AMERICAN VIEW /
By ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR
Why
the Arabs don’t want us in Syria
They
don’t hate ‘our freedoms.’ They hate that we’ve betrayed our
ideals in their own countries — for oil.
By ROBERT F.
KENNEDY, JR 2/23/16, 8:50 AM CET Updated 2/24/16, 6:08 AM CET
In part because my
father was murdered by an Arab, I’ve made an effort to understand
the impact of U.S. policy in the Mideast and particularly the factors
that sometimes motivate bloodthirsty responses from the Islamic world
against our country. As we focus on the rise of the Islamic State and
search for the source of the savagery that took so many innocent
lives in Paris and San Bernardino, we might want to look beyond the
convenient explanations of religion and ideology. Instead we should
examine the more complex rationales of history and oil — and how
they often point the finger of blame back at our own shores.
America’s unsavory
record of violent interventions in Syria — little-known to the
American people yet well-known to Syrians — sowed fertile ground
for the violent Islamic jihadism that now complicates any effective
response by our government to address the challenge of ISIL. So long
as the American public and policymakers are unaware of this past,
further interventions are likely only to compound the crisis.
Secretary of State John Kerry this week announced a “provisional”
ceasefire in Syria. But since U.S. leverage and prestige within Syria
is minimal — and the ceasefire doesn’t include key combatants
such as Islamic State and al Nusra — it’s bound to be a shaky
truce at best. Similarly President Obama’s stepped-up military
intervention in Libya — U.S. airstrikes targeted an Islamic State
training camp last week — is likely to strengthen rather than
weaken the radicals. As the New York Times reported in a December 8,
2015, front-page story, Islamic State political leaders and strategic
planners are working to provoke an American military intervention.
They know from experience this will flood their ranks with volunteer
fighters, drown the voices of moderation and unify the Islamic world
against America.
To understand this
dynamic, we need to look at history from the Syrians’ perspective
and particularly the seeds of the current conflict. Long before our
2003 occupation of Iraq triggered the Sunni uprising that has now
morphed into the Islamic State, the CIA had nurtured violent jihadism
as a Cold War weapon and freighted U.S./Syrian relationships with
toxic baggage.
This did not happen
without controversy at home. In July 1957, following a failed coup in
Syria by the CIA, my uncle, Sen. John F. Kennedy, infuriated the
Eisenhower White House, the leaders of both political parties and our
European allies with a milestone speech endorsing the right of
self-governance in the Arab world and an end to America’s
imperialist meddling in Arab countries. Throughout my lifetime, and
particularly during my frequent travels to the Mideast, countless
Arabs have fondly recalled that speech to me as the clearest
statement of the idealism they expected from the U.S. Kennedy’s
speech was a call for recommitting America to the high values our
country had championed in the Atlantic Charter; the formal pledge
that all the former European colonies would have the right to
self-determination following World War II. Franklin D. Roosevelt had
strong-armed Winston Churchill and the other allied leaders to sign
the Atlantic Charter in 1941 as a precondition for U.S. support in
the European war against fascism.
US Secretary of
Defense Robert Kennedy gives a speech on September 2, 1964
U.S. Secretary of
Defense Robert Kennedy gives a speech on September 2, 1964
But thanks in large
part to Allen Dulles and the CIA, whose foreign policy intrigues were
often directly at odds with the stated policies of our nation, the
idealistic path outlined in the Atlantic Charter was the road not
taken. In 1957, my grandfather, Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy, sat on
a secret committee charged with investigating the CIA’s clandestine
mischief in the Mideast. The so called “Bruce-Lovett Report,” to
which he was a signatory, described CIA coup plots in Jordan, Syria,
Iran, Iraq and Egypt, all common knowledge on the Arab street, but
virtually unknown to the American people who believed, at face value,
their government’s denials. The report blamed the CIA for the
rampant anti-Americanism that was then mysteriously taking root “in
the many countries in the world today.” The Bruce-Lovett Report
pointed out that such interventions were antithetical to American
values and had compromised America’s international leadership and
moral authority without the knowledge of the American people. The
report also said that the CIA never considered how we would treat
such interventions if some foreign government were to engineer them
in our country.
