The memo shows the advice Hillary Clinton was getting to plunge the U.S. deeper into the Syrian war. As Trump seeks to extricate the U.S. the memo has again become relevant, writes Daniel Lazare.
by
Daniel Lazare
Part
1
A memo
sent to Hillary Clinton that WikiLeaks made public in 2016 has not
gotten the attention it deserves. Now is the time. After President
Donald Trump tweeted that he was pulling American troops out of
Syria, Clinton joined his vociferous critics who want more war in
Syria.
“Actions
have consequences, and whether we’re in Syria or not, the people
who want to harm us are there & at war,” Clinton tweeted in
response to Trump. “Isolationism is weakness. Empowering ISIS is
dangerous. Playing into Russia & Iran’s hands is foolish. This
President is putting our national security at grave risk.”
Actions
indeed have consequences.
The memo
shows the kind of advice Clinton was getting as secretary of state to
plunge the U.S. deeper into the Syrian war. It takes us back to 2012
and the early phase of the conflict.
At that
point, it was largely an internal affair, although Saudi arms
shipments were playing a greater and greater role in bolstering rebel
forces. But once the President Barack Obama eventually decided in
favor of intervention, under pressure from Clinton, the conflict was
quickly internationalized as thousands of holy warriors flooded in
from as far away as western China.
The
1,200-word memo written by James P. Rubin, a senior diplomat in Bill
Clinton’s State Department, to then-Secretary of State Clinton,
which Clinton twice requested be printed out, begins with the subject
of Iran, an important patron of Syria.
The memo
dismisses any notion that nuclear talks will stop Iran “from
improving the crucial part of any nuclear weapons program—the
capability to enrich uranium.” If it does get the bomb, it goes
on, Israel will suffer a strategic setback since it will no longer be
able to “respond to provocations with conventional military
strikes on Syria and Lebanon, as it can today.” Denied the
ability to bomb at will, Israel might leave off secondary targets and
strike at the main enemy instead.
Consequently,
the memo argues that the U.S. should topple the Assad regime so as to
weaken Iran and allay the fears of Israel, which has long regarded
the Islamic republic as its primary enemy. As the memo puts it:
“Bringing down Assad would not only be a massive boon to
Israel’s security, it would also ease Israel’s understandable
fear of losing its nuclear monopoly. Then, Israel and the United
States might be able to develop a common view of when the Iranian
program is so dangerous that military action could be warranted.”
This
document, making the case to arm Syrian rebels, may have been largely
overlooked because of confusion about its dates, which appear to be
inaccurate.
The time
stamp on the email is “2001-01-01 03:00” even though Clinton was
still a New York senator-elect at that point. That date is also out
of synch with the timeline of nuclear diplomacy with Iran.
But the
body of the email gives a State Department case and document number
with the date of 11/30/2015. But that’s incorrect as well because
Clinton resigned as secretary of state on Feb. 1, 2013.
Source,
links:
https://consortiumnews.com/2019/01/13/the-memo-that-helped-kill-a-half-million-people-in-syria/
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