MCViewPoint

US foreign policy: fight the good guys that help defeat the bad guys. Help the bad guys defeat the good guys. Provide arms to any and everyone, not knowing which side they are on.

https://original.antiwar.com/henderson/2018/01/21/rex-tillerson-hoover/

Someone not familiar with the ISIS story might conclude that Tillerson was saying that the US government defeated ISIS. Of course, if you read his speech carefully, you’ll see that he didn’t say that. What he said was that the US government had a plan and had been active in defeating ISIS. He didn’t list other entities that had fought ISIS. What ones did he leave out? Two major ones: the Russian government and the Syrian government under Assad. Why? I think it’s obvious: it didn’t fit Tillerson’s narrative. The narrative is: Assad is bad; the US government needs to get rid of him. If Tillerson had admitted what I’m sure he knows well—that the Russian government has helped Assad go after ISIS—then he would have introduced complexity into what he wanted to tell as a simple story: Assad bad; let’s get rid of him.