This is the bloody
history that modern interventionists like George W. Bush, Ted Cruz
and Marco Rubio miss when they recite their narcissistic trope that
Mideast nationalists “hate us for our freedoms.” For the most
part they don’t; instead they hate us for the way we betrayed those
freedoms — our own ideals — within their borders.
* * *
For Americans to
really understand what’s going on, it’s important to review some
details about this sordid but little-remembered history. During the
1950s, President Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers — CIA Director
Allen Dulles and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles — rebuffed
Soviet treaty proposals to leave the Middle East a neutral zone in
the Cold War and let Arabs rule Arabia. Instead, they mounted a
clandestine war against Arab nationalism — which Allen Dulles
equated with communism — particularly when Arab self-rule
threatened oil concessions. They pumped secret American military aid
to tyrants in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon favoring puppets
with conservative Jihadist ideologies that they regarded as a
reliable antidote to Soviet Marxism. At a White House meeting between
the CIA’s director of plans, Frank Wisner, and John Foster Dulles,
in September 1957, Eisenhower advised the agency, “We should do
everything possible to stress the ‘holy war’ aspect,” according
to a memo recorded by his staff secretary, Gen. Andrew J. Goodpaster.
The CIA began its
active meddling in Syria in 1949 — barely a year after the agency’s
creation. Syrian patriots had declared war on the Nazis, expelled
their Vichy French colonial rulers and crafted a fragile secularist
democracy based on the American model. But in March 1949, Syria’s
democratically elected president, Shukri-al-Quwatli, hesitated to
approve the Trans-Arabian Pipeline, an American project intended to
connect the oil fields of Saudi Arabia to the ports of Lebanon via
Syria. In his book, Legacy of Ashes, CIA historian Tim Weiner
recounts that in retaliation for Al-Quwatli’s lack of enthusiasm
for the U.S. pipeline, the CIA engineered a coup replacing al-Quwatli
with the CIA’s handpicked dictator, a convicted swindler named
Husni al-Za’im. Al-Za’im barely had time to dissolve parliament
and approve the American pipeline before his countrymen deposed him,
four and a half months into his regime.
Following several
counter-coups in the newly destabilized country, the Syrian people
again tried democracy in 1955, re-electing al-Quwatli and his
National Party. Al-Quwatli was still a Cold War neutralist, but,
stung by American involvement in his ouster, he now leaned toward the
Soviet camp. That posture caused CIA Director Dulles to declare that
“Syria is ripe for a coup” and send his two coup wizards, Kim
Roosevelt and Rocky Stone, to Damascus.
Two years earlier,
Roosevelt and Stone had orchestrated a coup in Iran against the
democratically elected President Mohammed Mosaddegh, after Mosaddegh
tried to renegotiate the terms of Iran’s lopsided contracts with
the British oil giant Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now BP). Mosaddegh
was the first elected leader in Iran’s 4,000-year history and a
popular champion for democracy across the developing world. Mosaddegh
expelled all British diplomats after uncovering a coup attempt by
U.K. intelligence officers working in cahoots with BP. Mosaddegh,
however, made the fatal mistake of resisting his advisers’ pleas to
also expel the CIA, which, they correctly suspected, was complicit in
the British plot. Mosaddegh idealized the U.S. as a role model for
Iran’s new democracy and incapable of such perfidies. Despite
Dulles’ needling, President Harry Truman had forbidden the CIA from
actively joining the British caper to topple Mosaddegh. When
Eisenhower took office in January 1953, he immediately unleashed
Dulles. After ousting Mosaddegh in “Operation Ajax,” Stone and
Roosevelt installed Shah Reza Pahlavi, who favored U.S. oil companies
but whose two decades of CIA sponsored savagery toward his own people
from the Peacock throne would finally ignite the 1979 Islamic
revolution that has bedeviled our foreign policy for 35 years.
Mohammed Mosaddegh,
the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran from 1951-1953,
pictured left in 1951, the same year he was named TIME Person of the
Year, right. His tenure was cut short by a United States-led coup in
1953, which installed Shah Reza Pahlavi
Mohammed Mosaddegh,
the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran from 1951-1953,
pictured left in 1951, the same year he was named TIME Person of the
Year, right. His tenure was cut short by a United States-led coup in
1953, which installed Shah Reza Pahlavi
Flush from his
Operation Ajax “success” in Iran, Stone arrived in Damascus in
April 1957 with $3 million to arm and incite Islamic militants and to
bribe Syrian military officers and politicians to overthrow
al-Quwatli’s democratically elected secularist regime, according to
Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA, by John Prados.
