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The Watcher’s Council

The Council has spoken, the votes have been cast and the results are in for this week’s Watcher’s Council match-up.

With the headlines going to the Fiscal Cliff and the Left’s attack on the Second Amendment, not many people are really looking at foreign policy too closely these days. Mrs. Clinton’s fortuitous concussion and subsequent inability to testify, even took the Benghazi debacle off the radar, at least for now.

Another debacle in the making that no one’s focusing on is the Obama Administration’s handling of the civil war in Syria, where as this week’s winner, Joshuapundit’s, A Game Change In Syria reveals, the war is approaching a climax as President Obama and his team assist yet another radical Muslim Brotherhood and Salafist regime to power. Here’s a slice:

The situation in the Syrian insurgency has changed in an interesting way.

We started out with the Obama administration actually supporting Bashir Assad – remember Secretary of State Hillary Clinton referring to Assad as a ‘reformer’ and Senator John Kerry shilling for U.S. aid to him?

The next twist in the road was the Obama administration supporting the insurgents, consisting of the Syrian National Council(SNC) and the Syrian Free Army, a group put together at the insistence of President Obama’s closest friend among foreign leaders, Tayyip Erdogan and the Islamist Turkish government. The U.S. government has been supplying them with arms and some training via Turkey and Jordan while Qatar and the Saudis have been supplying most of the funding.

Of course, the problem is that the SNC and the Syrian Free Army are controlled in their entirety by the Muslim Brotherhood and other Salafists, some of them outright al-Qaeda affiliates like Jabhat al-Nusra. Apparently this troubling fact just came to light in Washington.

So the next step was to put together yet another insurgent group of Syrian ‘moderates’ to back, the Syrian Opposition Coalition,(SOC)and the associated Joint Military Council because, in President Obama’s words, it was “now inclusive enough, is reflective and representative enough of the Syrian population, that we consider them the legitimate representative of the Syrian people in opposition to the Assad regime.”

Except that there are just a few problems. Mere details.

This new coalition, formed in Qatar is only two thirds composed of members of the Muslim Brotherhood or their affiliates.

The leader of the SOC is one Ahmed Mouaz al-Khatib, former imam of the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, and – wait for it – a religious cleric closely allied to the Damascus branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Another troubling detail is that the SOC and their affiliated Joint Military Council are mostly located outside Syria, and it has few boots on the ground if any, let alone weapons. Thanks to the Obama Administration,it is the Syrian National Council and the Syrian Free Army who have the fighters and the weaponry, some of it reportedly taken from deposed Libyan leader Moamar Khaddaffi’s armories, although that part of the sordid Libyan story has yet to be proven conclusively. If that’s what actually went down, I suppose we could call it Fast and Furious, Middle East style.

As you might guess, the SNC and the Syrian Free Army aren’t taking kindly to a bunch of ferenghi in DC and the EU dumping them and telling them whom represents the resistance and whom doesn’t, especially when it’s been them doing the fighting and dying against Assad’s forces.

The ace in the hole for the newly formed and recognized Syrian Opposition Coalition is that they’re going to be the main recipient and control point of Western economic aid. That ought to buy them a seat at the table.

But let’s not make the mistake that this is going to end up with a moderate, pro-western government.

The SOC is just as anti-western, just as anti-Israel and almost as Islamist as the SNC.They will almost certainly come together and deal to put together a sharia governed Islamist state.

In our non-Council category, the winner was Larry Corriea’s piece in Monster Hunter Nation, An opinion on gun control, submitted by The Noisy Room. No less than four Council members originally nominated this superb piece as their non-Council selection this week. It’s a superb examination of the entire issue written by someone who actually knows what he’s talking about and anyone who is actually interested in that so-called ‘national conversation’ should read it.

Okay, here are this week’s full results. Gay Patriot and The Independent Sentinel were unable to vote this week and both would normally be subject to the mandatory 2/3 vote penalty. But hey, it’s Christmas…

Council Winners

• *First place with 3 1/3 votes! – Joshuapundit – A Game Change In Syria
• Second place with 2 votes – Bookworm Room – The Leftist delusion of a world without danger
• Third place with 1 1/3 votes – VA Right! – Virulent ‘Pro-Choice’ Rhetoric, ADHD Drugs, Video Games to Blame for School Shootings
• Fourth place *t* with 1 vote – The Razor – The Conscience Pangs of a Drone Pilot
• Fourth place *t* with 1 vote – Rhymes With Right – A Silly Anti-Gunnite Argument On Second Amendment Rights That Needs Dismissing
• Fourth place *t* with 1 vote – The Independent Sentinel – Gun Control Move Is Political Theater – Here’s Proof
• Fourth place *t* with 1 vote – The Noisy Room – Big Business and Marxist Collusion – Bourgeois Socialism
• Fifth place *t* with 2/3 vote – The Right Planet – A Real Plan for Recovery…
• Fifth place *t* with 2/3 vote – Simply Jews – The Guardian report on Christmas in Bethlehem
• Fifth place *t* with 2/3 vote – Gay Patriot – Larry Elder’s message to the GOP: Explain how Democratic policies hurt the poor
• Sixth place *t* with 1/3 vote – The Mellow Jihadi – Suicide Strikes the Navy, SEAL Commander Down
• Sixth place *t* with 1/3 vote – The Political Commentator – If your employee did these 10 things, would you fire them?

Non-Council Winners

• *First place with 4 votes! – Larry Corriea/Monster Hunter Nation – An opinion on gun control submitted by The Noisy Room
• Second place with 2 1/3 votes – American Thinker/Anne Lieberman – Against Nothingness submitted by Joshuapundit
• Third place with 1 2/3 votes – Thomas Sowell – Gun Control Ignorance submitted by The Right Planet
• Fourth place with 1 1/3 votes – The Socialism of Fools – The New Laocoon submitted by Simply Jews
• Fifth place with 1 vote – Seraphic Secret – Jew Without a Gun submitted by Bookworm Room
• Sixth place *t* with 2/3 votes – Victor Davis Hanson – Let the Real Fat Cats Pay Their Fair Share submitted by The Independent Sentinel
• Sixth place *t* with 2/3 vote – Sultan Knish – The Perfect Prison submitted by The Political Commentator
• Seventh place *t* with 1/3 vote – Boston Globe/ Michael Kranish – The Story Behind Mitt Romney’s Loss In The Presidential Campaign submitted by The Watcher
• Seventh place *t* with 1/3 vote – J.D. Tuccille/Reason.com – Gun Restrictions Have Always Bred Defiance, Black Markets submitted by The Glittering Eye
• Seventh place *t* with 1/3 vote – Urban Grounds – Does Anybody at the Texas Tribune Even Own a Gun? submitted by Rhymes With Right
• Seventh place *t* with 1/3 vote – Ann Althouse – Scenery chewing in the Theater of Outrage over Wayne LaPierre’s unremarkable news conference. submitted by Gay Patriot

See you next week! Don’t forget to tune in on Monday AM for this week’s Watcher’s Forum, as the Council and their invited special guests take apart one of the provocative issues of the day with short takes and weigh in… don’t you dare miss it. And don’t forget to like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter… ’cause we’re cool like that!