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 US national security officials have urged
the United State to downgrade the official US aim of achieving the departure
of 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 US interests and those of the Saudis, who continue
to support jihadist forces fighting with al-Qaeda’s Syria branch, al-Nusra Front,
increasingly clear.
Russia had proposed to the United States in September that the United States
and Russia share intelligence on ISIS 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 1 October: “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 pulling Obama administration policy. The most obvious shift
came two days after the attacks and just hours after Obama announced new intelligence
arrangements with France. CIA director John Brennan reversed the earlier US
decision to reject intelligence sharing with Russia on Islamic State. Revealing
that he had had several conversations with his Russian counterpart since the
beginning of Russia’s air offensive in Syria, Brennan said
the ISIS threat “demands” an “unprecedented level of cooperation” among
international intelligence services. Brennan said he and his Russian counterpart
had begun exchanging intelligence focused primarily on the flow of terrorists
from Russia into Iraq and Syria but that now US-Russian cooperation needed to
be “enhanced”.