Working with the Muslim Brotherhood and millions of dollars, Rocky
Stone schemed to assassinate Syria’s chief of intelligence, the
chief of its General Staff and the chief of the Communist Party, and
to engineer “national conspiracies and various strong arm”
provocations in Iraq, Lebanon and Jordan that could be blamed on the
Syrian Ba’athists. Tim Weiner describes in Legacy of Ashes how the
CIA’s plan was to destabilize the Syrian government and create a
pretext for an invasion by Iraq and Jordan, whose governments were
already under CIA control. Kim Roosevelt forecast that the CIA’s
newly installed puppet government would “rely first upon repressive
measures and arbitrary exercise of power,” according to
declassified CIA documents reported in The Guardian newspaper.
But all that CIA
money failed to corrupt the Syrian military officers. The soldiers
reported the CIA’s bribery attempts to the Ba’athist regime. In
response, the Syrian army invaded the American Embassy, taking Stone
prisoner. After harsh interrogation, Stone made a televised
confession of his roles in the Iranian coup and the CIA’s aborted
attempt to overthrow Syria’s legitimate government. The Syrians
ejected Stone and two U.S. Embassy staffers—the first time any
American State Department diplomat was barred from an Arab country.
The Eisenhower White House hollowly dismissed Stone’s confession as
“fabrications” and “slanders,” a denial swallowed whole by
the American press, led by the New York Times and believed by the
American people, who shared Mosaddegh’s idealistic view of their
government. Syria purged all politicians sympathetic to the U.S. and
executed for treason all military officers associated with the coup.
In retaliation, the U.S. moved the Sixth Fleet to the Mediterranean,
threatened war and goaded Turkey to invade Syria. The Turks assembled
50,000 troops on Syria’s borders and backed down only in the face
of unified opposition from the Arab League whose leaders were furious
at the U.S. intervention. Even after its expulsion, the CIA continued
its secret efforts to topple Syria’s democratically elected
Ba’athist government. The CIA plotted with Britain’s MI6 to form
a “Free Syria Committee” and armed the Muslim Brotherhood to
assassinate three Syrian government officials, who had helped expose
“the American plot,” according to Matthew Jones in “The
‘Preferred Plan’: The Anglo-American Working Group Report on
Covert Action in Syria, 1957.” The CIA’s mischief pushed Syria
even further away from the U.S. and into prolonged alliances with
Russia and Egypt.
Following the second
Syrian coup attempt, anti-American riots rocked the Mideast from
Lebanon to Algeria. Among the reverberations was the July 14, 1958
coup, led by the new wave of anti-American Army officers who
overthrew Iraq’s pro-American monarch, Nuri al-Said. The coup
leaders published secret government documents, exposing Nuri al-Said
as a highly paid CIA puppet. In response to American treachery, the
new Iraqi government invited Soviet diplomats and economic advisers
to Iraq and turned its back on the West.
Having alienated
Iraq and Syria, Kim Roosevelt fled the Mideast to work as an
executive for the oil industry that he had served so well during his
public service career at the CIA. Roosevelt’s replacement as CIA
station chief, James Critchfield, attempted a failed assassination
plot against the new Iraqi president using a toxic handkerchief,
according to Weiner. Five years later, the CIA finally succeeded in
deposing the Iraqi president and installing the Ba’ath Party in
power in Iraq. A charismatic young murderer named Saddam Hussein was
one of the distinguished leaders of the CIA’s Ba’athist team. The
Ba’ath Party’s Secretary, Ali Saleh Sa’adi, who took office
alongside Saddam Hussein, would later say, “We came to power on a
CIA train,” according to A Brutal Friendship: The West and the Arab
Elite, by Said Aburish, a journalist and author. Aburish recounted
that the CIA supplied Saddam and his cronies a murder list of people
who “had to be eliminated immediately in order to ensure success.”
