Seymour Hersh on the Obama Administration's Syria policy

Seymour Hersh has a piece at the London Review of Books on Obama's Syria policy and the criticism of it by some US military leaders.

That in itself is not new. There are always varieties of opinion and differences of evaluation within the military and intelligence agencies. And to a significant extent, both areas have systematic procedures in place to insure that various perspectives are vetted and the supporting evidence evaluated.

The criticism that Hersh reports certainly sounds like a credible scenario. It has to do with the role of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, which has been an obvious focus of public commentary, as well. The Pentagon's job is to focus on military capabilities. And since Daesh/ISIS and the Assad regime are each other's most significant opponents in the Syria civil war, it's fairly obvious that without a credible alternative force in play, siding with either Assad or with Daesh/ISIS works inevitably to the short-term benefit of the other.

Hersh reports:

The military’s resistance dates back to the summer of 2013, when a highly classified assessment, put together by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, then led by General Martin Dempsey, forecast that the fall of the Assad regime would lead to chaos and, potentially, to Syria’s takeover by jihadi extremists, much as was then happening in Libya. A former senior adviser to the Joint Chiefs told me that the document was an ‘all-source’ appraisal, drawing on information from signals, satellite and human intelligence, and took a dim view of the Obama administration’s insistence on continuing to finance and arm the so-called moderate rebel groups. By then, the CIA had been conspiring for more than a year with allies in the UK, Saudi Arabia and Qatar to ship guns and goods – to be used for the overthrow of Assad – from Libya, via Turkey, into Syria. The new intelligence estimate singled out Turkey as a major impediment to Obama’s Syria policy. The document showed, the adviser said, ‘that what was started as a covert US programme to arm and support the moderate rebels fighting Assad had been co-opted by Turkey, and had morphed into an across-the-board technical, arms and logistical programme for all of the opposition, including Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State. The so-called moderates had evaporated and the Free Syrian Army was a rump group stationed at an airbase in Turkey.’ The assessment was bleak: there was no viable ‘moderate’ opposition to Assad, and the US was arming extremists. [my emphasis]

In this following portion, he suggests that the Pentagon was secretly aiding the Assad government and thereby circumventing Administration policy:

‘Our policy of arming the opposition to Assad was unsuccessful and actually having a negative impact,’ the former JCS adviser said. ‘The Joint Chiefs believed that Assad should not be replaced by fundamentalists. The administration’s policy was contradictory. They wanted Assad to go but the opposition was dominated by extremists. So who was going to replace him? To say Assad’s got to go is fine, but if you follow that through – therefore anyone is better. It’s the “anybody else is better” issue that the JCS had with Obama’s policy.’ The Joint Chiefs felt that a direct challenge to Obama’s policy would have ‘had a zero chance of success’. So in the autumn of 2013 they decided to take steps against the extremists without going through political channels, by providing US intelligence to the militaries of other nations, on the understanding that it would be passed on to the Syrian army and used against the common enemy, Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State. [my emphasis]

The claim is pretty general and doesn't on the face of it imply any wrongdoing by the Pentagon.

But however realistic their evaluation may be, the Pentagon doesn't get to make foreign policy. Or at least they shouldn't. In practice, US foreign policy since the end of the Cold War has become far more militarized in the sense that war and the threat of war became more and more the most prominent tools of foreign policy.

He expands on the intelligence-sharing:

Germany, Israel and Russia were in contact with the Syrian army, and able to exercise some influence over Assad’s decisions – it was through them that US intelligence would be shared. Each had its reasons for co-operating with Assad: Germany feared what might happen among its own population of six million Muslims if Islamic State expanded; Israel was concerned with border security; Russia had an alliance of very long standing with Syria, and was worried by the threat to its only naval base on the Mediterranean, at Tartus. ‘We weren’t intent on deviating from Obama’s stated policies,’ the adviser said. ‘But sharing our assessments via the military-to-military relationships with other countries could prove productive. It was clear that Assad needed better tactical intelligence and operational advice. The JCS concluded that if those needs were met, the overall fight against Islamist terrorism would be enhanced. Obama didn’t know, but Obama doesn’t know what the JCS does in every circumstance and that’s true of all presidents.’ [my emphasis]

Later in the piece, Hersh has the adviser suggesting that the Pentagon was signaling to Assad that they could and would undermine the President's policy if it suited them:

‘We worked with Turks we trusted who were not loyal to Erdoğan,’ the adviser said, ‘and got them to ship the jihadists in Syria all the obsolete weapons in the arsenal, including M1 carbines that hadn’t been seen since the Korean War and lots of Soviet arms. It was a message Assad could understand: “We have the power to diminish a presidential policy in its tracks.”’

