Reported US-Syrian Accord on Air Strikes

By Robert Parry, Consortium News

19 September 14

he Obama administration, working through the Russian government, has secured an agreement from the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad to permit U.S. airstrikes against Islamic State targets in parts of Syria, according to a source briefed on the secret arrangements.

The reported agreement would clear away one of the chief obstacles to President Barack Obama’s plan to authorize U.S. warplanes to cross into Syria to attack Islamic State forces – the concern that entering Syrian territory might prompt anti-aircraft fire from the Syrian government’s missile batteries.

The usual protocol for the U.S. military – when operating in territory without a government’s permission – is to destroy the air defenses prior to conducting airstrikes so as to protect American pilots and aircraft, as was done with Libya in 2011. However, in other cases, U.S. intelligence agencies have arranged for secret permission from governments for such attacks, creating a public ambiguity usually for the benefit of the foreign leaders while gaining the necessary U.S. military assurances.

In essence, that appears to be what is happening behind the scenes in Syria despite the hostility between the Obama administration and the Assad government. Obama has called for the removal of Assad but the two leaders find themselves on the same side in the fight against the Islamic State terrorists who have battled Assad’s forces while also attacking the U.S.-supported Iraqi government and beheading two American journalists.

In a national address last week, Obama vowed to order U.S. air attacks across Syria’s border without any coordination with the Syrian government, a proposition that Damascus denounced as a violation of its sovereignty. So, in this case, Syria’s behind-the-scenes acquiescence also might provide some politically useful ambiguity for Obama as well as Assad.

Yet, this secret collaboration may go even further and include Syrian government assistance in the targeting of the U.S. attacks, according to the source who spoke on condition of anonymity. That is another feature of U.S. military protocol in conducting air strikes – to have some on-the-ground help in pinpointing the attacks.

As part of its public pronouncements about the future Syrian attacks, the Obama administration sought $500 million to train “vetted” Syrian rebels to handle the targeting tasks inside Syria as well as to carry out military ground attacks. But that approach – while popular on Capitol Hill – could delay any U.S. airstrikes into Syria for months and could possibly negate Assad’s quiet acceptance of the U.S. attacks, since the U.S.-backed rebels share one key goal of the Islamic State, the overthrow of Assad’s relatively secular regime.

Just last month, Obama himself termed the strategy of arming supposedly “moderate” Syrian rebels “a fantasy.” He told the New York Times’ Thomas L. Friedman: “This idea that we could provide some light arms or even more sophisticated arms to what was essentially an opposition made up of former doctors, farmers, pharmacists and so forth, and that they were going to be able to battle not only a well-armed state but also a well-armed state backed by Russia, backed by Iran, a battle-hardened Hezbollah, that was never in the cards.”

Obama’s point would seem to apply at least as much to having the “moderate” rebels face down the ruthless Islamic State jihadists who engage in suicide bombings and slaughter their captives without mercy. But this “fantasy” of the “moderate” rebels has a big following in Congress and on the major U.S. op-ed pages, so Obama has included the $500 million in his war plan despite the risk it poses to Assad’s acquiescence to American air attacks.

Neocon Wish List

Without Assad’s consent, the U.S. airstrikes might require a much wider U.S. bombing campaign to first target Syrian government defenses, a development long sought by Official Washington’s influential neoconservatives who have kept “regime change” in Syria near the top of their international wish list.

For the past several years, the Israeli government also has sought the overthrow of Assad, even at the risk of Islamic extremists gaining power. The Israeli thinking had been that Assad, as an ally of Iran, represented a greater threat to Israel because his government was at the center of the so-called Shiite crescent reaching from Tehran through Damascus to Beirut and southern Lebanon, the base for Hezbollah.

The thinking was that if Assad’s government could be pulled down, Iran and Hezbollah – two of Israel’s principal “enemies” – would be badly damaged. A year ago, then-Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren articulated this geopolitical position in an interview with the Jerusalem Post.

