[pluma]

Obama did not want to get directly involved however it seems the CIA was involved before Trump got into office:

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/08/02/world/middleeast/cia-s...

Considering the CIA's track record when it comes to interfering in internal armed conflicts throughout the Middle East and South America, I would be careful with the assumption of "if there's no official statement by the US saying they're involved, they're not involved" even if there's a thin line between that and outright conspiracy mongering.

There are a lot of conflicts in the world even without Western involvement but the US has a pretty solid track record of interfering in those conflicts to serve their own interests -- and I'm pretty sure the US is not the only one doing it (I'd say Russia but their interference in the Ukraine has been dramatized to the point where some people would assert there wouldn't be a conflict without Russian involvement in the first place).

[tariandbari]

So let me see if I can understand, the Syrian people started rally against the regime not because they are fully grown men and women capable of making their own decision, and they really wanted to have a better life. But because it was someone from Washington DC who wanted to ... (I don't know what exactly he wanted, but he surely wanted something)

[yorwba]

There is a spectrum of possibilities between "the people of Syria are freedom fighters who rose against their dictator to create a democracy" and "the people of Syria love their glorious leader, only foreign puppets would wish to fight him" and not everyone who disagrees with you has to be at the completely ridiculous opposite extreme. (Edit: in particular, disagreeing with your reply to zabana doesn't mean that they support their original argument.)

With a conflict this large, I'd be surprised if any foreign powers of note didn't at least try to plant sources within all major factions, as well as picking their favorites and supporting them with financial aid and weapons. That doesn't mean that everything was completely orchestrated, just that foreign involvement was pretty much inevitable as soon as things got violent.

[tariandbari]

The discussion is about whatever people are fully capable to hate and murder each other without Western involvement or not. This is a simple yes and no question and in light of that I'll ridicule anything that even remotely suggest otherwise.

[pluma]

There used to be a separatist movement (aka terrorists / freedom fighters) in Spain and France called the Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (or ETA for short). Until surrendering their weapons in April this year, they've been involved in a number of attacks since 1968 that most people would consider acts of terrorism.

Their goal was to establish an independent Basque nation by forcing the French and Spanish governments to give up their respective territories.

Now, for a number of reasons, they haven't been particularly successful. Their attacks mostly involved bombings, robberies, kidnapping or plain old executions. They've used some military grade weapons like mortars but never had much resembling a full army, let alone tanks.

If things had been different and the US would have had an interest in having the CIA fund, train and equip the ETA to the point where the ETA would have been able to wage an actual war of secession against Spain and/or France, wouldn't you agree that this situation would have been drastically different from "merely" killing less than 1000 people over decades of activity?

Yet apparently by your standards because ETA still existed and killed people without the hypothetical CIA support the situation would have been no different in the grand scheme of things and the US's involvement would have been completely irrelevant.

There are plenty of terrorists or separatists or nationalists or rebels or freedom fighters in all kinds of countries and plenty of them have killed people. Yes, people kill people without covert (or overt) military support from the US and other powers but pretending that makes the level of support they receive irrelevant is absurd.

Without US involvement, the Syrian civil war would look quite different, just like the Ukrainian civil war would look very different without Russian involvement.