Category: News

Much has been made of the Obama administration’s decision to set up shop in Jordan under the pretense of containing the Syrian conflict and of training so-called moderate elements in the Syrian rebel opposition. That is the pretense that has so far been publicized in the news media and is thus the pretense that critics have denounced as a matter of policy.

The popular refrain among those who oppose US intervention in Syria has been that the Obama administration is siding with Sunni jihadists to unseat the Assad regime. I’ve argued that is not what is happening, or at least that it is grossly oversimplified.

Another piece of the puzzle has been made public with a report from journalist Phil Sands who interviewed one of the Syrian rebel commanders that met with US officials in Jordan. According to him, “the Americans were more interested in talking about Jabhat Al Nusra, the Al Qaeda-affiliated group waging war on the Syrian regime, than they were in helping the rebels advance on Damascus.”

The Americans began discussing the possibility of drone strikes on Al Nusra camps inside Syria and tried to enlist the rebels to fight their fellow insurgents.

“The US intelligence officer said, ‘We can train 30 of your fighters a month, and we want you to fight Al Nusra’,” the rebel commander recalled.

Opposition forces should be uniting against Mr Al Assad’s more powerful and better-equipped army, not waging war among themselves, the rebel commander replied. The response from a senior US intelligence officer was blunt.

“I’m not going to lie to you. We’d prefer you fight Al Nusra now, and then fight Assad’s army. You should kill these Nusra people. We’ll do it if you don’t,” the rebel leader quoted the officer as saying.

What the commander says transpired in Jordan illustrates a dilemma that has preoccupied, even paralysed, Syria’s opposition and their international supporters – how to deal with the expanding role of Islamic extremists in the anti-Assad insurgency.

Other meetings with Western and Arab intelligence services have shown a similar obsession with Al Nusra, the commander said.

“All anyone wants is hard information about Al Nusra, it seems to be all they are really interested in. It’s the most valuable commodity you can have when dealing with these intelligence agencies,” he said.

According to this rebel commander, his goal of overthrowing the Assad regime was sidelined in favor of American plans to have the rebels fight among themselves. This falls in line with several other publicly available accounts of the US approach.

In describing Jordan’s role serving as a conduit for arms going to a select group of Syrian rebels, the Guardian reported last month that the US and its allies “have sharply increased their backing of some rebels to try to stop the advances of al-Qaeda-linked groups among them.”

“A push to defeat al-Qaeda, rather than an outright bid to oust Syria’s leader, Bashar al-Assad, is Jordan’s driving force,” the Guardian added.

In addition to the clandestine effort in Jordan to fight the Nusra Front, the Obama administration has also sent the CIA back into Iraq to support Iraqi state militias (the Shiite regime in Baghdad is an ally of Assad, nominally at least) to fight al-Qaeda affiliates pouring into Syria to join the rebellion. The Obama administration even considered a request from the Iraqi government to use drones to bomb Islamist rebel forces along the Iraq-Syria border.

It’s true that Obama has sent non-lethal and (indirectly) lethal aid to the rebels, despite the fact that the great bulk of the fighters who actually matter are jihadists. But the truth is, Obama has ruled out sending decisive aid, lethal or non-lethal, to Syria’s rebels. He reportedly overruled the suggestions of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Martin Dempsey – all of whom advocated arming the rebels. Instead, Obama made policy moves like designating the al-Qaeda in Iraq offshoot in Syria a terrorist organization and pressuring Saudi Arabia not to send heavier arms like anti-aircraft weapons.

As the State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said back in January, even as the US supports the Syrian opposition in some abstract way, it is of utmost importance to “maintain the functions of the state.” Syria may have been floated as a target for regime change by the Bush administration’s most fanciful neoconservatives, but Obama sees the chaos of Sunni jihadists taking control of Syria as a much worse outcome than Assad sticking around a while longer.

That said, this policy shift comes far too late. The Syrian war is now early in its third year and weapons from Washington’s Wahabi zealots in Saudi Arabia and in places like Qatar have undoubtedly made their way into the hands of jihadists. The protracted conflict, as Peter Harling and Sarah Birke write at The Middle East Research and Information Project, “never would have reached such cataclysmic proportions were it not for more than a little help from abroad.”

“The opposition would have thought twice about taking up arms had it not been convinced by shallow shows of Western outrage that it would not be left to face the consequences alone,” they argue.

US foreign policy is constantly remedying the catastrophes it has previously wrought. Bush’s war for regime change in Iraq gave rise to al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). Obama’s meddling (and that of his allies in the Gulf) in Syria’s civil conflict prompted AQI to move to Syria and fight Assad as Jabhat al-Nusra. Now the meddling continues to try and eliminate al-Nusra, which has quickly become the foremost element in Syria’s rebellion. It is an endless trail of failures, leading to more interventions, which lead to more failures.

