Mother Jones: “Behind the Lines”

Ambassador Ford told me he wishes, in retrospect, that he had advised Obama against calling for Assad to step down. Even though the president had said the United States would not impose regime change on Syria, the nuance in what Obama said…was totally lost. It wasn’t just opposition activists like Ahmed who were banking on US intervention. Many in the budding armed opposition were certain they would soon receive support from the Americans. Ford insisted to them this would never happen, but they just wouldn’t believe it, he recalled. Obama’s statement in the long run didn’t help anything. It probably made it worse.

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The CIA and the State Department had wanted to arm the rebels for a while. The idea was first proposed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, and CIA Director David Petraeus in the summer of 2012. Obama had refused, but he let the CIA provide logistical support to other countries’ efforts to arm the rebels. It was a clusterfuck, says a CIA field operative who was on the Syria task force at the time. (He asked that I not use his name.) Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar had their own programs to support the rebels. Everyone was providing their own funding, supporting whoever they wanted. In 2012, the CIA operative provided training to Syrian rebels and worked with regional intelligence agencies to organize the flow of arms. I said, Guys, we need a plan. We need to coordinate. Nobody wanted to take any orders from me. Without telling the Americans, the Qataris would just go and drop a ton of guns to a group we didn’t know. You don’t think these guys are stockpiling? I’m thinking about Iraq, where we just blew things up and didn’t think about what was next.

Shane Bauer

Wonderful investigative journalism about the long civil war in Syria and the toxic role played by the United States. President Obama was criticized on several occasions about his lack of decisiveness in Syria, and unfortunately the results speak for themselves. In retrospect, one aspect I think the article completely missed is the role of Iran in this conflict; other sources make it clear that General Suleimani was heavily involved to protect Iran’s strategic interests in Syria.

According to a Defense Department audit uncovered by Amnesty International in 2017, the United States has lost track of more than $1 billion in weapons sent to fight ISIS in Iraq. Sending millions of dollars’ worth of arms into a black hole and hoping for the best is not a viable counterterrorism strategy, said Patrick Wilcken, Amnesty’s arms control and human rights researcher. It is just reckless.

Officially, the weapons that the Pentagon has provided to the Syrian Democratic Forces and Kurdish militias in northern Syria are on loan. Yet human rights advocates worry what will happen to this gear when American troops withdraw from Syria. If recent history is any indication, arms purchased by US taxpayers will play a role in the region long after our forces come home.

Dan Spinelli

Damascus, Syria Christian Werner

And it continues with a Part II:

In 2005, journalists uncovered the United States’ deployment of white phosphorus in Fallujah during the Iraq War, our military’s first reported use of the substance since Vietnam. While white phosphorus is considered a conventional weapon when used in accordance with the incendiary weapons protocol, some said the US military had essentially used it as a chemical weapon in Iraq. (When Saddam Hussein was thought to have used white phosphorus against Iraqi Kurdish civilians in 1991, a classified Defense Department document described it as a “chemical weapon.”)

The United States did not ratify the incendiary weapons protocol until 2009, and even then it reserved the right to use white phosphorus against human targets when it’s determined that it would cause fewer casualties than another weapon. The government also specified that any commander who decides to use white phosphorus shall not be judged on the basis of information that comes to light after the action under review was taken. The coalition would not confirm to me whether it used white phosphorous in Syria.

Shane Bauer