https://socialistaction.org/2017/08/08/syria-did-trump-really-end-cias-secret-war/
Syria: Did Trump really end CIA’s secret war?
/ 3 days ago
Aug. 2017 U.S. bombs Syria
By JEFF MACKLER
“Trump Ends Covert Aid to Syrian Rebels Trying to Topple Assad,” read a
July 19 New York Times headline. Citing The Washington Post as its
source, the article noted that the official termination of the “secret”
U.S. program “was never publicly announced, just as the beginnings of
the program four years ago were officially a secret, authorized by
President Barack Obama through a ‘finding’ that permitted the C.I.A. to
conduct a deniable program.”
“Mr. Trump’s decisions,” said The Times, “amounted to an acknowledgment
that no escalation of the program, which began in 2013 in concert with
the C.I.A.’s counterparts in Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Jordan, was likely
to yield a different result.”
The CIA and its “counterparts” were intervening in Syria even before
2013, if not congruent with the brief Arab Spring mobilizations of 2011,
when poor peasants, democratically minded youth, and others protested
against the Bashar Assad government’s neo-liberal and repressive
policies. The New York Times revealed on June 21, 2012, that the CIA had
been ferrying arms, recruiting, and training anti-Assad groups based in
Turkey.
Simultaneously, the U.S. was the major power behind the Syrian National
Council (SNC), which it established to be the new Syrian “government in
waiting.” The SNC consisted of an exile-based 270-member leadership core
that was overseen by the U.S. State Department and funded by most of the
Gulf State monarchies. Within a year the SNC exploded as it became clear
that it was dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, whose on-the-ground
forces in Syria regularly collaborated with the al-Qaeda offshoot, the
Nusra Front, and related jihadist groups.
This collaboration, together with the poor coordination and fighting
ability of many local Free Syrian Army units, led the CIA to seek out
more “reliable” troops that would fight under its direct control. Over
the past five-plus years the CIA and other U.S. government agencies have
overseen various and re-named reincarnations of the SNC and FSA, all
aimed at publicly presenting these as secular and democratic forces as
opposed to their jihadist and otherwise reactionary and pro-imperialist
nature.
(See Stephen Gowans, “Washington’s Long War on Syria,” Chapter 4, “The
Myth of the Moderate Rebel,” pp. 141-160.)
“Assad must go!”
With Libya’s pulverizing defeat under their belts, via the U.S. and
NATO’s “humanitarian war” in that country, the original imperialist
expectation was that Assad’s army would crumble and his government would
fall in a matter of weeks or months. When this proved illusory, the
now-admitted “covert” operations began in earnest, soon to include an
estimated 50,000 jihadist fighters from 100 countries, but mostly from
the Middle East, supported by untold billions of dollars in U.S., NATO,
and other “coalition” nations’ arms, organized to accomplish in Syria
what U.S. imperialism had facilitated, in one form or another, in
Afghanistan, Egypt, Libya, and Iraq.
Assad’s repression of the protests in March 2011 provided the required
U.S. pretext for his instant demonization and the subsequent demand of
the Obama administration and its spokespersons, Secretaries of State
Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, that “Assad must go.”
General Tony Thomas, head of the military’s Special Operations Command,
provided, according to The New York Times, “the first public
confirmation by an American official that the Trump administration had
ended a secret C.I.A. program to arm Syrian rebels.” Although the
program remains “classified,” when asked if it was aimed at currying
favor with Russia, Thomas responded, “At least from what I know about
that program and the decision to end it, it was absolutely not a sop to
the Russians … it was a “tough, tough decision.” The CIA, upstaged by
Trump, said The Times, “declined to comment.”
In point of fact, yesterday’s “covert” operations in Syria have at least
in part been replaced by the Trump administration’s overt “no fly zone”
war over Syria today. Utilizing their massive air-power superiority in
the region, U.S. fighter jets now routinely attack Syrian government
troops and those of its allies from Iran and Hezbollah from Lebanon
whenever they move to challenge U.S.-backed and still existing “rebel”
positions in areas where the U.S. contemplates a long-term, if not
permanent, presence.
(See “President Trump’s ‘no fly zone’ escalates U.S. war on Syria” by
this writer in the July 2017 issue of Socialist Action.)
Having lost most of the territory that the reactionary U.S.-allied
forces had previously occupied, today’s bipartisan imperialist war
strategy revolves around establishing control over key border areas in
the north as well as in southern Syria for future use, the latter likely
as a future pipeline route across the Middle East to the Mediterranean
Sea. U.S. wars in the region, including in Iraq, buttressed U.S.
corporate control of vast oil and natural gas resources that in time
will require more competitive or advantageous routes than those planned
by Russia.
“To the victor, go the spoils of war!” as President Trump is fond of
proclaiming.
Revelations in The New York Times
That the U.S. was conducting a covert war against Syria was no secret.
