About 17 years ago the insufferable former general, Wesley Clark, reported on a talk he once had in the Pentagon:
“This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.”
Well, it took several years longer but now six of the seven countries mentioned in that famous memo have been thrown into utter chaos, where they stumble around the Middle East and North Africa as failed states and well-springs of barbarism, crime, economic collapse and terrorism. And the ludicrous thing is that every one of these calamities were the result of intentional policy on the banks of the Potomac.
So if any more proof is needed that Imperial Washington inhabits a loony bin this week’s demise of the sixth of these target states, Syria, is surely just that. It will now become another warlord-dominated no man’s land caught in the cross-hairs of maneuver by its neighbors – Turkey, Iran, Israel, Russia and, everywhere and always, the United States.
Still, perhaps the unfolding madness now overtaking the corpus of Syria will finally demonstrate that Empire First has been a catastrophe which must be abandoned once and for all. To layout the framework for that long overdue pivot back to an America First policy, we reach back to a picture we published five years ago. This was during his first time at bat, when the Donald made a tepid effort to bring home a few hundred troops and wind down Washington’s multi-front interventions and meddling in a tiny land with 20 million people, a GDP of just $40 billion, a per capita income of barely $2,000, no significant natural resources or industrial capacity and no capability to project any military power whatsoever beyond its own borders.
In short, there was not a single attribute of this troubled corner of the Levant that had any bearing on the America’s homeland security whatsoever. Still, the Donald got thoroughly rebuked by the UniParty blob on Capitol Hill for implicitly recognizing the obvious. As we said at the time (2019):
By a vote of 354-60 yesterday the U.S. House of Representative proved that Imperial Washington is addicted to war, and that the level of ignorance, bellicosity and mendacity among the people’s representative has reach appalling heights.
Having never voted for Washington’s pointless, illegal and destructive fomenting of Syria’s calamitous civil war in the first place, as the constitution requires, the bipartisan congressional mob actually had the gall to vote to keep US forces in the middle of a centuries old Kurd/Turk conflict that has zero implications for the security and safety of the American homeland. And we mean that as in zero, nichts, nada and nugatory.
The pretext, of course, is that the ISIS caliphate will come roaring back to life absent the armed resistance of the Kurdish-SDF forces positioned in Syria’s northeast quadrant; and that with these bombed-out, impoverished, no-count towns, villages, farms and dusty plains back under the black flag of ISIS, next up will be IEDs in the New York City subways.
That’s just blatant claptrap. If Syria becomes whole again, the Islamic State doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in the hot place of reviving. And letting Syria become whole again was exactly the purpose and consequence of Trump’s sensible decision to remove American forces from the Syria/Turkey border.
Well, the fools in the Biden national security apparatus were not about to let Syria become whole again. Instead, they kept up the pressure on the Assad government via intensified economic sanctions, continued US military occupation of Syria’s oil and wheat producing provinces in the east and military aid to a motley array of so-called rebel forces – including the Kurdish SDF militias which occupy a strip along the northern border and are the mortal enemy of, well, Washington’s NATO partner, Turkey.
In any event, the aforementioned picture was the smoke cloud below, which was the handiwork of a pair of American F-15s. These uninvited interlopers in Syria’s purportedly sovereign air space had bombed a large ammo storage dump US forces had left behind, after they had hastily vacated SDF-held territory near Kobani on the Syria/Turkey border.
The purpose, as we explained at the time, was to insure that this ammo did not end up in hostile hands. That is to say, the hands of the Turkey-backed Syrian National Army (SNA). That pack of brutes, however, had earlier been called the Free Syrian Army (FSA), which had been stood up by the CIA as part of Washington’s idiotic quest to overthrow Assad after the so-called Arab Spring of 2011.
Nor was there any doubt about the FSA’s Washington sponsor. In fact, it should have been been called the John McCain Memorial Brigade – since under his legislative mandate it had been brought, trained, paid-for and stood-up by the CIA.
So to clarify the story, Trump was bombing a US arms depot so that it would not fall into the hands of the “hostile forces” that Senator McCain and the CIA had created! And that was happening even as the Donald was being rebuked by the UniParty warmongers on Capitol Hill for trying to get a small detachment of US servicemen out of harms’ way in a country that had zero implications for national security!
