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In part because my
father was murdered by an Arab, I’ve
made an effort to understand the
impact of U.S. policy in the Mideast
and particularly the factors that
sometimes motivate bloodthirsty
responses from the Islamic world
against our country. As we focus on
the rise of the Islamic State and
search for the source of the
savagery that took so many innocent
lives in Paris and San Bernardino,
we might want to look beyond the
convenient explanations of religion
and ideology. Instead we should
examine the more complex rationales
of history and oil — and how they
often point the finger of blame back
at our own shores.
America’s unsavory record of violent
interventions in Syria —
little-known to the American people
yet well-known to Syrians — sowed
fertile ground for the violent
Islamic jihadism that now
complicates any effective response
by our government to address the
challenge of ISIL. So long as the
American public and policymakers are
unaware of this past, further
interventions are likely only to
compound the crisis. Secretary of
State John Kerry this week announced
a “provisional” ceasefire in Syria.
But since U.S. leverage and prestige
within Syria is minimal — and the
ceasefire doesn’t include key
combatants such as Islamic State and
al Nusra — it’s bound to be a shaky
truce at best. Similarly President
Obama’s stepped-up military
intervention in Libya — U.S.
airstrikes targeted an Islamic State
training camp last week — is likely
to strengthen rather than weaken the
radicals. As the New York Times
reported in a December 8, 2015,
front-page story, Islamic State
political leaders and strategic
planners are working to provoke an
American military intervention. They
know from experience this will flood
their ranks with volunteer fighters,
drown the voices of moderation and
unify the Islamic world against
America. To
understand this dynamic, we need to
look at history from the Syrians’
perspective and particularly the
seeds of the current conflict. Long
before our 2003 occupation of Iraq
triggered the Sunni uprising that
has now morphed into the Islamic
State, the CIA had nurtured violent
jihadism as a Cold War weapon and
freighted U.S./Syrian relationships
with toxic baggage.
This did not happen without
controversy at home. In July 1957,
following a failed coup in Syria by
the CIA, my uncle, Sen. John F.
Kennedy, infuriated the Eisenhower
White House, the leaders of both
political parties and our European
allies with a milestone speech
endorsing the right of
self-governance in the Arab world
and an end to America’s imperialist
meddling in Arab countries.
Throughout my lifetime, and
particularly during my frequent
travels to the Mideast, countless
Arabs have fondly recalled that
speech to me as the clearest
statement of the idealism they
expected from the U.S. Kennedy’s
speech was a call for recommitting
America to the high values our
country had championed in the
Atlantic Charter; the formal pledge
that all the former European
colonies would have the right to
self-determination following World
War II. Franklin D. Roosevelt had
strong-armed Winston Churchill and
the other allied leaders to sign the
Atlantic Charter in 1941 as a
precondition for U.S. support in the
European war against fascism.
But thanks in large part to Allen
Dulles and the CIA, whose foreign
policy intrigues were often directly
at odds with the stated policies of
our nation, the idealistic path
outlined in the Atlantic Charter was
the road not taken. In 1957, my
grandfather, Ambassador Joseph P.
Kennedy, sat on a secret committee
charged with investigating the CIA’s
clandestine mischief in the Mideast.
The so called “Bruce-Lovett Report,”
to which he was a signatory,
described CIA coup plots in Jordan,
Syria, Iran, Iraq and Egypt, all
common knowledge on the Arab street,
but virtually unknown to the
American people who believed, at
face value, their government’s
denials. The report blamed the CIA
for the rampant anti-Americanism
that was then mysteriously taking
root “in the many countries in the
world today.” The Bruce-Lovett
Report pointed out that such
interventions were antithetical to
American values and had compromised
America’s international leadership
and moral authority without the
knowledge of the American people.
The report also said that the CIA
never considered how we would treat
such interventions if some foreign
government were to engineer them in
our country. This
is the bloody history that modern
interventionists like George W.
Bush, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio miss
when they recite their narcissistic
trope that Mideast nationalists
“hate us for our freedoms.” For the
most part they don’t; instead they
hate us for the way we betrayed
those freedoms — our own ideals —
within their borders.
