It seems that the top brass in the US military have had some… disagreements… with the Obama administration’s handling of the Syrian crisis.
World-renowned journalist Seymour Hersh has provided evidence of this disconnect, which stemmed from the administration’s strange insistence that there are “moderate” rebels on the ground… and the policy of sending all manner of arms to them.
(Notably, the Free Syrian Army was supposed to be one of the most “moderate” of the groups- it had recently “moderately” used a US-supplied TOW missile to bring down a Russian rescue helicopter)
The Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, it seems, do not believe that there are true moderates on the ground; despite the administration’s constant illogical refrain that “Assad must go before ISIS” (because removing ISIS’s primary obstacle to unobstructed rule somehow results in its end), they have stepped in to provide intelligence on ISIS to the Syrian government through numerous intermediary governments.
An unnamed former senior adviser to the Joint Chiefs of Staff told Hersh that “Our policy of arming the opposition to Assad was unsuccessful and actually having a negative impact”.
“The Joint Chiefs believed that Assad should not be replaced by fundamentalists. The administration’s policy was contradictory. They wanted Assad to go but the opposition was dominated by extremists. So who was going to replace him? To say Assad’s got to go is fine, but if you follow that through – therefore anyone is better. It’s the “anybody else is better” issue that the JCS had with Obama’s policy,” the unnamed JCS advisor said to Hersh.
The London Review of Books published a report by Hersh, which states:
“The Joint Chiefs felt that a direct challenge to Obama’s policy would have ‘had a zero chance of success’. So in the autumn of 2013 they decided to take steps against the extremists without going through political channels, by providing US intelligence to the militaries of other nations, on the understanding that it would be passed on to the Syrian army and used against the common enemy, Jabhat al-Nusra”
A classified Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report found that Assad’s elimination would only result in a power vacuum that would be filled by Islamic extremists like ISIS. The military decided that action was necessary, in response to that report.
According to Hersh:
“A former senior adviser to the Joint Chiefs told me that the document was an ‘all-source’ appraisal, drawing on information from signals, satellite and human intelligence, and took a dim view of the Obama administration’s insistence on continuing to finance and arm the so-called moderate rebel groups. By then, the CIA had been conspiring for more than a year with allies in the UK, Saudi Arabia and Qatar to ship guns and goods – to be used for the overthrow of Assad – from Libya, via Turkey, into Syria. The new intelligence estimate singled out Turkey as a major impediment to Obama’s Syria policy. The document showed, the adviser said, ‘that what was started as a covert US programme to arm and support the moderate rebels fighting Assad had been co-opted by Turkey, and had morphed into an across-the-board technical, arms and logistical programme for all of the opposition, including Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State. The so-called moderates had evaporated and the Free Syrian Army was a rump group stationed at an airbase in Turkey.’ The assessment was bleak: there was no viable ‘moderate’ opposition to Assad, and the US was arming extremists.
Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, director of the DIA between 2012 and 2014, confirmed that his agency had sent a constant stream of classified warnings to the civilian leadership about the dire consequences of toppling Assad. The jihadists, he said, were in control of the opposition. Turkey wasn’t doing enough to stop the smuggling of foreign fighters and weapons across the border. ‘If the American public saw the intelligence we were producing daily, at the most sensitive level, they would go ballistic,’ Flynn told me. ‘We understood Isis’s long-term strategy and its campaign plans, and we also discussed the fact that Turkey was looking the other way when it came to the growth of the Islamic State inside Syria.’ The DIA’s reporting, he said, ‘got enormous pushback’ from the Obama administration. ‘I felt that they did not want to hear the truth.’”
In essence, the US military realistically assessed the situation and realized that Assad’s fall would only further destabilize the region. This is because there aren’t any “moderate” rebels; the US was only “accidentally” arming extremists.
In “response” to an ISIS takeover of Syria, military men and women might be sent to die for “freedom and democracy” again. While the Joint Chiefs of Staff could not openly oppose the Obama administration’s (and the CIA’s) actions, they fed Assad intel on ISIS that would keep him a step ahead- and hopefully US boots off the ground.
Sources: The Free Thought Project, BBC
This Article (While CIA Sent ISIS Weapons, US Military Gave Intel To Assad) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to the author(CoNN) and AnonHQ.com.