“The greatest danger to Israel is by the strategic arc that extends from Tehran, to Damascus to Beirut. And we saw the Assad regime as the keystone in that arc,” Oren said. “We always wanted Bashar Assad to go, we always preferred the bad guys who weren’t backed by Iran to the bad guys who were backed by Iran.” He said this was the case even if the other “bad guys” were affiliated with al-Qaeda.

More recently, however, with the al-Qaeda-connected Nusra Front having seized Syrian territory adjacent to the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights – forcing the withdrawal of UN peacekeepers – the balance of Israeli interests may be tipping in favor of preferring Assad to having Islamic extremists possibly penetrating directly into Israeli territory.

Direct attacks on Israel would be a temptation to al-Nusra Front, which is competing for the allegiance of young jihadists with the Islamic State. While the Islamic State, known by the acronyms ISIS or ISIL, has captured the imaginations of many youthful extremists by declaring the creation of a “caliphate” with the goal of driving Western interests from the Middle East, al-Nusra could trump that appeal by actually going on the offensive against one of the jihadists’ principal targets, Israel.

Yet, despite Israel’s apparent rethinking of its priorities, America’s neocons appear focused still on their long-held strategy of using violent “regime change” in the Middle East to eliminate governments that have been major supporters of Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Palestine’s Hamas, i.e. Syria and Iran.

One reason why Obama may have opted for a secretive overture to the Assad regime, using intelligence channels with the Russians as the middlemen, is that otherwise the U.S. neocons and their “liberal interventionist” allies would have howled in protest.

The Russian Hand

Besides the tactical significance of U.S. intelligence agencies arranging Assad’s tacit acceptance of U.S. airstrikes over Syrian territory, the reported arrangement is also significant because of the role of Russian intelligence serving as the intermediary.

That suggests that despite the U.S.-Russian estrangement over the Ukraine crisis, the cooperation between President Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin has not been extinguished; it has instead just gone further underground.

Last year, this subterranean collaboration between Obama and Putin represented a potential tectonic geopolitical shift in the Middle East. In the short term, their teamwork produced agreements that averted a U.S. military strike against Syria last September (by getting Assad to surrender his chemical weapons arsenal) and struck a tentative deal with Iran to constrain but not eliminate its nuclear program.

In the longer term, by working together to create political solutions to various Mideast crises, the Obama-Putin cooperation threatened to destroy the neocons’ preferred strategy of escalating U.S. military involvement in the region. There was the prospect, too, that the U.S.-Russian tag team might strong-arm Israel into a peace agreement with the Palestinians.

So, starting last September – almost immediately after Putin helped avert a U.S. air war against Syria – key neocons began taking aim at Ukraine as a potential sore point for Putin. A leading neocon, Carl Gershman, president of the U.S.-government-funded National Endowment for Democracy, took to the op-ed pages of the neocon Washington Post to identify Ukraine as “the biggest prize” and explaining how its targeting could undermine Putin’s political standing inside Russia.

“Ukraine’s choice to join Europe will accelerate the demise of the ideology of Russian imperialism that Putin represents,” Gershman wrote. “Russians, too, face a choice, and Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself.” At the time, Gershman’s NED was funding scores of political and media projects inside Ukraine.

By early 2014, American neocons and their “liberal interventionist” pals were conspiring “to midwife” a coup to overthrow Ukraine’s elected President Viktor Yanukovych, according to a phrase used by U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt in an intercepted phone conversation with Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, who was busy handpicking leaders to replace Yanukovych.

A neocon holdover from George W. Bush’s administration, Nuland had been a top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney and is married to prominent neocon Robert Kagan, a co-founder of the Project for a New American Century which prepared the blueprint for the neocon strategy of “regime change” starting with the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

The U.S.-backed coup ousted Yanukovych on Feb. 22 and sparked a bloody civil war, leaving thousands dead, mostly ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine. But the Gershman-Nuland strategy also drove a deep wedge between Obama and Putin, seeming to destroy the possibility that their peace-seeking collaboration would continue in the Middle East.