* * *
For Americans to really understand
what’s going on, it’s important to
review some details about this
sordid but little-remembered
history. During the 1950s, President
Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers —
CIA Director Allen Dulles and
Secretary of State John Foster
Dulles — rebuffed Soviet treaty
proposals to leave the Middle East a
neutral zone in the Cold War and let
Arabs rule Arabia. Instead, they
mounted a clandestine war against
Arab nationalism — which Allen
Dulles equated with communism —
particularly when Arab self-rule
threatened oil concessions. They
pumped secret American military aid
to tyrants in Saudi Arabia, Jordan,
Iraq and Lebanon favoring puppets
with conservative Jihadist
ideologies that they regarded as a
reliable antidote to Soviet Marxism.
At a White House meeting between the
CIA’s director of plans, Frank
Wisner, and John Foster Dulles, in
September 1957, Eisenhower advised
the agency, “We should do everything
possible to stress the ‘holy war’
aspect,” according to a memo
recorded by his staff secretary,
Gen. Andrew J. Goodpaster.
The CIA began its active meddling in
Syria in 1949 — barely a year after
the agency’s creation. Syrian
patriots had declared war on the
Nazis, expelled their Vichy French
colonial rulers and crafted a
fragile secularist democracy based
on the American model. But in March
1949, Syria’s democratically elected
president, Shukri-al-Quwatli,
hesitated to approve the
Trans-Arabian Pipeline, an American
project intended to connect the oil
fields of Saudi Arabia to the ports
of Lebanon via Syria. In his book,
Legacy of Ashes, CIA historian Tim
Weiner recounts that in retaliation
for Al-Quwatli’s lack of enthusiasm
for the U.S. pipeline, the CIA
engineered a coup replacing
al-Quwatli with the CIA’s handpicked
dictator, a convicted swindler named
Husni al-Za’im. Al-Za’im barely had
time to dissolve parliament and
approve the American pipeline before
his countrymen deposed him, four and
a half months into his regime.
Following several counter-coups in
the newly destabilized country, the
Syrian people again tried democracy
in 1955, re-electing al-Quwatli and
his National Party. Al-Quwatli was
still a Cold War neutralist, but,
stung by American involvement in his
ouster, he now leaned toward the
Soviet camp. That posture caused CIA
Director Dulles to declare that
“Syria is ripe for a coup” and send
his two coup wizards, Kim Roosevelt
and Rocky Stone, to Damascus.
Two years earlier, Roosevelt and
Stone had orchestrated a coup in
Iran against the democratically
elected President Mohammed
Mosaddegh, after Mosaddegh tried to
renegotiate the terms of Iran’s
lopsided contracts with the British
oil giant Anglo-Iranian Oil Company
(now BP). Mosaddegh was the first
elected leader in Iran’s 4,000-year
history and a popular champion for
democracy across the developing
world. Mosaddegh expelled all
British diplomats after uncovering a
coup attempt by U.K. intelligence
officers working in cahoots with BP.
Mosaddegh, however, made the fatal
mistake of resisting his advisers’
pleas to also expel the CIA, which,
they correctly suspected, was
complicit in the British plot.
Mosaddegh idealized the U.S. as a
role model for Iran’s new democracy
and incapable of such perfidies.
Despite Dulles’ needling, President
Harry Truman had forbidden the CIA
from actively joining the British
caper to topple Mosaddegh. When
Eisenhower took office in January
1953, he immediately unleashed
Dulles. After ousting Mosaddegh in
“Operation Ajax,” Stone and
Roosevelt installed Shah Reza
Pahlavi, who favored U.S. oil
companies but whose two decades of
CIA sponsored savagery toward his
own people from the Peacock throne
would finally ignite the 1979
Islamic revolution that has
bedeviled our foreign policy for 35
years. Flush from
his Operation Ajax “success” in
Iran, Stone arrived in Damascus in
April 1957 with $3 million to arm
and incite Islamic militants and to
bribe Syrian military officers and
politicians to overthrow
al-Quwatli’s democratically elected
secularist regime, according to Safe
for Democracy: The Secret Wars of
the CIA, by John Prados. Working
with the Muslim Brotherhood and
millions of dollars, Rocky Stone
schemed to assassinate Syria’s chief
of intelligence, the chief of its
General Staff and the chief of the
Communist Party, and to engineer
“national conspiracies and various
strong arm” provocations in Iraq,
Lebanon and Jordan that could be
blamed on the Syrian Ba’athists. Tim
Weiner describes in Legacy of Ashes
how the CIA’s plan was to
destabilize the Syrian government
and create a pretext for an invasion
by Iraq and Jordan, whose
governments were already under CIA
control. Kim Roosevelt forecast that
the CIA’s newly installed puppet
government would “rely first upon
repressive measures and arbitrary
exercise of power,” according to
declassified CIA documents reported
in The Guardian newspaper.
