Question...Why are we Fighting Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, but Arming Al Qaeda in Syria? 

 The U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee has voted to send a bill to the floor for a vote that authorizes “critical support to the Syrian opposition through provision of military assistance, training, and additional humanitarian support.”

The bill's official title is the Syria Transition Support Act, and its  two co-authors were Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and Senator Bob Corker (R-TN). Aside from providing weaponry and armamments, the bill includes:


• “Creation of a $250 million transition fund each year through FY2015 drawn from funds otherwise appropriated for regional transition support”;

• “Sanctions on arms and oil sales to Assad: Targeting any person that the President of the United States determines has knowingly participated in or facilitated a transaction related to the sale or transfer of military equipment, arms, petroleum, or petroleum products to the Assad regime.”; and

• “Amendment to the Syria Accountability Act: To allow for sanctions removal once a transitional government is in place and certain terrorism and WMD criteria have been met.”

That last one is important, and we'll return to it later.

The bill easily got through committee  15-3, and the only Senator to offer meaningful opposition was Senator Rand Paul ( R-KY).

“This is an important moment. You will be funding, today, the allies of al Qaeda,” Paul said.

 He's 100% correct.

The biggest and most prominent armed factions in the Syrian resistance are outright al-Qaeda affiliates like   Jabhat al-Nusra and the Syrian Free Army, which is a mixture of Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda dominated factions. Even the new 'official' Syrian resistance groups President Obama formed as a figleaf,  the Syrian Opposition Coalition,(SOC)and the associated Joint Military Council are dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood.The leader of the SOC is one Ahmed Mouaz al-Khatib, former imam of the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus,  a religious cleric closely allied to the Damascus branch of the Muslim Brotherhood and fairly hardline and radical himself.

Senator Paul tried to tack two amendments on to the bill, one that would have forbidden the transfer of weapons to the radical Islamists of the rebel forces and another that would have prevented the use of U.S. military armed forces in Syria.

Both were voted down.

There were the usual pro-forma remarks from Paul's colleagues about 'oversight' and transparency' but in the end, there's nothing to stop the Syrian rebels from simply telling us what we want to hear to get weapons and our money, and then turning those guns on whomever they wish...including us. The Qu'ran tells Muslims explicitly that any promise made to kuffars (non-Muslims), any treaty or agreement is null and void whenever it's convenient.

Anyone taken a look at what's happening in Afghanistan lately?

Just for the record, (not that it matters), the original Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) enacted after 9/11 specifically called for finding and destroying al-Qaeda..and here we are a few years later voting to supply arms to them!

What this is setting the stage for is a formalization of President's Obama's desire to put Islamists in charge of yet another Muslim country.

What happened in Benghazi was a failed Fast and Furious style covert attempt to purchase and send weapons from Khaddaffi's arsenals to the Syrian rebels. That failed, so now we're going to be doing it openly.

I would not be at all surprised to see U.S. boots on the ground in Syria in the next few months if Assad continues to hold out. That could have been what's behind the deployment of those 1,800 Marines off the USS Kearsarge who landed at the Israeli port of Eilat nine days ago and are now stationed on Jordan's Syrian border.

Americans traditionally rally behind a sitting president when there's a foreign intervention or crisis, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if a U.S. intervention in Syria wasn't timed to head off the fallout from the massive scandals the Obama regime finds itself entangled in of late.

This is a major strategic error on steroids.