This will be a collection of in depth studies on Syria by a man who loves Syria and has over 50 years of expertise and incites on same. Polk, who first wrote about Iraq for the Atlantic in the later 1950s, and who served on the State Department's Policy Planning staff during the Kennedy administration in the early 1960s, has just written another long analysis of the choices and contradictions ahead. Like the previous one, it is organized as a set of questions and answers. Also like the earlier installment, it is worth reading when you have time to go through it all. As of 2013.. Three sorts of weapons figure in the Syrian conflict: the first are “conventional” light and heavy weapons: rifles, machineguns, grenades and artillery.* They have done most of the killing in the civil war. Of an estimated 100,000 casualties, they have killed over 99 in each 100. Perhaps the best guess on who the casualties were comes from an Non-Governmental Organization based in London, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. It finds that 21,850 rebels fighters, 27,654 regular army soldiers, 17,824 militia fighters and about 40,000 civilians have been killed as of September this year. William Polk on Syria: What Now? - The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/.../william-polk-on-syria.../279707/ Sep 16, 2013 - By William R. Polk. Reflections on the Syrian Chemical Weapons Issue and Beyond. Because so much of the information and comment in the ...
Syrian Civil War Rooted In Drought Years Before Fighting Began : NPR www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=242150651 Oct 31, 2013 - Robert Siegel talks to William R. Polk about how a drought in Syria several years ago forced farmers and families into the cities and contributed ...
The impact of war on Syrian water is so vast, you can see it from space ... www.middleeasteye.net/columns/syrias-water-wars-143356197 Jan 9, 2017 - In the north, Syrian Kurdish forces say they are closing in on the Tabqa .... William Polksays the roots of the Syrian uprising began with climate
Careful studies of al-Qaeda and ISIS have shown that the United States and its allies are following their game plan with some precision. Their goal is to “draw the West as deeply and actively as possible into the quagmire” and “to perpetually engage and enervate the United States and the West in a series of prolonged overseas ventures” in which they will undermine their own societies, expend their resources, and increase the level of violence, setting off the dynamic that Polk reviews. https://chomsky.info/05102016/ Scott Atran, one of the most insightful researchers on jihadi movements, calculates that “the 9/11 attacks cost between $400,000 and $500,000 to execute, whereas the military and security response by the U.S. and its allies is in the order of 10 million times that figure. On a strictly cost-benefit basis, this violent movement has been wildly successful, beyond even Bin Laden’s original imagination, and is increasingly so. Herein lies the full measure of jujitsu-style asymmetric warfare. After all, who could claim that we are better off than before, or that the overall danger is declining?”