Tim Weiner writes that Critchfield later acknowledged that the CIA
had, in essence, “created Saddam Hussein.” During the Reagan
years, the CIA supplied Hussein with billions of dollars in training,
Special Forces support, weapons and battlefield intelligence, knowing
that he was using poisonous mustard and nerve gas and biological
weapons — including anthrax obtained from the U.S. government —
in his war against Iran. Reagan and his CIA director, Bill Casey,
regarded Saddam as a potential friend to the U.S. oil industry and a
sturdy barrier against the spread of Iran’s Islamic Revolution.
Their emissary, Donald Rumsfeld, presented Saddam with golden cowboy
spurs and a menu of chemical/biological and conventional weapons on a
1983 trip to Baghdad. At the same time, the CIA was illegally
supplying Saddam’s enemy, Iran, with thousands of anti-tank and
anti-aircraft missiles to fight Iraq, a crime made famous during the
Iran-Contra scandal. Jihadists from both sides later turned many of
those CIA-supplied weapons against the American people.
Even as America
contemplates yet another violent Mideast intervention, most Americans
are unaware of the many ways that “blowback” from previous CIA
blunders has helped craft the current crisis. The reverberations from
decades of CIA shenanigans continue to echo across the Mideast today
in national capitals and from mosques to madras schools over the
wrecked landscape of democracy and moderate Islam that the CIA helped
obliterate.
A parade of Iranian
and Syrian dictators, including Bashar al-Assad and his father, have
invoked the history of the CIA’s bloody coups as a pretext for
their authoritarian rule, repressive tactics and their need for a
strong Russian alliance. These stories are therefore well known to
the people of Syria and Iran who naturally interpret talk of U.S.
intervention in the context of that history.
While the compliant
American press parrots the narrative that our military support for
the Syrian insurgency is purely humanitarian, many Arabs see the
present crisis as just another proxy war over pipelines and
geopolitics. Before rushing deeper into the conflagration, it would
be wise for us to consider the abundant facts supporting that
perspective.
In their view, our
war against Bashar Assad did not begin with the peaceful civil
protests of the Arab Spring in 2011. Instead it began in 2000, when
Qatar proposed to construct a $10 billion, 1,500 kilometer pipeline
through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Turkey. Qatar shares with
Iran the South Pars/North Dome gas field, the world’s richest
natural gas repository. The international trade embargo until
recently prohibited Iran from selling gas abroad. Meanwhile, Qatar’s
gas can reach European markets only if it is liquefied and shipped by
sea, a route that restricts volume and dramatically raises costs. The
proposed pipeline would have linked Qatar directly to European energy
markets via distribution terminals in Turkey, which would pocket rich
transit fees. The Qatar/Turkey pipeline would give the Sunni kingdoms
of the Persian Gulf decisive domination of world natural gas markets
and strengthen Qatar, America’s closest ally in the Arab world.
Qatar hosts two massive American military bases and the U.S. Central
Command’s Mideast headquarters.
The EU, which gets
30 percent of its gas from Russia, was equally hungry for the
pipeline, which would have given its members cheap energy and relief
from Vladimir Putin’s stifling economic and political leverage.
Turkey, Russia’s second largest gas customer, was particularly
anxious to end its reliance on its ancient rival and to position
itself as the lucrative transect hub for Asian fuels to EU markets.
The Qatari pipeline would have benefited Saudi Arabia’s
conservative Sunni monarchy by giving it a foothold in Shia-dominated
Syria. The Saudis’ geopolitical goal is to contain the economic and
political power of the kingdom’s principal rival, Iran, a Shiite
state, and close ally of Bashar Assad. The Saudi monarchy viewed the
U.S.-sponsored Shiite takeover in Iraq (and, more recently, the
termination of the Iran trade embargo) as a demotion to its regional
power status and was already engaged in a proxy war against Tehran in
Yemen, highlighted by the Saudi genocide against the Iranian backed
Houthi tribe.
Of course, the
Russians, who sell 70 percent of their gas exports to Europe, viewed
the Qatar/Turkey pipeline as an existential threat. In Putin’s
view, the Qatar pipeline is a NATO plot to change the status quo,
deprive Russia of its only foothold in the Middle East, strangle the
Russian economy and end Russian leverage in the European energy
market. In 2009, Assad announced that he would refuse to sign the
agreement to allow the pipeline to run through Syria “to protect
the interests of our Russian ally.”
