Obama’s Big Lie on Syria, by Daniel Lazare

What a tangled web they weave. President Obama and his cohorts have lied, misled, and bent policy into a pretzel in the Middle East. From Daniel Lazare, at consortiumnews.com:

Exclusive: Despite the risk that Syria’s Christians, Alawites and Shiites will be slaughtered by Sunni extremists, the Obama administration is backing the Saudi-Israeli demand for “regime change” in Damascus, including tweeting bogus accusations linking Syria’s secular regime to ISIS, writes Daniel Lazare.

Although its doors have been closed since 2012, the U.S. embassy in Damascus has recently sent out a round of pugnacious tweets charging Syrian President Bashar al-Assad with giving Islamic State fighters a free pass while bombing U.S.-aligned Free Syrian Army (FSA) units holed up in the city of Aleppo.

By bombing one side in an intra-rebel war and not the other, the embassy says, Damascus is making its preference clear, i.e., in favor of the hyper-brutal Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. “Reports indicate,” declared an embassy tweet on June 1, “that the regime is making air-strikes in support of ISIL’s advance on Aleppo, aiding extremists against Syrian population.”

“We have long seen that the Assad regime avoids ISIL lines,” said another, “in complete contradiction to the regime’s claims to be fighting ISIL.” Added a third: “Assad is not only avoiding ISIL lines, but actively seeking to bolster their position.”

But this picture is complicated by the fact that the FSA also faults the U.S. for not bombing ISIS and that Shi‘ite forces across the border in Iraq actually accuse America of providing ISIS with military aid. The Islamic State is America’s “creation,” declared Akram al-Kabi, leader of the powerful Nujabaa Brigade, while Iraqi forces recently fired on a U.S. helicopter that they believed was ferrying aid to the other side.

“We have a continuous problem in effectively countering the narrative,” observes Brigadier General Kurt Crytzer, deputy commander for Special Operations Command Central. The story that the U.S. is secretly supporting ISIS is “easily believed by many … not just the poor and uneducated.”

For The New York Times’ Anne Barnard, this swirl of charges and counter-charges demonstrates “the complexity of the battlefield in Syria’s multifaceted war and the challenges it poses for United States policy.” But Barnard is wrong in her analysis. It’s not the Syrian battlefield that’s complex, but the predicament that the U.S. finds itself in.

What has caused Saudi Arabia and other Sunni states to ratchet up their support for radical Islamists fighting in Syria and Iraq is the impending nuclear accord with Iran, which has infuriated Sunni states and Israel and is leading the U.S. to assure its allies that it will redouble its efforts to roll back Iranian influence in other countries.

This means a stepped-up effort to topple the Iranian-backed government in Syria and to oppose pro-Iranian forces in Iraq, Bahrain, Yemen and inside Saudi Arabia. The Obama administration wants to have a peaceful agreement with Iran over nuclear issues but the price is to double down on a proxy war against Iranian (and Shi’ite) interests across the Middle East.

The upshot is a policy that has everyone in the Middle East shaking their head in confusion, which is why charges of back-stabbing and double-dealing are proliferating. A vastly overextended U.S. has no alternative but to scale back. But the more it does, the more nervous its partners grow and the more promises it makes that it can’t possibly keep.

https://consortiumnews.com/2015/06/05/obamas-big-lie-on-syria/

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