Noam Chomsky: "It's official: The U.S. is the world's leading terrorist state, and proud of it."

[dgauss]

19. Interesting excerpt from the NYT article that Chomsky references...

But in April 2013, President Obama authorized the C.I.A. to begin a program to arm the rebels at a base in Jordan, and more recently the administration decided to expand the training mission with a larger parallel Pentagon program in Saudi Arabia to train “vetted” rebels to battle fighters of the Islamic State, with the aim of training approximately 5,000 rebel troops per year.

So far the efforts have been limited, and American officials said that the fact that the C.I.A. took a dim view of its own past efforts to arm rebel forces fed Mr. Obama’s reluctance to begin the covert operation.

“One of the things that Obama wanted to know was: Did this ever work?” said one former senior administration official who participated in the debate and spoke anonymously because he was discussing a classified report. The C.I.A. report, he said, “was pretty dour in its conclusions.”

So here is Obama, asking the smart question, "Can you show me where this has worked in the past?"

The answer from the CIA seems to be "No not really."

The result, according to that article, was a sort of compromise.

Mr. Obama rejected that plan, but in the months that followed, Obama administration officials continued to debate the question of whether the C.I.A. should arm the rebels. Mr. Petraeus’s original plan was reworked until Mr. Obama signed a secret order authorizing the covert training mission after intelligence agencies concluded that President Bashar al-Assad of Syria had used chemical weapons against opposition forces and civilians.

Asking if this kind of intervention has actually worked in the past is a good question, but maybe a better one would be to ask who has this kind of intervention worked well for in the past and who has suffered?