The September 18, 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), ostensibly a vehicle for the U.S. to go after the perpetrators of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, DC., turns out to have been a whole hell of a lot more than that nearly 12 years on. That simple joint resolution has been stretched very thin during the War on Terror. The original text gives the President permission to “use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons.” Fair enough (ish).

But since September, 2001, we’ve had 12 years of war in Afghanistan. The Bush administration also used the AUMF to justify Gitmo and still-unknown levels of NSA spying on Americans. Bush began the drone program cautiously (relatively speaking), and the Obama administration’s drone strikes have continued and dramatically increased the scope and scale of those attacks — branching out into strike in Yemen, Somalia, Mali, and elsewhere. In short, the AUMF has served as a sturdy pillar of support for the potentially endless and apparently geographically limitless War on Terror.

So, knowing that, it’s almost tempting to take talk of an “update” to the resolution as good news. Could it be any worse?

Sure could. Most of the folks wanting to fix AUMF are notoriously hawkish. Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham being the most obvious — and alarming — examples of powerful folks who believe the president’s war powers are being forever constrained. Graham seems to miss no opportunity to clamor for more powers for the president. After the Boston Marathon bombing,he repeatedly demanded that surviving suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev be treated as an enemy combatant. Sen. Bob Corker is also touting the “update” AUMF line heavily. And has McCain met a warmaking power he doesn’t like, at least in the past 13 years?

Today it was reported that McCain, Democrat Sen. Dick Durbin, Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Carl Levin, along with Graham and Corker, gathered for the initial planning stages of a potential new AUMF. On May 16 there will be a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee on this matter.

Noted Politico, optimistically:

A new resolution could call for military action only against al Qaeda or affiliate groups, or organizations designated by Congress as terror backers, according to sources close to the talks. Obama would still be authorized to hold terror detainees, but there would be more congressional oversight of the U.S. struggle against such terror threats, a particularly sensitive issue in light of the recent Boston Marathon bombing.

The problem with messing with the AUMF has been pointed out by various sources in the last few months, including Antiwar’s Kelley B. Vlahos who wrote “Beware of Lawyers Bearing AUMF Fix” in April. Vlahos noted that various Senators, unnamed Obama sources, and the Brookings Institution are all repeating the line that the AUMF is “obsolete” and needs to be updated in order to explicitly authorize new foreign adventures against groups with –at best — tertiary ties to Al-Qaeda.  (Similar agenda, or just terrorists in general, the point is why have broad powers of war stifled by the need for a tie to 9/11?)

In March, Slate reminded us that Congress may be asking for new definitions of Obama’s war-fighting power in order to control it, but they have a laughable track record in that particular area. (See: a large chunk of the 20th century, the start of this one.)

The killing takeaway from the Politico article was also spotted by Empty Wheel, who noted the disturbing overlap between those who crafted the indefinite detainment portion of the 2012 NDAA,and those who think the AUMF isn’t strong enough.

Politico:

Some Democrats, for their part, worry that vocal Obama critics like [Sen. Rand] Paul and Ted Cruz (R-Texas) — or dozens of House Republicans — would use such a debate to attack the president’s policy on all military and national security issues, not just terror-related topics.

“Can you imagine what Paul or Cruz would do with this?” said one top Democratic aide. “It could be a disaster. And it would be worse in the House.” [emphasis added]

There you have it. Nobody hankering to rewrite the rules of war should be trusted in this task, especially not these guys. The only thing to do with the AUMF is repeal it.

If, as alleged, the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons, it would indeed be a serious development, constituting a breach of the Geneva Protocol of 1925, one of the world’s most important disarmament treaties, which banned the use of chemical weapons.

In 1993, the international community came together to ratify the Chemical Weapons Convention, a binding international treaty that would also prohibit the development, production, acquisition, stockpiling, retention, and transfer or use of chemical weapons. Syria is one of only eight of the world’s 193 countries not party to the convention.

However, U.S. policy regarding chemical weapons has been so inconsistent and politicized that the United States is in no position to take leadership in response to any use of such weaponry by Syria.

The controversy over Syria’s chemical weapons stockpiles is not new. Both the Bush administration and Congress, in the 2003 Syria Accountability Act, raised the issue of Syria’s chemical weapons stockpiles, specifically Syria’s refusal to ratify the Chemical Weapons Convention. The failure of Syria to end its chemical weapons program was deemed sufficient grounds by a large bipartisan majority of Congress to impose strict sanctions on that country. Syria rejected such calls for unilateral disarmament on the grounds that it was not the only country in the region that had failed to sign the CWC—nor was it the first country in the region to develop chemical weapons, nor did it have the largest chemical weapons arsenal in the region.

Indeed, neither Israel nor Egypt, the world’s two largest recipients of U.S. military aid, is a party to the convention either. Never has Congress or any administration of either party called on Israel or Egypt to disarm their chemical weapons arsenals, much less threatened sanctions for having failed to do so. U.S. policy, therefore, appears to be that while it is legitimate for its allies Israel and Egypt to refuse to ratify this important arms control convention, Syria needed to be singled out for punishment for its refusal.

