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.

[...]

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.

[...]

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.

Are the War Drums Quieter?

With so many people who call themselves liberals and leftists tearing their hair out in dread of a President Donald Trump, it is necessary to point out that the prospects of avoiding nuclear war are much better than they were the day before the election. Hillary Clinton was committed to imposing a “no fly zone” over Syria. [...] You’d think that would have made Clinton anathema to decent people. [...] [But b]ased on [Americans'] political behavior, they [...] support U.S. governments that have slaughtered millions since the end of World War Two. If you voted for Obama and Clinton, you gave your assent to continuing George Bush’s wars, allowing Obama to start two major wars of his own, in Libya and Syria, and to Hillary Clinton’s plans to roll the nuclear dice on the fate of humanity. The whole world knows that Americans are dangerous, to themselves and to others.

[...]

Donald Trump looks and talks like the ugly, racist, bullying American -- and he is exactly that, but he hasn’t killed anybody yet, and his public statements have been of a far more peaceful nature than the woman he beat at the polls. Trump says he wants to cooperate with the Syrians and the Russians to defeat ISIS. Trump also does not make distinctions between the various Islamic jihadist groups in Syria, unlike the Obama administration, which has directly and indirectly armed and funded all of the jihadist groups, and has spent much of the last several months trying to protect the al Nusra Front, the al Qaida affiliate in eastern Aleppo, from Russian bombing.

[...]

Hopefully, the Syrian government and its friends will be on the road to victory before Donald Trump’s presidency is decisively captured by the bipartisan War Party that runs the empire.

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Assad thinks the notion of Trump bucking the War Party is “dubious.” He’s right. Half a million Syrians are dead because most Americans don’t much care who their government kills, as long as they’re not white.

  Glen Ford @ Black Agenda Report

And not even then if they're eastern European or Russian.

Hopefully, this is one thing he'll follow through on. But, I'm not optimistic about it....but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Don't Hurt OUR Terrorists

Washington has asked Moscow not to conduct airstrikes against al-Nusra Front, which is Al-Qaeda’s branch in Syria, for fear that members of the “moderate opposition” could also be hit, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has reported.

“They [the US] are telling us not to hit it [al-Nusra Front], because there are also ‘normal’ opposition groups [on those territories],” Lavrov said in an interview with local Russian media that was published on the Russian Foreign Ministry’s website.

The minister also stressed that “such opposition groups should leave terrorist positions,” adding that “we have long agreed on that.” Russia first set a deadline for the “moderate” opposition to leave territories occupied by al-Nusra Front extremists, but then agreed to give them more time to withdraw.

  RT

That's more than the US did for the civilians of Falluja in '04.

Falluja: Chronicle of Genocide

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

Disillusioned in Syria

Since the start of the regime change operation in Syria Jenan Moussa, who works for the UAE based Al Aan TV, is an ardent fan of the "moderate rebels". Her embedded reports about them were more one sided anti-regime propaganda than journalism. She is quite prominent with over 100,000 followers on Twitter.

But her honeymoon with the FSA seems to be over. She finally recognizes that the FSA is a mere weapon courier service between the CIA and Saudis on one side and al-Qaeda and the Islamic State on the other.

[...]

That is, of course, not new. When the German journalist Jürgen Todenhöfer, who traveled to ISIS-controlled Syria and Iraq last year, was asked about how the FSA is seen by the Jihadis he responded (vid):

They are laughing about the FSA. They don't take them for serious. They say: "The best arms sellers we have are the FSA. If they get a good weapon they sell it to us."

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Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda in Syria, is meanwhile happy with all the attention the Islamic State gets. It helps Nusra to play the "moderates".

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Another long term fan of regime change in Syria and a busy propagandists on Twitter with some 26,000 followers is The 47th. Yesterday he finally had this realization:

The 47th @THE_47th
There isn't a single credible, promising & uniting Syrian oppositions figure that could possibly run against Assad.

  Moon of Alabama

So we can't possibly agree to free elections in Syria.

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

In a Nutshell

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

Can't Keep Track of the Players Without a Scorecard

New intelligence has emerged warning Washington that its upcoming confrontation with the Islamic State may leave it blind to a more sinister and direct threat from a much lesser known terrorist group that has arisen from the ashes of the Syrian war.

Very little information is being released at the moment by anyone within American intelligence circles, but the group calling itself Khorasan is said by officials to have concrete plans for striking targets in the United States and Europe as a chosen modus operandi – more so than the Islamic State (IS), formerly known as ISIS.

