This piece was reprinted by OpEd News with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.
U.S.-backed Syrian 'moderate' rebels smile as they prepare to behead a 12-year-old boy (left), whose severed head is held aloft triumphantly in a later part of the video.
(Image by [Screenshot from the YouTube video]) Details DMCA
Obama has allowed bureaucratic warfare to break out between Secretary of State John Kerry and Defense Secretary Ashton Carter over what to do in Syria. Kerry has pressed, successfully, for Russia's help in putting an end to the carnage; but Carter and the military would rather not cooperate with Russia -- no matter what the White House might wish.
So as Obama waffles -- and the U.S.-led air war over Syria massacred scores of Syrian soldiers on Saturday -- the hopes for a limited cease-fire have collapsed. Even if he summoned the courage to tell his inept national security adviser, Susan Rice, to tell Secretary Carter and the Pentagon to get in line, it probably wouldn't help at this point.
One of Obama's greatest fears seems to be that Israeli leaders will denounce him and whip up another political-media storm against him. Obama has been stung by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's animosity before, such as when Netanyahu embraced Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney in the run-up to Election 2012.
After Obama prevailed for reelection anyway, you might have thought the President -- arguably at the height of his political power -- would have given Netanyahu the cold shoulder. Instead, Obama rushed off for a three-day visit to Israel, behaving as some kind of supplicant begging forgiveness rather than the leader of the most powerful nation on earth.
Having taken a measure of Obama, Netanyahu brazenly opposed the President's nuclear negotiation with Iran, even appearing before a joint session of Congress to call on America's elected representatives to side with him against the U.S. president.
Obama responded by giving Israel a $38 billion arms package, the largest ever. No matter the affront, Obama has never stopped looking over his shoulder at Israel and its powerful U.S. lobby. Indeed, one could argue that Obama's feckless policy toward Syria has served Netanyahu's interests very well by destroying and destabilizing another Arab nation on Israel's borders.
Though Obama did resist pressure from Clinton and other hawks to engage in a more aggressive military operation against Syria, he secretly agreed to arm and train anti-government rebels who then joined with Al Qaeda's affiliate. However, when Al Qaeda's spinoff terror group, the Islamic State, began chopping off the heads of Western hostages in 2014, Obama authorized aerial bombing and Special Forces operations inside Syria against the Islamic State.
The Israeli Motive
Though Israeli leaders and their friends in Washington sought instead the outright overthrow of Syria's government, Obama's waffling has achieved Israel's primary goal of weakening a sometimes hostile neighbor and ally of Iran and Lebanon's Hezbollah militia. That, in turn, has bought Netanyahu more time to expand Israeli settlements on Palestinian lands.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton meets with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem, Nov. 21, 2012.
(Image by [State Department photo]) Details DMCA
In candid moments, some senior Israeli officials have admitted that their preferred outcome in Syria is "no outcome," as reported three years ago by the New York Times Jerusalem Bureau Chief, Jodi Rudoren.
"More quietly, Israelis have increasingly argued that the best outcome for Syria's two-and-a-half-year-old civil war, at least for the moment, is no outcome. ... This is a playoff situation [between Sunni and Shia] in which you need both teams to lose, but at least you don't want one to win -- we'll settle for a tie," said Alon Pinkas, former Israeli consul general in New York. "Let them both bleed, hemorrhage to death: that's the strategic thinking here. As long as this lingers, there's no real threat from Syria."
Another senior Israeli, then-Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren, offered a slightly different preference, that the Assad government, with its alliance with Iran and Lebanon's Hezbollah, would be overthrown even if that meant that Al Qaeda would prevail in Syria.
"The greatest danger to Israel is by the strategic arc that extends from Tehran, to Damascus to Beirut. And we saw the Assad regime as the keystone in that arc," Oren told the Jerusalem Post. "We always wanted Bashar Assad to go, we always preferred the bad guys who weren't backed by Iran to the bad guys who were backed by Iran."
But such frank assessments by Israel received little attention in the U.S. news media and Israel's stake in the Syrian chaos was quickly forgotten.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
7
6
3