Reminding us of how little so many policymakers have learned about "blowback" over the decades, Hersh writes, "State Department cables made public by WikiLeaks show that the Bush administration tried to destabilise Syria and that these efforts continued into the Obama years." But he also describes various ways in which Assad's government cooperated in the US' War on Terrorism. Including, of course, a particularly infamous one, "Assad also secretly turned over to the US relatives of Saddam Hussein who had sought refuge in Syria, and – like America’s allies in Jordan, Egypt, Thailand and elsewhere – tortured suspected terrorists for the CIA in a Damascus prison."

The United States should not be torturing people or subcontracting the job to foreign governments. But in various ways, the Assad government has cooperated with the US against terrorism in areas in which the two countries' interests overlapped. Just as Libya's Muammar Gaddafi had cooperated with the Cheney-Bush Administration in getting rid of its "weapons of mass destruction." It doesn't necessarily send the best message that the US has supported the opposition in Libya that overthrew Gaddafi and created a playground for jihadists there. Or that the US is stubbornly insisting on the ouster of Assad's regime.

But another one of our more dubious long-time friends has no reservations about wanting to overthrow the Assad regime: "Saudi Arabia continues to be a major provider of funds to the Syrian opposition, estimated by US intelligence last year at $700 million." Later he observes, "But as the [Syrian] army gained in strength with the Joint Chiefs’ [intelligence-sharing] support, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey escalated their financing and arming of Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State, which by the end of 2013 had made enormous gains on both sides of the Syria/Iraq border."

Part of what is complicating US policy now is the blowback from Obama's Libya policy:

A retired senior diplomat who served at the US embassy in Moscow expressed sympathy for Obama’s dilemma as the leader of the Western coalition opposed to Russia’s aggression against Ukraine: ‘Ukraine is a serious issue and Obama has been handling it firmly with sanctions. But our policy vis-à-vis Russia is too often unfocused. But it’s not about us in Syria. It’s about making sure Bashar does not lose. The reality is that Putin does not want to see the chaos in Syria spread to Jordan or Lebanon, as it has to Iraq, and he does not want to see Syria end up in the hands of Isis. The most counterproductive thing Obama has done, and it has hurt our efforts to end the fighting a lot, was to say: “Assad must go as a premise for negotiation.”’ He also echoed a view held by some in the Pentagon when he alluded to a collateral factor behind Russia’s decision to launch airstrikes in support of the Syrian army on 30 September: Putin’s desire to prevent Assad from suffering the same fate as Gaddafi. He had been told that Putin had watched a video of Gaddafi’s savage death three times, a video that shows him being sodomised with a bayonet. The JCS adviser also told me of a US intelligence assessment which concluded that Putin had been appalled by Gaddafi’s fate: ‘Putin blamed himself for letting Gaddafi go, for not playing a strong role behind the scenes’ at the UN when the Western coalition was lobbying to be allowed to undertake the airstrikes that destroyed the regime. ‘Putin believed that unless he got engaged Bashar would suffer the same fate – mutilated – and he’d see the destruction of his allies in Syria.’

Hersh also talks about Chinese troops in Syria! But he's not relying on Dr. Ben as a source. What he says is that Turkey is facilitating the passage of Uighur Muslim jihadists from China into Syria to fight for Daesh/ISIS. "IHS-Jane’s Defence Weekly estimated in October that as many as five thousand Uighur would-be fighters have arrived in Turkey since 2013, with perhaps two thousand moving on to Syria." When reality gets weird enough to echo Dr. Ben's fantasies, it's probably time to worry.

