so, i don't want to drop the front against fascism in syria. the islamic supremacist syrian nazis need to be fought everywhere they're found. they can be given no quarter. they must be eradicated by the civilized forces of the free world, as dark of a period as we may find ourselves in. nobody is coming to save us, we have to do it ourselves.
however, i may tentatively support the idea - and i think i'm talking to marco rubio here, as unpredictable an outcome as that might have been a few years ago. - of tying american aid to syria to coordination with israel in fighting hezbollah. stated crudely, i would support telling the syrians that they're going to get cut off if they don't work with israel to eliminate hezbollah. also tied to these aid packages would need to be a requirement that syria absorb lebanon's unwanted shia refugee population, which the indigenous christians in lebanon have grown fed up with and want gone, and which are actually almost entirely syrian in origin. the syrians may want to ship them to the east and that might be good for everybody. these kinds of population transfers are unheard of in europe but are normal in this area and have been since the assyrians. shipping the shias in lebanon, who are not indigenous but almost solely refugees, to the east of syria or west of iraq would transfer them somewhere where they have a like-minded culture and get them out of the hair of the indigenous christians and jews of the western mediterranean.
hezbollah pretends that it is protecting an indigenous population in the region, but this is absurd, much like absurd claims that palestinians are indigenous. what we call palestinians are about 70% converted hebrews and about 30% colonizing arabs that invaded not in the 7th century but in the modern era. both lebanon and palestine were 90%+ christian from the byzantine period until the 1700s, and lebanon retained that identity until the 20th century. the islamic colonization of lebanon and genocide of the christians there is barely a generation old; it's concurrent, it's ongoing. living people could and should be held accountable for these crimes against humanity. both hamas and hezbollah are at the front of foreign-financed shia colonizing movements, with the purposeful intent to change the demographics of the region from christian and jewish to shia and arab. this process has it's roots in the armenian genocide, which in truth is ongoing. that's what you're supporting when you wave these flags and attend these marches - the current incarnation of the evolution of the armenian genocide. uneducated fake leftists that simply don't understand what they're supporting should be embarrassed by their ignorance and malleability as useful idiots, but you have to educate them before they can understand their fallacies.
hezbollah is not protecting an indigenous population, they are unwanted invaders that the nominally democratic state has condemned and that are aggressively colonizing the region with the explicit intent of chasing out the indigenous christian groups.
shipping out the shia refugees to iraq would have the profound effect of pulling support for hezbollah out from underneath it. hezbollah requires constant immigration, in fact almost entirely from syria, in order to maintain it's support level. trump might not fully understand it, but he is actually hitting on something profound, here.
there was a lot of easily deconstructed propaganda about assad in western media. i'm not going to get into that here because he's gone and the russians have bailed entirely, but one of the points pushed by the west was that assad was an empty proxy for iran. there was little to no truth to that. in fact, assad was a secularist at the opposite end of the muslim political spectrum to the irgc and the iranians hated him, but they had to tolerate him because syria and iran were both russian allies. they had to go to the same meetings and get the same memos. there was some moderate to trivial coordination when the russians demanded it, but no active collaboration. they were more like bitter enemies forced to get along by moscow. syria was hardly an iranian proxy. in fact, assad would still be there, if he was one.
however, the basic issue brought up in western media of syria acting as a transit point between lebanon and iran hasn't changed and still needs to be addressed. this should be tied to western funding.
the demands on syria to maintain us funding, short of being dismantled and overthrown, should consequently be the following
1) take your shia refugees back from lebanon. all of them. do what you will with them.
2) coordinate with lebanon and israel in building a common front to just get hezbollah the fuck out of there and figure it out after
3) that includes preventing the desert from acting as a caravan transit medium
4) respect lebanon's sovereignty as a christian state and israel's sovereignty as a jewish state.
those should be seen as necessary but not sufficient conditions to tolerate the syrian government, which still must be expected to hold elections immediately. but you have to work with shitheads in the darkness of war. this is no time for moral purity. a pragmatic syria policy should be welcomed, if it's actually pragmatic and actually advances western goals.