Its basic outlines were frequently reported by The New York Times, with
its Middle East Bureau Chief Anne Barnard periodically citing the
details, albeit usually buried deep in her articles that aped the
imperialist line justifying every U.S. war in the region.
Largely based on Barnard’s revelations, the bulleted selections below,
taken from my Jan. 18, 2016, article entitled “U.S. imperialism’s Syria
strategy,” provided an accurate summary of at least some of the key U.S.
“covert” war efforts.
• “U.S. Major General Michael Nagata was unceremoniously removed some
two months ago after his $500 million Syrian assignment to train by the
end of the year a projected 5400 Syrian infantrymen to supposedly fight
ISIS (Islamic State of Syria and Iraq) ‘languished in complications,’
according to U.S. News and World Report. This project ‘ultimately
yielded a force of fewer than 60, most of whom were immediately captured
or voluntarily surrendered their U.S.-provided military equipment to
extremist groups. Nagata’s program, aimed at training 15,000 such
fighters over the next three years, was similarly abandoned.’”
• “The Oct. 9, 2015, New York Times article entitled, ‘Obama
Administration Ends Effort to Train Syrians to Combat ISIS,’ states,
‘Obama’s reversal of policy underscored a harsh reality: tens of
billions of dollars spent in recent years to train security forces
across the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia have rarely
succeeded in transforming local fighters into effective, long-term armies.’”
• “Today, after four and half years of U.S. ‘training of security
forces,’ supposedly to defeat ISIS, some two-thirds of Syria, mostly
thinly-populated areas, is under the control of one or another jihadist
group—either the Al Qaeda-affiliated Al Nusra Front, the Islamic State
(ISIS) itself, or other Islamist groups. Virtually all are directly,
indirectly, or covertly armed and financed by U.S. imperialism, its NATO
allies, the Saudi government (and ‘private’ Saudi billionaires), Qatar,
the United Arab Emirates or other Gulf State monarchies.
“In place of this failed program the Obama administration recently
announced a ‘new program’ where, ‘for the first time the Pentagon is
providing lethal aid directly to Syrian rebels, though the C.I.A. has
for some time been covertly training and arming groups fighting Mr.
Assad’ (emphasis added). (The New York Times, Oct. 9, 2015).”
In the same article, I wrote, “The U.S.-allied Saudis and the Turks
today account for the lion’s share of ISIS’s finances and
weapons—undoubtedly with the full knowledge of the U.S. government. The
reactionary Turkish government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a U.S. NATO
ally, still controls important portions of its southern border with
Syria and utilizes these as central corridors for the entrance of
thousands of international ISIS fighters to Syria to depose the Assad
government.
“In the same manner over 1000 trucks from ISIS-controlled oil fields in
northern Syria serve as the main conduit for ISIS-smuggled oil into Turkey.”
Today, with the covert cat out of the bag, The Times asserts that this
allegedly now defunct CIA program “joins similar failed efforts to
deliver arms and money to groups seeking to overthrow governments that
Washington found noxious, most famously the Kennedy administration’s
disastrous effort to do away with the government of Fidel Castro in Cuba.”
Russia’s “targeting and badly weakening the C.I.A.-backed rebels, who
were the most capable of the opposition fighters [against Assad]” was
seen by The Times as decisive to the Assad government’s winning back
Syrian territory. In this regard the Syrian government’s request for
Russian assistance was wholly within its right to self-determination,
that is, to defend itself against U.S. imperialist intervention, war,
and the organization of a “rebel” army aimed at the removal of the
Syrian government itself.
As it turned out, U.S. aid to these same “rebels” was not enough to
allow them to achieve key U.S. objectives. That is, according to The
Times of July 19, it was “not sufficient to clear the way for their
takeover of major cities or [to] approach the capital, Damascus.” These
issues, along with the now undisputed fact that the vast array of U.S.
arms supplied to these same rebels ended up in the hands of forces that
the U.S. deemed terrorist, essentially convinced Trump, if not his
generals, that a total U.S. victory in Syria was not possible—unless the
U.S. was prepared to engage in yet another land war akin to the present
imperialist catastrophes in Afghanistan and Iraq.
After six years of U.S.-orchestrated war in Syria, at a cost of 500,000
dead and nearly half the population displaced or in exile, U.S.
imperialism continues its effort to dominate a poor nation in order to
advance the corporate interests of the one percent, with Trump’s
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, former chief executive officer of one
of the world’s leading fossil fuel multi-national corporations,
Exxon-Mobile, perhaps being the visible symbol of all that is rotten and
corrupt in the imperialist U.S. body politic.
The demand for the immediate and total withdrawal of all U.S. forces
from Syria and the Middle East must stand at the center of the U.S.
antiwar movement’s efforts today. Self-determination for Syria! U.S. Out
Now!
(Photo) Boys search through rubble of a house in Kafar Dayan, Syria,
reportedly bombed by the U.S.-led coalition in 2014. Sami Ali / AFP /
Getty Images
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August 8, 2017 in Middle East, Trump / U.S. Government.
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