The warnings about escalation in the Middle East keep on coming ...,

... and for the moment it appears President Obama is acting on some of that kind of advice.

Paul Pillar writes in The Military Impulse and Hysteria Over ISIS The National Interest 12/06/2015, also at LobeLog Foreign Policy:

ISIS and its enclave certainly constitute a significant security problem in the Middle East and specifically for Syria and Iraq. But that is a problem distinct from, and should not be conflated with, the countering of terrorist threats in the United States. It would be a big mistake to let a surge of fear about such threats, let alone opportunistic political exploitation of such fear, drive the making of policy on Syria and Iraq.

Any use of military force in that theater ought to be guided instead by lessons from recent experience that are almost too obvious to need restating. One of those lessons is that the toppling or ouster of an undesirable regime or quasi-regime does not necessarily end a security problem but merely marks the start of a new phase of a war. Another is that as long as there is not the will and the consensus among local populations to form a new and stable alternative political order, the resulting disorder only works to the advantage of extremist groups. ISIS was born under a different name in the disorder in Iraq that followed the U.S. toppling of Saddam Hussein's regime. One of the few places where ISIS appears to have established a satellite presence where it has more of an organizational and not just inspirational connection is in the chaos of Libya since Muammar Gadhafi's regime was toppled with the aid of Western military force.

Stephen Walt writes about the short-sightedness of the US and other NATO nations in Don’t Give ISIS What It Wants Foreign Policy 11/16/2015, after the Paris attacks by ISIS sympathizers:

... jihadi terrorism is a political movement based on a minority’s narrow and fundamentalist interpretation of Islam. To some extent, the emergence of groups such as the Islamic State or the original al Qaeda is symptomatic of the broader legitimacy and governance crisis in the Arab and Islamic world. It is also, however, an unfortunate but understandable response to decades (or even centuries) of Western interference in the Middle East, and especially to the policies that have taken the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in the region.

To acknowledge this fact in no way justifies what happened in Paris, and I am most certainly not defending, excusing, or rationalizing what the attackers did last Friday or what other terrorists have done before. At the same time, to pretend that American and European actions have nothing whatsoever to do with this problem is to bury one’s head in the sand and ignore the obvious. To note just one example of the West’s own role in creating this problem: Had the United States refrained from invading Iraq back in 2003, there almost certainly would be no Islamic State today.

We have to face facts squarely: Decades of misguided U.S. and European policies have left many people in the Arab and Islamic world deeply angry at and resentful toward the West. Those policies include the West’s cozy coddling of various Arab dictators, its blind support for Israel’s brutal policies toward the Palestinians, and its own willingness to wage air campaigns, employ sanctions, or invade Middle Eastern countries whenever it thinks doing so suits its short-term interest. Consider how we would react if some foreign power had been doing similar things to us — and not just once but over many years. Unsurprisingly, among those many angry people are a few — fortunately, only a few — who decide to try to pay back the West for what they regard as illegitimate and murderous interference. Their response is morally despicable and will solve nothing, but it should not be all that difficult to fathom.

There is also something new about what is going on. Great powers have long taken advantage of weaker societies, but today, the weak are sometimes able to hit back at the great power’s homeland. Britain, France, Belgium, and other countries used to treat their colonial subjects in brutal and sometimes murderous ways, but the colonized peoples had no way to attack their colonial masters back in the imperial heartland. Today, groups like al Qaeda and the Islamic State can do just that, no matter how many precautions we take. That is the new reality we are now struggling to absorb.

And he notes:

If the Islamic State can get France and other countries to crack down on their Muslim citizens and also get the West to reoccupy large swaths of the Middle East, then its false narrative about the West’s deep and intrinsic antipathy to Islam will gain more credence, as will its carefully cultivated image as the staunchest defender of Islam today.

The Greatest ISIS Generation?

Generalissimo Tom Brokaw was on Meet the Press this morning describing how the US is at war (aren't we always?) with The Terrorists, ISIS specifically, and explaining how We have to conduct it.

Tom Brokaw on ISIS: "We're at War" 11/22/2015:

And according to him, we won't be able to count on our European allies. I guess because our European allies are never targeted by The Terrorists.

