Syria and the politics of wishful thinking

The Guardian claims to have"an exclusive" about the US-led "training" of "moderate" Syrian rebels in Jordan.

This story is part and parcel of  John Kerry's attempt to convince the world that the US can feed heavier weapons into Syria and control who gets them.

That's exhibit one in the wishful thinking indictment.

Stories about US and other NATO forces in Jordan have been around at least since December 2011, so what is "exclusive" about the Guardian's expose I'm not sure. Are these supposedely moderate rebels that NATO is training intended to fight the al-Nusra rebels after the fall of Assad?

If so, there's exhibit two.

The casual reference to Jordan having replaced Turkey as the staging ground of the revolution in Syria is interesting as well. The implication is that Turkey has been too friendly with the anti-Western Islamic radicals who, by the way, get their weapons and their finance from Saudi Arabia.

So can this training mission produce enough "secular opposition elements" to prop up the Jordanian monarchy and crush the radical Islamists post Assad?

This is a clear case of wishful thinking run amok.

Pot-addled hillbilly blogger beats Reuters to the story by three months

Oh, lookee, Reuters has a scoop for you today. Seems those Saudis are funding the Syrian uprising!

Who knew?!

Oh, lookee, The View From Falling Downs had the same story on April 1, almost three months ago.

Obviously our world-wide network of intelligence operatives digs deeper and asks more probing questions than the twats at Thomson-Reuters.

So much for major media...