Intentionally Conflating ISIS and Al Qaeda with Assad and Putin

Check out this video with Joe Scarborough, starting at 4:47:

Here's the key quote,

"It's hard for me to imagine any  presidential candidate not getting politically ripped to shreds in the next political campaign for turning a region back over to ISIS, to Iran, to Putin and to Assad. But that's what he would be doing."

Notice that? By not going to war with Assad, we would be turning the country over to both Assad and ISIS. Wait a minute... Assad is fighting ISIS, and Al Qaeda and all of the other Jihadist groups that the neocons and their sycophants like Joe Scarborough support. 

Congressman Roger Wicker went on Tucker Carlson and tried basically imply this same thing. He stammered around saying Assad gassed those kids and we should do something about Assad and then there was this exchange.

Wicker: "But defeating ISIS in Iraq and Syria is still our goal..."

Carlson: "But wasn't defeating ISIS one of the goals of the Assad government. Of course ISIS was a radical Sunni group. Assad is an Alawite aligned with the Shiites. He was fighting ISIS as well, so why wouldn't we, if we believe ISIS is the main enemy, functionally find ourselves on the side of Assad."

Wicker: "Well, you're correct in this sense and you're correct in many ways. It's complicated in Syria, there's no question about it. There's not a bunch of white hats and a bunch of black hats, so I'll give you that. And we're not in the business of regime change, so I would challenge that [ed. note: yeah right!], but it is in our national interest to make sure ISIS is defeated and we've almost got the job done. I just think it would be a mistake to pull away at this point."

It sounded like Wicker was very upset because you're not supposed to say that. ISIS and Assad are on the same side I tell you! It's very rare that the warhawks will cut out the sophistry and cheap parlor tricks and just admit that attacking Assad is aligning our aims with Al Qaeda and ISIS. Occasionally, you'll get like ISIS-sympathizer (and yeah, if they're going to call us "Assadists" I'm going to call them ISIS-sympathizers) Thomas Friedman, when he unironically asked "why is Trump fighting ISIS in Syria?" 

We've played this game before. In September of 2003, almost six months after we invaded Iraq on false pretenses, a Washington Post poll found that "Sixty-nine percent of Americans said they thought it at least likely that Hussein was involved in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon." 

This was deliberate. The Christian Science Monitor describes how it was done,

"In his prime-time press conference last week, which focused almost solely on Iraq, President Bush mentioned Sept. 11 eight times. He referred to Saddam Hussein many more times than that, often in the same breath with Sept. 11.
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"Bush never pinned blame for the attacks directly on the Iraqi president. Still, the overall effect was to reinforce an impression that persists among much of the American public: that the Iraqi dictator did play a direct role in the attacks. A New York Times/CBS poll this week shows that 45 percent of Americans believe Mr. Hussein was "personally involved" in Sept. 11, about the same figure as a month ago."

Don't be fooled again. Any war in Syria is a war for Al Qaeda no matter how many horrifying videos of dying children these chickenhawk pundits show you.