Scoop

Updated 9/17/2014:

Aleppo, late August. Photo by AFP/AMC/Zein Rifai via the Daily Star.

Apparently the "Syrian moderates" have decided they'd rather not have any US weapons after all:

Syrian rebels and jihadists from the Islamic State have agreed a non-aggression pact for the first time in a suburb of the capital Damascus, a monitoring group said on Friday.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the ceasefire deal was agreed between IS and moderate and Islamist rebels in Hajar al-Aswad, south of the capital.

Under the deal, "the two parties will respect a truce until a final solution is found and they promise not to attack each other because they consider the principal enemy to be the Nussayri regime."

Nussayri is a pejorative term for the Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam to which President Bashar al-Assad belongs. (Daily Star/AFP)

The rebel signers include the US-backed Syrian Revolutionary Front, according to sources cited by Charles Lister. Meanwhile, their new friends of the "Islamic State" have carried out their threats of a third video beheading, of British aid worker David Haines. I don't see how Obama can expect Congress to give the Sunni "moderates" half a billion dollars to sell more arms and hostages to the Caliphate. Nor do I see how he can go beyond the de facto alliance with Iran to a practical alliance with Iran's vile butcher client Bashar al-Assad.

Further evidence of how, although the Bush administration's heedless mayhem is the immediate cause of the ongoing Mesopotamian civil war, the war itself is not about the United States. Even-the-Neoliberal Thomas P. Friedman, better known as Thomas L. Friedman, Mystax Orientalis, is urging caution along these lines:

We keep making this story about us, about Obama, about what we do. But it is not about us. It is about them and who they want to be.

As for biblical-political science guru David Brooks, urging Obama to be more incautious because it's what Moses would have done, and his sentimental-fascist view that it's all about the US and Obama the unheroic failure to be a true Duce—

This is the sternest test of Obama’s leadership skills since the early crises of his presidency. If he sticks to this self-assigned duty, and pursues it doggedly, he can be a successful reluctant leader. Sometimes the hardest victories are against yourself.

—fuck him. Really. He's nothing but William Kristol, only an order of magnitude more weaselly.

Actually any weasel is far more attractive and socially acceptable. Mustela erminea, Unimak Island, Alaska.

Update September 17:

The Free Syrian Army is very strongly denying that there is any such truce as that reported by AFP last week.