August 31, 2016
Exclusive: As pressure
again builds on President Obama to attack Syria and press a new Cold War with
Russia, the extraordinary events of three years ago after a sarin attack
near Damascus are worth revisiting, says ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.
By Ray McGovern
Three years ago, when a
reluctant President Barack Obama was about to launch an attack on Syria,
supposedly in retaliation for President Bashar al-Assad crossing a “red line”
against using chemical weapons, Obama smelled a rat – or rather he sensed a
mousetrap.
Advised by some of his
intelligence advisers that the evidence blaming the Syrian government for the
lethal sarin attack was weak, Obama disappointed many of Washington’s neocons
and liberal war hawks, including those in his own administration, by deferring
action. He tossed the issue to Congress, thus guaranteeing a delay.
Precisely at that key juncture,
Russian President Vladimir Putin took the pressure off Obama by persuading the
Syrian government to destroy its chemical weapons, which Assad did – while
still denying any role in the attack at Ghouta, just outside Damascus, on Aug.
21, 2013.
Washington’s hardliners were
left aching for their lost opportunity to attack Syria by citing the Ghouta
attack as acasus belli. But the evidence suggested, instead, a
well-orchestrated Syrian rebel false-flag operation aimed at fabricating a
pretext for direct U.S. intervention in the war on Syria.
With Putin’s assistance in
getting Assad to surrender the chemical weapons, Obama was able to extricate
himself from the corner that he had rather clumsily painted himself into with
his earlier bravado talk about a “red line.”
But Washington’s irate neocons
and many of their liberal-interventionist chums felt cheated out of their
almost-war. After all, Syria had been on the neocon “regime change” list
as long as Iraq and was supposed to follow the 2003 Iraq invasion if that
neocon-driven adventure had not turned out so disastrously.
Still, the neocons would make
Putin pay for his interference six months later by promoting an anti-Russian
putsch in Ukraine, followed by U.S. and European Union sanctions to punish
Russia for its “aggression.” [See Consortiumnews.com’s “What
Neocons Want from Ukraine Crisis.“]
According to Jeffrey Goldberg
who conducted a series of interviews with Obama for a lengthy article in The
Atlantic, the President boasted about his decision on Aug. 30, 2013, to resist
pressure for military action from many of his advisers and instead step outside
what he called “the Washington playbook.”
Goldberg described the day as
Obama’s “liberation day.” For Secretary of State John Kerry, however, Aug.
30 ended in disappointment after earlier that day he had shaken the rafters at
the State Department bellowing for a U.S. attack on Syria.
Goldberg explained that having
already caved in under hardline pressure to double down on sending more troops
to Afghanistan for a feckless “counterinsurgency” operation in 2009, Obama was
not in the mood for “seeking new dragons to slay” merely to preserve his
“credibility.”
According to Goldberg, within
the White House, Obama would argue that “dropping bombs on someone to prove
that you’re willing to drop bombs on someone is just about the worst reason to
use force.”
Nevertheless, Washington’s
neocons and liberal hawks – along with the Saudis, Israelis and French – argued
strenuously that Obama was obliged to “retaliate” for Syria’s alleged violation
of the “red line” he had set a year earlier against Syria’s using – or merely
moving – chemical weapons.
Goldberg wrote that Kerry told
Obama that he was expecting the President to give the final order for a
military strike on Syria on Aug. 31 – the day after Kerry’s afternoon cri
de guerre and Obama’s evening volte-face.
Obama: Sensing a Trap
It took uncharacteristic grit
for Obama to face down his advisers and virtually Washington’s entire foreign
policy establishment by calling off the planned attack on Syria at the last
minute.
Goldberg wrote that Obama had
“come to believe that he was walking into a trap — one laid both by allies and
by adversaries, and by conventional expectations of what an American president
is supposed to do.”
Shortly after Kerry delivered
his Aug. 30 philippic at the State Department, in which he blamed the Syrian
government no fewer than 35 times for the chemical attack at Ghouta, Obama
chose to spend an hour with his Chief of Staff, Denis McDonough, on the South
Lawn of the White House.
Goldberg noted: “Obama did not
choose McDonough randomly: He is the Obama aide most averse to U.S. military
intervention, and someone who, in the words of one of his colleagues, ‘thinks
in terms of traps.’”