But all that CIA money failed to
corrupt the Syrian military
officers. The soldiers reported the
CIA’s bribery attempts to the
Ba’athist regime. In response, the
Syrian army invaded the American
Embassy, taking Stone prisoner.
After harsh interrogation, Stone
made a televised confession of his
roles in the Iranian coup and the
CIA’s aborted attempt to overthrow
Syria’s legitimate government. The
Syrians ejected Stone and two U.S.
Embassy staffers—the first time any
American State Department diplomat
was barred from an Arab country. The
Eisenhower White House hollowly
dismissed Stone’s confession as
“fabrications” and “slanders,” a
denial swallowed whole by the
American press, led by the New York
Times and believed by the American
people, who shared Mosaddegh’s
idealistic view of their government.
Syria purged all politicians
sympathetic to the U.S. and executed
for treason all military officers
associated with the coup. In
retaliation, the U.S. moved the
Sixth Fleet to the Mediterranean,
threatened war and goaded Turkey to
invade Syria. The Turks assembled
50,000 troops on Syria’s borders and
backed down only in the face of
unified opposition from the Arab
League whose leaders were furious at
the U.S. intervention. Even after
its expulsion, the CIA continued its
secret efforts to topple Syria’s
democratically elected Ba’athist
government. The CIA plotted with
Britain’s MI6 to form a “Free Syria
Committee” and armed the Muslim
Brotherhood to assassinate three
Syrian government officials, who had
helped expose “the American plot,”
according to Matthew Jones in “The
‘Preferred Plan’: The Anglo-American
Working Group Report on Covert
Action in Syria, 1957.” The CIA’s
mischief pushed Syria even further
away from the U.S. and into
prolonged alliances with Russia and
Egypt. Following
the second Syrian coup attempt,
anti-American riots rocked the
Mideast from Lebanon to Algeria.
Among the reverberations was the
July 14, 1958 coup, led by the new
wave of anti-American Army officers
who overthrew Iraq’s pro-American
monarch, Nuri al-Said. The coup
leaders published secret government
documents, exposing Nuri al-Said as
a highly paid CIA puppet. In
response to American treachery, the
new Iraqi government invited Soviet
diplomats and economic advisers to
Iraq and turned its back on the
West. Having
alienated Iraq and Syria, Kim
Roosevelt fled the Mideast to work
as an executive for the oil industry
that he had served so well during
his public service career at the
CIA. Roosevelt’s replacement as CIA
station chief, James Critchfield,
attempted a failed assassination
plot against the new Iraqi president
using a toxic handkerchief,
according to Weiner. Five years
later, the CIA finally succeeded in
deposing the Iraqi president and
installing the Ba’ath Party in power
in Iraq. A charismatic young
murderer named Saddam Hussein was
one of the distinguished leaders of
the CIA’s Ba’athist team. The Ba’ath
Party’s Secretary, Ali Saleh Sa’adi,
who took office alongside Saddam
Hussein, would later say, “We came
to power on a CIA train,” according
to A Brutal Friendship: The West and
the Arab Elite, by Said Aburish, a
journalist and author. Aburish
recounted that the CIA supplied
Saddam and his cronies a murder list
of people who “had to be eliminated
immediately in order to ensure
success.” Tim Weiner writes that
Critchfield later acknowledged that
the CIA had, in essence, “created
Saddam Hussein.” During the Reagan
years, the CIA supplied Hussein with
billions of dollars in training,
Special Forces support, weapons and
battlefield intelligence, knowing
that he was using poisonous mustard
and nerve gas and biological weapons
— including anthrax obtained from
the U.S. government — in his war
against Iran. Reagan and his CIA
director, Bill Casey, regarded
Saddam as a potential friend to the
U.S. oil industry and a sturdy
barrier against the spread of Iran’s
Islamic Revolution. Their emissary,
Donald Rumsfeld, presented Saddam
with golden cowboy spurs and a menu
of chemical/biological and
conventional weapons on a 1983 trip
to Baghdad. At the same time, the
CIA was illegally supplying Saddam’s
enemy, Iran, with thousands of
anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles
to fight Iraq, a crime made famous
during the Iran-Contra scandal.
