Exclusive: President Obama’s “regime change” policy in Syria has rested on a hopeful fantasy about the existence of a “moderate” rebel force and a willful blindness toward the jihadists who actually stand to gain power — a dangerous mix of make-believe and denial — as Ted Snider explains.
By Ted Snider
Attempts at “regime change” always involve three parties: the foreign government that desires to carry out the regime change, the regime that is targeted for changing, and the domestic group meant to replace the current regime or at least facilitate the coup. But regime change is a complex and messy business with the history of attempted American coups littered with disasters that resulted from a favored third party that was as nefarious than the regime it replaced — if not more so.
In that way, America’s initial reaction to the attempts by the Islamic State to topple the regimes in Iraq and Syria was bizarre and unexpected. As first “Al-Qaeda in Iraq” and then as “the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria” (or ISIS), the Islamic State was the very kind of force that the “war on terror” was supposed to eliminate from the region. However, initially as ISIS cut its own state out of the Levant (and especially Syria), America was largely silent.
In ISIS: the State of Terror, terrorism experts Jessica Stern and J.M. Berger say “the Obama administration gave the problem short shrift” and “dismissed concerns about [ISIS] and other jihadists fighting in . . . Syria.” The authors cite a 2014 interview in which President Barack Obama compared ISIS to a junior varsity team masquerading as major league. His administration seemed not to be noticing the ISIS threat and appeared “caught off guard” by its success and viciousness.
Journalist James Foley shortly before he was executed by an Islamic State operative.
Such a failure of intelligence would be bizarre enough. But it was not an intelligence failure; it was policy. What was truly strange was not that the Obama administration hadn’t noticed but that it had. U.S. intelligence had informed the policymakers about ISIS, and the policymakers chose silence.
So, why would the Obama…