Official Washington’s “Assad must go!” slogan is threatening to destroy hopes for a political settlement of the horrific Syrian conflict and for an end to the chaos cascading from it — finally prompting some U.S. officials to rethink the “group think,” as Gareth Porter reported for Middle East Eye.
By Gareth Porter
In the wake of the ISIS terrorist attack on Paris, President Barack Obama declared that his administration has the right strategy on ISIS and will “see it through.” But the administration is already shifting its policy to cooperate more closely with the Russians on Syria, and an influential former senior intelligence official has suggested that the administration needs to give more weight to the Assad government and army as the main barrier to ISIS and other jihadist forces in Syria.
Obama’s Europeans allies as well as U.S. national security officials have urged the United State to downgrade the official U.S. aim of achieving the departure of President Bashar al-Assad from Syria in the international negotiations begun last month and continued last weekend. Such a shift in policy, however, would make the contradictions between the U.S. interests and those of the Saudis, who continue to support jihadist forces fighting with al-Qaeda’s Syria branch, al-Nusra Front, increasingly clear.
Former CIA deputy director Michael Morell.
Russia had proposed to the United States in September that the United States and Russia share intelligence on ISIS (also known as ISIL, Islamic State and Daesh) and exchange military delegations to coordinate on joint steps against ISIS. The initial Obama administration response was to reject either intelligence sharing or joint planning with Russia on Syria out of hand.
The reasoning was that the Russians were engaged primarily, if not exclusively, to shore up the Assad regime, which was unacceptable to Washington. Secretary of State John Kerry declared on Oct. 1: “What is important is Russia has to not be engaged in any activities against anybody but ISIL. That’s clear. We have made that very clear.”
But that was before Paris. The fallout from that attack has changed the political vectors pushing and…