Peloni: The West prefers to deal with ruthless totalitarian because they are willing and capable of forcing their people to do as they want, thus providing results desired by the West. Yet, it remains to be seen why the West would prefer to deal with a totalitarian who is either incapable or unwilling to control his forces, as has been the case with Jolani. In truth, empowering a Jihadist radical in Syria will be unfortunate for the local minorities, and unsuccessful in bringing stability to this nation which has been too long gripped in a state of sectarian violence, with one or the other side having the opportunity to conduct slaughters on the other side, and without the interest or capability of preventing such atrocities from taking place. The peaceful solution for Syria lies in the development of divided nations valuing and supporting the separate identities of the various Syrian ethnicities, not as a centralized terror state which is dedicated towards the permanent erasure of those identities.
What game is MBS playing? Didn’t he introduce Jolani to Trump?
@stevenl
Jolani is a Turkish puppet. He has been fed, armed, trained, equipped and supported in all ways that matter by Turkey going back over a decade. Having come to seize power in Syria, with the kind effort of Israel having hollowed out the Hezbollah power structure, he did so while under Turkish influence, but he needed international support to maintain his position in Syria. In short he needed money, but also credibility from the region and from afar, most notably in the US.
What MBS did was to seize the moment to work a deal with Jolani which would give him everything he needed to maintain power, and which Turkey could grant him. So, yes, MBS made the proposal of keeping Turkey’s sock puppet in play, but to make him a more diversified sock puppet, one which would recognize that what he needed could only be granted thru the efforts of MBS, and more directly by the US. Notably, the US wanted this deal to work for their own interests. Hence, while MBS and Trump were trying to force a square peg into a terrorist hole, only Israel stood remote enough to grasp the very real likelihood that this long standing terrrorist would not find it easy to change his spots or the spots of those surrounding him.
Indeed, the problem is that Jolani needed to be able to provide credible assurances that he could control the very bad actors which surround him on the ground in and in the govt in Syria. Unfortunately for all, Israel’s apprehension of ignoring the very real bloodlust which exists between the sectarian elements in Syria was too great for Jolani to easily control, and he was not about to risk his position in a showdown in defense of the slaughter of the Alawhiites nor the Druze, for whom Jolani was no doubt happy to see a good bit of blood spilt.
This was the context for the debacle in Syria, but it should be noted that MBS’ project worked to a point, and we know this because of the discomfort which Turkey expressed in having its staged proxy acting independently of Istanbul.