Western diplomats, politicians and analysts have combined to float quite a few options to supposedly resolve the two-year civil war engulfing much of Syria right now.
Talk of everything from a no-fly zone to an all-out intervention has flown around the digital media and political sphere, and yet, it seems a very few have stated the obvious option: do nothing.
Miles Copeland Jr., a famed CIA Agent who helped the Agency stage a coup in Syria decades ago, suggested exactly that during an interview with the BBC ... in 1967.
'Do nothing,' Copeland says, partly because interventions are messy ordeals that don't always work out as planned (kind of like what Army General Martin Dempsey said recently).
Copeland told the BBC, that spotting an "imbalance" in another nation doesn't necessitate a response, "It's better to let a country stew in its own juice, if a country doesn't have what it takes to get rid of a corrupt leader, the hell with them, let them keep him."
He also talks about "meddling" in the internal affairs of a sovereign nation.
Here's the video:
Now certainly Copeland's prediction about the end of American interventionism was less than accurate — Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Kosovo, etc — but it goes without saying that Obama's Syrian "red line" on chemical weapons has not exactly elicited an immediate military response.
For good reason, Obama said this when it came to "perceived" use of chemical weapons, according to USA Today:
"I don't make decisions based on 'perceived.' We tried that in the past, by the way, and it didn't work out well," Obama said, referring to Iraq. "So we want to make sure that, you know, we have the best analysis possible."
That's just in terms of possible military action. When it comes to openly arming the rebels — a decidedly lesser of two ... possibilities — Rep. Peter King toldCNN this:
"If we are going to arm the rebels, we have to make sure that those arms are not going to end up in the possession of al Qaeda supporters, nor at the end game is al Qaeda going to be in a position to take over this movement."
For now, it's just been a lot of talk and a lot of investigating, and not a whole lot of action — certainly not overt action.
So it certainly looks as if the American government is following Copeland's advice ... at least for the time being.
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