis group !  http://thenakedfacts.blogspot.com/2011/11/director-of-cfr-richard-hass-at-w.html