Assad further
enraged the Gulf’s Sunni monarchs by endorsing a Russian-approved
“Islamic pipeline” running from Iran’s side of the gas field
through Syria and to the ports of Lebanon. The Islamic pipeline would
make Shiite Iran, not Sunni Qatar, the principal supplier to the
European energy market and dramatically increase Tehran’s influence
in the Middke East and the world. Israel also was understandably
determined to derail the Islamic pipeline, which would enrich Iran
and Syria and presumably strengthen their proxies, Hezbollah and
Hamas.
Secret cables and
reports by the U.S., Saudi and Israeli intelligence agencies indicate
that the moment Assad rejected the Qatari pipeline, military and
intelligence planners quickly arrived at the consensus that fomenting
a Sunni uprising in Syria to overthrow the uncooperative Bashar Assad
was a feasible path to achieving the shared objective of completing
the Qatar/Turkey gas link. In 2009, according to WikiLeaks, soon
after Bashar Assad rejected the Qatar pipeline, the CIA began funding
opposition groups in Syria. It is important to note that this was
well before the Arab Spring-engendered uprising against Assad.
Bashar Assad’s
family is Alawite, a Muslim sect widely perceived as aligned with the
Shiite camp. “Bashar Assad was never supposed to be president,”
journalist Seymour Hersh told me in an interview. “His father
brought him back from medical school in London when his elder
brother, the heir apparent, was killed in a car crash.” Before the
war started, according to Hersh, Assad was moving to liberalize the
country. “They had internet and newspapers and ATM machines and
Assad wanted to move toward the west. After 9/11, he gave thousands
of invaluable files to the CIA on jihadist radicals, who he
considered a mutual enemy.” Assad’s regime was deliberately
secular and Syria was impressively diverse. The Syrian government and
military, for example, were 80 percent Sunni. Assad maintained peace
among his diverse peoples by a strong, disciplined army loyal to the
Assad family, an allegiance secured by a nationally esteemed and
highly paid officer corps, a coldly efficient intelligence apparatus
and a penchant for brutality that, prior to the war, was rather
moderate compared to those of other Mideast leaders, including our
current allies. According to Hersh, “He certainly wasn’t
beheading people every Wednesday like the Saudis do in Mecca.”
Another veteran
journalist, Bob Parry, echoes that assessment. “No one in the
region has clean hands, but in the realms of torture, mass killings,
[suppressing] civil liberties and supporting terrorism, Assad is much
better than the Saudis.” No one believed that the regime was
vulnerable to the anarchy that had riven Egypt, Libya, Yemen and
Tunisia. By the spring of 2011, there were small, peaceful
demonstrations in Damascus against repression by Assad’s regime.
These were mainly the effluvia of the Arab Spring that spread virally
across the Arab League States the previous summer. However, WikiLeaks
cables indicate that the CIA was already on the ground in Syria.
But the Sunni
kingdoms with vast petrodollars at stake wanted a much deeper
involvement from America. On September 4, 2013, Secretary of State
John Kerry told a congressional hearing that the Sunni kingdoms had
offered to foot the bill for a U.S. invasion of Syria to oust Bashar
Assad. “In fact, some of them have said that if the United States
is prepared to go do the whole thing, the way we’ve done it
previously in other places [Iraq], they’ll carry the cost.” Kerry
reiterated the offer to Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.): “With
respect to Arab countries offering to bear the costs of [an American
invasion] to topple Assad, the answer is profoundly yes, they have.
The offer is on the table.”
Despite pressure
from Republicans, Barack Obama balked at hiring out young Americans
to die as mercenaries for a pipeline conglomerate. Obama wisely
ignored Republican clamoring to put ground troops in Syria or to
funnel more funding to “moderate insurgents.” But by late 2011,
Republican pressure and our Sunni allies had pushed the American
government into the fray.