Jihadists from both sides later
turned many of those CIA-supplied
weapons against the American people.
Even as America contemplates yet
another violent Mideast
intervention, most Americans are
unaware of the many ways that
“blowback” from previous CIA
blunders has helped craft the
current crisis. The reverberations
from decades of CIA shenanigans
continue to echo across the Mideast
today in national capitals and from
mosques to madras schools over the
wrecked landscape of democracy and
moderate Islam that the CIA helped
obliterate. A
parade of Iranian and Syrian
dictators, including Bashar al-Assad
and his father, have invoked the
history of the CIA’s bloody coups as
a pretext for their authoritarian
rule, repressive tactics and their
need for a strong Russian alliance.
These stories are therefore well
known to the people of Syria and
Iran who naturally interpret talk of
U.S. intervention in the context of
that history. While
the compliant American press parrots
the narrative that our military
support for the Syrian insurgency is
purely humanitarian, many Arabs see
the present crisis as just another
proxy war over pipelines and
geopolitics. Before rushing deeper
into the conflagration, it would be
wise for us to consider the abundant
facts supporting that perspective.
In their view, our war against
Bashar Assad did not begin with the
peaceful civil protests of the Arab
Spring in 2011. Instead it began in
2000, when Qatar proposed to
construct a $10 billion, 1,500
kilometer pipeline through Saudi
Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Turkey.
Qatar shares with Iran the South
Pars/North Dome gas field, the
world’s richest natural gas
repository. The international trade
embargo until recently prohibited
Iran from selling gas abroad.
Meanwhile, Qatar’s gas can reach
European markets only if it is
liquefied and shipped by sea, a
route that restricts volume and
dramatically raises costs. The
proposed pipeline would have linked
Qatar directly to European energy
markets via distribution terminals
in Turkey, which would pocket rich
transit fees. The Qatar/Turkey
pipeline would give the Sunni
kingdoms of the Persian Gulf
decisive domination of world natural
gas markets and strengthen Qatar,
America’s closest ally in the Arab
world. Qatar hosts two massive
American military bases and the U.S.
Central Command’s Mideast
headquarters. The
EU, which gets 30 percent of its gas
from Russia, was equally hungry for
the pipeline, which would have given
its members cheap energy and relief
from Vladimir Putin’s stifling
economic and political leverage.
Turkey, Russia’s second largest gas
customer, was particularly anxious
to end its reliance on its ancient
rival and to position itself as the
lucrative transect hub for Asian
fuels to EU markets. The Qatari
pipeline would have benefited Saudi
Arabia’s conservative Sunni monarchy
by giving it a foothold in
Shia-dominated Syria. The Saudis’
geopolitical goal is to contain the
economic and political power of the
kingdom’s principal rival, Iran, a
Shiite state, and close ally of
Bashar Assad. The Saudi monarchy
viewed the U.S.-sponsored Shiite
takeover in Iraq (and, more
recently, the termination of the
Iran trade embargo) as a demotion to
its regional power status and was
already engaged in a proxy war
against Tehran in Yemen, highlighted
by the Saudi genocide against the
Iranian backed Houthi tribe.
Of course, the Russians, who sell 70
percent of their gas exports to
Europe, viewed the Qatar/Turkey
pipeline as an existential threat.