Fortunately, respectable news organizations don't allow journalists to express political opinions: Hadas Gold, CNN reporter suspended after tweet on refugees Politico 11/19/15

Otherwise, We might think Generalissimo Tom was shamelessly warmongering instead of objectively commenting on the situation.

Kathleen Parker sounds like the sensible one in this clip, God help us. And of course, we need to go all Greatest Generation on The Evil Ones, too. I feel like I'm watching a bad remake of a bad clown movie.

There's nothing quite like watching the Sunday morning shoes to diminish your faith in the future of the human race.

Hillary on ISIS

The Council on Foreign Relations has the full transcript, A Conversation With Hillary Clinton 11/19/2015. Oddly, it includes the full text twice.

Her opening description of Daesh/ISIS sounds like standard war propaganda:

Now, let’s be clear about what we’re facing. Beyond Paris, in recent days, we’ve seen deadly terrorist attacks in Nigeria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Turkey, and a Russian civilian airline destroyed over the Sinai. At the heat of today’s new landscape of terror is ISIS. They persecute religious and ethnic minorities, kidnap and behead civilians, murder children. They systematically enslave, torture, and rape women and girls. ISIS operates across three mutually reinforcing dimensions—a physical enclave in Iraq and Syria, an international terrorist network that includes affiliates across the region and beyond, and an ideological movement of radical jihadism. We have to target and defeat all three.

And time is of the essence. ISIS is demonstrating new ambition, reach, and capabilities. We have to break the group’s momentum, and then its back. Our goal is not to deter or contain ISIS but to defeat and destroy ISIS.

There has understandably been a lot of coverage of Clinton's speech, like: Maddy Crowell, Hillary Clinton calls for increase in US air strikes against ISIS (+video) Christian Science Monitor 11/19/2015; Samantha Lachman, Hillary Clinton Proposes Intensified American Effort 'To Defeat And Destroy' ISIS Huffington Post 11/19/2015.

She said things here and there from which Democratic base voters could take some encouragement. I'm not sure this was one of them: "Like President Obama, I do not believe that we should again have 100,000 American troops in combat in the Middle East."

Great, she doesn't want to commit more than 99,000 combat troops. Until things go south for them, of course, and then a new Surge will be necessary to preserve American credibility, yadda, yadda. After a few decades, these phrases get to sound very tiresome. And familiar.

She talked about the political choices in the situation. For instance:

We need to put sustained pressure on the government in Baghdad to gets its political house in order, move forward with national reconciliation, and finally, stand up a national guard. Baghdad needs to accept, even embrace, arming Sunni and Kurdish forces in the war against ISIS. But if Baghdad won’t do that, the coalition should do so directly.

On the Syrian side, the big obstacle to getting more ground forces to engage ISIS beyond the Syrian Kurds, who are already deep in the fight is that the viable Sunni opposition groups remain understandably preoccupied with fighting Assad, who, let us remember, has killed many more Syrians than the terrorists have. But they are increasingly under threat from ISIS as well, so we need to move simultaneously toward a political solution to the civil war that paves the way for a new government with new leadership, and to encourage more Syrians to take on ISIS as well.

Nothing that she says seems to make it clear what side we would actually be supporting. Clearly not the Assad regime in Syria. She wants to support the Kurds up to a point, i.e., not to the point of establishing a Kurdistan state carved out of Turkey, Syria and Iraq.

And she doesn't want to make nice with Iran, which is an ally of both the Iraqi government and Assad. In response to a question after her main statement, she mentioned the Al-Qaeda affiliate the Al-Nusra Front, that is also fighting against ISIS and Assad in Syria. But she said the fight against ISIS should be the priority. The question period also includes this exchange:

ZAKARIA: So no fight—no fight against Assad for now?

CLINTON: There—we have to prioritize. And we had an opportunity, perhaps—I won’t say that it would have worked. But right now, we’ve got the Russians in protecting Assad, the Iranians, and Hezbollah protecting Assad. We need to get people to turn against the common enemy of ISIS. And then we need to figure out how we put together a political outcome that provides enough autonomy so that the separate immunities [sic] within Syria will be able to recreate a Syrian state, even though it probably is unlikely it will be controlled by the Alawites from Damascus, the same way it was before the civil war started.

