I don't have a problem with you, per se, but with nearly all of ideas you mentioned.
I don't know whether it's morale, or if I'm nave or something, but there are few things I'm insistent upon. First is that I insist calling a spade a spade, no matter what it takes. Second is I say what I think: I'm not acting one way while thinking the other, I'm not trying to be diplomatic for the sake of anything, and - for example - I can't 'make friends' with people that have plagiarised my publications even if they apologise. Kill me, I'm that way, and can't say why, but for similar reasons I couldn't make deals with mass murders.
Back to the topic: in this very case, I do not see how can anybody expect to make deals with a mass murderer that is then actually a puppet? I find it silly alone to call him a 'president of Syria', whereas he's little else but a representative for a conglomerate of yet more mass murderers, criminals, and terrorists.
Talking that way signals to me: 'Hey Tom, I've got no clue what I'm talking about, but this sounds like a damn good idea.'
That's why I started asking for both, your knowledge and logic.
For example: when you're talking about 'SAA', then tell me what kind of 'SAA' is there any more?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but after studying the Syrian military for years, and following this war on day-by-day base ever since it erupted, I cannot but conclude that, to the best of my knowledge, there is none, nitchevo, nix, absolutely nothing left of the 'SAA' - and that since quite long. Theoretically, one could consider the 'NDF' for its 'successor/replacement', but this is not even that: the NDF does consist of a number of companies and whatever other sorts of 'detachments', 'task forces' etc., of the former SAA. But, these have been reformed and retrained into newly-established battalions, with their - entirely new - designations too.
Without Iranians - i.e. without IRGC-QF's battlefield management staff - there would be even no unitary command of 'regime' forces.
And what's this NDF? Better guards. Even all the possible detachments from former 'elite' SAA units (like the 1st, 3rd, or 4th ADs) - now only have a bare minimum of 'offensive support' capability (in terms of, 'they can provide company-sized tank detachments for support of specific, short-duration operations'), while the majority of militias grouped underneath the aegis of the NDF only have a bare minimum of defensive capability.
Unsurprisingly, and to keep it short, the main military force of the 'Syrian regime' is not the NDF; it's a conglomerate of foreign - Iranian-controlled - militias (some of them, like certain Hezbollah units, with something like 'special forces' style of training). They're running the show: they're centrepieces of all offensives and all major defensive operations.
That's why I'm asking: it's not only 'morale', and politics. It's practiality too. How do you - or anybody else - expect the regime to 'lash its dogs', say Iranians to go, and then 'regain control of Syria' if this is de-facto the only military-like force in its hands?
Such expectations simply make no sense to me.
Originally Posted by CrowBat
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