Press TV has interviewed Richard Becker, with the ANSWER Coalition, in San Francisco, and Brent Budowsky, a Washington-based columnist at The Hill, to discuss the Syrian conflict.
Becker says there is no question that Bashar al-Assad is Syria’s legitimate president and if removed, an ISIL- or a Takfiri-led government will replace him.
He argues that without intervention by the White House, the Daesh Takfiri terrorists would have not existed in Iraq, Syria and Libya today.
The analyst maintains that to militarily intervene in Syria will be tricky for the White House, as neither history nor the American people are on its side.
“We have to remember that the 2003 invasion [of Iraq] and what followed came very close to an outright defeat for the US army,” he says. “The people in the United States have no stomach at this point for another massive war in the Middle East.”
He says the invasion of Iraq, the support for the so-called “moderate militants” in Syria and the military intervention in Libya and Afghanistan were supposed to be a “cakewalk” for Washington but they all have yielded unanticipated results.
“Their supreme arrogance is what brought about a circumstance that now the US government doesn’t know how to deal with,” Becker said.
There is no determination in the US or the UN to solve this crisis and it is only “the people of the region” who can solve the Syrian conflict, he concludes.
Budowsky, for his part, says that anybody who accuses Washington of working with Daesh is “wrong” because “the only discussion in the United States is the best way to kill them.” He also admits that the US invasion of Iraq gave rise to Daesh to some degree.
Everybody in the US knows invading Iraq was a mistake and that Washington “would never do again what Bush and Cheney did,” he adds.