Monday, January 04, 2016
US
‘Regime Change’ Madness in the Middle East
Bureaucratic self-interest trumped US
military’s conviction that American security is being endangered by Obama’s
policy of regime change
Defence Secretary Ashton Carter (L) and Joint
Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Joseph Dunford Jr. prepares to testify before
the Senate Armed Services Committee about the US military strategy in the
Middle East on 27 October, 2015 in the Dirksen Senate Office Building on
Capitol Hill, Washington, DC. (Photo: AGP)
Seymour Hersh’s recent revelations about an effort by the
US military leadership in 2013 to bolster the Syrian army against jihadist
forces in Syria shed important new light on the internal bureaucratic politics
surrounding regime change in US Middle East policy. Hersh’s account makes it
clear that the Obama administration’s policy of regime change in both Libya and
Syria provoked pushback from the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS).
That account and another report on a similar
episode in 2011 suggest that the US military has a range of means by which it
can oppose administration policies that it regards as unacceptable. But it also
shows that the military leadership failed to alter the course of US policy, and
raises the question whether it was willing to use all the means available to
stop the funnelling of arms to al-Nusra Front and other extremist groups in
Syria.
Hersh details a JCS initiative in the summer
of 2013 to share intelligence on Islamic State and al-Qaeda organisations with
other German, Russian and Israeli militaries, in the belief that the
information would find its way to the Syrian army. Hersh reports that the
military leadership did not inform the White House and the State Department
about the “military to military” intelligence sharing on the jihadist forces in
Syria, reflecting the hardball bureaucratic politics practised within the
national security institutions.
The 2013 initiative approved by the chairman
of the JCS, General Martin Dempsey, was not the first active effort by the US
military to mitigate Obama administration regime change policies. In 2011, the
JCS had been strongly opposed to the effort to depose the Muammar Gaddafi
regime in Libya led by then secretary of state Hillary Clinton.
When the Obama administration began its
effort to overthrow Gaddafi, it did not call publicly for regime change and
instead asserted that it was merely seeking to avert mass killings that
administration officials had suggested might approach genocidal levels. But the
Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), which had been given the lead role in
assessing the situation in Libya, found no evidence to support such fears and concluded that it was based on nothing
more than “speculative arguments”.
The JCS warned that overthrowing the Gaddafi
regime would serve no US security interest, but would instead open the way for
forces aligned with al-Qaeda to take over the country. After the Obama
administration went ahead with a NATO air assault against the Gaddafi regime the
US military sought to head off the destruction of the entire Libyan government.
General Carter Ham, the commander of AFRICOM, the US regional command for
Africa gave the State Department a proposal for a ceasefire to
which Gaddafi had agreed. It would have resulted in Gaddafi’s resignation but
retain the Libyan military’s capacity to hold off jihadist forces and rescind
the sanctions against Gaddafi’s family.
But the State Department refused any negotiation with Gaddafi on
the proposal. Immediately after hearing that Gaddafi had been captured by rebel
forces and killed, Clinton famously joked in a television interview, “We
came, we saw, he died” and laughed.
By then the administration was already
embarked on yet another regime change policy in Syria. Although Clinton led the
public advocacy of the policy, then CIA director David Petraeus, who had taken
over the agency in early September 2011, was a major ally. He immediately began
working on a major covert operation to arm rebel
forces in Syria.
The CIA operation used ostensibly independent
companies in Libya to ship arms from Libyan government warehouses to Syria and
southern Turkey. These were then distributed in consultation with the United
States through networks run by Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. The plan went
into operation within days of Gaddafi’s death on October 20, 2011 just before
NATO officially ended its operation at the end of that month, as the DIA later reported to the JCS.
But the result of the operation was to
accelerate the dominance of al-Qaeda and their Islamist allies. The Turks,
Qataris and Saudis were funnelling arms to al-Qaeda’s Syrian
franchise, al-Nusra Front or other closely related extremist groups. That
should not have surprised the Obama administration. The same thing had happened
in Libya in spring 2011 after the Obama administration had endorsed a Qatari
plan to send arms to Libyan rebels. The White House had quickly learned that the Qataris had sent
the arms to the most extremist elements in the Libyan opposition.
The original Petraeus covert operation ended
with the torching of the US consulate in Benghazi in September 2012 in which
Ambassador Chris Stevens was killed. It was superseded by a new programme
under which Qatar and Saudi Arabia financed the transfer of weapons from other
sources that were supposed to be distributed in cooperation with CIA officials
at a base in southern Turkey. But “thousands of tons of weapons” were still
going to groups fighting alongside the jihadists or who actually joined them as
Vice-President Joe Biden revealed in 2014.
By spring 2013, al-Nusra Front and its
Islamic extremist allies were already in control of wide areas in the north and
in the Damascus suburbs. The Islamic State had separated from al-Nusra Front
and established its own territory south of the Turkish border. The secular
armed opposition had ceased to exist as a significant force. The “Free Syrian
Army”, the nominal command of those forces, was actually a fiction within
Syria, as was reported by specialists on the Syrian conflict.
But despite the absence of a real “moderate opposition”, the Obama
administration continued to support the flood of arms to the forces fighting to
overthrow Assad.
In mid-2013, as Hersh recounts, the DIA
issued an intelligence assessment warning that the administration’s regime
change policy might well result in a repeat of what was already happening in
Libya: chaos and jihadist domination. The JCS also pulled off a clever
manoeuvre to ensure that the jihadists and their allies were getting only
obsolete weapons. A JCS representative convinced the CIA to obtain much cheaper
arms from Turkish stocks controlled by officials sympathetic to the CIA’s
viewpoint on Syria.
But the JCS failed to alter the
administration’s policy of continuing to support the flow of arms into Syria.
Did the military leadership really use all of its leverage to oppose the
policy?
In 2013, some officials on the US
National Security Council staff pushed for a relatively modest form of pressure
on Qatar to get it to back off its continued supply of arms to extremists,
including al-Nusra Front, by pulling out a US fighter squadron from the US air
base at al-Udeid in Qatar. But as the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this year, the Pentagon,
obviously reflecting the JCS position, vetoed the proposal, arguing that the
forward headquarters of the Central Command at the airbase was “vital” to US
operations in the Middle East.
The political implications of the episode are
clear: bureaucratic self-interest trumped the military’s conviction that US
security is being endangered. No matter how strongly the JCS may have felt
about the recklessness of administration policy, they were not prepared to
sacrifice their access to military bases in Qatar, Saudi Arabia or Turkey to
pressure their Middle Eastern allies.
© 2015 Middle East Eye
Gareth Porter is an investigative historian
and journalist on U.S. national security policy who has been independent since
a brief period of university teaching in the 1980s. Dr. Porter is the author of
five books, the latest book, “Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of
the Iran Nuclear Scare,” was published in February 2014. He has
written regularly for Inter Press Service on U.S. policy toward Iraq and Iran
since 2005.
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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