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
4 - Insurgency Mix
By
August 2012, a secret Defense Intelligence Agency report found that
Salafists, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Al Qaeda were already “the
major forces driving of the insurgency” and that the
U.S. and Gulf states backed them regardless. The report warned that
the U.S. and some of its allies were supporting the establishment of
a “Salafist principality” in eastern Syria to pressure Assad that
could turn into an “Islamic State”–two years before the Islamic
State was declared in 2014. Clinton was among senior Obama
administration officials who had to have seen the report as it was
sent to the State Department among several other agencies.
In 2016,
then Secretary of State John Kerry confirmed this policy in a leaked
audio conversation, saying that the U.S., rather than seriously
fighting the Islamic State in Syria, was ready to use the growing
strength of the jihadists to pressure Assad to resign, just as
outlined in the DIA document.
“We
know that this was growing, we were watching, we saw that Daesh [an
Arabic name for Islamic State] was growing in strength, and we
thought Assad was threatened,” Kerry said. “We thought
however we could probably manage that Assad might then negotiate, but
instead of negotiating he got Putin to support him.”
Speechwriter
Ben Rhodes summed up the problem of “moderate” rebels who were
indistinguishable from Al Qaeda, in his White House memoir, “The
World As It Is.” He writes: “Al Nusra was probably the
strongest fighting force within the opposition, and while there were
extremist elements in the group, it was also clear that the more
moderate opposition was fighting side by side with al Nusra. I argued
that labeling al Nusra as terrorists would alienate the same people
we want to help, while giving al Nusra less incentive to avoid
extremist affiliations.”
The
problem was how to separate the “good” Al Qaeda fighters from the
“bad.” Rhodes later complained when Russian President Vladimir
Putin said that he and his fellow Obama officials were “trying
to climb a spruce tree naked without scratching our ass.” This
was “smug,” Rhodes writes. But Putin was merely using a colorful
expression to say that the policy made no sense; which it didn’t.
The
cost of the Clinton-backed policy in Syria has been staggering. As
many as 560,000 people have died, and half the population has been
displaced, while the World Bank has estimated total war damage at
$226 billion, roughly six years’ income for every Syrian man,
woman, and child.
A
cockeyed memo thus helped unleash a real-life catastrophe that
refuses to go away. It’s a nightmare from which Trump is struggling
to escape by trying to withdraw U.S. troops in his confused and
deluded way. And it’s a nightmare that warmongers from arch-neocon
John Bolton, Trump’s national security adviser, to “liberal”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, to Hillary Clinton are determined to keep
going.
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