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
2 - Assessing the Damage
Five
years later, it’s worth a second look to see how Washington uses
self-serving logic to reduce an entire nation to rubble.
First a
bit of background. After displacing France and Britain as the
region’s prime imperial overlord during the 1956 Suez Crisis and
then breaking with Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser a few years
later, the United States committed itself to the goal of defeating
Arab nationalism and Soviet Communism, two sides of the same coin as
far as Washington was concerned. Over the next half-century, this
would mean steering Egypt to the right with assistance from the
Saudis, isolating Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi, and doing what it
could to undermine the Syrian Baathist regime as well.
William
Roebuck, the American embassy’s chargé d’affaires in Damascus,
thus urged Washington in 2006 to coordinate with Egypt and Saudi
Arabia to encourage Sunni Syrian fears of Shi‘ite Iranian
proselytizing even though such concerns are “often exaggerated.”
It was akin to playing up fears of Jewish dominance in the 1930s in
coordination with Nazi Germany.
A year
later, former NATO commander Wesley Clark learned of a classified
Defense Department memo stating that U.S. policy was now to “attack
and destroy the governments in seven countries in five years,”
first Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran.
Since
the United States didn’t like what such governments were doing, the
solution was to install more pliable ones in their place. Hence
Washington’s joy when the Arab Spring struck Syria in March 2011
and it appeared that protesters would soon topple the Baathists on
their own.
Even
when lofty democratic rhetoric gave way to ominous sectarian chants
of “Christians to Beirut, Alawites to the coffin,” U.S.
enthusiasm remained strong. With Sunnis accounting for perhaps 60
percent of the population, strategists figured that there was no way
Assad could hold out against religious outrage welling up from below.
Enter
Gambill and the FP. The big news, his article began, is that
secularists are no longer in command of the burgeoning Syrian rebel
movement and that Sunni Islamists are taking the lead instead. As
unfortunate as this might seem, he argued that such a development was
both unavoidable and far from entirely negative.
“Islamist
political ascendancy is inevitable in a majority Sunni Muslim country
brutalized for more than four decades by a secular minoritarian
dictatorship,” he wrote in reference to the Baathists.
“Moreover, enormous financial resources are pouring in from the
Arab-Islamic world to promote explicitly Islamist resistance to
Assad’s Alawite-dominated, Iranian-backed regime.”
So the
answer was not to oppose the Islamists, but to use them. Even though
“the Islamist surge will not be a picnic for the Syrian people,”
Gambill said, “it has two important silver linings for US
interests.” One is that the jihadis “are simply more
effective fighters than their secular counterparts” thanks to
their skill with “suicide bombings and roadside bombs.”
The
other is that a Sunni Islamist victory in Syria will result in “a
full-blown strategic defeat” for Iran, thereby putting
Washington at least part way toward fulfilling the seven-country
demolition job discussed by Wesley Clark.
“So
long as Syrian jihadis are committed to fighting Iran and its Arab
proxies,” the article concluded, “we should quietly root
for them – while keeping our distance from a conflict that is going
to get very ugly before the smoke clears. There will be plenty of
time to tame the beast after Iran’s regional hegemonic ambitions
have gone down in flames.”
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