It was an important
conversation. In my view, Obama’s willingness to listen and then assert
himself can be seen as a dress rehearsal for the kind of leadership that was
required to hammer out a deal on the nuclear issue with Iran. The
President ended up putting a tighter rein on Kerry and ordered him to avail
himself of Moscow’s help in negotiating last year’s landmark deal restraining
Iran’s ability to acquire a nuclear weapon.
In that venue also, Putin and
Russia Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov proved helpful, and both Obama and Kerry
have expressed appreciation for Russia’s assistance in closing that major deal.
Still, in late September 2013,
after the dust had settled regarding the Syrian mousetrap – with the
Putin-brokered agreement on track to destroy Syria’s chemical weapons on a U.S.
ship specially configured for that purpose – it must have become crystal clear
to Obama that he had come within inches of letting himself be tricked into
starting yet another unnecessary war.
The first step into that trap
had come a year earlier, when he was persuaded to set down a red line against
Syria’s using or even moving its chemical weapons.
At the end of an impromptu press conference on
Aug. 20, 2012, NBC’s Chuck Todd primed the mousetrap with some cheese by asking
what seemed like an expected question that Obama appeared ready to answer. Todd
asked a two-part question (one part was about Mitt Romney’s taxes and the other
about Syria’s chemical weapons). Obama eventually wound around to the
Syrian part of Todd’s question:
“I have, at this point, not
ordered military engagement … But the point that you made about chemical
and biological weapons is critical. That’s an issue that doesn’t just
concern Syria; it concerns our close allies in the region, including
Israel. It concerns us. … We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but
also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is we start seeing
a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That
would change my calculus. That would change my equation.”
Clinton’s Hand
It is a safe bet that
this answer was pushed by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her
neocon advisers who had made no secret of their determination to topple Bashar
al-Assad, one way or another. The Washington Post account of
the press conference suggests that White House staffers had been blindsided and
were trying to put the best face on it.
Then-Secretary of Defense Leon
Panetta told Jeffrey Goldberg, “I didn’t know it [the red line] was
coming.” Goldberg added that Vice President Joe Biden had repeatedly
warned Obama against drawing a red line on chemical weapons, fearing that it
would one day have to be enforced.
Ten days before Obama’s
impromptu press conference, Clinton met with her Turkish counterpart in
Istanbul and emphasized the need to jointly plan ways to assist the rebels
fighting to topple Assad – including possibly implementing a no-fly zone.
Clinton announced the establishment of a working group in Turkey to respond to
the Syrian crisis, according to The Associated Press. The group would
increase the Syrian involvement of the intelligence services and militaries of
both the U.S. and Turkey.
“We have been closely
coordinating over the course of this conflict, but now we need to get into the
real details of such operational planning. It needs to be across both of our
governments,” Clinton said.
The urgent tone reflected the
reality that in early 2012, Syrian government forces were beginning to prevail
in key parts of the country. Middle Eastern history and politics Professor
Jeremy Salt of Bilkent University, Ankara, noted that the Syrian opposition had
little hope of being effective without help from the West.
Professor Salt pointed out
that Damascus had mostly been cleared of rebels and Aleppo was on its way to
being cleared, with the rebels very much “on the back foot. … that’s why
Hillary Clinton is in Istanbul. To ask the basic question, ‘What’s next?’”
Foreign affairs analyst
Richard Heydarian put it this way: “What the Clinton administration [sic] is
trying to do right now is try to coordinate some sort of military approach with
Turkey and possibly also with the help of Israel and Arab countries because they
feel the opposition has a chance to retain its stronghold in Aleppo.”
These were signs of the
times. Washington’s hawks felt something needed to be done to stanch rebel
losses, and Turkey was eager to help – so much so that it appears likely that Turkey
played a key role in enabling and coordinating the sarin false-flag
attack in Ghouta a year later. [Also, see “A
Call for Proof on Syria Sarin Attack.”]
Evidence reported by
Seymour Hersh in April 2014 in the London Review of Books implicates Turkish
intelligence and extremist Syrian rebels, NOT the “Syrian regime.” Hersh
does his customarily thorough job of picking apart the story approved by the
Establishment.
A Convenient Sarin Attack
So, sure enough, a sarin gas
attack took place in Ghouta on Aug. 21, 2013, a year and a day after Obama set
his red line. The Washington establishment and its surrogate media
stenographers immediately blamed the attack on Bashar al-Assad – a pantomime
villain whom Western media shoehorn into the same category as its other
favorite bête noire, Vladimir Putin.