New Hope for ‘Regime Change’

The surprise success of Islamic State terrorists in striking deep inside Iraq during the summer revived neocon hopes that their “regime change” strategy in Syria might also be resurrected. By baiting Obama to react with military force not only in Iraq but across the border in Syria, neocons like Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham put the ouster of Assad back in play.

In a New York Times op-ed on Aug. 29, McCain and Graham used vague language about resolving the Syrian civil war, but clearly implied that Assad must go. They wrote that thwarting ISIS “requires an end to the [civil] conflict in Syria, and a political transition there, because the regime of President Bashar al-Assad will never be a reliable partner against ISIS; in fact, it has abetted the rise of ISIS, just as it facilitated the terrorism of ISIS’ predecessor, Al Qaeda in Iraq.”

Though the McCain-Graham depiction of Assad’s relationship to ISIS and al-Qaeda was a distortion at best – in fact, Assad’s army has been the most effective force in pushing back against the Sunni terrorist groups that have come to dominate the Western-backed rebel movement – the op-ed’s underlying point is obvious: a necessary step in the U.S. military operation against ISIS must be “regime change” in Damascus.

That would get the neocons back on their original track of forcing “regime change” in countries seen as hostile to Israel. The first target was Iraq with Syria and Iran always meant to follow. The idea was to deprive Israel’s close-in enemies, Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Palestine’s Hamas, of crucial support. But the neocon vision got knocked off track when Bush’s Iraq War derailed and the American people balked at extending the conflict to Syria and Iran.

Still, the neocons retained their vision even after Bush and Cheney departed. They remained influential by holding onto key positions inside Official Washington – at think tanks, within major news outlets and even inside the Obama administration. They also built a crucial alliance with “liberal interventionists” who had Obama’s ear.

The neocons’ new hope arrived with the public outrage over ISIS’s atrocities. Yet, while pushing to get this new war going, the neocons have downplayed their “regime change” agenda, getting Obama to agree only to extend his anti-ISIS bombing campaign from Iraq into Syria. But it was hard to envision expanding the war into Syria without ousting Assad.

Now, however, if the source’s account is correct regarding Assad’s quiet assent to U.S. airstrikes, Obama may have devised a way around the need to bomb Assad’s military, a maneuver that might again frustrate the neocons’ beloved goal of “regime change.

Stupid Stuff on Steroids - Syria and Comic Book Thinking

By William Boardman, Reader Supported News

19 September 14

“This president needs to rise to the occasion before we all get killed”

merican hysteria is a wondrous thing to behold.

Our hysteria is usually obvious in retrospect, whether the freak-out is over witches, labor unions, or communists. Hysteria is not always so easy to perceive as it happens or, in this case, as it is happening right now with ISIS-centric Islamophobia running rampant around the nation’s terror-drenched reptilian brain.

The collective rush to do “stupid stuff” kicked in with the mass-Pavlovian response to cleverly marketed, ISIS-produced infomercials featuring the beheading of two Americans (earlier beheadings of non-Americans failed to have the same effect). But killing Americans in the collective mind’s imaginary Islamistan hits those who are reflexively violent smack in the patriot-plexus, and has them screaming for blood vengeance over a horrific but strategically meaningless bit of savagery. (Funny how the equally savage killing of other Americans with a chokehold in New York or a hail of bullets in Ferguson has so much less impact on rampant public moral outrage.)

That psychic selectivity over what savagery is objectionable and what is tolerable has a long American history, as illustrated by natives receiving blankets full of smallpox and all the other gifts of manifest destiny. Given the American predisposition for morally selective high dudgeon, the media manipulation of the mindset of the United States by slick snuff films begins to look savvy, strategic, and morbidly effective. From the perspective of ISIS, this bit of theatrical propaganda has succeeded beyond reasonable expectation: it has inflated the threatening image of ISIS from the reality of a relatively small, regionally contained, regional band of pathological fundamentalists and their more numerous allies of convenience (which, from time to time, have included the U.S. and other NATO members).

