Fearing Sanders as "Closet Realist"

How little Official Washington's neocon-dominated foreign policy elite has learned from the past couple of decades can be measured by reading the last line of Friday's Washington Post op-ed by David Ignatius, supposedly one of the deeper thinkers from the American pundit class.

Ignatius writes, regarding the Syrian mess, "It's never too late for the United States to do the right thing -- which is to build, carefully, the political and military framework for a new Syria."

Though Ignatius doesn't get into the nitty-gritty of his nation-building scheme, it should be obvious that for President Barack Obama to "do the right thing" in Ignatius's way of thinking, the U.S. military would first have to invade and occupy Syria, killing any Syrians, Iranians, Russians and others who might get in the way. Then there would be the tricky process of "carefully" putting Syria back together again amid the predictable IEDs, suicide bombings and sectarian strife.

One is tempted to simply dismiss Ignatius as not a serious person, but he is considered part of the creme de la creme of Official Washington's current foreign-policy establishment. He's sought after to moderate foreign policy conferences and he pontificates regularly from the well-read pages of The Washington Post.

But he is really just another example of how dangerous it was for the American people to exact no accountability from the hubristic neoconservatives and their "liberal interventionist" sidekicks for their many disastrous miscalculations and war crimes.

If Americans still had pitchforks, they should have chased down this arrogant elite for inflicting so much pain and bloodshed on both the people of these tragic countries and on the U.S. soldiers who were dispatched so casually to make the benighted policies work. There's also the little issue of the trillions of dollars in taxpayers' money wasted.

But the neocons are impervious to criticism from the "little people." Within the neocon "bubble," the Syrian crisis is just the result of President Obama not intervening earlier and bigger by shipping even more weapons to Syria's mythical "moderate" rebels.

No one ever wants to admit that these "moderates" were always dominated by Sunni jihadists and -- by 2012 -- had become essentially their front men for receiving sophisticated U.S. weapons before passing the hardware on, willingly or not, to Al Qaeda's Nusra Front, Islamic State and other extremist groups.

Read, for instance, a remarkable account from veteran foreign affairs writer Stephen Kinzer, who describes in a Boston Globe op-ed the reign of terror that the Syrian rebels have inflicted on the people of Aleppo, while the mainstream U.S. news media painted pretty pictures about these noble insurrectionists.

Kinzer scolds his media colleagues for their malfeasance in reporting on the Syrian crisis, writing: "Coverage of the Syrian war will be remembered as one of the most shameful episodes in the history of the American press. Reporting about carnage in the ancient city of Aleppo is the latest reason why."

Another inconvenient truth is that the "moderate" rebels of Aleppo operate hand in glove with Al Qaeda's Nusra Front. So much so that a proposal for a partial Syrian cease-fire failed because U.S. diplomats wanted to extend its protections to Al Qaeda's forces, also known inside Syria as Jabhat al-Nusra.

As The Washington Post's Karen DeYoung nonchalantly mentioned deep inside a story on Saturday, "Jabhat al-Nusra, whose forces are intermingled with moderate rebel groups in the northwest near the Turkish border, is particularly problematic. Russia was said to have rejected a U.S. proposal to leave Jabhat al-Nusra off-limits to bombing as part of the cease-fire, at least temporarily, until the groups can be sorted out."

In other words, the cease-fire plan is being delayed -- and possibly killed -- because the Obama administration doesn't want the Syrian army and the Russian air force attacking Al Qaeda.

This strange reality underscores reporting by Mideast expert Gareth Porter who wrote that "Information from a wide range of sources, including some of those the United States has been explicitly supporting, makes it clear that every armed anti-Assad organization unit in those provinces [around Aleppo] is engaged in a military structure controlled by Nusra militants. All of these rebel groups fight alongside the Nusra Front and coordinate their military activities with it." [See Consortiumnews.com's "Risking Nuclear War for Al Qaeda."]

Believing in Unicorns