Official
Washington helped unleash hell on Syria and across the Mideast behind
the naïve belief that jihadist proxies could be used to transform
the region for the better.
by
Daniel Lazare
Part
1
When a
Department of Defense intelligence report about the Syrian rebel
movement became public in May 2015, lots of people didn’t know what
to make of it. After all, what the report said was unthinkable –
not only that Al Qaeda had dominated the so-called democratic revolt
against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for years, but that the West
continued to support the jihadis regardless, even to the point of
backing their goal of creating a Sunni Salafist principality in the
eastern deserts.
The
United States lining up behind Sunni terrorism – how could this be?
How could a nice liberal like Barack Obama team up with the same
people who had brought down the World Trade Center?
It was
impossible, which perhaps explains why the report remained a
non-story long after it was released courtesy of a Judicial Watch
freedom-of-information lawsuit. The New York Times didn’t mention
it until six months later while the Washington Post waited more than
a year before dismissing it as “loopy” and “relatively
unimportant.” With ISIS rampaging across much of Syria and Iraq, no
one wanted to admit that U.S. attitudes were ever anything other than
hostile.
But
three years earlier, when the Defense Intelligence Agency was
compiling the report, attitudes were different. Jihadis were heroes
rather than terrorists, and all the experts agreed that they were a
low-risk, high-yield way of removing Assad from office.
After
spending five days with a Syrian rebel unit, for instance, New York
Times reporter C.J. Chivers wrote that the group “mixes
paramilitary discipline, civilian policing, Islamic law, and the
harsh demands of necessity with battlefield coldness and outright
cunning.”
Paul
Salem, director of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, assured
the Washington Post that “al Qaeda is a fringe element”
among the rebels, while, not to be outdone, the gossip site Buzzfeed
published a pin-up of a “ridiculously photogenic” jihadi
toting an RPG.
“Hey
girl,” said the subhead. “Nothing sexier than fighting the
oppression of tyranny.”
And then
there was Foreign Policy, the magazine founded by neocon guru Samuel
P. Huntington, which was most enthusiastic of all. Gary Gambill’s
“Two Cheers for Syrian Islamists,” which ran on the FP web site
just a couple of weeks after the DIA report was completed, didn’t
distort the facts or make stuff up in any obvious way. Nonetheless,
it is a classic of U.S. propaganda. Its subhead glibly observed: “So
the rebels aren’t secular Jeffersonians. As far as America is
concerned, it doesn’t much matter.”
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