Now five years later during last week’s contretemps, these “hostile forces” (the SNA) had joined forces with the remnants of al Qaeda (nee the Nusra Front), which lately had rechristened itself for the third time under the name of HTF ( Hayat Tahrir al-Sham). Together, they managed to overthrow a regime in Damascus that had never posed any threat whatsoever to America’s homeland security.
Nevertheless, back in 2019 the situation had been far different. These SNA nee McCain Brigade brigands had attacked Washington’s Kurdish allies in the aforementioned Syrian Defense Forces (SDF), which had also been funded by Washington through a military channel.
Moreover, the SNA all along had consisted of buccaneers, thugs, criminals, mercenaries, jihadist and plain old job-seekers that were wearing the same uniforms mainly owing to Washington’s billions of blood money; and who had ended up mercenaries for pay mainly because Washington’s demented policy of Regime Change in Damascus had destroyed the Syrian civilian economy and turned it into a poison pit of war-lordism. That is, the SNA had replaced the civilian economy as a place for desperate men to find a paycheck.
Stated differently, without Washington’s endless payroll and weapons supply, the McCain Brigade and its heirs and assigns (SNA) would not have existed in 2019 or 2024. And they would not have been attacking and executing soldiers of Washington’s Kurdish SDF back then, nor marauding the country-side of a completely failed state today.
To be sure, at the time the War Party and its media megaphones were revising history so fast as to make even Uncle Joe Stalin blush with envy. The New York Times, as usual, gave the McCain Brigades an instant do-over, turning them into the darkest of bad guys, which in this instance they likely were – notwithstanding that John McCain and his Deep State network had lavished billions for the purpose of attacking the legitimate government in Damascus under the guise of fighting ISIS.
…Grandly misnamed the Syrian National Army, this coalition of Turkish-backed militias is in fact largely composed of the dregs of the eight-year-old conflict’s failed rebel movement… Early in the war the military and the C.I.A. sought to train and equip moderate, trustworthy rebels to fight the government and the Islamic State… A few of those now fighting in the northeast took part in those failed programs, but most were rejected as too extreme or too criminal.
In any event, just a few weeks earlier the Syrian Interim Government had come together bringing 41 different factions under the newly christened SNA or “Syrian National Army”. So doing, they elected Abdurrahman Mustafa as president and Salim Idriss as defense minister.
These good folks are pictured below at the launch of Senator McCain’s Free Syrian Army (FSA) back in 2013:
For want of doubt, Salim Idriss made the ambitions of the new Syrian Interim Government clear when during an announcement press conference, he stated one of its main purposes was to fight the Washington sponsored SDF or militia of the Kurdish PYD/PKK:
“We will fight all terrorist organizations, especially the PYD/PKK terrorist organization.”
That’s right. Idriss had made a career shaking the Washington money and sponsorship tree and had never hidden his bitter anti-Kurd agenda. Yet suddenly, the knuckleheads inside the beltway got amnesia and were shocked, shocked that he was leading the attack against Washington’s Kurdish/SDF.
In other words, Washington had sown the seeds of sectarian mayhem in Syria and was now arbitrarily shedding crocodile tears for one of the victims of its madness. Yet a Turkey-friendly analysis of this newly unified opposition (i.e. the forces attacking the Kurds) at the time showed that these factions have been in the Syrian civil war business at all points on the compass – nourished mainly by money, material and weapons supplied by Washington.
Accordingly, 11 of these factions 41 factions had fought battles against Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) or the old Al-Nusra Front nee al Qaeda. But to fast forward to today, they are now in a tacit alliance with HTS, which led the overthrow of Assad last week.
Another 27 of the 41 factions were previously engaged in fighting DAESH/ISIS; 30 factions had fought the Assad regime; and 31 fought the YPG/SDF!
That’s right. The largest share of the 41 factions that came together in 2019 and which are now operating under the banner of the Syrian National Army (SNA) had been fighting the Washington-armed Kurds – along with practically everyone else.
Moreover, at least 21 of the factions amalgamated into the Syrian National Army were previously funded and armed by the Washington.
But here’s the thing: Just 3 of them had received help via the Pentagon’s program to combat DAESH/ISIS. By contrast, 18 of these factions had been supplied by the CIA via the so-called MOM Operations Room in Turkey.
