The announcement last week by the United
States of the largest military aid
package in its history – to Israel – was
a win for both sides.
Israeli prime
minister Benjamin Netanyahu could boast
that his lobbying had boosted aid from
$3.1 billion a year to $3.8bn – a 22 per
cent increase – for a decade starting in
2019.
Mr Netanyahu has presented this as a
rebuff to those who accuse him of
jeopardising Israeli security interests
with his government’s repeated affronts
to the White House.
In the past weeks alone, defence
minister Avigdor Lieberman has compared
last year’s nuclear deal between
Washington and Iran with the 1938 Munich
pact, which bolstered Hitler; and Mr
Netanyahu has implied that US opposition
to settlement expansion is the same as
support for the “ethnic cleansing” of
Jews.
American president Barack Obama,
meanwhile, hopes to stifle his own
critics who insinuate that he is
anti-Israel. The deal should serve as a
fillip too for Hillary Clinton, the
Democratic party’s candidate to succeed
Mr Obama in November’s election.
In reality, however, the Obama
administration has quietly punished Mr
Netanyahu for his misbehaviour. Israeli
expectations of a $4.5bn-a-year deal
were whittled down after Mr Netanyahu
stalled negotiations last year as he
sought to recruit Congress to his battle
against the Iran deal.
In fact, Israel already receives
roughly $3.8bn – if Congress’s
assistance on developing missile defence
programmes is factored in. Notably,
Israel has been forced to promise not to
approach Congress for extra funds.
The deal takes into account neither
inflation nor the dollar’s depreciation
against the shekel.
A bigger blow still is the White
House’s demand to phase out a special
exemption that allowed Israel to spend
nearly 40 per cent of aid locally on
weapon and fuel purchases. Israel will
soon have to buy all its armaments from
the US, ending what amounted to a
subsidy to its own arms industry.
Nonetheless, Washington’s renewed
military largesse – in the face of
almost continual insults – inevitably
fuels claims that the Israeli tail is
wagging the US dog. Even The New York
Times has described the aid package as
“too big”.
Since the 1973 war, Israel has
received at least $100bn in military
aid, with more assistance hidden from
view. Back in the 1970s, Washington paid
half of Israel’s military budget. Today
it still foots a fifth of the bill,
despite Israel’s economic success.
But the US expects a return on its
massive investment. As the late Israeli
politician-general Ariel Sharon once
observed, Israel has been a US
“aircraft carrier” in the Middle East,
acting as the regional bully and
carrying out operations that benefit
Washington.
Almost no one blames the US for
Israeli attacks that wiped out Iraq’s
and Syria’s nuclear programmes. A
nuclear-armed Iraq or Syria would have
deterred later US-backed moves at regime
overthrow, as well as countering the
strategic advantage Israel derives from
its own nuclear arsenal.
In addition, Israel’s US-sponsored
military prowess is a triple boon to the
US weapons industry, the country’s most
powerful lobby. Public funds are
siphoned off to let Israel buy goodies
from American arms makers. That, in
turn, serves as a shop window for other
customers and spurs an endless and
lucrative game of catch-up in the rest
of the Middle East.
The first F-35 fighter jets to arrive
in Israel in December – their various
components produced in 46 US states –
will increase the clamour for the
cutting-edge warplane.
Israel is also a “front-line
laboratory”, as former Israeli army
negotiator Eival Gilady admitted at the
weekend, that develops and field-tests
new technology Washington can later use
itself.
The US is planning to buy back the
missile interception system Iron Dome –
which neutralises battlefield threats of
retaliation – it largely paid for.
Israel works closely too with the US in
developing cyberwarfare, such as the
Stuxnet worm that damaged Iran’s
civilian nuclear programme.
But the clearest message from
Israel’s new aid package is one
delivered to the Palestinians:
Washington sees no pressing strategic
interest in ending the occupation. It
stood up to Mr Netanyahu over the Iran
deal but will not risk a damaging clash
over Palestinian statehood.
