U.S. Military and Intelligence Officials to Obama: “Assad NOT Responsible for Chemical Attack”

[amandabeech]

147. Kerry also seemed to forget what bringing down the strongman Saddam Hussein

might mean for Iraq and the rest of the Middle East.

The Saudis, and probably the Jordanians, had persuaded the first Bush administration that taking out Saddam would probably mean the disintegration of Iraq with bad consequences throughout the area.

Iraq is a sectarian mess aligned with Iran, pretty much as predicted. Sunni Muslim Arabs and Christians have left in droves, and the country seems to have become a haven for radicals of every stripe.

I have seen and heard reports that a Syria without Assad would disintegrate like Iraq.

How many more people would die from that?

And the Russians were not allies of Saddam. I don't mean that the cold war would return if we attack Assad, but the Russians can cause problems all over, even though their power is diminished from what it was during the height of the cold war.

In addition, I wonder how much of the Obama administration's collective thinking is influenced by the guilt that some former Clinton administration officials feel for their failure to stop the killing in Rwanda. The President himself brought up that tragic situation in one of his statements recently. While the situation in Rwanda and Burundi was horrific, the US is in a much different situation now than it was in the '90s. Back then, we had not exhausted ourselves in a wholly unnecessary war and another that may have been necessary in party, but was expanded unnecessarily and is still going on. The economy was booming.

I'm not someone who thinks that the past should be completely put behind us, as our President so often does, but I don't think that we should always respond to different situations in the present just because of something that happened in the past.