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How The
Military Excluded The White House From International
Syria Negotiations
By Moon Of
Alabama
December 21,
2016 "Information
Clearing House"
- "Moon
Of Alabama"
-
The NYT laments today that international
negotiations about the situation in Syria now continue
without any U.S. participation:
Russia, Iran and Turkey Meet for Syria
Talks, Excluding U.S.
Russia, Iran
and Turkey met in Moscow on Tuesday to work toward a
political accord to end Syria’s nearly six-year war,
leaving the United States on the sidelines as the
countries sought to drive the conflict in ways that
serve their interests.
Secretary
of State John Kerry was not invited. Nor was the
United Nations consulted.
With
pro-government forces having made critical gains on
the ground, ...
(Note: The last
sentence originally and correctly said "pro-Syrian
forces ...", not "pro-government forces ...". It
was altered
after I noted the "pro-Syrian" change of tone on
Twitter.)
Russia kicked
the U.S. out of any further talks about Syria after the
U.S. blew a deal which, after long delaying
negotiations, Kerry had made with the Russian Foreign
Minister Lavrov.
In a recent
interview Kerry
admits that it was opposition from the Pentagon, not
Moscow or Damascus, that had blown up his agreement with
Russia over Syria:
More recently,
he has clashed inside the administration with
Defense Secretary Ashton Carter. Kerry negotiated an
agreement with Russia to share joint military
operations, but it fell apart.
“Unfortunately we had divisions within our
own ranks that made the implementation of that
extremely hard to accomplish,” Kerry said.
“But I believe in it, I think it can work, could
have worked."
Kerry's
agreement with Russia did not just "fell apart". The
Pentagon actively sabotaged it by intentionally and
perfidiously attacking the Syrian army.
The deal with
Russia was made in June. It envisioned coordinated
attacks on ISIS and al-Qaeda in Syria, both designated
as terrorist under two UN Security Council resolutions
which call upon all countries to eradicate them. For
months the U.S. failed to separate its CIA and Pentagon
trained, supplied and paid "moderate rebel" from
al-Qaeda, thereby blocking the deal. In September the
deal was modified and finally ready to be implemented.
The Pentagon
still
did not like it but had been overruled by the White
House:
The agreement
that Secretary of State John Kerry announced with
Russia to reduce the killing in Syria has widened an
increasingly public divide between Mr. Kerry and
Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter, who has deep
reservations about the plan for American and Russian
forces to jointly target terrorist groups.
Mr. Carter was
among the administration officials who pushed
against the agreement on a conference call with the
White House last week as Mr. Kerry, joining the
argument from a secure facility in Geneva, grew
increasingly frustrated. Although President
Obama ultimately approved the effort after
hours of debate, Pentagon officials remain
unconvinced.
...
“I’m not saying yes or no,” Lt. Gen. Jeffrey
L. Harrigian, commander of the United States Air
Forces Central Command, told reporters on a
video conference call. “It would be premature to say
that we’re going to jump right into it.”
The CentCom
general threatened to not follow the decision his
Commander of Chief had taken. He would not have done so
without cover from Defense Secretary Ash Carter.
Three days
later U.S. CentCom Air Forces and allied
Danish airplanes attack Syrian army positions near
the ISIS besieged city of Deir Ezzor. During 37 air
attacks within one hour between 62 and 100 Syrian Arab
Army soldiers were killed and many more wounded. They
had held a defensive positions on hills overlooking the
Deir Ezzor airport. Shortly after the U.S. air attack
ISIS forces stormed the hills and have held them since.
Resupply for the 100,000+ civilians and soldiers in
Deir Ezzor is now endangered if not impossible. The
CentCom attack enabled ISIS to eventually conquer Deir
Ezzor and to establish the
envisioned "Salafist principality" in east Syria.
During the U.S.
attack the Syrian-Russian operations center had
immediately tried to contact the designated coordination
officer at U.S. Central Command to stop the attack. But
that officer could
not be reached and those at CentCom taking the
Russian calls just hanged up:
By time the
Russian officer found his designated contact — who
was away from his desk — and explained that the
coalition was actually hitting a Syrian army unit,
“a good amount of strikes” had already taken place,
U.S. Central Command spokesman Col. John Thomas told
reporters at the Pentagon Tuesday.
Until the
attack the Syrian and Russian side had, as agreed with
Kerry, kept to a ceasefire to allow the separation of
the "marbled" CIA and al-Qaeda forces. After the CentCom
air attack the Kerry-Lavrov deal
was off:
On the
sidelines of an emergency UN Security Council
meeting called on the matter, tempers were high.
Russia's permanent UN representative, Vitaly
Churkin, questioned the timing of the strikes, two
days before Russian-American coordination in the
fight against terror groups in Syria was to begin.
"I have never
seen such an extraordinary display of American
heavy-handedness," he said, after abruptly leaving
the meeting.
The Pentagon
launched one of its usual whitewash investigations and a
heavily
redacted summary report (pdf) was released in late
November.
Gareth Porter
still
found some usable bits in it:
The report,
released by US Central Command on 29 November, shows
that senior US Air Force officers at the Combined
Air Operations Center (CAOC) at al-Udeid Airbase in
Qatar, who were responsible for the decision to
carry out the September airstrike at Deir Ezzor:
- misled
the Russians about where the US intended to
strike so Russia could not warn that it was
targeting Syrian troops
-
ignored information and intelligence analysis
warning that the positions to be struck were
Syrian government rather than Islamic State
-
shifted abruptly from a deliberate targeting
process to an immediate strike in violation of
normal Air Force procedures
The
investigation was led by a Brigade General. He was too
low in rank to investigate or challenge the responsible
CentCom air-commander Lt. Gen. Harrington. The name of a
co-investigator was redacted in the report and marked as
"foreign government information". That officer was
likely from Denmark.
Four days after
the investigation report was officially released the
Danish government, without giving any public reason,
pulled back its air contingent from any further
operations under U.S. command in Iraq and Syria.
With the attack
on Deir Ezzor the Pentagon has:
- enabled
ISIS to win the siege in Deir Ezzor where 100,000+
civilians and soldiers are under threat of being
brutally killed
- cleared
the grounds for the establishment of an ISIS ruled "Salafist
principality" in east-Syria
- deceived a
European NATO ally and lost its active cooperation
over Syria and Iraq
- ruined
Kerry's deal with Russia about a coordinated fight
against UN designated terrorists in Syria
- kicked the
U.S. out of further international negotiations about
Syria
It is clear
that the responsible U.S. officer for the attack and its
consequences is one Lt. Gen. Jeffrey L. Harrigian who
had earlier publicly spoken out against a deal that his
Commander in Chief had agreed to. He likely had cover
from Defense Secretary Ash Carter.
The White House
did not react to this public military insubordination
and undermining of its diplomacy.
Emptywheel
notes that, though on a different issue, the CIA is
also in quite open insurrection against the President's
decisions:
[I]t alarms me
that someone decided it was a good idea to go leak
criticisms of a [presidential] Red Phone exchange.
It would seem that such an instrument depends on
some foundation of trust that, no matter how bad
things have gotten, two leaders of nuclear armed
states can speak frankly and directly.
The views
expressed in this article are the author's own and do
not necessarily reflect Information Clearing House
editorial policy. |
