By contrast, Rand Paul was one of the only presidential candidates with a sane statement on this issue. He said this in an interview yesterday:
That’s drawing a red line in the sky. Once you draw a red line, and people cross it, what happens? Now we’re talking about an incident that could lead to World War III. We went 70 years having open channels of communication with the Russians, trying to avoid having one side shoot down the opposite side’s plane. I think the people who call for a no-fly zone are naive. Right now, Russia’s actually being invited by two of the neighboring countries, by Iraq and Syria. We’re going to say we’re going to stop Russia from flying in the area when two of the countries being flown over have invited that country in? [bold mine-DL] This gets back to whether we want to diplomatically isolate ourselves, or whether we want to diplomatically engage.
Vladimir Putin Plunges Into a Caldron: Saving Assad
After two days of attacks directed exclusively against insurgents opposed to the Syrian government, there is little question that Russia is determined to re-establish President Bashar al-Assad as Syria’s leader.
“Russia’s goal is to defend Assad; whoever is against him is a destabilizing factor,” said Aleksei Makarkin, the deputy head of the Center for Political Technologies, in Moscow. “Russia wants Assad to get engaged in a political settlement from a position of strength.”
.. Then again, as with the deal Mr. Putin engineered to rid Syria of its chemical weapons, he might manage to put together a peace deal that Mr. Obama finds he cannot refuse.
The CIA’s Torture Defenders
The seven men who contributed to the book (George Tenet, Michael Hayden, Porter Goss, John McLaughlin, Michael Morell, Jose Rodriguez, John Rizzo, and Philip Mudd) are, with the exception of Mudd, quite likely guilty of war crimes, so it is completely understandable that they would want to either set the record straight or redirect the narrative, depending on how one views their actions..
.. It is also interesting to note some of the evidence for malfeasance that the authors chose not to address. In 2004, the Agency’s own inspector general John Helgerson produced a Top Secret report that concluded that there had been a failure in leadership at CIA relating to nearly every aspect of the enhanced interrogation program. He reported that it was difficult to determine when and if certain techniques (i.e. torture) actually resulted in information that might not have been produced otherwise, that the procedures used themselves were more brutal than what was authorized in Department of Justice legal guidelines, that the program was poorly administered, and that some prisoners were tortured when there was no good reason to do so in terms of the information that they might have had access to.
.. We, of course, have the Patriot and Military Commissions Acts as well as the Authorization to Use Military Force and a new Pentagon manual that defines journalists as potential “unprivileged belligerents” subject to killing on or near a battlefield.
.. Recent media reports reveal that 52 intelligence analysts working out of the U.S. military’s Central Command and Defense Intelligence Agency have filed a formal complaint with the Pentagon inspector general claiming that reports on the war against ISIS have been routinely altered by senior officials to make them more optimistic. They describe their work environment as “Stalinist” and if what they allege is true, it confirms that even the White House doesn’t know what the Defense Department is actually doing in Syria.
Russia Buildup Seen as Fanning Flames in Syria
They see Russia as trying to avert the collapse of the Assad government for as long as it can while it establishes its most important foothold in the Middle East in decades. That military presence in Syria could remain in place even if Mr. Assad is eventually supplanted by a new government, because Russia would be a part of any transition talks. And if Russia, in the middle of all of this maneuvering, can also damage the Islamic State, then so much the better for Moscow.
.. the very first warplanes that Russia sent to Latakia were four SU-30 Flanker air-to-air fighters. Such aircraft, officials said, would be useful in expanding Russia’s military reach in the Middle East and perhaps in dissuading foes of Mr. Assad from even contemplating the establishment of a no-fly zone over Syria.
.. “First of all, I think that Russia very much wants to be seen as an equal on the world stage,” he said. Next, Moscow “wants to take the world’s eyes away from what they’re doing in Ukraine.”
Its other goals include maintaining “warm-water ports and airfield capabilities in the eastern Mediterranean” and prolonging the Assad government.
“And then, after all that,” he said, “they will do some counter-ISIL work in order to legitimize their approach in Syria.”