In Putin’s view, the Qatar pipeline
is a NATO plot to change the status
quo, deprive Russia of its only
foothold in the Middle East,
strangle the Russian economy and end
Russian leverage in the European
energy market. In 2009, Assad
announced that he would refuse to
sign the agreement to allow the
pipeline to run through Syria “to
protect the interests of our Russian
ally.” Assad
further enraged the Gulf’s Sunni
monarchs by endorsing a
Russian-approved “Islamic pipeline”
running from Iran’s side of the gas
field through Syria and to the ports
of Lebanon. The Islamic pipeline
would make Shiite Iran, not Sunni
Qatar, the principal supplier to the
European energy market and
dramatically increase Tehran’s
influence in the Middke East and the
world. Israel also was
understandably determined to derail
the Islamic pipeline, which would
enrich Iran and Syria and presumably
strengthen their proxies, Hezbollah
and Hamas. Secret
cables and reports by the U.S.,
Saudi and Israeli intelligence
agencies indicate that the moment
Assad rejected the Qatari pipeline,
military and intelligence planners
quickly arrived at the consensus
that fomenting a Sunni uprising in
Syria to overthrow the uncooperative
Bashar Assad was a feasible path to
achieving the shared objective of
completing the Qatar/Turkey gas
link. In 2009, according to
WikiLeaks, soon after Bashar Assad
rejected the Qatar pipeline, the CIA
began funding opposition groups in
Syria. It is important to note that
this was well before the Arab
Spring-engendered uprising against
Assad. Bashar
Assad’s family is Alawite, a Muslim
sect widely perceived as aligned
with the Shiite camp. “Bashar Assad
was never supposed to be president,”
journalist Seymour Hersh told me in
an interview. “His father brought
him back from medical school in
London when his elder brother, the
heir apparent, was killed in a car
crash.” Before the war started,
according to Hersh, Assad was moving
to liberalize the country. “They had
internet and newspapers and ATM
machines and Assad wanted to move
toward the west. After 9/11, he gave
thousands of invaluable files to the
CIA on jihadist radicals, who he
considered a mutual enemy.” Assad’s
regime was deliberately secular and
Syria was impressively diverse. The
Syrian government and military, for
example, were 80 percent Sunni.
Assad maintained peace among his
diverse peoples by a strong,
disciplined army loyal to the Assad
family, an allegiance secured by a
nationally esteemed and highly paid
officer corps, a coldly efficient
intelligence apparatus and a
penchant for brutality that, prior
to the war, was rather moderate
compared to those of other Mideast
leaders, including our current
allies. According to Hersh, “He
certainly wasn’t beheading people
every Wednesday like the Saudis do
in Mecca.” Another
veteran journalist, Bob Parry,
echoes that assessment. “No one in
the region has clean hands, but in
the realms of torture, mass
killings, [suppressing] civil
liberties and supporting terrorism,
Assad is much better than the
Saudis.” No one believed that the
regime was vulnerable to the anarchy
that had riven Egypt, Libya, Yemen
and Tunisia. By the spring of 2011,
there were small, peaceful
demonstrations in Damascus against
repression by Assad’s regime. These
were mainly the effluvia of the Arab
Spring that spread virally across
the Arab League States the previous
summer. However, WikiLeaks cables
indicate that the CIA was already on
the ground in Syria.
But the Sunni kingdoms with vast
petrodollars at stake wanted a much
deeper involvement from America. On
September 4, 2013, Secretary of
State John Kerry told a
congressional hearing that the Sunni
kingdoms had offered to foot the
bill for a U.S. invasion of Syria to
oust Bashar Assad. “In fact, some of
them have said that if the United
States is prepared to go do the
whole thing, the way we’ve done it
previously in other places [Iraq],
they’ll carry the cost.” Kerry
reiterated the offer to Rep. Ileana
Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.): “With respect
to Arab countries offering to bear
the costs of [an American invasion]
to topple Assad, the answer is
profoundly yes, they have. The offer
is on the table.”
Despite pressure from Republicans,
Barack Obama balked at hiring out
young Americans to die as
mercenaries for a pipeline
conglomerate. Obama wisely ignored
Republican clamoring to put ground
troops in Syria or to funnel more
funding to “moderate insurgents.”
