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
3 - Deals with the Devil
The U.S.
would settle with the jihadis only after the jihadis had settled with
Assad. The good would ultimately outweigh the bad. This kind of
self-centered moral calculus would not have mattered had Gambill only
spoken for himself. But he didn’t. Rather, he was expressing the
viewpoint of Official Washington in general, which is why the
ultra-respectable FP ran his piece in the first place.
The
Islamists were something America could employ to their advantage and
then throw away like a squeezed lemon. A few Syrians would suffer,
but America would win, and that’s all that counts.
The
parallels with the DIA are striking. “The west, gulf countries, and
Turkey support the opposition,” the intelligence report declared,
even though “the Salafist[s], the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI [i.e.
Al Qaeda in Iraq] are the major forces driving the insurgency.”
Where
Gambill predicted that “Assad and his minions will likely retreat
to northwestern Syria,” the DIA speculated that the jihadis might
establish “a declared or undeclared Salafist principality” at the
other end of the country near cities like Hasaka and Der Zor (also
known as Deir ez-Zor).
Where
the FP said that the ultimate aim was to roll back Iranian influence
and undermine Shi‘ite rule, the DIA said that a Salafist
principality “is exactly what the supporting powers to the
opposition want in order to isolate the Syrian regime, which is
considered the strategic depth of Shia expansion (Iraq and Iran).”
Bottle
up the Shi‘ites in northwestern Syria, in other words, while
encouraging Sunni extremists to establish a base in the east so as to
put pressure on Shi‘ite-influenced Iraq and Shi‘ite-ruled Iran.
As
Gambill put it: “Whatever misfortunes Sunni Islamists may visit
upon the Syrian people, any government they form will be
strategically preferable to the Assad regime, for three reasons: A
new government in Damascus will find continuing the alliance with
Tehran unthinkable, it won’t have to distract Syrians from its
minority status with foreign policy adventurism like the ancien
régime, and it will be flush with petrodollars from Arab Gulf states
(relatively) friendly to Washington.”
With the
Saudis footing the bill, the U.S. would exercise untrammeled sway.
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