  RT

Good grief. We haven’t even “accomplished” our mission with IS yet!

“What you have is a growing body of extremists from around the world who are coming in and taking advantage of the ungoverned areas and creating informal ad hoc groups that are not directly aligned with ISIS or Nusra,” a senior law enforcement official told the NY Times on condition of anonymity.

The CIA and the White House declined to give comment.

Wait for the official propaganda.

Although the first public mention of the group was only this Thursday, American intelligence is said to have been tracking it for over a decade.

And creating it at least that long.

George W. Bush once mentioned the name of its leader in 2005 in connection with a French oil tanker bombing in 2002 off the coast of Yemen.

Only he wasn’t the leader of Khorasan then, I imagine.

Like many other groups taking up the power vacuum in war-torn Syria, Khorasan has on occasion shifted its alliances.

And there’s your “money quote.” Khorasan and all others will continue to shift their alliances as it becomes advantageous to them.

[T]he US may be surprised by how difficult it soon may be to pinpoint the origin of the next threat.

I take it back. THERE's the money quote.

Sources tell CBS News the group includes technicians trained by al Qaeda's master bomb-builder, Ibrahim al-Asiri. The Yemen-based Asiri built the infamous but ultimately unsuccessfulunderwear bombs and two cargo bombs concealed in printer cartridges.

He is considered one of the most innovative bomb-builders in the jihadist world, and he's still operating freely -- at least for now.

CIA chief John Brennan recently told Orr that U.S. officials were "doing what we can" to track Asiri down, and predicted that his "time will come."

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At the moment, U.S. officials say there is no specific, credible threat to the homeland. But as information about Khorasan becomes available, it's clear that al Qaeda remains obsessed with bombs, airplanes, and attacking the United States.

  CBS

But, we’ll get ‘em.

It's Not a Peace Plan, It's a War Plan

In which case, it is successful.

Every year there are more cases in which this approach backfires. The most glaring and famous failure was in Afghanistan, where some of the groups taught (and supplied) to fight the Soviet Army later became stridently anti-Western. In that environment, Al Qaeda flourished and established the camps where perpetrators of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were trained. Yet instead of learning from its mistakes, the United States keeps making them.

  WaPo

And I keep telling you, at some point you have to come to the realization that this is not a mistake. It is a plan. It keeps the war coffers full and the defense industry flush and in turn contributing to the campaign coffers of Congress.

According to interviews with members of militant groups, such as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria’s Al Nusra Front (which is aligned with al Qaeda), that is exactly what happened with some of the fighters in Libya and even with factions of the Free Syrian Army.

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“We had, in the early stages, information that radical groups had used the vacuum of the Arab Spring, and that some of the people the US and their allies had trained to fight for ‘democracy’ in Libya and Syria had a jihadist agenda — already or later, [when they] joined al Nusra or the Islamic State,” a senior Arab intelligence official said in a recent interview.

He said that often his US counterparts would say things like, “We know you are right, but our president in Washington and his advisers don’t believe that.”

Yes. They do believe that. They are not stupid.

Seymour Hersh Is Still Here

He's been around a long time, a lone voice in the wilderness often enough. But he's still at it, Lord love 'im. I wonder if he'll be doing any work for Glenn Greenwald's new venture.

Though President Barack Obama eventually decided not to strike Syria, the administration made a public case for war by saying that Assad’s regime was responsible for a poison gas attack in the outskirts of Damascus. The U.N. later concluded the attack had involved the nerve agent sarin.

In his piece -- titled "Whose Sarin?" – [Pulitzer Prize-winning journalistSeymour] Hersh reported that al-Nusra, a jihadi group fighting in Syria’s long-running civil war, had also "mastered the mechanics of creating sarin and was capable of manufacturing it in quantity.” Therefore, he wrote, “Obama did not tell the whole story” when stating with certainty that Assad had to be responsible, thereby crossing a so-called "red line" that would trigger U.S. retaliation.

  

Well, what a surprise. And what a surprise that Hersh had a hard time finding anyone willing to publish the story.

Shawn Turner, spokesman for the Director of National Intelligence, said in a statement to BuzzFeed that "any suggestion that there was an effort to suppress intelligence about a nonexistent alternative explanation is simply false.”

[...]

Indeed, Hersh didn't seem particularly bothered by having to shop the story to different outlets, telling HuffPost over email that “these things happen on tough stories presented by a non-staff writer ... the way it goes ... freelancing is not for the faint of heart.”