Top Ten Reasons Romney Shouldn’t Arm Syrian Rebels

[tabatha]

4. Syria is geopolitically too important to flood with powerful arms. It abuts Israel, Jordan, Iraq, and Turkey. A US-supplied war that spills over onto these countries is a nightmare for US policy.

5. The conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians has entered a new and dangerous phase, with a significant expansion of Israeli theft of land and resources from Palestinians of the West Bank. The latter had been convinced to lay down their arms and join in a ‘peace process.’ The combination of the betrayal of all the promises made to the Palestinians about giving them a state and returning to them their territory, along with easy availability of US arms from Syria, might well provoke another violent Intifida or uprising.

6. The conflict in Syria is already threatening to destabilize Lebanon. That country’s disarming of its sectarian militias in the 1990s after the Ta’if Accords was a major achievement for stability in the Eastern Mediterranean. American arms given to Syrian rebels would risk reviving armed militias in Lebanon, where some groups (the Shiite Hizbullah e.g.) favor the al-Assad regime whereas others (many Sunnis) support the Syrian opposition. There have already been clashes between Allawis and Sunnis in the northern city of Tripoli.

http://www.juancole.com/2012/06/top-ten-reasons-romney-shouldnt-arm-syrian-rebels.html

Perhaps, that is why the US is not arming the Syrian rebels.

[pampango]

1. Love this part: Mitt can’t decide whether he is afraid of Muslims or wants to give them

sophisticated weapons. He once explained that he did not want to focus on killing Bin Laden because he was just one leader, and the problem was ‘Sunni and Shia’ and ‘the Muslim Brotherhood and … Hizbullah… etc.’ In other words, Romney looks at a fifth of humankind and jumps out of his skin in fright that there might be Muslims out there."

Typical Mitt short-term, partisan thinking. Whatever makes for the best sound bite and plays up the "macho-shoot from the hip" republican self-image is what he says. The long term folly of dumping more sophisticated weapons into a region with more than enough already, seems to escape him.