Adding to these reckless calls, Michele Flournoy, who is associated with CNAS and is rumored to be on the short list for consideration as Secretary of Defense in a Hillary Clinton administration, advocated regime change and sending U.S. forces into Syria to push Assad's forces out of southern Syria in a recent interview with Defense One magazine.
The Russian presence in Syria is, of course, characterized as pernicious in the CNAS report as well as in the aforementioned State Department memo, even though Russia is the only foreign actor operating legally in Syria at the request of the recognized government in Damascus. A no-fly zone implemented in Syria by the U.S., on the other hand, would violate international law.
Speaking of international law, one of the themes throughout the paper is that the U.S.'s leadership in the world is justified, in part, to uphold "a stable rules-based international order." Again, Washington's illegal aggressions, such as the invasion of Iraq and the bombing of numerous other countries, go unmentioned.
Aggression is the operative term, however, for Russia in this report: at one point, the authors praise German Chancellor Angela Merkel for holding together the sanctions "in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine."
Perhaps this is a reference to those numerous invasions of Ukraine we all heard about from NATO leaders in 2014; those times when the Russian military invaded, then retreated, then invaded again -- just to be weird (hey, they're Russian); numerous invasions that the OSCE always managed to miss when they were monitoring the border.
Weapons transfers to the Kiev regime under the guise of defense are a possibility as the authors state: "The United States must provide Ukrainian armed forces with the training and equipment necessary to resist Russian-backed forces and Russian forces operating on Ukrainian territory."
Of course, any military "equipment" or weapons could be just as easily put to offensive use as defensive (to "resist"). It is telling that the Minsk agreement is not mentioned once, as though it doesn't even exist -- like so many other inconvenient facts for the authors of this report.
Unsubstantiated assertions that Russia is a threat to the Baltic nations are trotted out to justify more of the current provocative actions by NATO: "The Baltics in particular are vulnerable to both direct attack and the more complicated "hybrid" warfare [never defined] that Russia has displayed in Ukraine."
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