In comments at the Aspen Security Forum, CIA Director John Brennan warned that after five years of bloody civil war, he is no longer confident that it’s even possible for Syria to remain as a whole country, saying it may not be possible to avoid a partition.
This is not the first time US officials have mentioned partition as a possibility for Syria, and indeed Secretary of State John Kerry presented it back in February as “Plan B” if that ceasefire failed. The ceasefire is gone, but Brennan is the first official to bring it up since.
Indeed, US officials have long resisted the notion of even couching partition as a possibility, insisting they want Syria to remain united, and with a powerful central government, albeit a different, more pro-US ruling faction. US officials have repeatedly spurning proposals that would involve keeping Syria nominally united but in a more federalized system, with significant regional autonomy. Such proposals have been common among both the Kurdish YPG and the Russians as possible solutions to the war.
It’s unclear what an eventual partition would look like, but at present there are three significant territorial possessions outside of central government control. This would be the Kurdish territory, mostly in the far northeast, ISIS territory across the east, and al-Qaeda’s territory around Idlib Province.
That was their goal from the start.
And his boys in IS are going to happy with just a part of Syria?
The Mideast from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf was arbitrarily carved up from the corpse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. If the current borders exacerbate ethnic and tribal conflicts, then partition would be a good thing. Just make sure the new borders keep the tribes apart. As Mark Twain correctly noted, good fences make for good neighbors.
That was the Zionist’s goal of expanding their territory beyond the Golan Heights and their puppets in the U.S. government are doing their master’s bidding.
Exactly
Gee,, as if breaking Syrfia and all the other arab countries into smaller weaker pieces was not the plan all along. How stupid and uninformed do they think the American people really are??
That would be really stupid and completely uninformed – and all intentional.
Keep repeating it over and over…the population will fall for it…like 9/11…
“We’re going to take out seven countries in 5 years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran”
— General Wesley Clark. Retired 4-star U.S. Army general, Supreme Allied Commander of NATO during the 1999 War on Yugoslavia .
The greater Israel project proceeds on schedule
Still trying to screw up other people’s countries?
Full marks for persistence, Zero for brains.
what a load of crap.. the cia is parroting the ISRAELI plan, break up Syria.. if you wish to know the entire ISRAELI plan, research the “greater israel plan”
They “isrealis” plan to break up and weaken their opposition. The opposition being the countries they intend to TAKE OVER.. those countries consist of north eastern Egypt, northern saudi arabia, most of western iraq, all of lebanon, all of jordan, all of syria and southern turkey. Israel claims all this as their alleged ancestral homeland.
to the cia chief, Fu*k you, you warmonger snake, people like you should be shot by a firing squad, period
“After all, Israel has been practicing genocide against the Palestinians for decades now”
Yeah — a form of genocide in which the victim population grows rather than shrinks, and in fact grows faster than the population of the country whose government is committing the genocide.
Strange, strange genocide, along the lines of me doubling my bank balance and calling it “losing money.”
Yep, almost akin to governments that have ever increasing budgets but whose cheerleaders lament about horrible cutbacks.
On the one hand, Holocaust denial crap isn’t allowed here.
On the other hand, you may not have known that and you did weave it into a larger point, so you get by with it once.
90% of Europe’s Jews were killed in the Holocaust. At the end of the war, there were 90% fewer of them. In Palestine, the Arab population has been increasing, not decreasing, pretty much all the time since 1948, and except during migration waves into Israel from e.g. Russia, has been growing faster than the Jewish population.
There are a lot of reasons to support the Palestinian Arabs and to oppose the actions of, or even the existence of, Israel. Genocide isn’t one of them. It’s a bullshit play that just makes the supporters of the Palestinian Arabs look like idiots.
There is no threat of “censorship” here, veiled or otherwise, because Antiwar.com is powerless to “censor” you.
“Censorship” is preventing you from saying something.
Choosing not to provide you with the means to say something at our expense isn’t “censorship” — you’re perfectly free to start your own blog or web site, or find one that welcomes what you have to say, or for that matter stand on a streetcorner and yell it at people.
Among the very few items of speech which are not welcome here is Holocaust revisionism. If you want to believe that crap, by all means indulge your fantasies. But you don’t get to use OUR microphone to preach them.
Hmmm
Surely you can do better than attempting to dodge responsibility for active censorship by conflating legality, ethics and morality Thomas. I suggest you
just put a disclaimer at the top of every page stating the truth: you censor comments you don’t like. Given that this website belongs to a third party which grants you the authority to “censor” at will, you and the owner are well within your rights to do so. And at no point in my comments have I
suggested otherwise.
But by all means Thomas lets cut the crap. So on come on now, own it. There is no doubt you are practicing “censorship” here. I quote from your last comment: “Among the very few items of speech which are not welcome here….” Clearly you are preventing me from saying something here on this website. What you are threatening to do is a text book example of “censorship”. Even the threat itself is a form of censorship. I refer you to virtually any English dictionary in existence.
Regardless, I will not further darken your pages here. Lest I be censored once again for disagreeing with you and your boss. Good day.
ddearborn,
Actually, whether or not I “like” a comment has precisely nothing to do with whether or not it’s the type of content allowed here, any more than whether or not I “liked” a particular floor would have anything to do with whether or not I mopped it if I was working as a janitor.