In little more than a month, ISIS (aka ISIL, or IS, or Islamic State, or Islamic Caliphate) has changed little on the ground, while its image in American minds has morphed into a ginormous, imaginary monster capable of throwing a terrifying shadow of fear across the American continent thousands of miles away. This is not a rational perception, even though the president feeds into it (even if he knows better). This is panic, deeply rooted in comic book thinking.

Comic book thinking: never hard to find, but not always dominant

The governor of Texas and other fear mongers, like Judicial Watch and Fox News, would have you believe there are agents of ISIS, the Islamic Caliphate, crossing the Rio Grande and making themselves at home in the American homeland undetected – except by these fearless watchdogs. They also cite a right-wing provocateur who crossed the Texas border in terrorist costume and may have gone undetected. Republican senator John McCain fulminated in comic book style about this imaginary security breach. The Homeland Security people say they detected him and knew he was a buffoon.

In an article about ISIS, the National Review published some articles of faith with headings like: “The growth of the Islamic State,” “The Success of the Islamic State,” and “The ascendancy of the Islamic State.” The writer made an intellectually dishonest anti-Obama/pro-Bush argument rooted in unreality in which he characterized President Obama as an Islamist apologist and an unreliable war maker. That may be just as well in a world where “the success of the Islamic State” and, even more so, “the ascendancy of the Islamic State” are hobgoblin projections of comic book fear with no objective reality.

The success of Fox News is built on comic book thinking. For example, on September 17, Fox touted an “intelligence bulletin from the Central Florida Intelligence Exchange” warning, somewhat incoherently:

… that Islamic State fighters have increased calls for “lone wolves” to attack U.S. soldiers in America in recent months, citing one tweet that called for jihadists to find service members’ addresses online and then “show up and slaughter them.”

Reportedly Fox News coverage of the ISIS crisis has achieved ratings higher than CNN and MSNBC combined, where comic book thinking can sometimes be more nuanced. CNN resorts to unprovable fearmongering to characterize ISIS as “the terror group that is striking fear into the hearts of leaders around the world,” which if true would say more about world leaders than about ISIS. In contrast, the BBC accurately describes ISIS as “the small but fanatical jihadist army now controlling large tracts of Syria and Iraq” ­– and then wonders, quite rationally, whether ISIS has the capability of governing an area roughly the size of Pennsylvania.

Peak hysteria so far comes from the senator from South Carolina

“This president needs to rise to the occasion before we all get killed back here at home,” Republican Lindsey Graham claimed on September 14 on Fox News Sunday. This raw, politically pointed hysteria was not new for Graham, who said more than a month earlier on the same Fox program: “If he does not go on the offensive against ISIS, ISIL, whatever you guys want to call it, they are coming here…. This is just not about Baghdad. This is just not about Syria. And if we do get attacked, then he will have committed a blunder for the ages.”

In the interim, the president announced from the Oval Office on September 10 that the country was going against ISIS [ISIL] with a limited offensive, as well as unlimited and contradictory rhetoric:

While we have not yet detected specific plotting against our homeland, ISIL leaders have threatened America and our allies…. Our objective is clear: We will degrade, and ultimately destroy, ISIL through a comprehensive and sustained counterterrorism strategy…. We will hunt down terrorists who threaten our country, wherever they are. That means I will not hesitate to take action…. If you threaten America, you will find no safe haven…. We will send an additional 475 servicemembers to Iraq … [but] we will not get dragged into another ground war in Iraq…. [emphasis added]

Extreme as it is in parts, the president’s declaration is nowhere near enough for Graham and his fellow warriors, whose goal seems to include a large American occupation of uncertain duration in the Middle East. Graham said that ISIS [ISIL] is:

… intending to come here…. There is no way in hell you can form an army on the ground to go into Syria, to destroy ISIL without a substantial American component. And to destroy ISIL, you have to kill or capture their leaders, take the territory they hold back, cut off their financing and destroy their capability to regenerate. This is a war we’re fighting…. This president needs to rise to the occasion before we all get killed back here at home.