But by late 2011, Republican
pressure and our Sunni allies had
pushed the American government into
the fray. In 2011,
the U.S. joined France, Qatar, Saudi
Arabia, Turkey and the UK to form
the Friends of Syria Coalition,
which formally demanded the removal
of Assad. The CIA provided $6
million to Barada, a British TV
channel, to produce pieces
entreating Assad’s ouster. Saudi
intelligence documents, published by
WikiLeaks, show that by 2012,
Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia were
arming, training and funding radical
jihadist Sunni fighters from Syria,
Iraq and elsewhere to overthrow the
Assad’s Shiite-allied regime. Qatar,
which had the most to gain, invested
$3 billion in building the
insurgency and invited the Pentagon
to train insurgents at U.S. bases in
Qatar. According to an April 2014
article by Seymour Hersh, the CIA
weapons ratlines were financed by
Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
The idea of fomenting a Sunni-Shiite
civil war to weaken the Syrian and
Iranian regimes in order to maintain
control of the region’s
petrochemical supplies was not a
novel notion in the Pentagon’s
lexicon. A damning 2008
Pentagon-funded Rand report proposed
a precise blueprint for what was
about to happen. That report
observes that control of the Persian
Gulf oil and gas deposits will
remain, for the U.S., “a strategic
priority” that “will interact
strongly with that of prosecuting
the long war.” Rand recommended
using “covert action, information
operations, unconventional warfare”
to enforce a “divide and rule”
strategy. “The United States and its
local allies could use the
nationalist jihadists to launch a
proxy campaign” and “U.S. leaders
could also choose to capitalize on
the sustained Shia-Sunni conflict
trajectory by taking the side of the
conservative Sunni regimes against
Shiite empowerment movements in the
Muslim world … possibly supporting
authoritative Sunni governments
against a continuingly hostile
Iran.” As
predicted, Assad’s overreaction to
the foreign-made crisis — dropping
barrel bombs onto Sunni strongholds
and killing civilians — polarized
Syria’s Shiite/Sunni divide and
allowed U.S. policymakers to sell
Americans the idea that the pipeline
struggle was a humanitarian war.
When Sunni soldiers of the Syrian
Army began defecting in 2013, the
western coalition armed the Free
Syrian Army to further destabilize
Syria. The press portrait of the
Free Syrian Army as cohesive
battalions of Syrian moderates was
delusional. The dissolved units
regrouped in hundreds of independent
militias most of which were
commanded by, or allied with, jihadi
militants who were the most
committed and effective fighters. By
then, the Sunni armies of Al Qaeda
in Iraq were crossing the border
from Iraq into Syria and joining
forces with the squadrons of
deserters from the Free Syrian Army,
many of them trained and armed by
the U.S. Despite
the prevailing media portrait of a
moderate Arab uprising against the
tyrant Assad, U.S. intelligence
planners knew from the outset that
their pipeline proxies were radical
jihadists who would probably carve
themselves a brand new Islamic
caliphate from the Sunni regions of
Syria and Iraq. Two years before
ISIL throat cutters stepped on the
world stage, a seven-page August 12,
2012, study by the U.S. Defense
Intelligence Agency, obtained by the
right-wing group Judicial Watch,
warned that thanks to the ongoing
support by U.S./Sunni Coalition for
radical Sunni Jihadists, “the
Salafist, the Muslim Brotherhood and
AQI (now ISIS), are the major forces
driving the insurgency in Syria.”
Using U.S. and Gulf state funding,
these groups had turned the peaceful
protests against Bashar Assad toward
“a clear sectarian (Shiite vs.
Sunni) direction.” The paper notes
that the conflict had become a
sectarian civil war supported by
Sunni “religious and political
powers.” The report paints the
Syrian conflict as a global war for
control of the region’s resources
with “the west, Gulf countries and
Turkey supporting [Assad’s]
opposition, while Russia, China and
Iran support the regime.” The
Pentagon authors of the seven-page
report appear to endorse the
predicted advent of the ISIS
caliphate: “If the situation
unravels, there is the possibility
of establishing a declared or
undeclared Salafist principality in
eastern Syria (Hasaka and Der Zor)
and this is exactly what the
supporting powers to the opposition
want in order to isolate the Syrian
regime.” The Pentagon report warns
that this new principality could
move across the Iraqi border to
Mosul and Ramadi and “declare an
Islamic state through its union with
other terrorist organizations in
Iraq and Syria.” Of
course, this is precisely what has
happened. Not coincidentally, the
regions of Syria occupied by the
Islamic State exactly encompass the
proposed route of the Qatari
pipeline. But then,
in 2014, our Sunni proxies horrified
the American people by severing
heads and driving a million refugees
toward Europe. “Strategies based
upon the idea that the enemy of my
enemy is my friend can be kind of
blinding,” says Tim Clemente, who
chaired the FBI’s Joint Terrorism
Task Force from 2004 to 2008 and
served as liaison in Iraq between
the FBI, the Iraqi National Police
and the U.S. military. “We made the
same mistake when we trained the
mujahideen in Afghanistan. The
moment the Russians left, our
supposed friends started smashing
antiquities, enslaving women,
severing body parts and shooting at
us,” Clemente told me in an
interview. When the
Islamic State’s “Jihadi John” began
murdering prisoners on TV, the White
House pivoted, talking less about
deposing Assad and more about
regional stability. The Obama
administration began putting
daylight between itself and the
insurgency we had funded. The White
House pointed accusing fingers at
our allies. On October 3, 2014, Vice
President Joe Biden told students at
the John F. Kennedy Jr. forum at the
Institute of Politics at Harvard
that “our allies in the region were
our largest problem in Syria.” He
explained that Turkey, Saudi Arabia
and the UAE were “so determined to
take down Assad” that they had
launched a “proxy Sunni-Shia war”
funneling “hundreds of millions of
dollars and tens of thousands of
tons of weapons into anyone who
would fight against Assad. Except
the people who were being supplied
were al-Nusra, and al-Qaeda” — the
two groups that merged in 2014 to
form the Islamic State. Biden seemed
angered that our trusted “friends”
could not be trusted to follow the
American agenda.
