AMERICAN
VIEW
Why the Arabs don’t want us in Syria
They
don’t hate ‘our freedoms.’ They hate that we’ve betrayed our
ideals in their own countries — for oil.
By
2/23/16,
8:50 AM CET
Updated 2/24/16,
6:08 AM CET
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.
Mohammed
Mosaddegh, the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran from
1951-1953, pictured left in 1951, the same year he was named TIME
Person of the Year, right. His tenure was cut short by a United
States-led coup in 1953, which installed Shah Reza Pahlavi
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.
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.
Robert
F. Kennedy, Jr. is the president of Waterkeeper Alliance. His newest
book is Thimerosal: Let The Science Speak.
