Many Gabbad supporters make the false equation of other Democrats visiting Assad with her actions [View all]

[karynnj]

Last edited Sat Aug 17, 2019, 09:15 PM - Edit history (1)

I answered this on a long, dying thread, but decided to post my own thread on this.

Nancy Pelosi, Chris Dodd and John Kerry all visited Assad BEFORE the Syrian civil war when he committed documented war crimes against his own people.

All three of them visited when George Bush was President and there were questions of Syria's actions relative to the war in Iraq. When Bush was President, Kerry and Dodd represented the SFRC to meet Assad. Before going, they requested and got a list of questions that Secretary Rice and the State Department wanted asked. (That came out after the right attacked them and was verified by the Bush administration.)

Kerry visited alone, and once with Teresa, as Chair of the SFRC in the early years of the Obama administration when he was an unofficial envoy on this and other issues for Obama. The goal was to move Assad away from allowing material for Hezbollah to transit through Syria and to push Democratic reforms. He did this in support of Obama, but not as part of the administration to allow Obama to discretely pursue the possibility of diplomacy working with Syria - but to not put the administration on the line.

Kerry did NOT meet with him after he committed war crimes against his own people. He did, indirectly, work to get rid of a huge amount of Syrian chemical weapons that would otherwise have made the horrendous situation worse. In addition, he worked to get the UN resolution that defined the process for going forward diplomatically, that never was used, but is still referenced by other countries. Russia represented Assad's interest.

Gabbad, on the other hand, met Assad in 2016, after he was clearly a war criminal and backed the Russian lies that suggested that neither the Russians or Syrians were responsible for the planes that used gas on people. As the rebels had no planes, this blames the US led coalition.

In 2016, as many who followed either the Ukraine or Syrian threads on DU saw, there were posters - who we questioned as not being AMerican - who posted RT, Sputnik and other links that claimed that atrocities that the UN defined as Russian or Syrian were actually "false flag" American or our side atrocities. (Two examples - the shoot down of an airplane over Ukraine and the attack on the UN convoy, approved by Syria, brining humanitarian goods to Aleppo.)

I COMPLETELY sympathize with those who disagreed with Bush's attack on Iraq or the Libyan humanitarian effort that morphed into the US being the air force behind the rebels. Syria was extremely complex -- the US is accused both of supporting the rebels and not giving the rebels the support they needed against Assad - just using them against ISIS. In fact, the US had a problem that they needed people on the ground, native to that area to fight ISIS and to govern after areas were won, but many of these people thought the fight against Assad was more important. Ultimately, other than the Kurds, we could not get the rebels on our side to repudiate the groups linked to AQ. The problem is that they argued that groups like Al Nusra were the most effective against Assad.

In Syria, there were many innocents caught in the crossfire but very few good guys among the Syrian fighters - other than probably the Kurds.

However, Gabbad parroting the Russian troll factories in support of Assad and putting her weight as a Congresswoman behind the arguments that Syria (and Russia) were not to blame for much of the violence was not helpful.