"Bandar Bush", the CIA, and Syria

”Now we are all following Congress and Senate discussions on whether to sanction the use of force in Syria. This contradicts common sense. With the understanding of the international law, no congress in any country can approve such things. What are they approving? They are approving an act of aggression, because anything that doesn’t fit the U.N. Security Council framework is aggression except self-defense. Syria, as we know it, is not attacking the U.S., so we cannot talk about self-defense. Everything else without the U.N. approval is an act of aggression.” -- Vladimir Putin

  Democracy Now!

The Wall Street Journal recently revealed new details about how Prince Bandar bin Sultan al-Saud — Saudi’s former ambassador to the United States — is leading the effort to prop up the Syrian rebels. Intelligence agents from Saudi Arabia, the United States, Jordan and other allied states are working at a secret joint operations center in Jordan to train and arm hand-picked Syrian rebels. The Journal also reports Prince Bandar has been jetting from covert command centers near the Syrian front lines to the Élysée Palace in Paris and the Kremlin in Moscow, seeking to undermine the Assad regime. "Really what he’s doing is he’s reprising a role that he played in the 1980s when he worked with the Reagan administration to arrange money and arms for mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan and also worked with the CIA in Nicaragua to support the Contras," says Wall Street Journal reporter Adam Entous. "So in many ways this is a very familiar position for Prince Bandar, and it’s amazing to see the extent to which veterans of the CIA were excited to see him come back because, in the words of a diplomat who knows Bandar, he brings the Arabic term wasta, which means under-the-table clout. You know his checks are not going to bounce and that he’ll be able to deliver the money from the Saudis."

[...]

”[Prince Bandar] really didn’t have a strong connection to these rebels until a couple years ago, when the king of Saudi Arabia decided to put him in the job of intel chief last summer. And since then, he’s been very aggressive in arranging arms shipments and funding for these rebels.

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”Then-CIA Director David Petraeus was involved, as well, in helping assure the Jordanians that the U.S. would have Jordan’s back.

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”[W]hat is happening now is you have actually more CIA officers now there at that base than there are Saudi personnel.

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”The Saudis and the Jordanians draw on defectors, largely, from the Syrian military, which already have a good degree of military training. And they’re brought to this base, where different intel agencies train them. And the Americans are there. The Brits are there. The French are there. The Saudis, UAE is there. And they train them, and then they send them into the fight.

[...]

”[T]he United States is not at war with Syria, so this is obviously being done covertly with the CIA. The Saudis were instrumental in getting the CIA to agree to pay these salaries. And the idea is, if these—if these FSA commanders receive American money, the U.S. is building loyalty and building relationships that would last into the future.”

  Democracy Now!

Yes, just as has been the case in numerous Middle Eastern countries, and apparently the US still has not learned that loyalty and lasting relationships are not a part of the Middle Eastern rebel culture.

The Democracy Now! article points out that they have been training in Jordan for months, but because there is division in the CIA as to whether this will be a big enough benefit to the US, only about 50 CIA-trained rebels have actually entered Syria to fight. Of course, the rest stand ready for orders, and I am guessing that those 50 would be able to train others once on Syrian territory.

The article also says that, for some time, there have been small incidents of sarin gas use that the White House believed to be only in possession of Assad’s regime, and that these incidents are what led Obama to authorize the CIA to arm the trainees in Jordan.  Perhaps Mr. Obama still believes that only Assad has sarin.  How naïve would he have to be?  I'm pretty sure that no American president has ever known the full extent of CIA operations at any particular time, but they all surely know its history and its capabilities.  But isn't "plausible deniability" a wonderful thing?

In a companion piece to this Democracy Now! program, the same Wall Street Journal reporter said this:

Russians feel that they were hoodwinked by the Americans, where they agreed to go on and support a [UN Security Council] resolution that authorized the use of force in Libya in 2011, after, they say, they got assurances from the United States that regime change would not be the objective.

  Democracy Now!

The Russians probably feel they were hoodwinked because they WERE.

WSJ article (requires subscription)