This blog has covered Syrian foreign policy in a number of posts. The most infuriating aspect of it all - as usual - has been the media coverage, or lack thereof. And, in a similar vein, the eery silence of the anti-war left that liked to organize international marches when W was engaged in his foreign interventions. The media - being highly liberal - did not want to publicize the incompetence of their Messiah figure, and the media - being highly Jewish - did not want to inadvertently scuttle Israel's ambitions in Syria. (I suspect the latter half is true...the first part is certainly true.) Media coverups are fodder for conspiracy theories. When events that clearly should be reported are not being reported, the intellectually curious grow deeply suspicious. The media always pays a price in credibility when it shirks it's duty. At some point, most of the people who were willing to call out Obama's blunders were also the ones to speak of Anglo-Zionist conspiracies. They became more credible than the professional media, who largely refused to report any inconvenient truths.
The Harper's article doesn't duck any of the contentious circumstances. That Islamist rebels were being heavily funded by Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey...all US allies. That US policy initiatives were rudderless, scattered, and ad hoc. That diplomatic signaling was confusing to Syrians on all sides. That Obama's infamous "red line" proclamation set the stage for what was in all likelihood a false-flag operation. That American arms intended for "moderate" rebels frequently ended up in the hands of extremists. That American foreign policy reached a new watermark for insanity when it slipped into a proxy war with itself, with CIA-armed rebels fighting against DOD-armed rebels. That Russia ultimately wielded more influence in the region because they were willing to take decisive action backed by moral clarity.
The article frames Obama's "brain trust" not as sinister schemers pushing a neocon agenda, but as waffling naive do-gooders grappling with the burden of doing the right thing. The reality is nicely summed up by Ben Rhodes, referring to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey.
Up to this point, he had argued that Syria was a slippery slope where there was little chance of success. Now he said that something needed to be done even if we didn’t know what would happen after we took action.Rhodes himself opined.
Even though I had misgivings about our Syria policy, I was glad we were doing something.Former DNI Director Michael Dempsey (brother of the other Dempsey) opined similarly.
Some of the training programs were options between doing nothing and military intervention. No one was sure it would work, but we had to do something.No one knew what to do except they had to do something. The article paints the administration as, if anything, non-interventionist. They were a bit trigger shy after their disastrous project in Libya, which they rightfully should have been. (Another fiasco excused by the press.) I would generally offer the advice that, if you don't know what to do, don't do anything. And if you must do something, pick a course and commit to it. The Obama administration handicapped itself by determining it must do something, yet acting timidly under the constant fear of getting embroiled in yet another boondoggle. Trump would have first established himself as a madman who might just nuke the slate clean if he didn't get his way. He's the leverage president. Obama was the feelings & fear president.
Syria wasn't a tactical miscue that can be learned from and added to the book "How to Do Empires Good" for reference in later projects. The fault goes all the way to the core values of President Obama and his base of supporters. When the Arab Spring showed up in Syria, Obama felt bad for the people under an autocrat prone to heavy handedness. Fair enough, but his tragic fault is to assume that the victim is righteous and correct. Perhaps the victim is wrong and a little heavy handedness is what's needed to keep order in that neck of the woods. I don't know the answer, but the thing is that Obama and his ilk always know what the answer is. The guy with power must be the bad guy. It's basic Victomnomics. So they work against the bad guy and next thing you know a really bad guy shows up and starts exporting terrorism globally. It's the kind of calamity that ultimately ensues in a world where feelings are facts.
The best thing Trump ever did was to label Obama as the "founder of ISIS." It's a hyperbolic claim, in response to a hyperbolic lack of coverage over the mistakes that led to the neo-Caliphate. If you want some good reading entertainment, go to FeelingsCheck.org's review of the claim and witness how pedantic and narrow they have to be to come up with a conclusion of FALSE. (Hint: a Ctrl+F for 'Assad' comes up nil.)
For all it's candor, the article does seem to omit a couple things, as far as I see it.
The triumphs of the Islamic State caused a change in thinking at the White House. One of the Obama insiders I interviewed said, “When I left in 2014, it was game over for dealing with Syria outside of ISIS.”We're supposed to believe that, after the reality of the ISIS scourge became apparent, the administration fully re-shifted focus from ousting Assad to dealing with ISIS. And yet - as the article fails to mention - ISIS remained stable and healthy all the way until September 2015 - when Russia snuck warplanes into the theater and began its own bombing campaign and quickly turned the tide. Russia's contingent was still small compared to America's. Obama wasn't trying to destroy ISIS; he was determined to push them out of Iraq and towards Damascus, to further weaken Assad's position. He was always using ISIS, a force of pure evil, in pursuit of doing the right thing. I know of no other explanation for ISIS to survive American but not Russian bombing campaigns.
Near the end of the article they quote Phil Gordon, an Obama advisor who is now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Once we topple the regime, are the stable moderates going to come to power and govern Syria? I don’t think so. And then you’ve just got a different form of chaos that we’re responsible for.It sounds great, and it's totally wrong. They were responsible for just that form of chaos in both Libya and in Syria. How can he pretend that ISIS capturing Mosul wasn't chaos? Delusion. And it resulted from the efforts they took to topple the regime indirectly. Further, he omits - and this is the primary glaring omission of the article - that Obama and Kerry actually tried to rally the nation to a full-scale military invasion of Syria in a media blitz that lasted for...a couple weeks, if I recall. They actually tried to topple the regime by force, and failed to muster the political support. And now they pretend they decided themselves not to send in tanks for logical reasons. After that political failure, they tried to arm opposition forces to do the job for them, which ultimately failed, as Harper's nicely sums up.
The result of US meddling in Syria was failure on all counts. It did not depose Assad, who looks like he is set to hold on to power for years. It did not expel Iran and Russia, whose influence and footprints in Syria expanded. It did not break the Syria–Hezbollah alliance. Nor did it ameliorate civilian suffering, as refugees either stay in exile squalor or return to demolished homes. It had the unintended consequence of turning Turkey from a traditional ally into a regional adversary. Syrian conspiracy theorists claim the US goal was to destroy Syria, as it did Iraq, to protect Israel. Only if that were true could the United States be said to have achieved any objective.
No comments:
Post a Comment