Boots on the ground in Syria and military support for Ukraine
Image Credits: AFGE, Flickr
Image Credits: AFGE, Flickr
John McCain is expected to become chairman of the powerful Senate Armed Services Committee in January following a Republican election victory on November 4.
In the position, McCain will drive defense policy on Capitol Hill, including the Senate’s version of the National Defense Authorization Act dictating how the Pentagon spends money. He will also determine the foreign policy agenda of the United States.
McCain and a clique of neocon Republicans have called for boots on the ground in Syria and Iraq. In addition to sending U.S. troops, McCain has called for arming the Kurds and intensive airstrikes against the Islamic State as the terrorist army consolidates recent military gains.
He also wants to bolster support for the so-called Free Syrian Army (FSA) which is, as we noted on Sunday, an anachronism. Any distinction between the FSA, al-Nusra and the Islamic State is now rhetorical.
The government and its corporate media have attempted to sell the FSA as the “moderate” wing of the U.S. and Gulf Emirate campaign to violate Syrian national sovereignty and oust president Bashar al-Assad.
The U.S. maintains this fiction despite the fact Harakat Hazam and the Syrian Revolutionary Front (SRF) handed over bases and weapons to Jabhat al-Nusra in the Idlib province in Syria over the weekend. The SRF was an alliance formed in December 2013 by FSA brigades in response to a merger of the Islamist Islamic Front.
McCain is as equally hawkish on Ukraine. In September he characterized the U.S. policy in Ukraine as “shameful” and demanded the Obama administration provide the government with weapons and intelligence to fight what he calls the “invasion” of eastern Ukraine by Russia.
The effort to arm the Ukrainian government that assumed power after a U.S State Department initiated coup in February is supported by the current Armed Services chairman, Democrat Robert Mendez. “We should provide the Ukrainians with the type of defensive weapons that will impose a cost upon Putin for further aggression,” he said in September.
“I will be urging our administration to arrange that transfer as quickly as possible,” McCain said in March. “Time and again, they asked us for military help. They need it. I think they should have it. They have to have the wherewithal to defend themselves,” he said.
John McCain traveled to Kiev in December to give his support to fascist elements attempting to remove Ukraine’s elected president from power. He met Ukrainian opposition leaders Arseniy Yatsenyuk and Oleh Tyahnybok. Yatsenyuk, a former banker with connections to the financial elite, became interim prime minister. Tyahnybok is a member of the Verkhovna Rada, the Ukrainian Parliament, and the leader of nationalist Svoboda political party. He has complained that Ukraine is controlled by a "Muscovite-Jewish mafia” and warns “Germans, kikes and other scum” want to “take away our Ukrainian state.”
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