Both the president and the senator offer up comic book thinking. Hunting down terrorists wherever they are is a Bush-like boast detached from reality. Imaging an enemy powerful enough to kill 320 million Americans is silly even in a Hollywood apocalypse movie.

Delusional thinking isn’t really a good basis to build a war on

One of the benefits of delusional thinking is that it relieves the mind of the stress of contemplating an unpleasant and intractable reality. One of the drawbacks of delusional thinking is that it’s not likely to make that reality any better, and may well make it worse.

Take for example the truly comical bi-partisan vote in the House in favor of arming and training Syrian rebels, and its equally bi-partisan opposition. The 273 votes in favor included 114 Democrats, while the 156 in opposition included 71 Republicans (with three Republicans not voting). Only five states voted unanimously, all in favor (Alaska, Montana, Arkansas, and both Dakotas). This vote was to add an amendment of six micro-managing pages to the Continuing Appropriations Resolution, 2015, that would allow, but provide no funding for, the buildup of a Syrian opposition army from “appropriately vetted Syrian groups and individuals.”

The amendment ends with this admonition:

Nothing in this section shall be construed to constitute a specific statutory authorization for the introduction of United States Armed Forces into hostilities or into situations wherein hostilities are clearly indicated by the circumstances. [emphasis added]

On September 17, President Obama told a military audience:

The American forces that have been deployed to Iraq do not and will not have a combat mission. I will not commit you and the rest of our armed forces to fighting another ground war in Iraq. [emphasis added]

That Congressional admonition, like the presidential assertion, is delusional to the extent that the United States is already at war in Iraq, where U.S. pilots are flying combat missions and an unknown number of special forces are engaged in hostilities, and another 1,500 or so soldiers are guarding the embassy and carrying out other missions “wherein hostilities are clearly indicated by circumstances.” Iraq is a war zone, and has been for more than eleven years. The ground war that started with the U.S. invasion of 2003 has not ended. “Another ground war in Iraq” is delusional or dishonest. Even though the U.S. has mostly withdrawn its military forces, the war in Iraq never ended in any meaningful sense.

By Congressional logic, the president has no statutory authority to send armed forces there, even though they are already there. The president has said he has all the authority he needs under the AUMFs, the Authorizations for the Use of Military Force passed in 2001 and 2002, open-ended war-making authority Congress has chosen not to review. “We’re traveling on vapors,” said Illinois senator Dick Durbin of the aging AUMFs on September 18. Then, like all his colleagues, he made no effort to change the situation.

Senator Manchin notices the empire’s lack of a wardrobe

Nothing the collective leadership of the United States – or its harshest critics – propose to do will likely change the political situation. Their comic book thinking based on false perceptions of reality makes the likelihood of a sensible course of action virtually nil.

West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin was reportedly prepared to shut down the government to prevent adoption of the House plan to arm Syrian rebels. In the end, he caved and the Senate supported the amendment to the continuing resolution 78-22, with bi-partisan votes for and against. Despite his opposition, even Manchin did not challenge the core perception dominating government and media. On the Senate floor, he solemnly affirmed that “we must defeat and destroy ISIS…. ISIS are barbaric terrorists with no respect for humanity and they deserve to die.”

He expressed support for airstrikes in Iraq, for humanitarian aid, for cutting off funding to ISIS, adding somewhat preposterously: “Doing these things has already helped prevent genocide.”

And then he questioned the conventional wisdom that it was up to the U.S. to take on ISIS and save the world: “This should be an Arab ground war and a U.S. air war…. Important as it is to know your enemy, it is equally important to know our allies. And I am not confident that we know who are allies are…. As of today, we have only hints of military support from Arab countries, who themselves face a greater threat from ISIS than anyone else.”

This semi-dissent is important, but it only begins to explore the absurdity of the present American impulse to defend itself against an imaginary threat by saving countries unwilling to save themselves. Or maybe they don’t feel the need to be “saved.” The coalition’s main partners now are the U.S., Australia, Germany, and those old colonial favorites in the Middle East, France and the United Kingdom. That’s one reality.

