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On 12/19/16 3:31 PM, Carl G. Estabrook wrote:
I’m sure you’ve seen Andrew Cockburn, "A Special Relationship: The United
States is teaming up with Al Qaeda, again,” Harper’s (January 2016).
Actually, there was an exchange of letters between me and him over this
rancid article:
Andrew Cockburn depicts a White House that is bent on regime change in
Syria, despite a New York Times report from October 2013, which stated
that from the beginning, “Obama made it clear to his aides that he did
not envision an American military intervention.” Cockburn suggests that
the eventual intervention was part of a master plan concocted by the
Saudis to thwart Shiite influence in the region. But such a plan does
not square with the invasion of Iraq, which resulted in the rise of a
Shiite regime that has alienated Sunnis so much that they have come to
see the Islamic State as a lesser evil in Anbar province. This is to say
nothing of the Pentagon training program for Syrian rebels, which
required trainees to agree in advance that their weapons would be used
only against the Islamic State, not against the soldiers of Bashar
al-Assad. If this is a proxy war, it is not a very good one.
The White House has been far more determined to punish Al Qaeda, through
its drone attacks in Afghanistan and elsewhere. The sad truth is that
the most effective intervention in Syria has come from Assad’s allies.
Iran, Russia, and Hezbollah have now joined forces with the Baathist
military to destroy non–Islamic State rebels who took up arms after
peaceful protesters were attacked by government snipers. The failure of
Cockburn to acknowledge the scorched-earth tactics of this unholy
alliance is regrettable.
Louis Proyect
New York City
(This was an abridgement of my original letter to Harpers that was not
intended for publication:
https://louisproyect.org/2015/12/29/andrew-cockburn-joins-the-baathist-amen-corner/)
Andrew Cockburn responds:
Louis Proyect’s string of misconceptions usefully reflects the addled
thinking of the administration, its allies, and the media, which has
done so much to prolong Syria’s agony. Obama forswore as politically
impossible military intervention (excepting the anti–Islamic State air
campaign) in Syria. Instead he opted for covert action, in collusion
with regional allies, that was aimed at displacing the Assad regime.
Since he and other administration officials repeatedly stressed that
“Assad must go” and supported armed opposition forces as a means to that
end, it is hard to see why eschewing direct military intervention
indicated a contrary policy. The United States and Saudi Arabia have
pursued the same policy in Syria. This is confirmed not merely by their
public statements; as I revealed in my article, the United States
actively enabled Saudi arms supplies to flow to that country’s jihadist
proxies. The loud complaints last fall that Russia was bombing
“CIA-backed moderates” (who were embedded with an Al Qaeda coalition) on
the front lines against Assad’s forces give the lie to assertions that
we were interested only in fighting the Islamic State.
---
I had the last word on my blog:
There’s not much more to say here except that it is patently absurd to
link me to the “addled thinking of the administration” especially when
there are reports of John Kerry and Sergey Lavrov being united around
the need to keep the ghoulish Assad regime intact out of the
Chamblerlain-Ribbentrop playbook. Unfortunately space limitations
prevented me from getting too deep into Cockburn’s “Assad must go”
nonsense so let me reprise it here and be done with it. From my blog
post on Andrew Cockburn’s idiotic article:
In fact there was zero interest in a large-scale intervention in Syria
in either civilian or military quarters. All this is documented in a NY
Times article from October 22nd 2013, written when the alarums over a
looming war with Syria were at their loudest, that stated “from the
beginning, Mr. Obama made it clear to his aides that he did not envision
an American military intervention, even as public calls mounted that
year for a no-fly zone to protect Syrian civilians from bombings.” The
article stressed the role of White House Chief of Staff Dennis
McDonough, who had frequently clashed with the hawkish Samantha Power.
In contrast to Power and others with a more overtly “humanitarian
intervention” perspective, McDonough “who had perhaps the closest ties
to Mr. Obama, remained skeptical. He questioned how much it was in
America’s interest to tamp down the violence in Syria.”
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