We're Listening to the Wrong Voices on Syria
We're Listening to the Wrong Voices on Syria
Syrian army soldiers flash the victory sign after government forces capture
five villages in the country's northwest. (SANA via AP)
Once upon a time, Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard traveled to Syria and met with
the strongman President Bashar Assad. She considered her willingness to
engage all sides of the country's bloody civil war to be an important step
toward peace. For this bold action, she was widely pilloried at the time and
considered by some an authoritarian apologist or outright traitor. The claim
was repeated again recently by the ever-so-mainstream California Sen. Kamala
Harris, a fellow Democratic presidential hopeful. The attacks on Gabbard's
Syria record have been quite regular among Washington insiders, who
considered the congresswoman foolish. But was she? More than two years
later, given events in Syria, one must conclude that she certainly was not.
Indeed, Gabbard was right all along.
Recently, Assad's Syrian Arab Army (SAA) has squeezed the anti-regime rebels
in their last major stronghold of Idlib, in the country's northwest. Thus,
the latest phase of Syria's civil war is nearly over. And Assad, along with
his Russian and Iranian backers, have won. Perhaps that's not such a bad
thing. Un-American blasphemy, right? Hardly.
For years, the West and its Gulf State theocratic partners decried the
admittedly brutal Assad and sold their populations the fantasy that there
were "moderate," non-Islamist rebels. The reality is that the rebels were
infused with, and quickly dominated by, various jihadist fighters from the
very start. Yes, Assad is a veritable monster; but what of the Nusra Front
(an al-Qaida franchise) and the even more extreme Islamic State-are they not
equally deplorable, and, frankly, more of a transnational threat to the
U.S.? Of course they are. Assad, at least, posed no serious threat to the
United States (neither did his neighbor, Saddam Hussein, by the way) and
both suppressed Sunni jihadism and protected Syria's plethora of Christian,
Allawi and other minority populations.
Related Articles
Syria Controversy: Don't Believe the Official Narrative
Syria Controversy: Don't Believe the Official Narrative
by Max Blumenthal
Why Are the Media So Eager to Declare Trump's Syria Withdrawal Dead?
Why Are the Media So Eager to Declare Trump's Syria Withdrawal Dead?
by Gareth Porter
Yet, as journalist Max Blumenthal made clear in two illuminating chapters of
his latest book, "The Management of Savagery," the U.S. and its European and
Arab "partners" spent most of the brutal civil war backing the very
Islamists that most threatened America. As such, the Western-Gulf alliance
enabled, even caused, the "Talibanization" of huge swaths of Syria,
especially in the oil-rich east.
It worked like this: The CIA set up shop across the border in Turkey and
Barack Obama authorized $500 million in military aid-including anti-armor
TOW missiles-which ended up in the hands of the Nusra Front and an array of
other Islamist groups. At the peak of the mission, $1 in every $15 the CIA
spent went to the Syria assistance mission. The blowback, so to speak, was
the resurrection of al-Qaida, the empowerment of Islamic State, and the
turning of much of Syria into a jihadi stronghold.
It all bore disturbing similarity to Operation Cyclone, the failed,
9/11-catalyzing, CIA assistance mission to the equally theocratic Afghan
mujahedeen in its battle against the Soviets from 1979 to 1988. In this
tragic counterproductive redux, Turkey stood in as Pakistan, once the way
station for arms and cash to the mujahedeen. The U.S., Western Europe and
the Gulf States performed an encore as the largest backers of rebels, and
all the blowback was essentially the same-if no worse-in the Syria reprise.
This time around, Israel counterintuitively lent a hand to empower the Nusra
Front and even Islamic State. It bombed Syrian targets over the years and
funded some Islamists along its Golan Heights border. Indeed, one
right-wing, Netanyahu-allied scholar published an op-ed titled, "The
Destruction of the Islamic State Is a Mistake." What's more, as a former
Israeli defense minister emphatically stated in 2016, "In Syria, if the
choice is between Iran and the Islamic State, I choose the Islamic State."
This was all patently ridiculous, since Islamic State's ideology poses an
enormous threat to Israel's future, whereas Iran is a boxed-in,
sanctions-riddled, non-nuclear power. Yet it reflects exactly the prevailing
Israeli-and, by extension, American and Gulf State-strategic dogma in the
region.
U.S. policymakers, furthermore, had ample evidence early in the civil war
that the rebels were infused with and rapidly dominated by Islamists. Even
hyperconservative Defense Intelligence Agency head (and later Trump national
security adviser) Michael Flynn reported this, as did the United Nations. It
all pointed to the massive empowerment of Islamists, including Islamic
State.