Across the Mideast, Arab leaders
routinely accuse the U.S. of having
created the Islamic State. To most
Americans, such accusations seem
insane. However, to many Arabs, the
evidence of U.S. involvement is so
abundant that they conclude that our
role in fostering the Islamic State
must have been deliberate.
In fact, many of the Islamic State
fighters and their commanders are
ideological and organizational
successors to the jihadists that the
CIA has been nurturing for more than
30 years from Syria and Egypt to
Afghanistan and Iraq.
Prior to the American invasion,
there was no Al Qaeda in Saddam
Hussein’s Iraq. President George W.
Bush destroyed Saddam’s secularist
government, and his viceroy, Paul
Bremer, in a monumental act of
mismanagement, effectively created
the Sunni Army, now named the
Islamic State. Bremer elevated the
Shiites to power and banned Saddam’s
ruling Ba’ath Party, laying off some
700,000 mostly Sunni, government and
party officials from ministers to
schoolteachers. He then disbanded
the 380,000-man army, which was 80
percent Sunni. Bremer’s actions
stripped a million of Iraq’s Sunnis
of rank, property, wealth and power;
leaving a desperate underclass of
angry, educated, capable, trained
and heavily armed Sunnis with little
left to lose. The Sunni insurgency
named itself Al Qaeda in Iraq.
Beginning in 2011, our allies funded
the invasion by AQI fighters into
Syria. In April 2013, having entered
Syria, AQI changed its name to ISIL.
According to Dexter Filkins of the
New Yorker, “ISIS is run by a
council of former Iraqi generals. …
Many are members of Saddam Hussein’s
secular Ba’ath Party who converted
to radical Islam in American
prisons.” The $500 million in U.S.
military aid that Obama did send to
Syria almost certainly ended up
benefiting these militant jihadists.
Tim Clemente, the former chairman of
the FBI’s joint task force, told me
that the difference between the Iraq
and Syria conflicts is the millions
of military-aged men who are fleeing
the battlefield for Europe rather
than staying to fight for their
communities. The obvious explanation
is that the nation’s moderates are
fleeing a war that is not their war.
They simply want to escape being
crushed between the anvil of Assad’s
Russian-backed tyranny and the
vicious jihadist Sunni hammer that
we had a hand in wielding in a
global battle over competing
pipelines. You can’t blame the
Syrian people for not widely
embracing a blueprint for their
nation minted in either Washington
or Moscow. The superpowers have left
no options for an idealistic future
that moderate Syrians might consider
fighting for. And no one wants to
die for a pipeline.
* * *
What is the answer? If our objective
is long-term peace in the Mideast,
self-government by the Arab nations
and national security at home, we
must undertake any new intervention
in the region with an eye on history
and an intense desire to learn its
lessons. Only when we Americans
understand the historical and
political context of this conflict
will we apply appropriate scrutiny
to the decisions of our leaders.
Using the same imagery and language
that supported our 2003 war against
Saddam Hussein, our political
leaders led Americans to believe
that our Syrian intervention is an
idealistic war against tyranny,
terrorism and religious fanaticism.
