There has been a lot of talk amongst the chattering classes lately about Obama looking the other way as Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar have been supporting the local al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria against the Assad government. For a long period of time American arms "accidentally" flowed freely into the hands of the radical Islamist jihadis of al-Qaeda and ISIS. Then the "journalism" outlets started to get on board with the program.

It comes out now that Obama has specifically encouraged his "vetted moderates" to cooperate more closely with the Islamists:

Reporting on al Nusra’s recent victories in Idlib, Charles Lister at Brookings reported:

“Several commanders involved in leading recent Idlib operations confirmed to this author that the U.S.-led operations room in southern Turkey, which coordinates the provision of lethal and non-lethal support to vetted opposition groups, was instrumental in facilitating their involvement in the operation from early April onwards. That operations room — along with another in Jordan, which covers Syria’s south — also appears to have dramatically increased its level of assistance and provision of intelligence to vetted groups in recent weeks.

Whereas these multinational operations rooms have previously demanded that recipients of military assistance cease direct coordination with groups like Jabhat al-Nusra, recent dynamics in Idlib appear to have demonstrated something different. Not only were weapons shipments increased to the so-called “vetted groups,” but the operations room specifically encouraged a closer cooperation with Islamists commanding frontline operations.”

The article concludes:

These developments are truly breathtaking. What does it say about the clarity of the strategic thinking behind the current “war on terror” that the perpetrators of 9-11 may morph from enemies into allies? One would think that after decades of blowback from supporting the Mujahidin forefathers of al Qaeda in Afghanistan in the eighties, that our allies and the U.S. foreign policy elite would learn their lesson. Unfortunately, the willingness to advance goals through a short-sighted military support of unsavory characters still holds firm in Washington.

These sorts of actions indicate a divide between Obama's stated policy in the region and his actual policy.

Sadly, it has just gotten worse. Patrick Cockburn kindly assumes that Obama has blundered in his recent article, titled, Was approving air strikes against the PKK America's worst error in the Middle East since the Iraq War?

The US's great NATO ally, Turkey (which has been at best been turning a blind eye to ISIS smuggling men and materiel into Syria across its borders) has decided that this would be a great time to liquidate the Kurds and rekindle the war with the Kurdish PKK ending a 2 year ceasefire.

Turkey's urge to liquidate Kurds isn't limited to the revolutionary group in its own territory. Turkey's Erdogan has started bombing Syrian Kurds as well.

At the same time, it appears that Erdogan would like to draw NATO into the mess that he's been making as well, calling an Article 4 conference of NATO to ask for assistance fighting terrorists on its border.

Unfortunately, Erdogan's ideas about bombing terrorists seem to have more to do with the domestic threat that he's been whipping up, rather than the threat of foreign jihadis on his border that he's also been whipping up.

Even more unfortunately, for Obama and NATO, the Kurds that Erdogan is bombing are the only force on the ground in Syria or Iraq that has a prayer of defeating ISIS.

Since Obama has a significant aversion to putting boots on the ground in Syria or Iraq to directly engage ISIS, the cooperation with the Kurds has been the only promising strategy.

Sadly, as Patrick Cockburn points out, Obama may have just traded that away for the use of a Turkish airbase and the promise of Turkish assistance of clearing a 60 mile long "safe zone."

The US was accused by Kurds of tolerating a renewed Turkish government assault on its Kurdish minority as the price for permission for US aircraft to use Turkey’s Incirlik air base against Isis jihadists for the first time.

“The Americans are not very clever in calculating this sort of thing,” said Kamran Karadaghi, an Iraqi Kurdish commentator and former chief of staff to the Iraqi President, Jalal Talabani. “Maybe they calculate that with Turkey involved on their side, they don’t need the Kurds.”

Or maybe Obama has an 11th dimensional chess move based on allowing Erdogan to eliminate the Kurds and turn Syria and Iraq into a jihadi wasteland, like that swell international effort that Obama led in Libya. After all, that was a great humanitarian triumph!

The result is that the US may find it has helped to destabilise Turkey by involving it in the war in both Iraq and Syria, yet without coming much closer to defeating Isis in either country. If so, America will have committed its biggest mistake in the Middle East since it invaded Iraq in 2003, believing it could overthrow Saddam Hussein and replace him with a pro-American government.