Obama's Serious Syria Errors

President Barack Obama has long been under fire from the US national security elite and the media for failing to intervene aggressively against the Assad regime.

  Middle East Eye

And lambasted constantly in media and political circles for "inaction" in Syria, which would be laughable if it weren't pathetic. Action, I suppose, doesn't include funding, arming and advising. (And, in September, running an air strike on the Syrian army.)

But the real strategic blunder was not that Barack Obama didn’t launch yet another war in Syria, but that he decided to go along with the ambitions of America's Sunni allies to create and arm a Syrian opposition army to overthrow the regime in the first place.

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[A] former [anonymous] official revealed that when Obama made the first move toward supporting the arming of Syrian opposition forces, the president failed to foresee the risk of a direct Iranian or Russian intervention on behalf of the Syrian regime in response to an externally armed opposition – because his advisors had failed to take this likelihood into account themselves.

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Obama’s advisers assumed instead that neither Iran nor Russia would do more than offer token assistance to keep Assad in power, so there was no risk of an endless, bloody sectarian war.

I find this almost impossible to believe. How could they not foresee such an event? The entire world has known about the American Project for a New American Century  (PNAC) created in the run-up to the GW Bush administration with one of its stated goals being to take control over Syria. Syria has been seen for decades in the Middle East as a deterrent to attacks from Israel. Did they think Russia and Iran would just stand back and watch? And, if they did realize it would draw them into the conflict, it suggests that they intended it.

The former administration official confirmed the recollections of both former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and former Pentagon official Derek Chollet that Obama’s advisers believed Assad’s fall was inevitable.

Some of those advisers believed Assad lacked the “cunning and fortitude” to remain in power, as Chollet put it.

Just as they believed Hillary's coronation was inevitable. Bubbles are bad places from which to govern.

Obama did make a statement [in the summer of 2011] suggesting that Assad should step aside, but he made it clear privately that he had no intention of doing anything about it. “He viewed it as simply a suggestion, not a hard policy,” the ex-official said.

But soon after that, a bigger issue arose for the administration’s policy: how to respond to pressure from Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar for a US commitment to help overthrow Assad.

Countries who were counting heavily on a Hillary Clinton presidency which would announce a no-fly zone in Syria, further increasing the chance of a direct confrontation between Russia and the US.

Apparently to assuage the dissatisfaction of the Sunni allies, then-director of the CIA David Petraeus devised a plan, which Obama approved, to help move the small arms from Libyan government stocks in Benghazi to Turkey.

Confirming the 2014 story by Seymour Hersh, the ex-official recalled: “It was highly secret but officials involved in the Middle East learned of the programme by word of mouth.”

The combination of those two policy decisions committed Obama – albeit half-heartedly - to the armed overthrow of the Assad regime.

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Obama and his advisers blundered on Syria in thinking that they were not getting into a high-risk war situation.

I would say that's an extremely large blunder, to the point of almost being unbelievable.

But there is a deeper level of explanation for the willingness of Obama and his advisers to go along with the inherent risk of another regime change policy – even if Obama was half-hearted about it at best and limited direct US involvement in it.

The administration was unwilling to be at cross-purposes with its Sunni allies, the former official recalled, because of the direct US military interests at stake in its alliances with those three states: the Saudis effectively controlled US access to the naval base in Bahrain, Turkey controlled the airbase at Incirlik, and Qatar controlled land and air bases that had become central to US military operations in the region.

Now that sounds more like it. They knew, but they decided the risk was worth it. Besides, if we don't stay involved in war, our economy will sink like a stone. It's barely hanging on as it is, and the next financial crash will need a big cushion.

This Gareth Porter article outlines the entire Syria debacle, including how the US once again became a partner with a terrorist organization in the Middle East, and is definitely worth the read if you're fuzzy on the details.

By the way, Donald Trump said America will no longer be in the regime change business when he's in the White House.  I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that was just another lie to get elected. It might not happen in the beginning, but it will happen.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.