Not yet tired of the organisation that compares Jews to pigs and whose Egyptian branch has selected as its head a man who has quite openly called Obama a liar--that's Mohamed Morsi, the Egyptian President--the Obama Administration has decided to back the Muslim Brotherhood again. This time in Syria.
Jonathan Spyer analyses the situation over there and basically concludes that the United States is funding Islamist groups and is intentionally supplying the Muslim Brotherhood with arms and weaponry.
It is also in effect, and simply due to the impossibility of monitoring where the arms go, supplying arms to Salafist groups like Ahrar al-Sham that openly cooperate with Al Qaeda.
The unfortunate conclusion I would draw is that Syria will stay in a civil war for the foreseeable future and that the likely winners in it will be not the majority of the Syrian people per se but the most organised and committed ideologues or ethnic groupings. Assad's Alawis fear massacre and have their backs to the wall. The Muslim Brotherhood's men do not fear death but welcome it (to paraphrase their own propaganda). These two groups have the most skin in the game and unless the evidence proves to the contrary there are no other significant groups that the West is able to fund without helping the MB at the same time.
While it might be argued that the MB will not want to cooperate with Iran et al, I would not bet my house on it. The best course of action seems to me to leave well enough alone.
Jonathan Spyer analyses the situation over there and basically concludes that the United States is funding Islamist groups and is intentionally supplying the Muslim Brotherhood with arms and weaponry.
It is also in effect, and simply due to the impossibility of monitoring where the arms go, supplying arms to Salafist groups like Ahrar al-Sham that openly cooperate with Al Qaeda.
The unfortunate conclusion I would draw is that Syria will stay in a civil war for the foreseeable future and that the likely winners in it will be not the majority of the Syrian people per se but the most organised and committed ideologues or ethnic groupings. Assad's Alawis fear massacre and have their backs to the wall. The Muslim Brotherhood's men do not fear death but welcome it (to paraphrase their own propaganda). These two groups have the most skin in the game and unless the evidence proves to the contrary there are no other significant groups that the West is able to fund without helping the MB at the same time.
While it might be argued that the MB will not want to cooperate with Iran et al, I would not bet my house on it. The best course of action seems to me to leave well enough alone.
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