The first country in the Middle East to obtain and use chemical weapons was Egypt, which used phosgene and mustard gas in the mid-1960s during its intervention in Yemen’s civil war. There is no indication Egypt has ever destroyed any of its chemical agents or weapons. The U.S.-backed Mubarak regime continued its chemical weapons research and development program until its ouster in a popular uprising two years ago, and the program is believed to have continued subsequently.

Israel is widely believed to have produced and stockpiled an extensive range of chemical weapons and is engaged in ongoing research and development of additional chemical weaponry. (Israel is also believed to maintain a sophisticated biological weapons program, which is widely thought to include anthrax and more advanced weaponized agents and other toxins, as well as a sizable nuclear weapons arsenal with sophisticated delivery systems.) For more than 45 years, the Syrians have witnessed successive U.S. administration provide massive amounts of armaments to a neighboring country with a vastly superior military capability which has invaded, occupied, and colonized Syria’s Golan province in the southwest. In 2007, the United States successfully pressured Israel to reject peace overtures from the Syrian government in which the Syrians offered to recognize Israel and agree to strict security guarantees in return for a complete Israeli withdrawal from occupied Syrian territory.

Continue reading “The US and Chemical Weapons: No Leg to Stand On”

Israel’s bombing of Syria this week represented a very serious escalation in the civil war that carries a high risk of internationalizing the conflict. The supposed justification for the attacks was to eliminate a depot of Fateh-110 missiles, shipped from Iran and allegedly headed to Hezbollah in Lebanon.

That was the pretext. On it’s own terms, it is illegitimate. As was discussed by Glenn Greenwald and several others, it abides by a doctrine of preventive military attack that would never be considered valid or lawful for anyone other than the U.S. or Israel.

But even if we buy into the preventive war doctrine (despite the fact that it qualifies as a war crime under international law), Israel’s bombing was still not executed out of necessity. As Danger Room’s Noah Shachtman reports, Israel’s missile defense system is capable of obstructing Fateh-110 missiles even in the unlikely event Hezbollah decided to strike first against Israel.

…current and former Israeli missile defense officials insist that if Hezbollah militants ever got the Fateh-110 weapons, Israel could shoot the missiles out of the sky.

“We are now able to cope with all the missiles that are threatening Israel right now, including the longer-range missiles in Iran and in Syria,” Arieh Herzog, the former director of the Israel Missile Defense Organization, tells Danger Room.

Shachtman explains that if scores of the missiles were shot off at Israel simultaneously, it might not work. But this should do away with any arguments that Israel merely acted to neutralize an imminent threat of attack.

Robert Fisk spoke to Democracy Now this morning about Israel’s attack, and Syria more generally.

Bill Keller’s piece in The New York Times yesterday got a lot of attention, and for all the right reasons. The absurdity of the piece wasn’t lost on most people: Keller lays out how terribly wrong he was for supporting the Bush administration’s war of choice in Iraq, and is now asking readers not to collapse in laughter as he speaks with an air of authority on why we should invade, or at least bomb, Syria.

Keller explains that “at the outset of the Iraq invasion, I found myself a reluctant hawk. That turned out to be a humbling error of judgment, and it left me gun-shy.” How harrowing the experience must have been for you, Bill – using your position as an opinion-shaper at the most widely read newspaper in the country to cheerlead an illegal war that destroyed an entire country, killed hundreds of thousands of people, and cost trillions of dollars.

Still, Keller wants you to know he thinks we’ve over-learned the lessons of Iraq: “But in Syria, I fear prudence has become fatalism, and our caution has been the father of missed opportunities, diminished credibility and enlarged tragedy.”

He then takes us through all “the ways it is not Iraq,” and what follows is a dubious motley of pro-war arguments. Some of them are just flat out delusional, like his first one:

“First, we have a genuine, imperiled national interest, not just a fabricated one. A failed Syria creates another haven for terrorists, a danger to neighbors who are all American allies, and the threat of metastasizing Sunni-Shiite sectarian war across a volatile and vital region.”

Keller’s too blinded by his own warmongering to realize that it’s been our limited interventions that has made his scenario a reality, not the other way around. The rebels, many of them jihadists, received arms and support from dogmatic religious dictators in Riyadh and Doha (with CIA help) from very early on. The Sunni-Shiite sectarian war has already metastasized thanks to foreign meddling.

Despite all the wishful thinking from Keller, every option for intervention, from no-fly zones to invasion, carries terrible consequences for Syrians and Americans. But beyond that, what he and his establishment brethren can’t overcome is this idea that America has either the right or the responsibility to police the world and make civil wars our own wars. They are infused with the propagandistic notion that America is “the indispensable nation,” the moral actor on the international stage. And they are once again putting those delusions to use by rallying for another illegal, elective, protracted conflict in the Middle East that is bound to worsen the humanitarian situation and carry grave costs in blood and treasure.