The laughable fiasco that is our Syrian strategy

General Austin's testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee last week about the condition of our War against ISIS was so bad that at least one Senator wondered if he was pulling her leg.
When General Austin was asked by the Senate how many Pentagon-trained fighters remained after spending $42 million the results were embarrassing.

“We’re talking four or five,” General Lloyd J. Austin III told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Wednesday. Austin heads Central Command, which runs U.S. military operations in the Middle East and South Asia, a position made famous by former General David Petraeus. Austin conceded that the rebel program is “off to a slow start.”
“That’s a joke,” Kelly Ayotte, the New Hampshire Republican, responded.

You would think that with results in Syria that spectacularly bad, that the Pentagon simply couldn't do any worse.
But you would be wrong.

On Friday the Pentagon sent another 75 U.S.-trained rebels into Syria.
So confident was the Pentagon in this new batch of fighters, that the headline this morning was With fight against the Islamic State in Iraq stalled, U.S. looks to Syria for gains. That headline should a) give you an idea of just how poorly we are doing in Iraq, and b) shows just how much they are counting on the Syrian effort.
So maybe we shouldn't have been surprised when this happened.

Pentagon-trained rebels in Syria are reported to have betrayed their American backers and handed their weapons over to al-Qaeda in Syria immediately after re-entering the country.
Fighters with Division 30, the “moderate” rebel division favoured by the United States, surrendered to the al-Qaeda-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra, a raft of sources claimed on Monday night.
A statement on Twitter by a man calling himself Abu Fahd al-Tunisi, a member of al-Qaeda’s local affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra, read: "A strong slap for America... the new group from Division 30 that entered yesterday hands over all of its weapons to Jabhat al-Nusra after being granted safe passage.

If we just wanted to arm al-Qaeda we didn't have to go through middlemen. We could have done it cheaper by going directly to them.
Amazingly, the Pentagon has decided that this no longer matters.

Rather than subjecting rebels to repeated rounds of screening before and during their training, U.S. officials might restrict vetting to unit leaders already in the fight. “The key thing is getting them some [expletive] bullets,” one U.S. official said.

Oh yes. Getting "them" some bullets. If by "them" you mean al-Qaeda jihadists.

Maybe this is why former CIA Director David Petraeus said that we should "use al-Qaeda" against ISIS. We've already given them enough of our weapons.

In fact, arming jihadists has been our most successful strategy of the Syria conflict so far. Consider this article from early 2013.

With help from the C.I.A., Arab governments and Turkey have sharply increased their military aid to Syria’s opposition fighters in recent months, expanding a secret airlift of arms and equipment for the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad, according to air traffic data, interviews with officials in several countries and the accounts of rebel commanders.

Thanks to Snowden's whistleblowing, we know that the CIA was $1 Billion a year training approximately 10,000 rebel fighters, and sending weapons to Syrian rebels that all too often fell into the hands of al-Qaeda and ISIS.
 photo SyrianRebelArms_zpsscz3xalm.png

Obviously we are too strict with who we give weapons too. We've also been too strict with which "moderate rebels" we train.

Abu Omar al-Shishani, the red-bearded face of ISIS terror lately described in such headlines as ‘Star pupil’: Pied piper of ISIS recruits was trained by U.S. for the fact that he received American military training as part of an elite Georgian army unit in 2006 and after, did not stop playing for “team America” once he left his home country in the Caucuses. He actually enjoyed US backing and American taxpayer largesse as late as 2013, soon after entering Syria with his band of Chechen jihadists.

We've spent so much time and money training and arming the fanatics that we are at war with, that pretty much everyone in the Obama Administration and Pentagon should be fired for gross incompetence....assuming that the objective is to actually win this war and make America safer.
Is it any wonder that 82% of Syrians blame the United States for ISIS? They have a good point. Unlike people in the United States, they have first-hand knowledge of the situation, rather than the official government lies that we are being fed.
If we keep training and arming the people who want to kill us, is there any hope that this war can ever end?
If we are to blame for ISIS, then we've also got a big hand in creating the refugee crisis.

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joe shikspack's picture

We've spent so much time and money training and arming the fanatics that we are at war with, that pretty much everyone in the Obama Administration and Pentagon should be fired for gross incompetence....assuming that the objective is to actually win this war and make America safer.

i'm convinced that the strategy is to keep the various contestants as evenly matched as possible so that they keep killing each other and to offer encouragements as often as possible to keep the "civil" war going.

