Bill Van Auken<\/p>\n
The offensive of Syrian government forces, backed by Russian air strikes, has cut off the main supply route for Western-backed \u201crebels\u201d and is apparently poised to deal them a decisive blow in Aleppo, Syria\u2019s largest city. This situation is provoking increasingly bitter recriminations within Washington and its vast military and intelligence apparatus over the debacle of the US regime-change operation.<\/p>\n
The anger and mutual finger-pointing going on within the Pentagon and the CIA, as well as on Capitol Hill and in the White House, have found a particularly hysterical expression in a February 8 New York Times<\/em> column by the newspaper\u2019s international affairs columnist Roger Cohen, entitled \u201cAmerica\u2019s Syrian Shame.\u201d<\/p>\n Cohen denounces the Obama administration for pursuing a policy in Syria that amounts to \u201cfecklessness and purposelessness,\u201d together with \u201cfeeble evasions masquerading as strategy\u201d and \u201cawkward acquiescence to Moscow\u2019s end game.\u201d<\/p>\n The Times<\/em> columnist continues: \u201cSyria is now the Obama administration\u2019s shame, a debacle of such dimensions that it may overshadow the president\u2019s domestic achievements.\u201d<\/p>\n The \u201cshame,\u201d according to Cohen, is not that Washington\u2019s instigation of a sectarian civil war, in which it and its regional allies\u2014Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar\u2014financed and armed Al Qaeda-linked Salafist jihadi militias, has plunged Syria into a bloodbath. Rather, his criticism is that US imperialism failed to pursue a sufficiently aggressive policy.<\/p>\n He writes: \u201cThe president and his aides have hidden at various times behind the notions that Syria is marginal to core American national interests; that they have thought through the downsides of intervention better than others; that the diverse actors on the ground are incomprehensible or untrustworthy; that there is no domestic or congressional support for taking action to stop the war or shape its outcome; that there is no legal basis for establishing \u2018safe areas\u2019 or taking out Assad\u2019s air power; that Afghanistan and Iraq are lessons in the futility of projecting American power in the 21st century…\u201d<\/p>\n All of this is anathema to Cohen, who, for at least the last quarter-century, has never met a US war of aggression or imperialist intervention that he did not like, from the dismemberment of Yugoslavia onward. He was a prominent advocate for the US war against Iraq, promoting, along with other Times<\/em> reporters and columnists such as Judith Miller and Thomas Friedman, the lies that the government of Saddam Hussein had \u201cweapons of mass destruction\u201d and ties to Al Qaeda. As late as 2009, with the number of Iraqi lives lost estimated at 1 million and the country devastated, he wrote, \u201cI still believe Iraq\u2019s freedom outweighs its terrible price.\u201d<\/p>\n He likewise promoted the 2011 US-NATO war against Libya as a humanitarian necessity. After the fall of Tripoli, he penned a triumphalist column entitled \u201cScore One for Interventionism.\u201d Nearly five years later, Libya is wracked by war between rival militias, its social infrastructure destroyed and millions of its people forced into exile.<\/p>\n It is worth considering Cohen\u2019s indictment of Obama for his alleged failings. The US president is charged with believing that the \u201cdiverse actors on the ground\u201d in Syria are \u201cincomprehensible or untrustworthy.\u201d In point of fact, the composition of the so-called rebels backed by Washington and its Middle Eastern allies is quite comprehensible. They are dominated by outfits like ISIS and the al-Nusra Front, Al Qaeda\u2019s Syrian affiliate. That this presents certain tactical challenges is hardly a surprise.<\/p>\n He accuses the Obama administration of concern over the lack of any \u201cdomestic or congressional support for taking action.\u201d This exaggerates the administration\u2019s \u201cconcern,\u201d given its launching of the US-NATO war in Libya, the return of US troops to Iraq and the initiation of the regime-change operation in Syria, followed by the dispatch there of Special Forces troops, all in the face of popular hostility and in the absence of any congressional vote. However, widespread opposition to war combined with the UK parliament\u2019s vote against British action in Syria did play a role in the 2013 decision to back away from a bombing campaign.<\/p>\n He goes on to chide the Obama White House for worrying about irrelevancies like the absence of any legal basis for \u201cestablishing \u2018safe areas\u2019 or taking out Assad\u2019s air power.