Consider the host of other realities our comic book thinkers avoid for the sake of a simplistic solution to a problem they’re unable to explain realistically:

• IRAQ has a weak government that is unable to choose a defense minister or an internal security minister. Iraq has been in a multifaceted state of civil war for about a decade, primarily Shia/Sunni. As a result, Sunni Iraq has allied with ISIS to hold about a third of the country. Kurdistan is a quasi-independent state in another third of Iraq. And this fragmented Iraq is the base of American operations.


• KURDS in Iraq, Turkey, and Iran comprise a wild card that has the potential for coalescing into its own disruptive state.


• SYRIA’s multifaceted civil war has divided the country into a minimum of three mutually hostile, ill-defined areas: the government territory is the most stable, followed by the ISIS sector. Rebel territory is scattered, and no one knows just how many militia-governments are in control of or disputing different areas. These represent the “Syrian rebels” the U.S. thinks will fight ISIS even though their rebellion is against the Assad government.


• SYRIAN REBELS, appropriately vetted, may turn out to be as rare as unicorns. So far, Syrian rebels have been a reliable source of arms for ISIS. And Syrian rebels reportedly sold one of the beheaded American reporters to ISIS for cash. Like ISIS, Syrian rebels are predominantly Sunni.


• TURKEY is supposed to be part of the burgeoning U.S. coalition, but so far Turkish commitment is limited to allowing the use of a NATO air base. Turkey has contributed to the rise of ISIS. Turkey doesn’t want to fight ISIS on the same side as the Kurds, who want a piece of Turkey. Turkey doesn’t want to disrupt its economic ties to the ISIS region. Predominantly Sunni Turkey doesn’t want to fight the predominantly Sunni ISIS coalition, nor does it want to fight on the side of predominantly Shia Iraq or its predominantly Shia ally, Iran.


• SAUDI ARABIA’s commitment to the coalition is a promise to offer bases for training. Saudi Arabia and Qatar are widely credited with years of sponsoring and building up ISIS. Both countries are predominantly Wahhabi, a stricter-than-Sunni version of Islam. Saudi Arabia has little incentive to contribute significantly to any anti-ISIS coalition.


• JORDAN is predominantly Sunni and is an advanced, humane nation, especially in comparison to most of its neighbors. Presently it is home for millions of refugees: from Palestine since 1948; from Iraq since the U.S. war of 2003; and from Syria, since the civil war began. Jordan provides some 50,000 peacekeeping troops to the United Nations. It has trained Iraqi security forces.


• GULF COUNTRIES such as Kuwait, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, and Oman have offered the use of their air bases and air spaces, but little more. These Islamic states are all predominantly Sunni except Oman, which is Ibadi (predating Sunni and Shia).

The first step on the road to doing stupid stuff is framing the question in a way that allows for only one possible answer. For example, “This president needs to rise to the occasion before we all get killed.” If we’re all going to get killed if we don’t do something, how can we not do something?

But “before we all get killed” is entry level stupid stuff. And who is going to kill us? The standard estimate for ISIS strengths is 10,000 fighters or so, an unknown portion of whom are Iraqi Sunnis more interested in their homes in Iraq than some invented Islamic caliphate. For ISIS to approach being even a slightly credible threat, one needs to apply serious threat-inflation. Threat inflation happened recently when the Pentagon tripled the size of ISIS from maybe 10,000 fighters to maybe 30,000 fighters, with no basis offered for any estimate. Even at 30,000, ISIS would be only a tenth the size of the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security, which some see as a greater threat.

If ISIS were any sort of genuine threat, or if our political and pontifical public figures were any sort of genuine leaders, wouldn’t someone have thought to make a point of it when ISIS took control of Fallujah, just 43 miles from Baghdad, in January 2014? Why did they wait till June to be surprised by ISIS taking Mosul from a fleeing Iraqi army?

No matter what perspective one takes considering ISIS, there’s none that escapes stupid stuff. And what stupid stuff could create millions more Islamic enemies of the United States? Plunging into the middle of the centuries-old, international Sunni/Shia religious civil war should work.

William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.