If
the paeans to McCain by diverse political climbers seems detached
from reality, it’s because they reflect the elite view of U.S.
military interventions as a chess game, with the millions killed by
unprovoked aggression mere statistics.
by
Max Blumenthal
Part
4 - McCain’s Syrian Boondoggle
Like
Libya, Syria had resisted aligning with the West and was suddenly
confronted with a Salafi-jihadi insurgency armed by the CIA. Once
again, McCain made it his personal duty to market Islamist insurgents
to America as a cross between the Minutemen and the Freedom Riders of
the civil rights era. To do so, he took under his wing a youthful
DC-based Syria-American operative named Mouaz Moustafa who had been a
consultant to the Libyan Transitional Council during the run-up to
the NATO invasion.
In May
2013, Moustafa convinced McCain to take an illegal trip across the
Syrian border and meet some freedom fighters. An Israeli millionaire
named Moti Kahana who coordinated efforts between the Syrian
opposition and the Israeli military through his NGO, Amaliah, claimed
to have “financed the opposition group which took senator John
McCain to visit war-torn Syria.”
“This
could be like his Benghazi moment,” Moustafa remarked excitedly
in a scene from a documentary, “Red Lines,” that depicted his
efforts for regime change. “[McCain] went to Benghazi, he came
back, we bombed.”
During
his brief excursion into Syria, McCain met with a group of CIA-backed
insurgents and blessed their struggle. “The senator wanted to
assure the Free Syrian Army that the American people support their
cry for freedom, support their revolution,” Moustafa said in an
interview with CNN. McCain’s office promptly released a photo
showing the senator posing beside a beaming Moustafa and two
grim-looking gunmen.
Days
later, the men were named by the Lebanese Daily Star as Mohammad Nour
and Abu Ibrahim. Both had been implicated in the kidnapping a year
prior of 11 Shia pilgrims, and were identified by one of the
survivors. McCain and Moustafa returned to the U.S. the targets of
mockery from Daily Show host John Stewart and the subject of harshly
critical reports from across the media spectrum. At a town hall in
Arizona, McCain was berated by constituents, including Jumana Hadid,
a Syrian Christian woman who warned that the sectarian militants he
had cozied up to threatened her community with genocide.
But
McCain pressed ahead anyway. On Capitol Hill, he introduced another
shady young operative into his interventionist theater. Named
Elizabeth O’Bagy, she was a fellow at the Institute for the Study
of War, an arms industry-funded think tank directed by Kimberly Kagan
of the neoconservative Kagan clan. Behind the scenes, O’Bagy was
consulting for Moustafa at his Syrian Emergency Task Force, a clear
conflict of interest that her top Senate patron was well aware of.
Before the Senate, McCain cited a Wall Street Journal editorial by
O’Bagy to support his assessment of the Syrian rebels as
predominately “moderate,” and potentially Western-friendly.
Days
later, O’Bagy was exposed for faking her PhD in Arabic studies. As
soon as the humiliated Kagan fired O’Bagy, the academic fraudster
took another pass through the Beltway’s revolving door, striding
into the halls of Congress as McCain’s newest foreign policy aide.
McCain
ultimately failed to see the Islamist “revolutionaries” he glad
handled take control of Damascus. Syria’s government held on thanks
to help from his mortal enemies in Tehran and Moscow, but not before
a billion dollar CIA arm-and-equip operation helped spawn one of the
worst refugee crises in post-war history. Luckily for McCain, there
were other intrigues seeking his attention, and new bands of
fanatical rogues in need of his blessing. Months after his Syrian
boondoggle, the ornery militarist turned his attention to Ukraine,
then in the throes of an upheaval stimulated by U.S. and EU-funded
soft power NGO’s.
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