Some believe that Mr Obama signed the
aid package to win the credibility
necessary to overcome his domestic
Israel lobby and pull a rabbit from the
hat: an initiative, unveiled shortly
before he leaves office, that corners Mr
Netanyahu into making peace.
Hopes have been raised by an expected
meeting at the United Nations in New
York on Wednesday. But their first talks
in 10 months are planned only to
demonstrate unity to confound critics of
the aid deal.
If Mr Obama really wanted to pressure
Mr Netanyahu, he would have used the aid
agreement as leverage. Now Mr Netanyahu
need not fear US financial retaliation,
even as he intensifies effective
annexation of the West Bank.
Mr Netanyahu has drawn the right
lesson from the aid deal – he can act
against the Palestinians with continuing
US impunity.
- See more at: http://www.jonathan-cook.net/2016-09-19/palestinians-lose-in-us-military-aid-deal-with-israel/#sthash.fL4Eq28N.dpuf
How the US Armed-up Syrian Jihadists
The West blames Russia for the bloody mess
in Syria, but U.S. Special Forces saw close
up how the chaotic U.S. policy of aiding
Syrian jihadists enabled Al Qaeda and ISIS
to rip Syria apart, explains ex-British
diplomat Alastair Crooke.
By Alastair Crooke
September 30, 2016 "Information
Clearing House"
- "Consortium
News"
- “No one on the ground believes in
this mission or this effort”, a former Green
Beret writes of
America’s covert and clandestine programs to
train and arm Syrian insurgents, “they know
we are just training the next generation of
jihadis, so they are sabotaging it by
saying, ‘Fuck it, who cares?’”. “I don’t
want to be responsible for Nusra guys saying
they were trained by Americans,” the Green
Beret added.
In
a detailed report, US Special Forces Sabotage
White House Policy gone Disastrously Wrong
with Covert Ops in Syria, Jack Murphy,
himself a former Green Beret (U.S. Special
Forces), recounts a
former CIA officer having told him how the
“the Syria covert action program is [CIA
Director John] Brennan’s baby …Brennan was
the one who breathed life into the Syrian
Task Force … John Brennan loved that
regime-change bullshit.”
In
gist, Murphy tells the story of U.S. Special
Forces under one Presidential authority,
arming Syrian anti-ISIS forces,
whilst the CIA, obsessed with overthrowing
President Bashar al-Assad, and operating
under a separate Presidential authority,
conducts a separate and parallel program to
arm anti-Assad insurgents.
Murphy’s report makes clear the CIA disdain
for combatting ISIS (though this
altered somewhat with the beheading of
American journalist James Foley in August
2014): “With the CIA wanting little to do
with anti-ISIS operations as they are
focused on bringing down the Assad regime,
the agency kicked the can over to 5th
Special Forces Group. Basing themselves out
of Jordan and Turkey” — operating under
“military activities” authority, rather than
under the CIA’s coveted Title 50 covert
action authority.
The
“untold story,” Murphy writes, is one of
abuse, as well as bureaucratic infighting,
which has only contributed to perpetuating
the Syrian conflict.
But
it is not the “turf wars,” nor the “abuse
and waste,” which occupies the central part
of Murphy’s long report, that truly matters;
nor even the contradictory and
self-defeating nature of U.S. objectives
pursued. Rather, the report tells us quite
plainly why the attempted ceasefires have
failed (although this is not explicitly
treated in the analysis), and it helps
explain why parts of the U.S. Administration
(Defense Secretary Ashton Carter and CIA
Director Brenner) have declined to comply
with President Obama’s will – as expressed
in the diplomatic accord (the recent
ceasefire) reached with the Russian
Federation.
The
story is much worse than that hinted in
Murphy’s title: it underlies the present
mess which constitutes relations between the
U.S. and Russia, and the collapse of the
ceasefire.
“The FSA [the alleged “moderates” of the
Free Syria Army] made for a viable partner
force for the CIA on the surface,
as they were anti-regime, ostensibly having
the same goal as the seventh floor at
Langley” [the floor of the CIA headquarters
occupied by the Director and his staff] –
i.e. the ousting of President Assad.
