The British government does not get it. There is no reasonable alternative to the current government of Syria. The Syrian National Council is a joke:
Over the weekend, the Syrian National Coalition failed to failed to agree on a prime minister during a summit in Turkey. A member of the SNC said the biggest dispute at the Istanbul meeting centred around a split between the favoured candidates of vital funders Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
Everyone seems to acknowledge that those idiots should not be allowed to run Syria. Why then still go for regime change?
Britain’s top diplomat says the US-led military campaign in Syria against Islamic State militants must be followed by regime change in Damascus, the seat of power for President Bashar al-Assad.
In an interview, Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said Britain would help the US to stand up a proxy army in Syria that would be capable of fighting both Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, and President Assad’s forces.
The CIA has been building up a proxy army in Syria for three years. It has supplied it with all kinds of weapons including hundreds of anti-tank missiles. Other “allies” have supplied Chinese anti-air missiles. The CIA proxy army, the Free Syrian Army, is in disarray. It has allied itself with extreme Jihadist forces and the weapons it received have been taken by the Jihadists and have recently been used to shoot down Iraqi army helicopters.
What Hammond now at least admits is that the forces he wants to train are mercenaries. People who fight for money and not for some higher interests:
Hammond argues that regular funding is key to building a cohesive rebel force in Syria. “They will be employees. We’re not talking about training a bunch of freelancers who go off on their pick-up trucks and we never see them again,” he says, noting that the FSA already has organized units that draw a regular salary.
He estimates that IS fighters are paid between $300 and $600 a month, which provides a yardstick for funding a proxy army. “The wage bill for a force built up eventually to 50,000 is not going to break the bank,” he says.
I am confident that it will be nearly impossible to find enough Syrians willing to continue to fight to fill another 50,000 men army. The war has been going on for some years and people get tired of it. And what is the difference here between employees and freelancers? Would “employee” mercenaries be more loyal to Hammond than “freelance” mercenaries? Does he think he can pay those Islamic State fighters a bit more than their Caliph pays them and they will forget about the ideology and do his bidding?
Is Hammond really that naive?