In 2011, the U.S.
joined France, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the UK to form the
Friends of Syria Coalition, which formally demanded the removal of
Assad. The CIA provided $6 million to Barada, a British TV channel,
to produce pieces entreating Assad’s ouster. Saudi intelligence
documents, published by WikiLeaks, show that by 2012, Turkey, Qatar
and Saudi Arabia were arming, training and funding radical jihadist
Sunni fighters from Syria, Iraq and elsewhere to overthrow the
Assad’s Shiite-allied regime. Qatar, which had the most to gain,
invested $3 billion in building the insurgency and invited the
Pentagon to train insurgents at U.S. bases in Qatar. According to an
April 2014 article by Seymour Hersh, the CIA weapons ratlines were
financed by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
The idea of
fomenting a Sunni-Shiite civil war to weaken the Syrian and Iranian
regimes in order to maintain control of the region’s petrochemical
supplies was not a novel notion in the Pentagon’s lexicon. A
damning 2008 Pentagon-funded Rand report proposed a precise blueprint
for what was about to happen. That report observes that control of
the Persian Gulf oil and gas deposits will remain, for the U.S., “a
strategic priority” that “will interact strongly with that of
prosecuting the long war.” Rand recommended using “covert action,
information operations, unconventional warfare” to enforce a
“divide and rule” strategy. “The United States and its local
allies could use the nationalist jihadists to launch a proxy
campaign” and “U.S. leaders could also choose to capitalize on
the sustained Shia-Sunni conflict trajectory by taking the side of
the conservative Sunni regimes against Shiite empowerment movements
in the Muslim world … possibly supporting authoritative Sunni
governments against a continuingly hostile Iran.”
As predicted,
Assad’s overreaction to the foreign-made crisis — dropping barrel
bombs onto Sunni strongholds and killing civilians — polarized
Syria’s Shiite/Sunni divide and allowed U.S. policymakers to sell
Americans the idea that the pipeline struggle was a humanitarian war.
When Sunni soldiers of the Syrian Army began defecting in 2013, the
western coalition armed the Free Syrian Army to further destabilize
Syria. The press portrait of the Free Syrian Army as cohesive
battalions of Syrian moderates was delusional. The dissolved units
regrouped in hundreds of independent militias most of which were
commanded by, or allied with, jihadi militants who were the most
committed and effective fighters. By then, the Sunni armies of Al
Qaeda in Iraq were crossing the border from Iraq into Syria and
joining forces with the squadrons of deserters from the Free Syrian
Army, many of them trained and armed by the U.S.
Despite the
prevailing media portrait of a moderate Arab uprising against the
tyrant Assad, U.S. intelligence planners knew from the outset that
their pipeline proxies were radical jihadists who would probably
carve themselves a brand new Islamic caliphate from the Sunni regions
of Syria and Iraq. Two years before ISIL throat cutters stepped on
the world stage, a seven-page August 12, 2012, study by the U.S.
Defense Intelligence Agency, obtained by the right-wing group
Judicial Watch, warned that thanks to the ongoing support by
U.S./Sunni Coalition for radical Sunni Jihadists, “the Salafist,
the Muslim Brotherhood and AQI (now ISIS), are the major forces
driving the insurgency in Syria.”
Using U.S. and Gulf
state funding, these groups had turned the peaceful protests against
Bashar Assad toward “a clear sectarian (Shiite vs. Sunni)
direction.” The paper notes that the conflict had become a
sectarian civil war supported by Sunni “religious and political
powers.” The report paints the Syrian conflict as a global war for
control of the region’s resources with “the west, Gulf countries
and Turkey supporting [Assad’s] opposition, while Russia, China and
Iran support the regime.” The Pentagon authors of the seven-page
report appear to endorse the predicted advent of the ISIS caliphate:
“If the situation unravels, there is the possibility of
establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in
eastern Syria (Hasaka and Der Zor) and this is exactly what the
supporting powers to the opposition want in order to isolate the
Syrian regime.” The Pentagon report warns that this new
principality could move across the Iraqi border to Mosul and Ramadi
and “declare an Islamic state through its union with other
terrorist organizations in Iraq and Syria.”
Of course, this is
precisely what has happened. Not coincidentally, the regions of Syria
occupied by the Islamic State exactly encompass the proposed route of
the Qatari pipeline.