Of course, you would not have
learned this history from reading the “mainstream media,” which operated with
the same sort of “group think” that is demonstrated before the disastrous
invasion of Iraq, but evidence was
available at the time and accumulating evidence since then has put the
finger on jihadist rebels as the most likely sarin culprits. Intelligence
reporting showed that they were getting sarin precursors from Europe via Turkey
and making “homemade sarin.”
Though the behind-the-scenes
story was ignored by the major U.S. news media, Hersh reported that
British intelligence officials promptly acquired a sarin sample from the debris
of the Aug. 21 attack, ran it through their laboratory, and determined it NOT
to be the kind of sarin in Syrian army stocks.
(Hersh holds the uncommon
twin-distinction of being the quintessential investigative, Pulitzer
Prize-winning reporter during an earlier era of more independent American
journalism and now being blacklisted from today’s U.S. “mainstream media” which
shuns such independence in favor of government “access” and lucrative
careers. This is why he must go to the London Review of Books to get
published.)
In late 2013, Hersh reported that
the al-Nusra Front, a jihadi group affiliated with Al Qaeda had mastered the
mechanics of making sarin and should have been an obvious suspect. But U.S.
Ambassador to the U.N. (and a top proponent of “humanitarian” wars) Samantha
Power told the media the opposite. After all, blaming the sarin attack on
Assad was just what Power and the other hawks needed to push Obama into a major
retaliatory strike on Syria.
Hersh noted that intelligence
analysts became so upset with “the administration cherry-picking intelligence”
to “justify” a strike on Assad that the analysts were “throwing their hands in
the air and saying, ‘How can we help this guy [Obama] when he and his cronies
in the White House make up the intelligence as they go along?’”
Writing in December 2013,
Hersh asked if “we have the whole story of Obama’s willingness to walk away
from his ‘red line’ threat to bomb Syria. … It appears possible that at some
point he was directly confronted with contradictory information: evidence
strong enough to persuade him to cancel his attack plan, and take the criticism
sure to come from Republicans.”
We Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) tried
to warn Obama shortly after the sarin attack. But we have little
reason to believe that our Memoranda
to the President are high on his reading list.
More likely, Obama was brought
up short when, a few days before Aug. 30, 2013, he was paid a visit by James
Clapper, Director of National Intelligence. According to Goldberg’s account,
Clapper interrupted the President’s morning intelligence briefing “to make
clear that the intelligence on Syria’s use of sarin gas, while robust, was not
a ‘slam dunk.’
“He chose the term carefully.
Clapper, the chief of an intelligence community traumatized by its failures in
the run-up to the Iraq War, was not going to overpromise, in the manner of the
onetime CIA director George Tenet, who famously guaranteed George W. Bush a
‘slam dunk’” regarding all those non-existent WMD in Iraq.
Or, who knows? We should
allow for the chance that the President was told the truth by someone else in
his entourage.
Pay-Back for Putin
For his part, Russian
President Putin had the gall to think that Moscow’s help on Syria might bring a
more cooperative spirit in Washington and a chance to cultivate healthy
bilateral relations based on mutual interest and respect. He even suggested
that Washington might consider abandoning the notion that the U.S. is more
equal, so to speak, than other nations.
Perhaps a bit deluded in the
immediate afterglow of having helped Obama steer away from an unnecessary war
in Syria, Putin published a highly unusual op-ed in the New York Times on Sept.
11, 2013. Putin reportedly drafted the final paragraph himself. It is
worth citing in full:
“My working and personal
relationship with President Obama is marked by growing trust. I appreciate
this. I carefully studied his address to the nation on Tuesday. And I
would rather disagree with a case he made on American exceptionalism, stating
that the United States’ policy is ‘what makes America different. It’s what
makes us exceptional.’ It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see
themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation. There are big countries and
small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those
still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ, too. We are all
different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that
God created us equal.”
So, if you are still wondering
why the neocons and their complicit mainstream media have made Putin into the
devil incarnate, think about his sin of pulling Obama’s chestnuts out of the
fire in September 2013 when war with Syria was so tantalizingly close. The
neocons would make Putin pay for that by moving into high gear plans for a coup
d’etat in Ukraine six months later (Feb. 22, 2014), as Putin’s
attention was focused on the Winter Olympics in Sochi and the fear that it
would be disrupted by a terrorist attack.
In more than a half century
watching U.S. presidential administrations develop foreign policy, I have not
seen a more bizarre sequence of events.
[I provide more detail on the
play-by-play during the fall 2013 imbroglio on Syria in a 30-minute video.]
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