Konflikten i Syrien

/…/President Vladimir Putin, recently reelected with evangelical support, “is seen as playing a big role to protect the Christian faith,” said Vlasenko, “and a sense of international brotherhood is deep within the heart of Russian Christians.” He emphasized the historic bond between the region’s Eastern Orthodox churches and the 19th-century Russian wars in their defense against the Ottoman Turks.

By contrast, Russia’s Protestants are more locally minded and concerned to secure their own religious freedom in worship and evangelism, said Vlasenko. “But most evangelicals are like the Orthodox: supportive of Russia’s efforts to protect Christians in the Middle East.”

One example is Sergei Riakhovskii, lead bishop of the Pentecostal Russian Union of Christians of Evangelical Faith.

A member of several governmental councils to help convey the concerns of religious citizens, his church has forged strong connections with Syrian Protestants and organized several food convoys to aid the displaced.

“I still don’t understand the actions and statements of some American politicians,” said Riakhovskii. “If it were not for Russia, Christians in Syria might not have survived at all.”

Vlasenko cited local polls which show two-thirds of Russians view the United States as their enemy. Evangelicals are more open, believing Americans want peace.

But the US, viewed widely as an evangelical country, leaves them very confused.

“American policy has created chaos, giving oil to the fire of Islamic terrorism,” he said. “It is hard for Russian evangelicals to understand this.”

Citat:

Ursprungligen postat av E.Merckx

Fran Ben Rhodes nya bok om sin tid i Obamas WH:

Letting Assad gas children to own the neocons

https://twitter.com/shmarxism/status/1010818059681062912

MH: But Ben, here’s what I don’t get, if you’re saying this about Afghanistan and prolonged conflict, all of which I don’t disagree with what you’re saying. How do you, then, explain Syria? Because you’ve been criticized a lot. I’ve been listening to your interviews on the book tour; you talk about in the book about how you were criticized for not doing enough on Syria. I remember being an event in D.C. a couple years ago where Syrian opposition members were berating you for not doing enough at an event, and you often were the public face who came out and defended Obama. I want to come to the other direction and say: Did you intervene too much in Syria? Because the CIA spent hundreds of millions of dollars funding and arming anti-Assad rebels, a lot of those arms, as you know, ended up in the hands of jihadist groups, some even in the hands of ISIS. Your critics would say you exacerbated that proxy war in Syria; you prolonged the conflict in Syria; you ended up bolstering jihadists.

BR:
/…/
On the support of the opposition, you know, I don’t know that I would give us that much agency. There are a lot of people putting arms into Syria, funding all sorts of —

MH: Oh, come on, but you were coordinating a lot of their arms. You know, the U.S. was heavily involved in that war with the Saudis and the Qataris and the Turks.

BR: Well, I was going to say: Turkey, Qatar, Saudi.

MH: You were in there as well.

BR: Yeah, but, the fact of the matter is that once it kind of devolved into kind of a sectarian-based civil war with different sides fighting for their perceived survival, I think we, the ability to bring that type of situation to close, and part of what I wrestled with in the book is the limits of our ability to pull a lever and make killing like that stop once it’s underway.

So that’s why I still look to that initial opening window. I also describe, there was a slight absurdity in the fact that we were debating options to provide military support to the opposition at the same time that we were deciding to designate al-Nusra, a big chunk of that opposition, as a terrorist organization. So there was kind of a schizophrenia that’s inherent in a lot of U.S. foreign policy that came to a head in Syria.