But
in practice, as Murphy states bluntly:
“distinguishing between the FSA and al-Nusra
is impossible, because they are virtually
the same organization. As early as 2013, FSA
commanders were defecting with their entire
units to join al-Nusra. There, they still
retain the FSA monicker, but it is merely
for show, to give the appearance of
secularism so they can maintain access to
weaponry provided by the CIA and Saudi
intelligence services. The reality is that
the FSA is little more than a cover for the
al-Qaeda-affiliated al-Nusra. …
“The fact that the FSA simply passed
American-made weaponry off to al-Nusra is
also unsurprising considering that the CIA’s
vetting process of militias in Syria is
lacklustre, consisting of little more than
running traces in old databases. These
traces rely on knowing the individuals’ real
names in the first place, and assume that
they were even fighting-age males when the
data was collected by CTC [Counterterrorism
Centre] years prior.”
Sympathy for Al Qaeda
Nor, confirms Murphy, was vetting any better
with the 5th Special Forces operating out of
Turkey: “[It consisted of] a database check
and an interview. The rebels know how to
sell themselves to the Americans during such
interviews, but they still let things slip
occasionally. ‘I don’t understand why people
don’t like al-Nusra,’ one rebel told the
American soldiers. Many had sympathies with
the terrorist groups such as Nusra and
ISIS.”
Others simply were not fit to be soldiers.
“They don’t want to be warriors. They are
all cowards. That is the moderate rebel,” a
Green Beret told Murphy, who adds:
“Pallets of weapons and rows
of trucks delivered to Turkey for
American-sponsored rebel groups simply sit
and collect dust because of disputes over
title authorities [i.e. Presidential
authorities] and funding sources, while
authorization to conduct training for the
militias is turned on and off at a whim. One
day they will be told to train, the next day
not to, and the day after only to train
senior leaders. Some Green Berets believe
that this hesitation
comes from the White House getting wind that
most of the militia members are affiliated
with Nusra and other extremist groups.”
[emphasis added.]
Murphy writes: “While the games continue on,
morale sinks for the Special Forces men in
Turkey. Often disguised in Turkish military
uniform, one of the Green Berets described
his job as, ‘Sitting in the back room,
drinking chai while watching the Turks train
future terrorists’ …
“Among the rebels that U.S. Special Forces
and Turkish Special Forces were training, ‘A
good 95 percent of them were either working
in terrorist organizations or were
sympathetic to them,’ a Green Beret
associated with the program said, adding, ‘A
good majority of them admitted that they had
no issues with ISIS and that their issue was
with the Kurds and the Syrian regime.’”
Buried in the text is this stunning one-line
conclusion: “after ISIS is defeated, the
real war begins. CIA-backed FSA
elements will openly become al-Nusra; while
Special Forces-backed FSA elements like the
New Syrian Army will fight alongside the
Assad regime. Then the CIA’s militia and
the Special Forces’ militia will kill each
other.”
Well, that says it all: the U.S. has created
a ‘monster’ which it cannot control if it
wanted to (and Ashton Carter and John
Brennan have no interest to “control it” —
they still seek to use it).
U.S.
Objectives in Syria
Professor Michael Brenner, having attended a
high-level combined U.S. security and
intelligence conference in Texas last week, summed
up their apparent objectives in
Syria, inter alia, as:
–Thwarting Russia in Syria.
–Ousting Assad.
–Marginalizing and weakening Iran by
breaking the Shi’ite Crescent.
–Facilitating some kind of Sunni entity in
Anbar and eastern Syria. How can we prevent
it falling under the sway of al-Qaeda?
Answer: Hope that the Turks can
“domesticate” al-Nusra.
–Wear down and slowly fragment ISIS. Success
on this score can cover failure on all
others in domestic opinion.