This sounds like a mighty muddle to me. Clinton wants military escalation. But she doesn't seem to have any clear plan for what a desirable or acceptable political outcome would be. This doesn't sound good to me.

"Spiegel International" story on the origins of Daesh/ISIS

Spiegel International has a story about the creation of Daesh/ISIS, The Terror Strategist: Secret Files Reveal the Structure of Islamic State by Christoph Reuter 04/18/2015.

It claims that a former intelligence official in Saddam's regime, Samir Abd Muhammad al-Khlifawi, originally organized and headed the group. It reports on organization charts and plans from Al-Hlifawi's Al-Khlifawi's files. Al-Hlifawi Al-Khlifawi was killed in January 2014, according to the Spiegel report.

The story was picked up by The Guardian with a Reuters wire story (Former Saddam Hussein spy masterminded the rise of Isis, says report 04/20/2015), the Daily Mail (Sara Malm and John Hall, The murderous blueprint which plotted the rise of ISIS 04/19/2015)and Aljazeera (Documents show Saddam-era Iraqi officer masterminded ISIL’s rise 04/20/2015)

The poor quality of some of Spiegel Online's reporting on the euro crisis and their willingness to pass along the German government's spin with American-style stenography makes me a bit more cautious than I used to be about Spiegel's reporting. I'm curious what Juan Cole may have to say about it. The last three paragraphs of the Spiegel piece pick up on the Sunni-Shi'a war narrative that Cole has been warning is a gross oversimplification of events in the Middle East. Spiegel:

As the West's attention is primarily focused on the possibility of terrorist attacks, a different scenario has been underestimated: the approaching intra-Muslim war between Shiites and Sunnis. Such a conflict would allow IS to graduate from being a hated terror organization to a central power.

Already today, the frontlines in Syria, Iraq and Yemen follow this confessional line, with Shiite Afghans fighting against Sunni Afghans in Syria and IS profiting in Iraq from the barbarism of brutal Shiite militias. Should this ancient Islam conflict continue to escalate, it could spill over into confessionally mixed states such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain and Lebanon.

In such a case, IS propaganda about the approaching apocalypse could become a reality. In its slipstream, an absolutist dictatorship in the name of God could be established.

For some of Cole's cautions about that narrative, see Juan Cole on Europe's Muslims and More Carnegie Council 04/13/2015.

This article by Bill Roggio at The Long War Journal, ISIS confirms death of senior leader in Syria 02//05/2014, published soon after Al-Khlifawi his death, also indicates he was an important leader in Daesh/ISIS. The organization confirmed his death, referring to him by a pseudonym he adopted, Abu Bakr al-Iraqi:

The ISIS leader, known as Abu Bakr al Iraqi or Haji Bakr, was a senior military commander and top deputy to Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, the embattled emir of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Sham. Haji Bakr was first reported killed in early January after his group clashed with the Syrian Martyrs’ Brigade, a unit of the Free Syrian Army in Aleppo. A picture that purported to show Haji Bakr’s corpse was published on LiveLeak, but the image does not appear to match a picture released by the ISIS.

The ISIS announced the death of Haji Bakr in an official statement that was released on a jihadist Twitter account on Feb. 2. The statement was obtained and translated by the SITE Intelligence Group.

“We congratulate the mujahideen in general and in Iraq and al Sham in particular, for the martyrdom of the Mujahid Sheikh, the Commander, Abu Bakr al Iraqi,” the ISIS eulogy stated. The ISIS claimed he was “knocked down by the cowardly, insidious hands in the countryside of Northern Aleppo by the criminals of the Awakenings.” The group has tagged Free Syrian Army and even allied Islamist groups as Awakening, or anti-al Qaeda groups, that are supported by Western and Arab countries.

Digby has commented on the story in Yet another terrifying lesson in the perils of blowback Hullabaloo 04/19/2015. So has Charlie Pierce in The Many Wars Of Fred Hiatt: The Unique History Of One Man's Mongering Esquire Politics Blog 04/20/2015.