But then, in 2014,
our Sunni proxies horrified the American people by severing heads and
driving a million refugees toward Europe. “Strategies based upon
the idea that the enemy of my enemy is my friend can be kind of
blinding,” says Tim Clemente, who chaired the FBI’s Joint
Terrorism Task Force from 2004 to 2008 and served as liaison in Iraq
between the FBI, the Iraqi National Police and the U.S. military. “We
made the same mistake when we trained the mujahideen in Afghanistan.
The moment the Russians left, our supposed friends started smashing
antiquities, enslaving women, severing body parts and shooting at
us,” Clemente told me in an interview.
When the Islamic
State’s “Jihadi John” began murdering prisoners on TV, the
White House pivoted, talking less about deposing Assad and more about
regional stability. The Obama administration began putting daylight
between itself and the insurgency we had funded. The White House
pointed accusing fingers at our allies. On October 3, 2014, Vice
President Joe Biden told students at the John F. Kennedy Jr. forum at
the Institute of Politics at Harvard that “our allies in the region
were our largest problem in Syria.” He explained that Turkey, Saudi
Arabia and the UAE were “so determined to take down Assad” that
they had launched a “proxy Sunni-Shia war” funneling “hundreds
of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of tons of weapons into
anyone who would fight against Assad. Except the people who were
being supplied were al-Nusra, and al-Qaeda” — the two groups that
merged in 2014 to form the Islamic State. Biden seemed angered that
our trusted “friends” could not be trusted to follow the American
agenda.
Across the Mideast,
Arab leaders routinely accuse the U.S. of having created the Islamic
State. To most Americans, such accusations seem insane. However, to
many Arabs, the evidence of U.S. involvement is so abundant that they
conclude that our role in fostering the Islamic State must have been
deliberate.
In fact, many of the
Islamic State fighters and their commanders are ideological and
organizational successors to the jihadists that the CIA has been
nurturing for more than 30 years from Syria and Egypt to Afghanistan
and Iraq.
Prior to the
American invasion, there was no Al Qaeda in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
President George W. Bush destroyed Saddam’s secularist government,
and his viceroy, Paul Bremer, in a monumental act of mismanagement,
effectively created the Sunni Army, now named the Islamic State.
Bremer elevated the Shiites to power and banned Saddam’s ruling
Ba’ath Party, laying off some 700,000 mostly Sunni, government and
party officials from ministers to schoolteachers. He then disbanded
the 380,000-man army, which was 80 percent Sunni. Bremer’s actions
stripped a million of Iraq’s Sunnis of rank, property, wealth and
power; leaving a desperate underclass of angry, educated, capable,
trained and heavily armed Sunnis with little left to lose. The Sunni
insurgency named itself Al Qaeda in Iraq. Beginning in 2011, our
allies funded the invasion by AQI fighters into Syria. In April 2013,
having entered Syria, AQI changed its name to ISIL. According to
Dexter Filkins of the New Yorker, “ISIS is run by a council of
former Iraqi generals. … Many are members of Saddam Hussein’s
secular Ba’ath Party who converted to radical Islam in American
prisons.” The $500 million in U.S. military aid that Obama did send
to Syria almost certainly ended up benefiting these militant
jihadists. Tim Clemente, the former chairman of the FBI’s joint
task force, told me that the difference between the Iraq and Syria
conflicts is the millions of military-aged men who are fleeing the
battlefield for Europe rather than staying to fight for their
communities. The obvious explanation is that the nation’s moderates
are fleeing a war that is not their war. They simply want to escape
being crushed between the anvil of Assad’s Russian-backed tyranny
and the vicious jihadist Sunni hammer that we had a hand in wielding
in a global battle over competing pipelines. You can’t blame the
Syrian people for not widely embracing a blueprint for their nation
minted in either Washington or Moscow. The superpowers have left no
options for an idealistic future that moderate Syrians might consider
fighting for. And no one wants to die for a pipeline.
* * *
What is the answer?