Gabbard knew this-saw it, even-from the start. Anyone with a willingness to
study recent history should have, though most didn't. She wasn't exactly
alone, of course. Reliably antiwar Dennis Kucinich, a former Ohio
representative, once flippantly, but astutely, asked whether U.S. aid to
rebels and strikes on Assad didn't essentially turn the U.S. into
"al-Qaida's Air Force." More surprisingly, in what was, at the time,
considered one his notorious gaffes, then-Vice President Joe Biden admitted
that "[t]he problem is our allies [the Gulf States and Turkey] . they poured
in [money and weapons] . and the people who were being supplied were
Al-Nusra and Al-Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from
other parts of the world." For this nugget of truth, Uncle Joe was sent on
an "apology tour" around the region.
If Gabbard and Kucinich were right, it's clear who was very, very wrong: the
late and now canonized John McCain. The wildly hawkish Arizona senator
visited rebel groups a number of times. During one visit, he exclaimed,
"Thank God for the Saudis and Prince Bandar and for our Qatari friends."
Bandar, conveniently, was the very same Saudi official who had spearheaded
support for the mujahedeen, and later the Taliban, in Afghanistan. On
another trip, McCain was photographed with a small group of rebel fighters.
It was a nice, touching scene. Problem was, two of the rebels posing beside
him were Islamists previously implicated in the kidnapping of Shiite
pilgrims. McCain never apologized or disavowed his firm support for the
rebels, even after he knew full well that Islamists had gotten their hands
on most of the U.S. aid and arms. And, of course, he was never attacked as
traitorous, the way Gabbard was-and is.
All in all, Gabbard was pilloried precisely because she was uncomfortably
and rationally correct about the rebels and the course of the war in Syria.
Gabbard is no doubt imperfect, but she is remarkably consistent-even when it
is politically unpalatable-in her anti-interventionist stances. In this,
she's all but alone in the bloated Democratic primary field; that's exactly
why she's the most intriguing presidential hopeful. It's also partly why
she's unlikely to last much longer in the race to the top.
An alliance of beltway insiders, interventionist think-tankers, corporate
arms dealers and mainstream Democratic Party stalwarts feel they have to
sink her campaign. It must be stillborn, in fact, because they fear her and
all she stands for. She seemed to know that while Assad, Russian President
Vladimir Putin and Iran's ayatollahs aren't exactly America's friends, they
did, and do, possess goals in common with the U.S. The Assad-backing
coalition also fights terrorists, both native Syrian and transnational.
Furthermore, though the generals and admirals will never admit it, the SAA
and Russian air force acted as a veritable anvil to the U.S. and Kurdish
hammer that rolled back Islamic State in its eastern Syrian stronghold.
To further disturb reflexively liberal friends, Donald Trump-though he did
meaninglessly bomb a Syrian runway, leading CNN journalist Fareed Zakaria to
declare The Donald presidential-seems to also partly recognize the real
score in Syria. Though 2,000 U.S. troops foolishly remain in place in the
country, he hasn't escalated conflict with Russia per se and appears to
understand the common goals between the otherwise implacable opponents.
Nevertheless, the situation on the ground in Syria is dangerous as all hell.
Through its counterproductive policies, Washington ended up with the worst
of all worlds: a costly war with an empowered Islamic State, a hair-trigger
standoff with Russia and Iran along the Euphrates River, and another
perilous military footprint in an unstable Mideast quagmire. Bravo, America!
In a wildly byzantine and absurdly self-defeating redux of the 2003 Iraq War
folly and the 1980s anti-Soviet campaign in Afghanistan, the U.S. again
fueled Islamism in the region before subsequently turning on the
Frankenstein's monster of Sunni jihadism to justify "forever war" anew. In
retrospect, it was almost as if Washington wanted Syria to collapse, for the
war to rage on indefinitely, and for a new, bigger, Islamist boogeyman to
rise like the mythical phoenix (though I loathe how conspiratorial that
sounds).
All told, at present, Islamic State is hardly gone and is again gaining
strength; Russia, Assad and Iran hold all the high cards in the civil war;
U.S. troops remain enmeshed in the East; and the Kurdish question has yet to
be solved (and could even lead to a war with Turkey). Moreover, an entire
people, and a region, are once more shattered.
That, as recent history demonstrates, makes America less safe and has led to
hundreds of thousands of dead brown bodies, for which the U.S. public hardly
cares. Which means Tulsi Gabbard, almost alone, was right from the start.
And that's precisely why America's perpetual warfare state must destroy her.
Maj. Danny Sjursen
Maj. Danny Sjursen is a retired U.S. Army officer and former history
instructor at West Point. He served tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq
and Afghanistan...
Maj. Danny Sjursen