The latter was a joint intelligence operation of the ‘Friends of Syria’. It was organized for the explicit purpose of supporting the armed opposition to Assad and the then legitimate government in Damascus. Fourteen factions of the 28 were also recipients of Washington-supplied TOW anti-tank guided missiles, which are heavy-duty lethal and costly to boot.
Yet at the time of the Donald’s Congressional rebuke in 2019, the NYT wanted us to believe that the 70,000-90,000 armed ruffians that had been aligned under the Syrian National Army were simply outcasts and misfits who came together spontaneously and that Washington had nothing to do with it!
Indeed, the facts on the ground were so damn obvious that it was clear the Imperial City and its media megaphones have been reduced to blithering stupidity and mendacious humbug, staring with the flagrant contradictions and lies that has flowed from the lips of every War Party factotum and bag-carrier that filled the airways and cyberspace when the Donald unsuccessfully tried to pull the plug on American ground forces in Syria.
To wit, the risible claim that Trump’s action was a signal to the rag-tag remnant of ISIS to reconquer the territory in north and eastern Syria from which they had recently been routed. But for crying out loud, the only reason the caliphate briefly implanted itself in the god-forsaken region of eastern Syria was that Washington and the petro-states had prevented the Syrian government and its allies from policing and protecting its own territory; and from safeguarding Syria’s meager oil fields in the northeast, which for a brief period of time ISIS looted in order to fund its pretensions to being a state with an army.
But as this map below from the end of September 2019 shows, the caliphate was long gone. And the remnants of the affiliated jihadi forces in Idlib (purple area) would likely rendezvous with their 13 virgins soon – once Trump had greenlighted the Syrian government and its Russian/Iranian allies to finish them off.
Equally, importantly, all the handwringing about the Kurds was vastly exaggerated. They had made their deal with Assad. In completing the re-conquest and unification of his own country, he had every reason to abide by the arrangement which has already re-established Syrian military control in strategic towns on the Turkish border.
Moreover, for reasons amplified further below, Turkey’s goal was the establishment of a “safe zone” signified by the white hash marks over the then Kurdish controlled (blue area) part of Syria. The purpose was to move the US-armed YPG/SDF 20 miles inland from its border – given the fact that rightly or wrongly Erdogan considers Kurdish separatism and armed insurrection an existential threat to the Turkish state.
In any event, within days the YPG/SDF had moved out of the safe zone, thereby permitting Turkey to call off the attack permanently, and re-purposing the corridor into a staging and processing area for the repatriation of some 3.6 million Syrian who have fled to refugee camps in Turkey.
In fact, deals made behind the scenes had already paved the way for a sustainable pacification of Syria for the first time since Washington and its allies mugged the Syrian state during the 2011 Arab Spring:
- During the summer of 2019 Trump announced his intention to withdraw US troops from all of Syria, starting with Rojava on the express condition of cutting the line of communication between Iran and Lebanon.
- Turkey entered into this commitment in exchange for a military occupation of the Syrian border strip from which YPG “terrorist” artillery could otherwise bombard it.
- Russia has indicated that it does not support the YPG/SDF armed state of Rojava and would accept Turkish intervention if the Christian population were allowed to return to its land – a condition to which Turkey has acquiesced.
- Syria has indicated that it would not repel a Turkish move into the safe zone if it could liberate an equivalent territory in the Idleb govern orate. Turkey had accepted this.
- Iran has indicated that, although it disapproved of Turkish intervention, it would intervene only for the benefit of the Shiites and was not interested in the fate of the incipient Kurdish state of Rojava.
And, yet, as we will see in my next piece, it all came apart under the Biden Administration for one simple reason: The Trump Derangement Syndrome afflicted Dems could not abide a deal that Trump had greenlighted and which his alleged doppelganger, Vlad Putin, had also embraced.
David Stockman was a two-term Congressman from Michigan. He was also the Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan. After leaving the White House, Stockman had a 20-year career on Wall Street. He’s the author of three books, The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed, The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America, TRUMPED! A Nation on the Brink of Ruin… And How to Bring It Back, and the recently released Great Money Bubble: Protect Yourself From The Coming Inflation Storm. He also is founder of David Stockman’s Contra Corner and David Stockman’s Bubble Finance Trader.
