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
4 - Disastrous Thinking
Has a
forecast that ever gone more spectacularly wrong? Syria’s Baathist
government is hardly blameless in this affair. But thanks largely to
the U.S.-backed sectarian offensive, 400,000 Syrians or more have
died since Gambill’s article appeared, with another 6.1 million
displaced and an estimated 4.8 million fleeing abroad.
War-time
destruction totals around $250 billion, according to U.N. estimates,
a staggering sum for a country of 18.8 million people where
per-capita income prior to the outbreak of violence was under $3,000.
From Syria, the specter of sectarian violence has spread across Asia
and Africa and into Europe and North America as well. Political
leaders throughout the advanced industrial world are still struggling
to contain the populist fury that the Middle East refugee crisis, the
result of U.S.-instituted regime change, helped set off.
So
instead of advancing U.S. policy goals, Gambill helped do the
opposite. The Middle East is more explosive than ever while U.S.
influence has fallen to sub-basement levels. Iranian influence now
extends from the Arabian Sea to the Mediterranean, while the country
that now seems to be wobbling out of control is Saudi Arabia where
Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman is lurching from one self-induced
crisis to another. The country that Gambill counted on to shore up
the status quo turns out to be undermining it.
It’s
not easy to screw things up so badly, but somehow Washington’s
bloated foreign-policy establishment has done it. Since helping to
snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, Gambill has moved on to a
post at the rightwing Middle East Forum where Daniel Pipes, the
group’s founder and chief, now inveighs against the same Sunni
ethnic cleansing that his employee defended or at least apologized
for.
The
forum is particularly well known for its Campus Watch program, which
targets academic critics of Israel, Islamists, and – despite
Gambill’s kind words about “suicide bombings and roadside bombs”
– anyone it considers the least bit apologetic about Islamic
terrorism.
Double
your standard, double the fun. Terrorism, it seems, is only terrorism
when others do it to the U.S., not when the U.S. does it to others.
***
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