\u201d Why should the United States be concerned with international law now? It did not stop it from illegally invading Iraq.<\/p>\n That creating \u201csafe areas\u201d or \u201ctaking out\u201d Syrian government aircraft would inevitably lead to a clash between the US and Russia, two nuclear-armed powers, is not a concern for Cohen. Indeed, one suspects he would welcome such a development.<\/p>\n Cohen traces the downfall of US policy in Syria to Obama\u2019s 2013 failure to carry through on his threat to treat the use of chemical weapons as a \u201cred line\u201d that would be answered with a US bombing campaign. That the case against the Assad regime fell apart rapidly amid evidence that the chemical attack on suburbs of Damascus had been the work of a \u201crebel\u201d faction seeking to provoke just such an American intervention is of no consequence to Cohen. His charge is that Obama let a perfectly serviceable, albeit false, pretext for direct US intervention go unused.<\/p>\n Cohen\u2019s denunciations of Obama\u2019s policies reach their frenzied high point with the charge that \u201cObama\u2019s Syrian agonizing, his constant what-ifs and recurrent \u2018what then?\u2019 have also lead [sic] to the slaughter in Paris and San Bernardino.\u201d<\/p>\n Really? Bombing Damascus, the imposition of a no-fly zone or the successful toppling of the Assad regime would have dissuaded the attackers in France and California?<\/p>\n The reality is that both of these attacks\u2014like the horrors in Syria itself\u2014are the product not of Washington\u2019s supposed inaction, but of the succession of crimes carried out by US imperialism in the Middle East over the course of decades.<\/p>\n Assad did not send the killers into the streets of Paris or San Bernardino. In France, it was manifestly a case of \u201cblowback\u201d from Western support for the Islamist \u201crebels\u201d in Syria. The facilitation of thousands of youth going there to fight in the Western-backed war for regime-change, some of whom joined ISIS\u2014Washington\u2019s Frankenstein\u2019s monster\u2014and similar organizations, inevitably led to the return of a section of Islamist fighters, bringing the mayhem back with them.<\/p>\n As for the couple who carried out the killings in San Bernardino, by all accounts their supposed radicalization began as a result of traveling to Saudi Arabia, Washington\u2019s closest ally in the Syrian intervention, and developed through contact with al-Nusra, one of the principal fighting forces in the war against the Assad government.<\/p>\n While adopting the tone of an outraged liberal interventionist, concerned for the fate of the Syrians and devastated by Syria having become \u201cthe bloody graveyard of American conviction,\u201d Cohen really speaks for an entirely different constituency. There are few, if any, journalists working in the US media today who function so directly and openly as a mouthpiece for CIA conspiracies, Black Op interventions and US wars of aggression.<\/p>\n In the case of Syria, the operation has gone sour. The CIA was heavily invested in its outcome, literally. According to the Washington Post<\/em>, it allocated fully 10 percent of its budget to support for the Islamist \u201crebels.\u201d<\/p>\n There are powerful factions within the American state who are angry over the lack of any apparent return on this investment. Cohen\u2019s column serves as a warning that the repercussions will be enduring and will undoubtedly find expression in new and far bloodier explosions of US military aggression. Via WSWS<\/a>. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News<\/a> with permission or license.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Bill Van Auken The offensive of Syrian government forces, backed by Russian air strikes, has cut off the main supply route for Western-backed \u201crebels\u201d and is apparently poised to deal them a decisive blow in Aleppo, Syria\u2019s largest city. This situation is provoking increasingly bitter recriminations within Washington and its vast military and intelligence apparatus […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-223061","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223061","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=223061"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223061\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=223061"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=223061"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=223061"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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