One of great ironies of our over-saturated media environment is that, often, the biggest falsehoods and most transparent acts of political theater enjoy the most widespread acceptance and demonstrate the most stubborn popularity.
For years, the press has convinced itself—and, by extension, much of the public—that President Barack Obama refused to intervene in Syria after a ghastly sarin nerve agent attack in 2013 violated his “red line” warning about chemical weapons use to Syrian President Bashar Assad.
Previously, FAIR (9/5/15) documented how this narrative was mere “fantasy” and that, in fact, “the US has been ‘intervening’ in the Syrian civil war, in measurable and significant ways, since at least 2012—most notably by arming, funding and training anti-Assad forces.”
The Washington Post (6/12/15) reported that the CIA was spending $1 billion a year, or about 1/15th of the agency’s budget, on efforts to train Syrian rebels; the Pentagon had a separate program that spent another half billion dollars on an almost completely useless rebel-training effort that a Foreign Policy analysis (3/18/16) bluntly called money “wasted.”
Several countries—among them the US, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and Russia—have already been intervening in Syria for years, with untold numbers of military staff and materiel to the tune of billions of dollars. In fact, one could make a very good argument that even before Trump’s missile strike, the Syrian civil war was suffering from far too much foreign intervention, rather than not enough.
The full article is available here
