When I first heard that Gen. Michael Flynn, former head of the Defense Intelligence
Agency (DIA) under President Obama, was rumored
to be on Donald Trump’s short list for the GOP vice presidential nomination,
my ears pricked up. I wrote about Flynn here,
and Antiwar.com has covered
the controversy
surrounding
the 2012
DIA report that warned
the Obama administration that its policy of regime change in Syria would lead
to the rise of a Sunni Islamic “caliphate” in Syria – a warning that fell on
deaf ears.
Flynn was forced out of his job as DIA director because, he says, his views
“did not fit the narrative.” But what narrative is he talking about? In order
to understand this intramural fight within the highest levels of the intelligence
and military communities, we have to go back to the Bush administration, and
the Iraq war.
As the US was fighting a losing battle against Iraqi insurgents, Gen. David
Petraeus arose to show us the way forward, and the myth of the successful “surge”
was born. The Petraeus strategy was to recruit Sunni tribesmen in the Iraqi
hinterlands bordering Syria to fight al-Qaeda, to win their “hearts and minds.”
In reality, this meant putting them on the American payroll: we’ll never know
how many millions of taxpayer dollars went to financing this effort, but no
doubt it was a considerable sum.
As the tribes took on al-Qaeda, the “surge” was declared a success – but the
blowback wasn’t long in coming. These same tribes soon turned against the central
government in Baghdad, and their American protectors, while the remnants of
al-Qaeda in Iraq migrated across the border to Syria, where they became the
core of what morphed into ISIS. Those Sunni “hearts and minds” were now pledging
allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the “caliph” of the Islamic State.
The Petraeus strategy was the logical extension of the Bush administration’s
“Sunni turn,” which Seymour Hersh writes about here:
“To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration
has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In
Lebanon, the Administration has cooperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which
is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the
Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in
clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these
activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a
militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.”
Having finished off Iraq, the neocons in the Bush administration were setting
their sights on Iran. In league with Prince Bandar, then head of Saudi intelligence
– and a close friend of the Bushes and Vice…