Discussion: Obama Thanks Congress For Passing Measure To Arm Syrian Rebels

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Discussion for article #227851

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Big dumb move.

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I remain unconvinced there is a “moderate” islamic extremist. Is one better than another simply because they don’t behead innocent people? and once we send arms there’s no guarantee who will get them or keep them. We’ve seen this time and again.

And many in the GOP are running around saying we gotta send in troops as if we had not done that for the last decade+ in Iraq and Afghanistan

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Great! Now we know who we will be fighting against 10 years from now.

EDIT: I believe it should be “whom” we will be fighting against. But that doesn’t sound right.

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The truth is there are no good answers. There are only 3 choices.

  1. Be hard enough to break their culture and build our own state / colony. And I mean hard to the point of being evil. We, the US, don’t want to do this. Moreover I don’t think our system could do it if we wanted to.

  2. Don’t interfere at all and live with whatever naturally develops there, no matter how good or bad.

  3. Move it sideways. Keep arming and training rebels only to fight against those very same men with the very same guns 10-15 years later, but making sure that nothing every really changes. Sideways.

I think we know this and are deliberately choosing door #3.

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I thank Sen. Gillibrand for voting “no” on arming the rebels, an act of war in my eyes.

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Sadly I see #3 as the choice that’s gonna be made.

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“Who” is the subject of “who we will be fighting,” so it very well might be right. I found at least one person who said it that way. I think it sounds correct as well.

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It’s funny to me that the media was so incredibly reluctant to call the Iraq War a war, yet no troops on the ground is immediately described as a war? Yeah, one day the media is going to have atone to the treatment of this president.

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Moderate rebel: oxymoran.

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Hezbollah has been doing much of the effective fighting against ISIS and the al Qaeda groups. Are they “moderate” enough for US aid? Are we ever going to have a Middle Eastern policy based more on actual facts on the ground instead of domestic US politics?

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Whether smart or dumb, it’s not a big move either way. It’s a small one.

They’re going to train 5000 vetted opposition fighters. It’s just not a significant action one way or the other.

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Of course there isn’t a moderate Islamic extremist, but why are you assuming that everyone in the Middle East is an Islamic extremist?

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I don’t think all in the Mid-east are extremist. It’s likely that those who have not taken up arms are not. I would expect that those who have taken up arms are not all that moderate in their feelings. Some are just thugs looking for opportunity. Others are hard core terrorists. Some are motivated by regime change. Others by patriotism. Many if not most groups are a mix. I was trying to point out the difficulty in deciding who’s a moderate and who isn’t. I have traveled through Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan many years ago and even then, 4 decades ago, I ran into some hard core people. And a lot of really good people also.

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Actually “who” is the object of the preposition “against”. “We” is he subject of the verb “will be fighting”. “Against” is the preposition modifying the verb “will be fighting”. “Who” is the object of the preposition. Since it is the object of the preposition, it should be the objective case “whom” instead of the subjective case “who”.

I could rearrange it to read, “Against whom will we be fighting.”

I’m pretty sure that is correct. It just sounded so odd, we I said it to myself, that I knowingly used “who”. But my English teacher would roll over in her grave if I knowingly taught someone bad English.