Senator John McCain was just sure he could pick moderates in Syria worth supporting. To prove his point he made a trip to Syria this spring to demonstrate how much the insurgents were just like us, struggling for democracy and equal rights for all.<\/p>\n
But his trip was organized by the Syria Emergency Task Force\u2019s Mouaz Moustafa<\/a>, who not long ago headed up<\/a> the Libyan Council of North America. Both organizations are partly funded by the US State Department through a mirrored wilderness of NGO cutouts. But both have close ties to extremists fighting in each country. (In Libya, for example, Mustafa was with the people who killed US ambassador Stevens.) In McCain\u2019s case, the \u201cmoderates\u201d he met and was so attracted to in Syria tunred out to be kidnappers and thugs<\/a>.<\/p>\n Moustafa\u2019s key staffer until recently was war lobbyist Elizabeth O\u2019Bagy, whose day job was with the US military contractor funded<\/a>\u00a0 neoconservative \u201cthink tank,\u201d the Institute for the Study of War. Shockingly enough, this \u201cthink tank\u201d never saw a potential war it did not want to turn into a real one. O\u2019Bagy was the bagman for the State Department, delivering goodies to the Syrian rebels while delivering fantasies of Syrian moderates needing support to Capitol Hill and environs.<\/p>\n She had many customers, including McCain<\/a> and Secretary of State John Kerry, who were eager to cite her \u201cstudies\u201d revealing that the rebels in Syria were by and large all moderates, with a few extremists who could simply be marginalized and ignored.<\/p>\n But O\u2019Bagy wrote as an independent think-tanker while being paid as a regime-change lobbyist in semi-secret. Very naughty.<\/p>\n Now this week the final strategic pillar of McCain and the neocons has come crashing to the ground. Critical elements of the ever-shrinking \u201cmoderate\u201d Free Syrian Army have this week pledged their loyalty<\/a> to the local al-Qaeda franchise in Syria, which happens to be on the US terror list.<\/p>\n How can President Obama, McCain, Lindsay Graham, Samantha Power, John Kerry, and the rest of the neoconservatives and humanitarian interventionists continue to justify sending weapons of war to such people? How is it possible that a \u201cglobal war on terror\u201d has morphed into a \u201cglobal effort to arm terrorists\u201d? Does it not seem rather insane?<\/p>\n