We tend to dismiss as mere cynicism
the views of those Arabs who see the
current crisis as a rerun of the
same old plots about pipelines and
geopolitics. But, if we are to have
an effective foreign policy, we must
recognize the Syrian conflict is a
war over control of resources
indistinguishable from the myriad
clandestine and undeclared oil wars
we have been fighting in the Mideast
for 65 years. And only when we see
this conflict as a proxy war over a
pipeline do events become
comprehensible. It’s the only
paradigm that explains why the GOP
on Capitol Hill and the Obama
administration are still fixated on
regime change rather than regional
stability, why the Obama
administration can find no Syrian
moderates to fight the war, why ISIL
blew up a Russian passenger plane,
why the Saudis just executed a
powerful Shiite cleric only to have
their embassy burned in Tehran, why
Russia is bombing non-ISIL fighters
and why Turkey went out of its way
to shoot down a Russian jet. The
million refugees now flooding into
Europe are refugees of a pipeline
war and CIA blundering.
Clemente compares ISIL to Colombia’s
FARC — a drug cartel with a
revolutionary ideology to inspire
its footsoldiers. “You have to think
of ISIS as an oil cartel,” Clemente
said. “In the end, money is the
governing rationale. The religious
ideology is a tool that inspires its
soldiers to give their lives for an
oil cartel.” Once
we strip this conflict of its
humanitarian patina and recognize
the Syrian conflict as an oil war,
our foreign policy strategy becomes
clear. Like the Syrians fleeing for
Europe, no American wants to send
their child to die for a pipeline.
Instead, our first priority should
be the one no one ever mentions — we
need to kick our Mideast oil jones,
an increasingly feasible objective,
as the U.S. becomes more energy
independent. Next, we need to
dramatically reduce our military
profile in the Middle East and let
the Arabs run Arabia. Other than
humanitarian assistance and
guaranteeing the security of
Israel’s borders, the U.S. has no
legitimate role in this conflict.
While the facts prove that we played
a role in creating the crisis,
history shows that we have little
power to resolve it.
As we contemplate history, it’s
breathtaking to consider the
astonishing consistency with which
virtually every violent intervention
in the Middle East since World War
II by our country has resulted in
miserable failure and horrendously
costly blowback. A 1997 U.S.
Department of Defense report found
that “the data show a strong
correlation between U.S. involvement
abroad and an increase in terrorist
attacks against the U.S.” Let’s face
it; what we call the “war on terror”
is really just another oil war.
We’ve squandered $6 trillion on
three wars abroad and on
constructing a national security
warfare state at home since oilman
Dick Cheney declared the “Long War”
in 2001. The only winners have been
the military contractors and oil
companies that have pocketed
historic profits, the intelligence
agencies that have grown
exponentially in power and influence
to the detriment of our freedoms and
the jihadists who invariably used
our interventions as their most
effective recruiting tool. We have
compromised our values, butchered
our own youth, killed hundreds of
thousands of innocent people,
subverted our idealism and
squandered our national treasures in
fruitless and costly adventures
abroad. In the process, we have
helped our worst enemies and turned
America, once the world’s beacon of
freedom, into a national security
surveillance state and an
international moral pariah.
America’s founding fathers warned
Americans against standing armies,
foreign entanglements and, in John
Quincy Adams’ words, “going abroad
in search of monsters to destroy.”
Those wise men understood that
imperialism abroad is incompatible
with democracy and civil rights at
home. The Atlantic Charter echoed
their seminal American ideal that
each nation should have the right to
self-determination. Over the past
seven decades, the Dulles brothers,
the Cheney gang, the neocons and
their ilk have hijacked that
fundamental principle of American
idealism and deployed our military
and intelligence apparatus to serve
the mercantile interests of large
corporations and particularly, the
petroleum companies and military
contractors that have literally made
a killing from these conflicts.
It’s time for Americans to turn
America away from this new
imperialism and back to the path of
idealism and democracy. We should
let the Arabs govern Arabia and turn
our energies to the great endeavor
of nation building at home. We need
to begin this process, not by
invading Syria, but by ending the
ruinous addiction to oil that has
warped U.S. foreign policy for half
a century. |
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