Jack Murphy explains
succinctly why this “monster” cannot be
controlled: “In December of 2014, al-Nusra
used the American-made TOW missiles to rout
another anti-regime CIA proxy force called
the Syrian Revolutionary Front from several
bases in Idlib province. The
province is now the de facto caliphate of
al-Nusra.
That Nusra captured TOW missiles from the
now-defunct Syrian Revolutionary Front is
unsurprising, but that the same anti-tank
weapons supplied to the FSA ended up in
Nusra hands is even less surprising when one
understands the internal dynamics of the
Syrian conflict, i.e. the factional warfare
between the disparate American forces, with
the result that “Many [U.S. military
trainers] are actively sabotaging the
programs by stalling and doing nothing,
knowing that the supposedly secular rebels
they are expected to train are actually
al-Nusra terrorists.”
How
then could there ever be the separation of
“moderates” from Al-Nusra – as required by
the two cessations of hostilities accords (February and September
2016)? The entire Murphy narrative
shows that the “moderates” and al-Nusra cannot
meaningfully be distinguished from each
other, let alone separated from each
other, because “they are virtually the same
organization.”
The
Russians are right: the CIA and the Defense
Department never
had the intention to comply with the
accord – because they could not. The
Russians are also right that the U.S. has
had no intention to defeat al-Nusra – as
required by U.N. Security Council Resolution
2268 (2016).
So
how did the U.S. get into this “Left
Hand/Right Hand” mess – with the U.S.
President authorizing an accord with the
Russian Federation, while in parallel, his
Defense Secretary was refusing to comply
with it? Well, one interesting snippet in
Murphy’s piece refers to “hesitations” in
the militia training program thought to stem
from the White House getting wind that most
of the militia members were “affiliated with
Nusra and other extremist groups.”
Obama’s Inklings
It
sounds from this as if the White House
somehow only had “inklings” of “the jihadi
monster” emerging in Syria – despite that
understanding being common knowledge to most
on-the-ground trainers in Syria. Was this
so? Did Obama truly believe that there were
“moderates” who could be separated? Or, was
he persuaded by someone to go along with it,
in order to give a “time out” in order for
the CIA to re-supply its insurgent forces
(the CIA inserted 3,000 tons of weapons and
munitions to the insurgents during the
February 2016 ceasefire, according to IHS
Janes’)
Support for the hypothesis that Obama may
not have been fully aware of this
reality comes from Yochi Dreazen and Séan
Naylor (Foreign Policy’s senior
staff writer on counter-terrorism and
intelligence), who noted (in
May 2015) that Obama himself seemed to take
a shot at the CIA and other intelligence
agencies in an interview in late 2014, when
he said the community had collectively
“underestimated” how much Syria’s chaos
would spur the emergence of the Islamic
State.
In
the same article, Naylor charts the power of
the CIA as rooted in its East Coast Ivy
League power network, its primacy within the
intelligence machinery, its direct access to
the Oval Office and its nearly unqualified
support in Congress. Naylor illustrates the
CIA’s privileged position within the
Establishment by quoting Hank Crumpton, who
had a long CIA career before becoming the
State Department’s coordinator for
counterterrorism.
Crumpton told Foreign
Policy that when “then-Director
Tenet, declared ‘war’ on Al-Qaeda as far
back as 1998, “you didn’t have the Secretary
of Defense [declaring war]; you didn’t have
the FBI director or anyone else in the
intelligence community taking that kind of
leadership role.”
Perhaps it is simply – in Obama’s prescient
words – the case that “the CIA
usually gets what it wants.”
Perhaps it did: Putin demonized, (and Trump
tarred by association); the Sunni Al Qaeda
“monster” – now too powerful to be easily
defeated, but too weak to completely succeed
– intended as the “albatross” hung around
Russia and Iran’s neck, and damn the
Europeans whose back will be broken by waves
of ensuing refugees. Pity Syria.
Alastair Crooke is a former British diplomat
who was a senior figure in British
intelligence and in European Union
diplomacy. He is the founder and director of
the Conflicts Forum, which advocates for
engagement between political Islam and the
West. |