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gulfgal98's picture

Winning would mean that war is over. Perpetual war keeps the money flowing to the MIC.

Here is the key as to why this works. If we do not have a draft, then the majority of the American public have no personal stake in whether or not we "win" these wars. It is a scam.

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Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy

enhydra lutris's picture

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

LapsedLawyer's picture

The war we all compare these adventures to is Vietnam, and that took place with a draft firmly ensconced, and took years before a mass movement came forth to challenge it.

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"Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we're being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I'm liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That's what's insane about it."
-- John Lennon

LapsedLawyer's picture

in my head whenever I hear this bs: "WTF does 'winning' even look like in these circumstances?"

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"Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we're being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I'm liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That's what's insane about it."
-- John Lennon

gulfgal98's picture

in the pockets of the MIC and the banksters.

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Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy

LapsedLawyer's picture

materialist grubbing is, it's more like this:

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxD-5z_xHBU]

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"Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we're being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I'm liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That's what's insane about it."
-- John Lennon

lotlizard's picture

http://www.ahavat-israel.com/eretz/future

In their view, any temporary troubles are just a bump in the road on the way to fulfilment of the divine plan.

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LapsedLawyer's picture

in big enough or soon enough to do the job, and that we now need to go in bigger:

HILLARY CLINTON: Well, John, I did recommend that at the beginning of this conflict we do more to help train those who were in the forefront of leading the opposition against Assad, looking to try to bring the moderates together. A lot of these rebels originally, they were business people. They were professional people. They were students. They had no training in going up against the Syrian army, which Assad clearly was going to use to the ultimate effect. That was not the decision taken at that time. A lot of what I worried about has happened. There are now big, ungoverned territories within Syria that are dominated by terrorist groups, ISIS being the best-known but not the only one. You have Iran and Russia increasingly moving in to support Assad and his constant bombardment against his own people, and then you have these millions of refugees.

So where we are today is not where we were. And where we are today is that we have a failed program. You heard the testimony. Five people trained for half--$500 million, half a billion dollars. But I think we still have to keep working with the Turks, with the Jordanians, with others of our partners. We also have to do more to support the Kurds.

Her Nibs is always angling for the PNAC vote.

(BTW, I would have linked to the PNAC website, but if you click on the links from the linked article you will be greeted with a lemon-yellow banner that reads, "Account has been suspended." A bit of cosmic justice, or just those darned Yes Men?)

The article from which that quote was taken has some choice contrast to her uber-hawk dissembling. A nice succinct summary of what the real problem in the Middle East is given by the interviewee of that article, Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report:

GLEN FORD, EXEC. EDITOR, BLACK AGENDA REPORT: Well you know, she is correct. This is a failed policy. But it's not just a failed program, it's a failed strategy that the United States has been employing over the last 35 years since the U.S. and Saudi Arabia actually created, we're not just the midwives of but we're the birth mothers of the international jihadist movement. Which didn't exist until the Saudis and the United States put it together to fight the Soviets and the left wing government and secular government in Afghanistan. And they've been using these people, these jihadists, as foot soldiers ever since.

And the reason that they use them as foot soldiers is because there is no social basis for the U.S. policy in the Muslim world. Certainly not in that part of the Middle East. And so you can't get large numbers of people to volunteer to be part of an armed force that is managed by the Americans. That's why we could only get 54 people to train, and now have only four or five, according to the [black] general who heads the central command, who might be out there somewhere. If they are out there somewhere. If they are out there somewhere they're probably with ISIS.

Blowback much?

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"Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we're being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I'm liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That's what's insane about it."
-- John Lennon

gulfgal98's picture

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Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy

lotlizard's picture

http://www.ronpaul.com/2008-05-17/ron-paul-exposes-the-neocon-agenda/
http://original.antiwar.com/paul/2015/09/20/blame-america-no-blame-neocons/

Yeah, I know, "crazy uncle Ron" … And son Rand seems to have thrown in with the very same neocons for his POTUS run … Still, stopped clocks and all that.

Still waiting for a Democrat to speak as clearly about neocons. Hint: nope, Bernie's not going to do it.

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Go bigger and sooner. Bigger bombs and more of them. More soldiers. More "dick-waving", as George Carlin would say.

It's never more talking, more listening, or simply a different strategy.
It's like our foreign policy debate was designed by 7th grade bullies.

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