If our objective is long-term peace in the Mideast, self-government
by the Arab nations and national security at home, we must undertake
any new intervention in the region with an eye on history and an
intense desire to learn its lessons. Only when we Americans
understand the historical and political context of this conflict will
we apply appropriate scrutiny to the decisions of our leaders. Using
the same imagery and language that supported our 2003 war against
Saddam Hussein, our political leaders led Americans to believe that
our Syrian intervention is an idealistic war against tyranny,
terrorism and religious fanaticism. We tend to dismiss as mere
cynicism the views of those Arabs who see the current crisis as a
rerun of the same old plots about pipelines and geopolitics. But, if
we are to have an effective foreign policy, we must recognize the
Syrian conflict is a war over control of resources indistinguishable
from the myriad clandestine and undeclared oil wars we have been
fighting in the Mideast for 65 years. And only when we see this
conflict as a proxy war over a pipeline do events become
comprehensible. It’s the only paradigm that explains why the GOP on
Capitol Hill and the Obama administration are still fixated on regime
change rather than regional stability, why the Obama administration
can find no Syrian moderates to fight the war, why ISIL blew up a
Russian passenger plane, why the Saudis just executed a powerful
Shiite cleric only to have their embassy burned in Tehran, why Russia
is bombing non-ISIL fighters and why Turkey went out of its way to
shoot down a Russian jet. The million refugees now flooding into
Europe are refugees of a pipeline war and CIA blundering.
Clemente compares
ISIL to Colombia’s FARC — a drug cartel with a revolutionary
ideology to inspire its footsoldiers. “You have to think of ISIS as
an oil cartel,” Clemente said. “In the end, money is the
governing rationale. The religious ideology is a tool that inspires
its soldiers to give their lives for an oil cartel.”
Once we strip this
conflict of its humanitarian patina and recognize the Syrian conflict
as an oil war, our foreign policy strategy becomes clear. Like the
Syrians fleeing for Europe, no American wants to send their child to
die for a pipeline. Instead, our first priority should be the one no
one ever mentions — we need to kick our Mideast oil jones, an
increasingly feasible objective, as the U.S. becomes more energy
independent. Next, we need to dramatically reduce our military
profile in the Middle East and let the Arabs run Arabia. Other than
humanitarian assistance and guaranteeing the security of Israel’s
borders, the U.S. has no legitimate role in this conflict. While the
facts prove that we played a role in creating the crisis, history
shows that we have little power to resolve it.
As we contemplate
history, it’s breathtaking to consider the astonishing consistency
with which virtually every violent intervention in the Middle East
since World War II by our country has resulted in miserable failure
and horrendously costly blowback. A 1997 U.S. Department of Defense
report found that “the data show a strong correlation between U.S.
involvement abroad and an increase in terrorist attacks against the
U.S.” Let’s face it; what we call the “war on terror” is
really just another oil war. We’ve squandered $6 trillion on three
wars abroad and on constructing a national security warfare state at
home since oilman Dick Cheney declared the “Long War” in 2001.
The only winners have been the military contractors and oil companies
that have pocketed historic profits, the intelligence agencies that
have grown exponentially in power and influence to the detriment of
our freedoms and the jihadists who invariably used our interventions
as their most effective recruiting tool. We have compromised our
values, butchered our own youth, killed hundreds of thousands of
innocent people, subverted our idealism and squandered our national
treasures in fruitless and costly adventures abroad. In the process,
we have helped our worst enemies and turned America, once the world’s
beacon of freedom, into a national security surveillance state and an
international moral pariah.
America’s founding
fathers warned Americans against standing armies, foreign
entanglements and, in John Quincy Adams’ words, “going abroad in
search of monsters to destroy.” Those wise men understood that
imperialism abroad is incompatible with democracy and civil rights at
home. The Atlantic Charter echoed their seminal American ideal that
each nation should have the right to self-determination. Over the
past seven decades, the Dulles brothers, the Cheney gang, the neocons
and their ilk have hijacked that fundamental principle of American
idealism and deployed our military and intelligence apparatus to
serve the mercantile interests of large corporations and
particularly, the petroleum companies and military contractors that
have literally made a killing from these conflicts.
It’s time for
Americans to turn America away from this new imperialism and back to
the path of idealism and democracy. We should let the Arabs govern
Arabia and turn our energies to the great endeavor of nation building
at home. We need to begin this process, not by invading Syria, but by
ending the ruinous addiction to oil that has warped U.S. foreign
policy for half a century.
Robert F. Kennedy,
Jr. is the president of Waterkeeper Alliance. His newest book is
Thimerosal: Let The Science Speak.
Authors:
Robert F. Kennedy,
Jr
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